We arrived to my L+D room after a bumpy ride over in the
ambulance. The nurses that came with me
in the ambulance told me that I need to use the restroom in a bed pan since
standing wasn’t a good option at that point.
So once I got there, I got to experience the joys of peeing in a bed pan. Unfortunately
for me (and the nurses) I had to go almost every 20 min because I had had an IV
for my surgery and I was ridding my body of all that fluid. Some one told me that once you get pregnant,
you get over being shy pretty quickly.
That is very true. I had been in
emotional ruins for the past week so it felt good to find humor in the fact
that I was peeing in a bed pan in front of people I just met and they had the
joy of taking it out from under me and wiping me. I’m only 27 and I never thought those words
would come out of my mouth.
Kevin drove the car from Children’s to University Hospital
so it took him a little bit longer to make his way up to my room. Once he got there, he told me that he had
talked to my mom and told her what transposed with the surgery and that she was
on her way down.
I had two nurses that afternoon. Lisa and Alicia. It looked like Lisa was training Alicia. UC was a teaching hospital and I am all for certain things being “practiced” on me, but when it came to making sure my babies were taking care of, Mama Bear would come out to play if anything was going wrong. They hooked me up to a plethora of equipment. I had two heart monitors on my belly, one for Colin and one for Nathan, and then a contraction monitor for me. Each monitor had 1 large, wide, itchy, strap to hold it down. And because the monitors were so sensitive, if I moved even just a little bit, we would sometimes loose the baby’s heart beat and they would have to come in and try and find it again. So I was on my back sitting up and not moving. I also had a pulse ox on my finger, an IV through my hand and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around my arm. I tried to get some rest before my mom got there and everything was calm. I did nod in and out but I couldn’t go long periods of sleeping because someone was in my room taking my temperature or giving me medicine every 2-3 hours.
Once, Alicia came in to fix a heart monitor and as she was
leaving, she tripped over a chord, which tugged on the monitors. This startled me because the monitor slid
over the incision site where I just had surgery. A couple hours later, Lisa came in and
tripped over them as well. Needless to
say we were happy to have a shift change and we were more aware of where the nurses
were standing from then on out.
That afternoon when my mom arrived, I cried when I saw
her. I now know how powerful a mothers
love is for her child(ren) and I could tell that seeing me go through this was
very hard on her. Around 6 pm, the
nurses suggested that I order dinner for myself because the cafeteria would
close at 7. My mom got on the phone but
was on hold for 15 min. Then she tried
again at 6:25pm. While on hold, a Fellow
from the NICU stopped in named Kim. She
wanted to come in and talk with us to give insight on what to expect if our
babies were born in the next day or so. My mom hung up so she could hear what
Kim had to say. What I was learning
through the whole process was that there is not one single person who can
predict what the outcome is going to be.
No one knew when my boys were to be born and if they were born soon,
what would the future hold. No one could
answer that. But Kim could at least give
us a general idea of what to expect our babies would go through if born as 23 weekers. She was wonderful and answered a bunch of
questions. Although what she had to say
was hard to hear, all we could do was hope that we would not have these babies
soon and we would go as long as we possibly could.
Kim left and since my mom hung up the phone while trying to
order me dinner, the cafeteria had closed and I was left dinnerless. My nurse Lisa scrounged up some crackers and
a luke warm cup of Chicken Noodle soup.
I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before at Brio so I was a bit hungry. I took what I was given and was just happy I
wasn’t going in to labor. After a bit,
my mom left to go stay in the hotel room that Kevin and I stayed in the past
two nights.
A wrest-less night was upon me. Kevin was asleep on the tiny pull out couch
but I was in a lot of pain. Being on my
back for that long without being able to turn on my side really took a toll on my lumbar spine. They gave me medicine to
help the pain. I can tell you right now
that it was not back labor. Not that I
know what back labor feels like but I eventually was able to get up to go to
the restroom and the pain subsided.
The next morning I started to have a lot of
contractions. None of my contractions
were painful to me. Sometimes I wouldn’t
even realize I was having one. Kevin
would be watching the monitor and look at me and say “Kelly? Are you having a
contraction?” I would look at the
monitor and say, “I guess I am.” And
other times I would think I was having a contraction but then look at the
monitor and it wasn’t even spiking. But
that morning, I was having a lot in a row that I could feel. I had been taking Procardia, which is a pill
that helps lessen contractions, since the night before my ablation. This worried Kevin and me, so the doctors
gave me some morphine which would help contractions and make me sleepy. I later found out that they mainly gave it to
me to ease my worry more so than for my contractions. After I received that I took a nice little
nap.
