32 posts tagged “pregnancy”

I started having contractions around 5:30pm Monday. I only felt them in my lower back and lower abdomen and they were completely bearable. They felt just like the braxton hicks contractions I had been having for 5+ weeks, only with some lower back tightening. I knew that could mean back labor, so I kept in mind that it could be the real thing, but mostly ignored them.

I started timing contractions around 9:30pm. After an hour, I could see that they were mostly about a minute long but varied in frequency--anywhere from 3-7 minutes apart, bouncing around. During this time, I finished packing what I needed in the hospital bag and made some cookies for the nurses.

I actually called L&D, not to see if I should come in, but if they thought it might be early labor. I figured they'd know! The nurse said that it probably was. I asked her if I should get my son to his grandparents. She said it couldn't hurt, and worst case, I'd sleep all night, wake up and realize it wasn't really labor, and get my son in the morning. So my husband took our son to his parents and I decided to try to sleep. I think this was around 11pm.

Only I couldn't sleep. Which is funny, because I was normally tired all the time. I've heard that women get a burst of energy right before labor. So I had another clue that it might be it. Because of this energy, I wasn't able to get to sleep, even though I could still ignore the contractions.

During the night, they started picking up slightly in intensity, but not really in frequency. Around 1am, I decided that they were strong enough that it was probably the real deal. I wanted to wait a bit, because they were still bearable. Around 1:30 I had one that seemed to meet the "can't walk or talk through it" limit that the doctor told me would signal needing to go in. So I told my husband it was time to go.

Around 2am we arrived at the hospital and I was 6-7cm. I was told that if I wanted an epidural, I had to ask then, because it takes a while to get the IV for fluids placed and get the anesthesiologist there. Since things were completely bearable, despite the fact that I was having back labor, I decided I would go natural.

Around 4am, I was checked and was 8-9cm. Within half an hour, I was exhausted. I hadn't had any sleep that night, and was starting to fall asleep between contractions. I decided to have them break my water so that I could get to pushing before I was too tired. The doctor came and broke my water. There was heavy meconium staining in the water. So there went my plan to catch my baby. With meconium in the water, they want to keep the baby as quiet as possible so that they can suction and check for meconium in the throat before the baby cries and pulls it into her lungs. So the new plan was that she would be placed on my tummy, have her cord clamped right away, brought to the warmer where NICU nurses would suction and check her.

 

My sweet baby girl at home

She was brought to the NICU and tests were run. She had low hemoglobin levels and needed a blood transfusion. As of right now, we don't know why her hemoglobin levels were so low. She had to get 48 hours of antibiotics because of the meconium. Wednesday night she was able to nurse for the first time and has been nursing like a champ. Thursday around noon, she got to come home.

Recovery has been great. Some parts might be better from pushing for only 7 minutes compared to the 2.5 I did with my son. Some might be because of the lack of epidural--at least the immediate recovery. Because of this, I'm not sure if I would get an epidural again or if I would try without again--despite telling my husband that I never wanted to go without one again. Afterall, the 7 minutes of agony were shorter than the bad recovery time that can be blamed on the epidural.

I just realized that it's been forever since I've updated here.

I'm still alive. I'm still pregnant. I'm 39 weeks tomorrow. The end of this pregnancy is much rougher on me than the end of pregnancy with my son. My hips ache in the morning from all the weight on them during the night. My baby is poking something into my back in such a way that I have constant upper back pain. And I've been having contractions for almost three weeks now.

I'm exhausted. The idea that I might have up to three more weeks of this makes me cry. The fact that I still won't be able to get restful sleep once she's born makes me cry. Everything makes me cry. And the contractions make me feel like I'm hungry for some reason. So I'm eating way too much and gaining about 2 lbs a week.

So with my last pregnancy I threw up 2-15 times a day. I lost 15% of my body weight and had to get IV fluids for hydration three times. My insurance company was stingy with the only drug that worked to help (Zofran). My prescription was written for me to take 3-4 pills daily. Insurance would cover 12 pills per copay and had a cap on how many I could get. So I only took them on "special occasions" (long car rides, holiday dinners, or if I hadn't kept anything down for 24 hours).

