On the night of February 27th I had a pain in my upper right torso area. It was not incredibly excruciating or anything. It felt almost exactly like mild gallbladder attacks used to feel when I still had a gallbladder. I had any of a number of things to blame such a pain on, of course, such as coughing due to the cold I was recovering from or a newish heartburn effect. Whatever it was I kept noticing it, but not feeling affected enough by it to worry overmuch. It was annoying and I took some Tylenol and hoped for the best.
It faded by the next morning and I carried on with life. Saturday night, though, I noticed a headache starting up on the left side of my head. Kind of radiating up from my neck and around to my forehead. I popped a couple more Tylenols but by the next morning it was on both sides of my head and was much worse. I figured it was a migraine since it had some of the same symptoms and results, like nausea and light sensitivity. So Sunday night I still had a headache that hadn't really responded to pain meds much. On Monday morning the headache seemed a bit less, but still present, and by Monday night I was getting pretty worried. I get lots of headaches, yes, but three-day headaches are a rarity for me and headaches that don't respond to pain meds during pregnancy are a bad sign.
I'd read about pre-eclampsia, and one account in particular that I'd shared with Andrew as an example of something that I hoped would NEVER happen to me. One of my favourite webcomic authors had her daughter quite early as a result of pre-eclampsia and had presented symptoms from quite early on, mostly very swollen feet. I wasn't having any issues like that, my pee sticks for protein had been coming up clear at the doctor's office and my blood pressures seemed to be OK. The visit to the obgyn right before Jen and Colin's wedding had a tiny bit of protein in my urine, but it was a trace amount.
So, the three-day headache was concerning me but I wasn't having any other symptoms like swelling or vision disturbances. I decided in the end that it was better to be safe than sorry so on Monday night after Andrew got home from work we headed out to the emergency room at Toronto General to ask about my headache.
I'll just get this out of the way right now so I don't have to repeat it a lot: We don't really know why we went there instead of Mt. Sinai. We were on autopilot or something, it's where we went last time we visited an emergency room and in the end it worked out pretty much the same as it would have in any case.
The wait ended up not being too terribly long for me to get in and talk to a nurse at the ER. She sat me down and asked me what all was going on, I said I'd had this three-day headache that was unresponsive to pain meds, she strapped on the blood pressure cuff and when it beeped she did a total double-take. "That can't be right." Yep, she thought the machine was broken, like in some cheap movie script. So she took it again, it was even more alarming and she was like, "OK, this is an issue." I did have to go wait again in the general waiting area but it really wasn't all that long, thankfully, as it kind of turned out that I was a walking seizure waiting to happen. Andrew and I were called back into the ER and I got on a bed and pretty much didn't get up for days.
The poking and prodding and questioning and needling and blood-pressure-cuffing began in earnest. Things get fuzzy for me at this point because they started me on magnesium sulfate and it made me light-headed and flushed, which was very distracting. Basically after a lot of talking about pre-eclampsia, how I definitely had it, how dangerous it is, how close I was to having seizures and brain hemorrhages and dying we were told that the baby pretty much should come out that night so that I wouldn't die, and kill her in turn. My 28 week baby, since apparently I ONCE AGAIN had the weeks counted wrong, argh.
I was instinctively like, "No, that's stupid," but that was inside my head. In reality I knew there wasn't much choice, so Andrew and I were like, "Um, OK." They were talking about DYING, which is scary to hear in your face like that.
Usually I'd have been transferred over to Mt. Sinai for the c-section, but they were having a flooding issue so I was taken by ambulance over to Women's College Hospital at around 10:00, to Andrew's best recollection. I am SO thankful that's where I had my baby. I cannot say enough good about the place or the people that work there. It is just yes in every way possible.
