The last birth story post

Friday: Hospital Day 3

Aaron finally left for home around 1:00am. I had to call the nurses for a couple of things, and they never failed to respond within an hour and a half. At 1:30 I called and said I thought I was bleeding a lot. At 2:00 a nurse came in and said she would check again at 3:00 to see how I was doing. Around 2:30 I called again and asked if there was anything else that could be done for pain because by that time I was hurting a lot, as though I were having real contractions again. At 2:45 the intern came in and I passed a couple of huge clots. I immediately felt much better, but they asked how long it had been since someone had checked my blood loss. After I said it had only been since 2:00 the room was suddenly full of people. My blood pressure was really low – 60/40 was the lowest I heard – so they tipped the bed up so my head was down. Because of the clots and the continued bleeding, they decided I probably had retained some pieces of placenta and would need an emergency D&C. There was an exam that involved screaming akin to when the baby was coming out. I heard someone say that my blood pressure was so low that they would have to use ketamine as the anesthetic. They wouldn’t let me or the intern call Aaron because the doctor wanted to do it herself. No one was really talking to me and I think I was only able to follow what was going on because of learning to speak medspeak in school. Although I’m not sure being able to follow what was going on was such a great thing.

So poor Aaron got called at 3:30 in the morning. He told my mom and Annie to stay at the house so they wouldn’t be too scared. He then had to wait in the hospital room for the next couple of hours. He text messaged Annie that they had given me Special K and she and my mom thought it was nice that I was eating cereal.

It turned out to have been a bad decision to take out the IV line they had used for the pitocin. I was soon being prodded in both arms to put two more IVs in. I was wheeled into an operating room. The surgery and recovery room parts seem like a movie montage. It was freezing and I was shivering and there were tons of bright lights and they had to try a couple of times to move me (I hadn’t had time to lose the baby weight yet). Someone eventually put some warm towels over me and I remember seeing one of the nurses standing with my tie-dye pillow saying she would make sure to take it back to my room. I remember them putting the ketamine in one of the IVs. After that I saw a lot of fluorescent orange boxes floating around for a while. As it wore off things would switch back and forth from bright colors to the operating and recovery rooms. They told me they had managed to avoid giving me a transfusion. Eventually I got wheeled back to my room, where Aaron was waiting.

In the morning the intern came in and said there was still a chance that they would give me a transfusion. I didn’t really understand why they would do that if they had managed to not do it during the D&C. They said that if I did okay in the next couple of days it might be possible to avoid it. My hematocrit was 23 that morning, but they said it would probably go down as they gave me more fluids. They checked again later in the day and it was 21. I had lost about a liter and a half of blood overall.

I spent the rest of that day feeling very weak. I didn’t get out of bed for a long time, and I felt dizzy even sitting up. They pay a lot less attention to you in the hospital after you have the baby, so no one gave me any idea of when they were thinking about discharging me and no one was around to help me out of bed. We were all exhausted and spent most of that day just hanging around the hospital. The pediatrician came in and was very nice and said the baby looked good. My dad and Tommy came and saw Dylan.

I have to say that the food in the hospital was fun. They call it room service and give you a big menu and you just call when you want food and they bring it right to your bed. I recommend the tofu ravioli.

That night was marked by the Bullying Night Nurse of Aggression who alternated between passive aggressive and outright aggressive techniques. She brutalized me in the process of trying to help me breastfeed. Twice in the middle of the night she gave me the baby, said she would help me nurse, then left to give someone else meds and didn’t come back for an hour and a half. Then she told me she would take the baby to the nursery to give me a break and never did. She tried in a very manipulative way to get us to give the baby both formula and a pacifier, which are not such terrible things, but are not things that brand new emotional parents who have experienced massive blood loss want to talk about.


Saturday & Sunday: Hospital Days 4 & 5

I was worried about being too weak to take care of the baby, but once I stopped taking percocet I felt a lot better and everyone said I perked up a lot. My hematocrit was back up to 23 by Saturday morning. The doctor mentioned a transfusion one more time, but they seemed to think I was doing well enough not to have one. When they drew my blood I had been on IV fluids for over a day, so I was really puffed up. I usually have easy veins, but one of the nurses trying to draw blood said she had been doing this for 20 years and had never had so much trouble as with me. She then tried to tell me the swelling was normal for postpartum and she would be surprised if I didn’t get worse for the next two weeks. I was about ten times more swollen than I had been at any point during the pregnancy and had a hard time believing that, and by the next day I was back down to a less alarming level of puffiness.

We again spent most of the day hanging around the hospital not doing much. They wanted to watch me for one more day and thought they would discharge me Sunday morning.

Saturday night I had the Nice Night Nurse of Helpfulness, who did a wonderful job helping with the breastfeeding. The lactation consultant said the next day that I was lucky and that I got the best night nurse.

Sunday morning the nurse asked about my plans and when I thought I could head home. We agreed that I would pack up and shower and be ready to go in an hour. I called for reinforcements and we were all sitting there holding bags and pillows, ready to head home. We foolishly tried to walk out the door of the room, which I hadn’t left in five days aside from the surgery, and were shooed back in since I had to be wheeled out in a wheelchair with the baby in my lap. Two hours later all the paperwork was done and the wheelchair arrived. We didn’t feel like learning how to use the car seat, so my mom just walked home with the baby while Aaron drove me. From Wednesday to Sunday that was five days in the hospital, and we were really happy to be home.