How Avery got here so early
December 31st, 2006
note: This is an old draft that was supposed to be posted earlier.
I really believed I was going to be able to keep Avery in until at least 34 weeks, but probably 37. I got out of the hospital again for at-home bed rest and I went to my doctors appt and ultrasound last Tuesday. The ultrasound was first. They measure things like how much amniotic fluid he has, whether he’s doing practice breaths, heart rate, and movement to show that hes doing ok in there. Only every 3rd week would they measure him to see that he was growing at the proper rate. Later that afternoon I had a doctor’s appt to check my blood pressure and and my protein levels. The nurse does your vital signs first, and then they send you back to see the doctor, Well, she took my blood pressure, and it was 184/110. I still felt fine. When they called me back to see the doctor, they didn’t put me in an exam room, they put me in her office. My chart was sitting on her desk. She came in and said “you know what I’m going to say right?”. Because I had 2 very high blood pressure readings, I was now considered “severe pre-eclampsia” and I was definitely not going to go home before the baby was born this time. I still of course, felt fine.
So, back up to labor and delivery I go. They put me on the fetal monitors and take my BP every 15 minutes, They came in and did an ultrasound and measured him. He was supposed to be 32 weeks and 3 days, but he was measuring between 29 weeks 6 days and 30 weeks 4 days. He still weighed around 3 lbs, which is what he weighed at 30 weeks. They measure intrauterine growth restriction by when a baby’s size falls below the 10th percentile for gestational age, which Avery was still in the 17th percentile (down from 23rd percentile at 30 weeks). So they say “we’ll keep an eye on it” and I get admitted on bed rest again. Every day on bed rest they come and do a fetal heart rate monitoring twice a day for 1/2 hour and they expect to see rises in heart rate with movement, and the heart rate should vary a bunch when hes not moving.
On Thursday morning the doctors came in and said that they were planning to schedule me for a induction/c-section (depending on the baby’s presentation) for right after christmas because I probably wouldn’t make it any farther. She put in orders for us to get a NICU tour that day. A couple hours later the nurse comes to do the fetal monitoring for a while. I noticed it was flatter that normal (less variation) and there were a couple of times where the heart rate dipped down (which it hadn’t done before. The nurse calls up to the doctor to make sure they’ve seen it and see if I can be taken off the monitor now. Apparently, the doctor was calling down at the same time to say to bring me to labor and delivery. The nurse came in and told me, and said to get all my stuff together. I asked her if I should call someone and she said “I would”. A few minutes later the doctor came in and asked if I heard the story. I said “I don’t think I’ve heard the whole story”. And she said that they were looking at delivering me TODAY. I was already having a hard enough time adjusting to the 34-week idea from earlier that morning, and now he was going to be born at 32 weeks instead. Up to labor and delivery again I went, this time to a delivery room instead of just triage. I was telling the nurse about how before everything happened the highlight of my day was going to be taking a shower. Luckily, her and my doctor sympathized and let me take a really quick shower before I got strapped in for the ride. I got hooked up to the fetal and contraction monitors, blood pressure cuff on one arm, IV in the other, with dextrose and magnesium sulfate to prevent any progression to eclampsia (ie. seizures). They took a quick look by ultrasound to see what position he was in. On Tuesday he had moved transverse, with his head on my left side, but I’d felt him move and didn’t feel the head on the left anymore, so I thought maybe he had moved head down so I could have an induction instead of cesarean. Nope! He did move, but now he was breech, so c-section it was!
They wanted to wait until 8hrs after I’d last eaten before doing it, so it was tenatively scheduled for 5pm. Apparently, it was a big night for C-sections. I ended up getting in line behind 4 other C-sections which had higher priority, including 2 others from the antepartum floor. Finally around midnight, Corey donned a mask and gown, and they wheeled me down to the operating room. I had spinal anesthesia, so I sat on the edge of the bed with my back curled while they did it. It took 3 tries before they got it, but when they did, they practically pushed me down on the table, because my lower half went numb almost immediately. She started pricking me up my abdomen until I could feel it, to gauge how well it was working. Corey came in shortly after and sat by my head, and apparently they started right away. I could see what they were doing in the reflection of the big light they had right over me. Within a few minutes (it seemed) I saw the head and the body come out, and he cried! I was so so happy when I heard him cry. I figured if he cried, that meant he had to have been breathing. He was immediately taken over to the warmer and surrounded by 3 or 4 people from the NICU. I just kept staring over there to try and see him. He was stable I think, so they brought him over to me to let me kiss his head before taking him over to the NICU. They sewed me up and took me back to my room. The nurse stayed for a while and kept checking my vitals and pushing on my abdomen (which luckily I still couldnt feel). I was so exhausted from the magnesium sulfate and the whole day, that I just drifted in and out of sleep for hours. Corey called everyone and went down to see him after an hour, and he brought me pictures since I couldn’t go see him. Finally, the next night after another day of magnesium sulfate to prevent postpartum seizures and the pain slowly coming to reality, I was wheeled down to the NICU to see him. He was so much smaller than the pictures Corey brought me showed. I got to hold him, and all I could do was stare at him and say “he’s so tiny”.
1 Response to “How Avery got here so early”
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January 1st, 2007 at 10:49 PM
Happy new years.
I hope everything is working out okay with my nephew.