I'm in my 7th week right now, and I'm throwing up 1-3 times a day. This last Wednesday, I called up the new clinic I'm going to for this pregnancy to let them know my history and where I'm at. I don't have my first appointment for a few weeks, and didn't want to wait that long to find out what the plan would be this time around. I explained to them that I'm keeping food down, but having a hard time getting enough fluids, because plain water comes back up immediately. Well, because of my history, they said that they won't wait until I'm actually dehydrated before giving me medication and they faxed a prescription for Zofran over to my pharmacy.

And the good news is that now Zofran is a generic! Instead of rationing 12 pills, I got 30 pills for a $10 co-pay! I was able to eat a normal breakfast this morning. And drink water in the middle of the night when I woke up thirsty! I'll probably never get so bad this pregnancy that I feel like walking death!

The Husband and I decided to do Natural Family Planning (NFP) for birth control. Because of the different levels of hormones a woman's body has during the month, there are observable signs for where in her cycle she is. Three "standard" (in terms of being used to avoid or achieve pregnancy) ones are basal body temperature (it goes up about 1/2 a degree right after ovulation), cervical mucus (more as you get close to ovulation, has an egg white consistency the peak fertile day), and cervix position (this is not one I've ever been able to do, so I don't know as much about it).

I'm confident that I can read a temperature chart to see when I've ovulated, as I did that for almost a year when I got pregnant. I'm not as confident with the cervical mucus part. Unfortunately, the mucus is what tells you that you're fertile, the temperatures only let you know when the fertile time has passed. The temperatures are also not so useful for me right now. For those to be accurate, you have to wake at the same time everyday, which is hard to do with a very young baby.

So I did some research and found another thing that can be tracked to figure out fertility--saliva. Specifically, how it looks when it dries. Apparently the hormones around ovulation cause sodium levels to rise in all bodily fluids. Sodium causes saliva to form a crystalline like pattern when it dries, referred to as "ferning". To check this, you put your saliva on a slide to dry and look at it under a pocket microscope.

So The Husband and I got the Fertility Tracker to use this method. I've been playing with it just so that I could get comfortable with how much saliva to use and looking at the slide. The first time I did it, it looked like the typical picture given for infertile times. Great, that's what I would expect. The next time I did it (last week sometime), it looked like the "transition" pattern, which would imply I was transistioning in or out of my fertile time. I figured I did something wrong with the sample and didn't think much of it. I'll interrupt my story here to say that The Husband and I have been waiting for my six week checkup (which is tomorrow) before resuming intercourse. I did a sample either Friday or Saturday and let it sit to dry. I forgot to look at it until today.

It showed ferning, which implies that I'm fertile.

Had we not gotten the Fertility Tracker, we would have assumed I wasn't fertile yet. After all, I'm breastfeeding exclusively and on demand. We could have gotten pregnant. Which would mean babies 10 months apart! You may remember that I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum with this pregnancy. And then Wiggle Worm has colic. I cannot even imagine having to deal with puking and screaming and IV fluids for dehydration and breastfeeding, all at once.

So hooray for the Fertility Tracker! Hooray for not having babies 10 months apart!

So I'm 39 weeks pregnant.

Lately, I've been having lots of nose bleeds. I've been caulking it up to the increased blood volume one gets during pregnancy. But they were coming so frequently that people started to ask if I had mentioned it to my doctor. After getting three nose bleeds on Easter and one the next morning, I called the nurse line for my health insurance (Monday). She told me that she wanted to to call my doctor that day and not wait until my appointment on 4/13 (Friday). I tried calling, and was on hold for 20 minutes before even talking to a nurse to ask for the doctor to call me. So I hung up. I forgot to call back that day. I wound up not getting it done and figured I could just ask at my next appointment.

Go forward to yesterday. My appointment is at 2pm. The nurse does the usual weight and blood pressure check and tells me to undress from the waist down and wait for the doctor. At 2:20, still no doctor. I called The Husband, who at this point was in the waiting room for me to get done so that we could go to a loan closing at 3pm. At 2:30, still no doctor. I put my clothes back on and stormed out, asking where the doctor was. She was on the phone, she'd be right with me, I was told. I was ushered back to the exam room and told to wait. Finally at 2:40 she came in. Well, that leaves no time for an internal exam. That leaves no time to mention my nose bleeds (never mind that I was having one during the exam even). She measured my uterus, listened to the baby's heartbeat, and I had to leave for the closing.