My mom got to the hospital as I was sleeping. My dad was also on his way down from New
Wilmington, PA. While I was sleeping, apparently my mom asked Kevin how he was
handling everything and he just started to cry and said, “I just don’t want
Kelly to be disappointed.” I am sure
this was hard on him because he was worried about me as well as his boys
whereas I was just mainly concerned about my boys. I knew that deep down in my heart, no matter
what was going to happen that we would be alright but I didn’t want things to
be ‘just alright.’ I wanted them to end with Kevin, myself, Colin and Nathan
all home in Columbus happy and healthy.
My dad finally arrived and we caught him up on the
details. Dr. Jaekle along with Dr. Vasconti came in that day to
talk with us and see how we are all holding up. Dr. Vasconti was very quiet when he came in with other Doctors. He was mainly an observer but then when he came in to tell us information, he was still very quiet and hard to hear. But he was nice, none the less. It was really nice to have family with us so they could hear everything
I heard and just be extra sets of ears for Kevin and I. The boys’ heart rates were doing fine so I
asked Dr. Jaekle what his thoughts were on me taking a shower. He said that it would do me some good to get
all freshened up but then get right back on the heart monitors. I was relieved to hear that. And I know what I am about to say might be a
bit more information that you would like, but I also asked him about having a
bowel movement. To be quite honest, I was
scared to bare down. I didn’t want that
to cause anything to happen that shouldn’t happen. He also gave me the go ahead to do that as
well. Once again, I was relieved.
I had a wonderful nurse named Poni that day. She was so sweet and she knew what she was
doing. But just because she knew what
she was doing, I still kept track of what medicines I was taking and when I
should take my next dose. I was given 2
shots of a steroid to help the babies lungs function just incase they were born
while I was there. I got one the day of
my surgery and one that next day.
That night, my parents had left to go back to the
hotel. It was 7 pm when they do shift
change and my new nurse for the night came in named Bridgett. She was Jamaican and she came in and got
right to work giving me my medicine and everything. She wasn’t very personable and she was very
hard to understand. About 20 min later,
she came in and told me that she was going to give me this other medicine and
then stick a progesterone up me. Both
Kevin and I asked her 5 times, “Are you sure this is for me?” She said, “Yes” because it was supposed to
help with my contractions. I was already
taking Procardia, which was helping with my contractions, so why was I getting
something else AND the Doctor never came in to tell me that they were ordering
this medicine. Since we asked her 5
times and she sounded very certain, I took the pill but we asked to see the
Resident on duty that night, Dr. Penna, just to find out why they decided to
give me this. The Dr. never once came in
that whole night to explain. Bridgett
came in 30 min later and said, “I am so sorry, that medicine was not meant for
you. But it is not going to hurt
you.” They are damn lucky that it wasn’t
something that would have thrown me in to labor. We would have had a HUGE issue if that were
the case. And then around 8 pm, Poni
came in right before she was about to leave for the night and said, “I hear you
are 4 cm dilated!” Kevin and I looked at
each other and said “NO!!! No one has checked my cervix at all. You have the WRONG patient!!!” So clearly, they were mixing me up with
another patient down the hall. We were
glad the medicine I took wasn’t going to have a negative effect on my boys
and me, but it still freaked us out at first.
The rest of the night was pretty calm.
The next morning was Friday the 6th. The Doctors came in and said that the heart
monitoring was going very well and they wanted to move me to the Antepartum
unit. This was a unit that was farther
away from the O.R. but because the monitoring was so good, they felt
comfortable sending me down there. They
said that I could go on intermittent monitoring which would be 1 hour for 3
times a day. But if one hour didn’t look
good, I would go right back on continuous monitoring. Although they gave me the option, I still
insisted on continuous monitoring.
That afternoon they wheeled me down to Antepartum. We had a quiet night that evening. That next morning the 7th, I was
watching the boys heart monitor and I was noticing that Nathan’s heart started
to decelerate more so than usual. I got
really scared and started to cry so my mom called the nurse in. The nurse came in and said she would get the
Doctor to come in and talk to me about it.
There were monitors all over the unit as well as the Labor and Delivery
unit so someone was always watching them.
The Doctor came in and calmed me down.
She was also 24 weeks pregnant with a singleton baby. She said that decels like that were normal
for that gestational age. She said her
baby was doing it as well, they just didn’t know about it because they weren’t
monitoring her baby. She got me to stop
crying, I calmed down and then she left. 5 minutes
later, she came back in and explained that since she left, Nathan’s heart was
decelerating way more than it should be so she called Dr. Jaekle and they
decided to move me back over to Labor and Delivery to be as close to the O.R.
as possible. I was very scared and
upset. I seriously thought that my
babies were going to be born that day.
