Now, take a deep breath … it all turned out okay.
So that was a lo-oong night, and I was pretty exhausted the next morning. I kept having contractions through the night, and they picked up the next morning, so they gave me more meds to stop labor, and we were just waiting for the fetal monitoring specialist.
She came in pretty early the next morning and did her thing with the abdomen ultrasound, where she looked for the placental abruption. It appeared that I had placenta previa as well as the abruption.
an obstetric complication in which the placenta is attached to the uterine wall close to or covering the cervix
After doing an internal ultrasound, she found that I did, in fact, have placenta previa. She wanted to take the images back to the main specialist to look over and said that he’d be there around lunchtime.
The great thing was that the ultrasound also showed that Lucy was extremely healthy and BIG for her age – they estimated that she was around 6lbs 10oz and measuring between 36 and 37 weeks.
The OB that was seeing me (because I had been seeing a midwife rather than an OB, I was referred to the one that happened to be on call that night and morning) said that since they had slowed my contractions, I could go ahead and eat some breakfast – a delicious plate of french toast and bacon. [Little did I know that I would be eating that same breakfast for a few more days!]
Sure enough, around lunchtime, the fetal specialist came in to discuss the images that he had seen.
Basically, he explained that a couple of things were happening …
1. I had a placental abruption at the top of my uterus, and it allowed blood to pool and clot between the placenta and the wall of the uterus (called a retroplacental clot). Does anyone remember me complaining of back pain? It had been determined that I had a pinched nerve, but it was actually an abruption happening over time. This had been going on for MONTHS, and I had been bleeding for a long time (hence the clot that I lost at home).
2. I also had placenta previa, and there appeared to be a placental blood vessel right at the opening of my cervix.
The placenta is responsible for working as a trading post between the mother’s and the baby’s blood supply. Small blood vessels carrying the fetal blood run through the placenta, which is full of maternal blood. Nutrients and oxygen from the mother’s blood are transferred to the fetal blood, while waste products are transferred from the fetal blood to the maternal blood, without the two blood supplies mixing.
He said that if I had continued with my planned waterbirth and that vessel had burst during labor, Lucy would have died in seconds.
I pretty much lost it at that point.
It was determined immediately that we would do an emergency c-section, and while the doctor said he’d like to wheel me down the hall right away, I had to wait at least 6 hours to let my breakfast digest.
They were monitoring me and the baby constantly, so they were prepared if anything happened, but I practically tried to hold my breath for the next 6 hours.
Around 3pm, the nurse started preparing me for surgery, and it became a reality that this was actually happening. We were going to have our baby girl that night.
I called my parents, and they drove up from Georgia, as well as my brother. The rest of the afternoon was mostly just a waiting game and a lot of prep for surgery. They came and got me around 5:30pm, and I was so nervous.
The operating room was SO cold, they were covering me with heated blankets, but I couldn’t stop shivering. And once the spinal was administered, I completely freaked out. I don’t know if it was just everything crashing at once or what it was, but I could not get comfortable with the fact that I couldn’t feel my legs. It was the strangest sensation ever to be able to feel my arms and shoulders and head but nothing else.
I remember apologizing to everyone, because I was such a nutjob, but I still couldn’t calm myself down until they told me that the doctor had cut into me … it was then that I realized that I wouldn’t be able to feel anything. It was going to be okay.
So for 35 weeks, the baby had been head down. Every ultrasound, every exam, every second of every day, she was head down with her feet in my ribs. And during the ultrasound that morning, she was head down. So the doctor prepped me and cut me based on that.
It wasn’t until they got in there that they realized she was actually breech, which made things a little more complicated. [As if things needed to get more complicated, right!?] But after a lot of pushing down on my chest, a lot of pulling and tugging and rocking my body around, there she was.
6:17pm
Because she was early, they didn’t really hold her up for pictures or for me to see her, so while they were cleaning her up and giving her a little bit of oxygen, I’m asking Ken if she’s okay – and he’s telling me that she’s perfect.
And she certainly was.
All 6lbs 14oz of her was absolute perfection.
It wasn’t long until they brought her to Ken, and it was amazing. She was here and she was healthy. And then I got to hold her for the trip back to our room.
So … it was a completely crazy 24 hours. Lots of ups and downs and worry and peace. And in the end, it all worked out exactly how it was supposed to.
The things that happened – the bleeding, the contractions, the fact that I didn’t get the waterbirth I had planned, the early bed rest – it all came together for a purpose.
God was truly watching over us.
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