I’m sorry I’ve been MIA for two weeks now. For those of you who get my Facebook and Twitter updates, you may have saw my quick note a few days ago with a brief explanation. Now that I have a few minutes, I wanted to share with everyone here.
Because my BP had been up fairly high for the last couple weeks of my pregnancy, and because I was officially past my due date, I went into the hospital at the request of my Dr. on February 20th to be induced. You hear the word “induced” and you think “yay, this should be quick!”. Then you find out – hey, just kidding! Induction is so slow. At least in my case it was. We started with pills to thin things out Sunday night, and the nurses were telling me to get as much sleep as I could that night, because I was going to need it. Except that Baby C has been a squirmy gymnast since about month four, and that night was no exception. The nurses had to keep waking me up to readjust the fetal monitor for my belly, because the baby kept moving away from it.
Monday morning we started the Pit drip, and again I thought “okay, here we go, this will really get things rolling”. Again – not so much. By mid-afternoon I was barely half-way there and things were slowing back down. It was at that point that I decided to go ahead and get an epidural; I had planned on trying to go natural, but I was in quite a bit of pain, and the nurses said it was likely going to be hours still before anything happened. In fact, every time they came in to check on me, they pushed back their “guesstimate” of when I could expect the show to start.
The epi made me more comfortable for a few hours, but then the machine administering the epidural started to beep beep beep beep beep (imagine that over and over and then imagine being annoyed. Oh so annoyed.) The beeping triggered the machine to shut off (ended up there was an air bubble in the line), and after awhile I started feeling some pain on one side. While they were trying to get the machine fixed and do a few other things, they had me laying flat on my back. Laying on my back had not been my friend at all while pregnant. At my last ultrasound, which was taking awhile because they were checking on Baby C to make sure she wasn’t stressed from my BP being up, I started feeling really hot and nauseated and I almost passed out. So I told the nurse that was checking my progress that I was starting to feel not so hot, and then I told the nurse that I was actually feeling worse than not so hot; about 15 seconds later I was sick to my stomach. Not fun!
After they were able to get my epi fixed (and showing me how to use the button to give myself more, something my anesthesiologist had forgotten to do; how do you forget to show someone that part??) and gave me an extra dose to make up for it being off so long (my left side was really hurting at that point), things started moving along again. One of the doctors from my practice (not my actual doctor as she had gone off her shift a few hours before. It made me really glad she had rotated my early appointments around so that I’d meet all the staff; a brand new face at that point might have made me a little nervous) came in and said “let’s do this!” and so we did. Less than 40 minutes after starting, Baby C showed her sweet little face to the world for the first time. Oh, she is adorable. And yes, I’m a little partial!
Because it was just after midnight, they wanted us to stay for the full two days, so we weren’t able to leave until Thursday afternoon, which meant 5 days total in the hospital. We were oh so ready to leave by then! We wanted to sleep in our own bed and we wanted to get home and cuddle Baby C! My hubby was awesome; he stayed at the hospital and slept there every night. He did go home for a couple of hours one day to take a shower and email pictures to our family, but otherwise, never left.
So now we’re home and trying to settle into a routine. We’re doing really well, other than being a little tired. Or a lot tired, to be more accurate. But she’s so precious that even living on three 15-minute bursts of sleep per night isn’t that big of a deal. Though I’ll be happy when she sleeps for a few hours at a time.
I’m trying to get back into the swing of things here, too; between the baby and having to had to return work already, it’s been a little hard to find a groove. I know I have some winners to draw, some reviews to write, giveaways to post and deals to share. In the next day or so, I should be getting a good start on all of that. Just bare with me for a couple of days as we adjust to our new schedules here at home.