Hospital Mini Scare

By: Ann

I just wanted to give everyone an update on the stuff that’s been going on here. Last night we had a little scare. I’m currently home now, newly discharged from the hospital. But Jason, the baby, and I are all okay.

Around 3:30pm or so I had this feeling of nausea and clamminess at work, but I thought it was just my sugar getting low. I alleviated this feeling by having my “just-in-case” supply of scrumptious corn pops cereal that I had on hand. I immediately felt better eating that. However, 2 hours later, I started having that same feeling, only this time I felt really out of it. It wasn’t like I had a particularly busy day at work. In fact, my day at work was a little on the slow side.

We were planning on going to our last childbirth class last night, so I thought that maybe it was just me dreading the thought of going back outside for another long night of class. Jason proceeded to start to eat dinner, and all I could do was just stare at my food. The very idea of putting anything in my mouth seemed to make my nausea a little worse. The clamminess and nausea then became worse. Then I blacked out. According to Jason, I still had my eyes open, but I just stared into blank space. I was unresponsive to Jason for a few seconds. When I finally came to, I was very confused and wondering why Jason was yelling my name insistently. He asked me if I was okay. I just said that I felt really hot, sweaty, and nauseous. Then I blacked out again. Jason called my name several times and then I finally came to again, very confused. It was then, with some other alarming symptoms, that my husband decided it was time that we should go to the hospital…or at least call my doctor/OB.

The OB on call called us back and got my information. She didn’t seem too concerned at first and just told me to take a 30 minute walk and hydrate myself. Which we did. On our walk, we also were trolling for any drug store that sold litmus paper in order to see if my water had broken or not. Funny thing is, many pharmacists (hopefully I was talking to techs and not the actual pharmacist) did not know what litmus paper was. So, for future reference, if you’re ever in the need of litmus paper, it needs to be ordered from the pharmacy first, and you need to spell it and define it several times for people to know what you’re talking about. It’s not something that they have on hand, as I was told by my doula. Also, during the walk I started to have some tightening in my abdomen that I was just attributing to braxton hicks every 20-40 minutes.

After the walk, the OB on-call called back because she thought about my situation even more and was starting to get a little concerned. We decided that it would be a good idea to check in at the hospital. Jason made fun of me because while he was frantically running around the house trying to pack the “birthing bag”, I was frantically trying to find a number of someone I could reach at work to let them know I wasn’t going to be in to work today.

So, when we got to the hospital, they did the usual poking and prodding and gathered from the fetal monitor that I was having contractions every 2-3 minutes pretty regularly. I wasn’t feeling most of them, just the really big ones every 5-10 minutes or so. These didn’t hurt at all, just lots of pressure. They settled us into our hospital room for the night, pumped me up with lots of IV fluids, and gave me a shot of terbutaline to simmer my uterus down. The terbutaline did help for the rest of the night, but upon being discharged, the monitor was showing that I was having the contractions again. It wasn’t doing anything to progress labor, so they sent me home, along with a neurology consultation appointment that I have tomorrow for the blacking out. I also have a follow-up appointment with my OB on Friday to give me the good bill of health to return back to work. So…no work for Ann for the rest of the week.

Jason was so great throughout it all. He’s the best. I felt so sorry for him because he had to sleep in a chair for most of the night (no sleeper chairs, just a regular chair). I made him finally hop in bed with me to have him at least get some kind of sleep during the night. I maybe got 2 hours of sleep. There was a channel called the “newborn channel’ that was really addicting. All the stuff that I don’t have in my pregnancy books was on here about being a new parent.

This all came about so quick. I felt absolutely fine over the weekend. I did have a busier than normal weekend, but I handled it fine. Looking back, however, I did have the biggest braxton hicks contraction ever that lasted about 10-15 seconds long on Sunday right before seeing the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park. The walk that we took wasn’t a long hike. I don’t do hikes any more with my buddha belly and all.

Okay. Here are some pictures of the pregnancy progression. I haven’t been as good about it as I wanted to be. Maybe next pregnancy I’ll be better.

13 weeks

16 weeks

24 weeks

30 weeks

33 weeks...the day before the hospital stay

Jason told me to make a sick face

I really was okay