Guess what. That stomach pain was not a growth spurt.
It turns out that I was massively pre-eclamptic, and the symptoms were just presenting in completely oddball ways.
Tuesday morning I finally called Bear in a panic. I knew something was wrong and I couldn’t deal with the pain anymore, but I needed him to be my advocate with the doctors. I’m just too likely to apologize and excuse my pain and convince myself it’s not as bad as I think it is. The nurse had us come down to the hospital with the high-risk L&D merely as a precaution. Nobody thought it was going to be anything more serious than gall-stones.
They ran me through a million labs, gave me a two hour long ultrasound looking for stones, and finally decided to admit me because of my high blood-pressure. By this point they still couldn’t explain anything. I had never had so much as a slightly elevated reading before, and they didn’t understand why pre-eclampsia would cause so much pain, but they weren’t willing to take any chances. The doctors told us that I would most likely have to stay in the hospital for three weeks to give the baby as much time in the womb as possible. They shot me up with steroids for the baby’s lungs and Bear ran home to get my toothbrush.
An hour later when he came back, we got the news that they were going to have to do an emergency C-section. Right then. Stat. They barely had time to get my blood type back before I went in, pushing everybody else out of my way. We didn’t know how bad it was at the time, but I was crashing, and fast. There was no time for hand-holding because things were going black for me very quickly. From the time they threw me down on that table to the time my baby was wheeled off to the NICU was no more than 10 minutes. They weren’t even sure if I was going to get anesthesia in time before my platelet count was so low I’d just bleed to death.
My precious birth plan kind of went out the window. I had all these romantic notions of how I wanted things to go, and that turned out to not quite be an option. But we’re both still here, and if we hadn’t gone in to the doctors for the pain right then, that wouldn’t be true. I’m just astounded at how many miracles we witnessed to get us through. Heaven was very close.
Atticus Ross Edmunds was born Tuesday night at 10:30, at 15 inches long and weighing 2 lbs 4 oz. I heard all the stories, but there was just no way to prepare for how this little guy was going to sweep me off my feet. I’ve never been so blissed out in all my life. Plus, I have vicodin.