Things happened fairly quickly. I was taken to the high risk delivery floor and they got me ready for surgery. Andrew wasn't allowed in the operating room while they did the epidural and that part ended up taking longer than we thought it would. I have to say that the epidural was the most unpleasant part of the entire operating procedure for me. Mostly when women giving birth have one they've been in labour for a while, so the physical sensation of the epidural is overshadowed by the pain of labour. In this case not so much. I felt everything the anaesthesiologist did, and it was pretty unpleasant the time he injected in a spot where there wasn't enough anaesthetic. Once it was finished and took effect everything was great. I couldn't feel a thing from my chest down and I was immensely grateful that they waited until then to insert the catheter!
So they found Andrew and the surgery started. I was feeling weird because of the mag sulfate and they also gave me some morphine so it's somewhat fuzzy for me, but I remember thinking that it felt exactly like a description I'd read of getting a c-section, where you are on a bed and there are people trying to wrestle a pair of too-small jeans onto your body. It really did feel a lot like that. Then there was a HUGE sensation of pressure and pulling and suddenly I heard someone say, "It's a girl!" Then I heard a couple of little tiny cries and I knew our daughter was born. It was 1:35 a.m. on March 3rd.
I didn't see her at all. Andrew did get a glimpse of her, but they took her immediately away to get her intubated in case she couldn't breathe on her own, even though she'd definitely breathed enough to cry out which was a very good sign. I was left to get reassembled and stitched back up, then I was taken to recovery.
Things get even fuzzier for me at this point. I remember talking to my nurse, talking to Andrew, asking about Shaughnessy and things like that. I was probably in shock, plus drugged a bit and the mag sulfate was still being administered through the IV so I wouldn't have a seizure. Eventually I was wheeled back to the high risk birthing unit and I stayed there until the next day.
Andrew had of course contacted my mom and sisters and so my mom came as soon as she could the next day to see me. My mom is awesome. I know she pretty much had zero sleep and yet she came all the way to Toronto and sat at my bedside and just hung out with me while I lay there all woozy and stupid from the mag sulfate and whatever other drugs were messing me up. She and Andrew got to go see Shaughnessy; something I couldn't do while I was still on the mag sulfate since I was still a seizure risk and they didn't want that to happen in the NICU. It was really hard for me to wrap my brain around the fact that I was no longer pregnant since I hadn't actually seen my own baby yet and physically I didn't feel a whole lot different since the numbness was still present. I made sure to tell them to touch her, though. For some reason it was really important to me that somebody who loves her touched her.
Mom had to leave that evening, but I was so, so glad she'd come. The whole experience had been pretty terrifying and surreal and having my mom appear was incredibly comforting. Thank you, Mom, for being so awesome.
I finally got to see Shaughnessy the next morning after they took me off of the magnesium sulfate and moved me to the high risk recovery part of the floor. It was a bit rushed, but being able to see my incredibly tiny daughter for the first time was amazing. She was so very small inside her big old incubator, all wrapped up and covered in tubes and wires and things stuck to her body. I couldn't do anything but look at her and hope with everything in me that she was going to be all right.
There's lots more about being in the hospital, which I was up until yesterday with soaring blood pressure and general recovery from the c-section. It's not all that interesting, though. What's awesome is how great our little girl is doing. She's apparently a tough, smart little baby what with all the breathing on her own and not needing any assistance beyond a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) device that reminds her to keep taking breaths just in case she ever forgets. The nurses consistently tell us how cute and funny she is and that she has a feisty little attitude and lots of personality. While I was in the hospital I spent a lot of time beside her incubator staring at her little self, touching her sometimes (although preemies are not necessarily all about the wanting to be touched, as it turns out, although a hand placed on them and held still is comforting,) and generally just getting used to the idea of being a mother!
Andrew promptly came down with some kind of virus right after our daughter was born so his contact with her has been a lot more limited than mine, unfortunately. He should be better in time for us to both be able to hold her, though, since her belly button IV came out today and that means more mobility for her. We've been taking some pictures and admiring her teeny little self. Here; admire her, too:
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