A crazy couple of weeks!!!

So here we are - the middle of November, the girls are 10 days old and I'm still trying to find time to get my story posted. This will probably be an incredibly long post, but I want to get as many of the details written down before I start to forget them. For those of you that already know most of what happened, feel free to skip this entry....

On Sunday, November 2nd, I wasn't feeling very well all day. I was extremely tired and moody (lots of tears - mostly for no particular reason) and had a hard time eating anything without getting a stomach ache. Paul took off late in the day to get some groceries while I napped and did a few little things around the house. By about 5 or 5:30, I decided to start paying some bills and when I sat down at the table, I started to have some pretty bad blurred vision. My right eye had a weird blind spot that just wouldn't go away and made it hard for me read the numbers on the bills and write checks. After about 20 minutes, it still wasn't any better and I was starting to get a little scared and nervous so I called Paul and asked him to try to get home asap. Once he got home, I took my blood pressure reading two different times and both times it was very high (173/113 - yikes!!!). I knew my machine was a little high compared to the doctor's office and hospital, but I'd never seen it that high.... I immediately called my doctor to see what he wanted to do - although I was about 99% sure I already knew the answer. He agreed that those numbers were way too high for me and that we needed to get our bags packed and get to the hospital. Yes, it was time to have babies! And here I was just telling my sister earlier that afternoon that I was sorry we told so many people about the November 7th scheduled induction date because that meant we couldn't call and surprise our family when I went into labor. Now we were getting to make those surprise "it's time" phone calls! :D By the time we left for the hospital an hour later, I was determined that I was not coming back home without our babies.

Once at the hospital, we had to go through the usual routine - register, hang out in triage for a couple hours, get hooked up to monitors, have some blood drawn, answer a bunch of the nurse's questions and chat with the on-call doctor about what the plan would be. My blood pressure readings were still pretty high even after we'd been at the hospital for a couple hours and my doctor decided that since I was just a couple days shy of 37 weeks, we would go ahead and move over to Labor and Delivery and start to induce me. Initially, I was very excited to hear that - but then I learned that I would have to be hooked up to the dreaded magnesium again and that meant I would feel sick and be confined to the bed for all of labor. Even worse, once on the magnesium, you have to stay on it for 24 hours after delivery which meant I couldn't move to the post partum unit right away (where the well-baby nursery is) and it would be complicated for me to the see the girls and harder still to try to nurse them in those early hours and they definitely wouldn't be able to stay in the room with Paul and I that first night. This was not going the way I planned and that led to more tears. Eventually I calmed down ( I really had no choice in the matter, right?!) and looking back, I know it was the right thing to do for my own health. Pre-eclampsia related seizures are pretty common in the first 24 hours after delivery and the magnesium helps to bring the blood pressure back under control.

Back to the story... by about 10pm, I was hooked up to the IV and getting magnesium, pitossin and fluids. Shortly after that, around 11pm, I got my epidural. I was quite nervous about the epidural and the big needle going into my spine, but truth be told, I've had blood draws and shots of novocaine at the dentist that felt much worse. Although my nurse did tell me that magnesium is considered to be a sort of muscle relaxer so maybe that played a part in the epidural not feeling too bad. Or maybe the anethesiologist that gave me the shot is just really good at his job... Either way, I was happy that at least one of the potentionally scary labor moments went so smoothly. And once that drug kicked in, I felt pretty good. My L&D nurse kept telling me that I was having some pretty strong contractions, but I couldn't feel a single thing. Very Nice.... :D At that point, I tried to get some sleep, but it's hard when you're hooked up to the IV and all the monitors, including a blood pressure cuff that took a reading just about every 30-40 minutes so I just dozed off and on and around 2am, my water broke. I was starting to make some real progess (at 3-4cm dilated) and the nurse kept coming in pretty frequently to turn up the pitossin. By early morning (6ish), I was beginning to feel uncomfortable and a little nauseated. They adjusted my epidural and offered me some drug to help with the nausea. My nurse said it would make me feel better but also a little sleepy. At that time, I was only 6cm dilated and we all thought there would be plenty of time for the sleepiness to wear off before the action started. Unfortunately, we were wrong... By about 8am, I was really uncomfortable and no matter how I laid in the bed or how many times I hit my epidural button, I had horrible pain in my back and hips. Paul tried to help me get more comfortable lying on my side, but nothing worked and I was in tears (again!). I called my nurse in and she told me that I was already 10cm dilated and ready to start pushing. My doctor was paged and when he got there, he agreed - we were ready to go! Since this was a multiples birth, I would have to go to an OR room for the actual delivery, but I did most of the hard work in my L&D room. Because of my bed rest, I never had a chance to go to a childbirth class and was a bit nervous about how I would do. Thankfully, I had two wonderful nurses who told me exactly what to do and sometime around 9am, Paul was getting into his scrubs and I was being wheeled to my OR room.... It was finally time to meet our baby girls!