I'm pretty upset about this. My nose bleeds take from 20-40 minutes to stop bleeding. The insurance nurse said they should stop after 10 minutes. If I press on my nose, it makes the bleeding worse (heavier and out of both nostrils instead of one). I'm worried that my blood isn't clotting right. I'm about to give birth. I'm about to lose so much blood that the hospital will give me an adult diaper for two days rather than a maxi pad. And simple nose bleeds don't stop in a timely manner. My imagination runs away and thinks that I'm goin to hemorage on the delivery table and die.

Called up urgent care today (Saturday), and they don't really want to see me. I think they're worried about liability with pregnant women--espeically ones due in one week. They want me to go to the hospital I'm giving birth at instead. I finally got them to at least look at my nose. Going there today.

"Write about the last time you laughed at yourself"

I walk to work. It's not a long walk, maybe about 5-7 minutes. I exit out of a side door on the first floor of the apartment building, walk down the fire lane, switch to the sidewalk when it runs out, cross the street, walk one block, cross another street, and I'm at my work parking lot. I go this path because the fire lane is almost always plowed and there is no traffic there. When I come home, I take a different path that has me enter in on the 3rd floor of the building, where the mailboxes are. Work is about level with the 2nd floor of my apartment building.

Just recently, the midwest got dumped on with snow. Most of the snow seemed to come on weekends, when businesses weren't being as good at clearing their sidewalks and parking lots. One day, I was walking to work in almost knee deep snow along the fire lane. It was obvious that I was the first person to walk in that snowfall. The pine trees that line the fire lane were heavy with snow and it looked like an overdone movie set. I had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

But what made me laugh the most is the stories I get to tell my son when he's older. You may have noticed that I exit on the low floor and enter on the high floor of my building. This has the unusual feature of making my walk be at an incline all the time. So, I get to tell our kid, "When I was pregnant with you, I walked to work, uphill, both ways, in the snow!"

At birth class the other day, they showed us the diapers they provide for after birth. No, not for the baby, for the mom. Now, I knew that there is blood after birth is done, I've bought pads in preparation for it. I did not know that the hospital provides adults sized diapers to contain it.

It reminds me of a couple weeks ago. The Husband and I were playing "Apples to Apples" with family. The word my husband had was "cuddly" and someone put in the card "having a baby". He rejected that one, saying that although babies are cuddly, the act of having a baby is distinctly not cuddly.

In related news, I think I may be nesting. We're moving in two weeks. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. After about 40 minutes or so, I got out of bed and packed a box to move to the new house. In the dark, in the middle of the night, without even my glasses on.

The Husband and I attended our 2nd of 6 sessions of birthing class last Thursday night. We got to watch The Birth Video. The baby that was in the video was covered in vernix. The mom in the video must have had a mirror, because you could hear her say, "I doesn't look like a baby" when he was crowning. When she delivered and they put the baby on her chest, she had this look of terror, as if she were thinking, "What did I just give birth to?!"

The Husband's reaction was similar to the mom in the video. He had been told that newborns are red and wrinkly. He was not expecting to see a grayish/white alien cone-head child. My reaction was that the stretching they showed looks awfully painful.

Next week we talk about meds. I've read that an epidural can cause your blood pressure to drop. My blood pressure is normally low, even now in pregnancy (so I don't have to add "pregnancy induced hypertension" to the list of bad ways my body reacts to pregnancy). I'm going to try to remember to ask if they would refuse an epidural to me because of that.

And then in other news, we had a drama/late night after coming home from class. I was in the kitchen, the cat was in the doorway, and I heard a weird noise coming from the direction of the cat. "What is the cat doing?" It happened again. I got closer to the cat to investigate and I must have discovered at the same time that she did that the noise was from water drops hitting the carpet. Our ceiling was leaking. Through the light fixture. The cat got very distressed and refused to move from the spot, crying for us to make it stop.

We're in an apartment and aren't on the top floor, so it wasn't the roof leaking. We called the after hours number and they paged the maintenance guy. He called us up to let us know that he lives 1/2 hour away and was just heading out. I told him where in the building we are, and where in the apartment the leak was. He hypothesized that the upstairs neighbors, who have a different floor plan, have a bathroom over our entry way which had an overflowing toilet. So he went to their apartment first when he arrived. It turns out that it wasn't the toilet directly above us that was overflowing. It was the toilet two floors up. Running from the fourth floor to the second floor. It was probably coming out of the light fixture because that is where a hole is cut in the ceiling. So no ceiling damage.