She's here! Our little girl, Livia Jean, arrive a few weeks early on November 17th. It was quite a crazy experience. It was a rather normal week. I had just finished my preceptorship in the emergency room. I was very happy to be down to just work and school and have all my clinicals out of the way. Now, all I needed to do was make it through the semester. I was down to going to my nurse midwives every week. I had an appointment on Tuesday. Everything was looking great, except randomly, my blood pressure was elevated from where it usually is. I wasn't too worried and my nurse midwife was only slightly concerned. After all, I am in nursing school. That would raise anyone's blood pressure.....She had me go to the hospital to have some labs drawn just to be sure everything was ok. She was a little worried I might be developing preeclamsia which is high blood pressure that occurs during pregnancy with no known cause. It usually happens late in pregnancy and is more common for first time moms. I went and had my blood drawn and waited. No one called which meant that all my labs were normal.
The next day, Wednesday, I was working a 12 hour shift at the hospital. I checked my messages during lunch and there was a message from the nurse midwife I had seen the day before. She said that while my lab work looked pretty good, she had a bad feeling and wanted me to come in on Thursday and had my blood pressure rechecked. Well, since I was at work, I just grabbed a nurse and had her check my blood pressure. No good. It was really high. Significantly higher than even the day before. I called my nurse midwife and told her I had just rechecked it and what I had gotten. She said, "Come to the hospital right now." Ummm...ok. I left work (my poor coworkers got left high and dry) and called David to get a ride to the hospital (I was delivering at a different hospital). I figured they would probably recheck my blood pressure and lab work when I got there and then put me on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy and hey--I wasn't going to complain about that.
We got to Labor and Delivery and the nurse got me all checked in. We rechecked my blood pressure which was still really high. They re-drew all the labs we had done the day before and then we waited. Finally, my nurse midwife walks in and says she's going to admit me and we would start inducing labor. WHAT?? I was not mentally prepared to have a baby that day, but with a high blood pressure, they were worried about me having seizures, so they started a medication to prevent that (magnesium sulfate) and another to start labor. I called my mom and David texted his parents and let them know that we would be having a baby sometime in the next little while.
Well, all that night, they continued the medication that they hoped would put me into labor. My blood pressure had stabilized somewhat and the baby was doing fine. The next morning, they were unimpressed with my progress and decided to start me on pitocin.A few hours later, they broke my water. I was nervous about this because the baby's head wasn't engaged fully and there was a chance we would need to get her out really fast. Luckily, everything was good and she handled everything fine. Contractions started going pretty well, but unfortunately, the magnesium sulfate I was getting to keep me from seizing is a muscle relaxant and was working against the pitocin. So after 30-something hours, I was only dilated to a 3 and 70 percent effaced. My nurse midwife came in and told me that she's thinking it will probably end up a c-section and I could do it now or later, but odds are I wouldn't dilate much more. So, we decided to do the c-section.
Nurse midwives can't perform c-sections, so the OB-GYN on-call came in to perform mine. Into my room walks this nice little man who introduced himself and five minutes later, we were in the OR. The c-section started out fine. David got all dressed up in his pilsbury dough boy outfit and stayed right by my head. The epidural did its job fabulously (I love epidurals...), but they had a hard time getting little Liv out...she really wanted to stay inside.
Another potential complication of preeclamsia is that your platelets stop doing their job. During the c-section, I started bleeding quite a bit and they had a hard time controlling it. I could hear the doctor panicking just a little bit and telling the CRNA I needed more pitocin and he needed more hands to help him. AKA This girl is bleeding out (Afterward the doctor said, "That was a lot of blood! How much blood do you think she lost??"...I wonder if they forget that their patient is awake during a c-section...) My blood pressure dropped pretty quickly and I started throwing up all over the OR--one of my finer moments in life--but they soon stopped my bleeding and got my blood pressure to stabilize. David was great and stayed by my side the whole time, talking to me and keeping me calm. After everything was back under control, they handed our beautiful little girl over to her daddy. I was still trying to not throw up and didn't have my glasses on (they took them off so they could put on oxygen mask on me) so I didn't really get to see her until we got back to my room. But daddy was with her the whole time and I could already tell he loved that little girl with all his heart. It was amazing. Seeing our little girl for the first time was indescribable. It's crazy how much love you can have for someone after just meeting them, but we fell in love with our daughter immediately.
Our recovery went very well. We were in the hospital for a few more days so they could keep an eye on us and then we were home! We named our little girl Livia Jean. She is amazing. We have a lot of adventures headed our way--I can tell. I'm already having a lot of fun being a mom and David is the perfect dad.
Now David and I just have to hang in until the end of the semester. In just a couple of weeks, David will be half-way through with law school and I will be eligible to get my RN. It's crazy. What else can I say? Life is good.