They were 24 weeks on this particular day. I did NOT want them to arrive yet. I cried all the way to my new room in
L+D.
 |
| In Antepartum |
They put me in a different room than I was in to begin
with. This room was tiny to say the
least. Kevin would have to move
furniture in order to get around my hospital bed. The bathroom was a shared bathroom with
another room and the sink was in our room instead of in the bathroom. It was very cramped and I was very sad and
scared. And it didn’t help that in the
room next to us was what sounded like 20 people just being completely loud and
obnoxious. Here I am scared that my
babies were going to be born today and these people would just not be
quiet. I told my nurse Bob that I was
scared and that these thin walls weren’t helping. He listened and said that the noise wasn’t
going to stop all night so he went out to see if there was another room
available.
Bob came back in and told us we were moving rooms! We went down the hall to a much larger and
much quieter room. We loved Bob. He was our nurse once before we moved to Antepartum. The babies loved Bob as well. Every time they fell off the monitor, it
would only take Bob 10 seconds to find them.
Sometimes nurses would have to bring in an ultra sound to find the
babies heartbeat. This could take up to an
hour sometimes but it seemed so easy for Bob.
They rolled me in to my new room.
It was towards the end of the hallway and it was massive! We were so grateful that it was a room that
Kevin and our family could all fit in and best of all….it was quiet.
That night our friend Tyler came by the hospital to
visit. It was good to see him. His wife was pregnant and was due only a week
later than we were so he could understand how scared we were about the
possibility of our babies being born this prematurely.
The next day, Sunday the 8th, my friends Sarah
and Brittany drove all the way from Columbus to come visit me. They were so sweet. They brought me DVD’s to
watch, magazines to read and they also brought me a little Christmas Tree to
put in my hospital room. They hung out
for a few hours and we talked about everything that we had been through up
until that point. They left and then a
few hours later, Kevin’s former boss Jonathan, that now lives 30 min away from
our hospital, came to visit us as well.
Kevin was happy because Jonathan snuck in three Killian’s. He felt like he was back in College hiding
his beer every time a nurse came in. He
stayed for a little bit and then when the nurses came in to fix the babies
heart monitors, he took off.
I remember one night while I was sleeping, there was a lot
of commotion outside of my room. I woke
up scared because I thought they were coming in to get me to deliver my
babies. That is the scariest feeling in
the world. So the next morning, I asked
what would happen if I had to be rushed in for an emergency C-Section? They said there would be a bunch of people
that would rush in to my room. They
would turn me on my side to see if that helped the heart rate, and if that
didn’t work, I would be rushed in the O.R.
They would put me under general anesthesia and my babies could be born
within 5 min or less. I needed to know
what to expect if that were to happen so I could prepare myself mentally for it.
 |
| Kevin enjoying his Killians |
I was able to take showers while in the hospital but I have
to tell you that those were the scariest showers I have ever taken. Although it felt good to wash my hair and
shave my legs, the possibility of my babies going under while I was not being
monitored was always in the back of my mind.
So while I was getting clean, my babies could potentially be dying and
that was an awful feeling. Dr. Jaekle
said that there is no point in letting myself feel crappy physically if I can
help it. My emotional state was already
feeling crappy so if I could feel good on the outside, he wanted to me do
so. He also said that there was no use
punishing the staff by not taking a shower.
He was such a jokester.
Through this entire process, the issue of going back to Columbus
was in question. We wanted so badly to
have them NOT born in Cincinnati. If we
could get back to Columbus to Riverside Hospital, that would make it so much
easier since we live there and Kevin could go back to work and if they were
born in Cincinnati, that meant I was there until they were discharged from the
NICU. They usually say babies are in
there until around their DUE date which would have been end of March. Other than that Saturday morning that
Nathan’s heart decelerated a bunch, the heart monitoring had been very
decent. We kept asking the Doctors,
“What would it take for you to allow us to go back to Columbus?” They said they would like to see a few days
of excellent heart monitoring as well.
They told us that if we did get to that point, that that is a risk that
Kevin and I would have to be willing to take.
There were no hospitals between Cincinnati and Columbus. So in that 2-hour drive, our babies could die
and we would have no way of knowing it. Going
by ambulance was also a risk because at this stage, there is an entire TEAM of
people who need to be there for a delivery.
It would be about 5 people for each baby and then a team of people for
me. So even being in an ambulance would
be fatal to the babies.
That Monday and Tuesday, the 9th and 10th, the boys had very good heart monitoring. They asked me if I would like to do intermittent monitoring on Wednesday. Again that was 1 hour monitoring for 3-4 times a day. They said if we could pass all monitoring on Wednesday and on Thursday, then we could go back to Columbus, POTENTIALLY, on Friday. Although I was nervous, if the Doctors thought we were good enough to do intermittent, then I would trust them and do intermittent monitoring on Wednesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment