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The week of Lauren's birth - and the several weeks preceding it - were a blur of OB appointments and hospital visits, where we sometimes stayed for hours, once stayed overnight, and always came back home to a chaotic apartment filled with boxes and suitcases, disheveled kitchen cupboards, and clothes lying all over the place. My life and apartment were unorganized, and now my pregnancy was unorganized as well.
On Monday, June 29, I went in to the hospital for a scheduled non-stress test. It was going very well and the nurse supervisor, who had just come into my room near the end of the test, was about to unhook me from the monitors and let me continue on with my day when one last automatic blood pressure reading went off. That one was through the roof. We can argue all day about if the nurse just coming into the room had any effect on the reading or not, but the fact is that although all the prior readings had been in my late-pregnancy normal range, that last one worried the nurse and she left to call the on-call doctor (which was the same doctor who had been on-call the Thursday before when I had ended up staying in the hospital overnight to do a 24-hour urine test) to find out his opinion. I knew instinctively I wouldn't be leaving the hospital any time soon. The nurse soon came back to tell me that the doctor wanted me to stay the night again, and have more blood tests and another 24-hour urine test done to see if any of my levels had changed from my stay the week before.
While the nurse set up the bathroom in my room to start the urine test, I texted Jonathan and he arrived a few hours later. By that time my blood pressures had gone higher and higher, and each time the next BP measurement was drawing nearer, no matter how much I tried, I was unable to relax myself enough for the BPs to go back down to my normal levels. After a couple more hours of Jonathan and me trying in vain to bring them down in an attempt to have the on-call doctor let me go home, I was done. I knew staying in the hospital was keeping me from achieving lower BP readings again, and I knew that these sustained higher ones were not beneficial to either me or my baby, although the baby's heartbeat still looked great. The nurses kept telling us the on-call doctor would be coming in soon to talk to us, but soon kept getting pushed back, and finally they said he would be coming in the evening after seeing his last patients of the day. Anxious and frustrated, I told them I was going home. The nurses were surprised and dismayed. They tried to talk me out of it, but I was so absolutely done lying in that hospital bed, having my baby constantly monitored, and having blood pressures taken every half hour. I knew it wasn't a popular choice, nor the recommended one, but I also knew that if I stayed, induction would be pushed and I wasn't ready to make that decision without the counsel of my own doctor, who was still out of town until Wednesday. I agreed to bring home the equipment to continue to take my own 24-hour urine test and that I would bring the sample back to the hospital the next afternoon and get another non-stress test. After signing papers saying I was checking out against medical advice and listening to the come-back-in-immediately-if... speech yet again, we headed to the lobby where I waited while Jonathan brought around the car. The nurse assigned to me for the afternoon waited with me and walked me out to the car, telling me even at the last minute when I was belted in that she wished I would stay, that my insurance might not cover the cost if something happened while at home after I'd left against medical advice, and that she really hoped I'd have my baby in my arms by the time she was scheduled to work again on Wednesday. I wearily nodded, said goodbye, and we drove off into the late-afternoon sauna-temps traffic.
I took my BP again immediately upon arriving home. It was still high, but I was still worked up. After lying down on the couch for awhile and still having a high BP when checking again, Jonathan convinced me to have a bath. When I got out of the bath and checked my blood pressure again, it was back down to my regular readings. I laid low, lounging on the couch for the rest of the evening.
Early in the afternoon on Tuesday I headed back to Folsom to return my 24-hour urine sample to the hospital. The nurses took the sample and set me up in a room for my non-stress test. Although I was nervous for the test after what had happened the day before, my blood pressures that day were much better, back within my normal levels. Unfortunately, once again the nurses were concerned with my BPs and called the on-call doctor. He also wasn't too impressed with them either and wanted me to stay in until he could come talk to me. I knew that he, too, would want to admit me and start an induction. Jonathan came to the hospital in the afternoon and not long later, the nurse assigned to me came in to the room to ask me if she could put in a saline lock, just in case I had any seizures. I told her I would really rather not have one, as I was hoping to be able to leave later that evening. She was very nervous about this and tried to convince me to let her put one in. When she finally realized that I was serious, she told me she would leave all the equipment in the room just in case I changed my mind or if my blood pressures got really high again like the day before. She put the basket of supplies on the counter by the sink and laid out several different paraphernalia before leaving the room. A few minutes later she was back, this time with an armful of padding, which she proceeded to fasten to the sides of the hospital bed. I was quite surprised since no one had done these things the day before when my BPs had been much higher, nor the night the week before when I'd ended up staying overnight. In any case, I let her continue on as I knew it would make her feel better about me not having the saline lock in.
Once she was done and left the room, Jonathan and I visited until the doctor arrived to talk to us. He had a kind bedside demeanor and gave us a nice explanation of why he thought I should agree to an induction, which we appreciated. After talking to us, he said he would let us think about it for awhile. We talked it over and decided that we still wanted to wait one more day and talk to our own doctor when she got back. When we told the nurse, she was surprised by our decision and told me how concerned she was for me, but in the end she took off all the seizure pads, had me sign discharge papers, gave me the speech of things to watch out for once again, and let us leave. We left the hospital in the evening and I was relieved when we finally got home, but also worn out. We took some time before going to bed to get a hospital bag ready in case our doctor wanted us to go back in to the hospital in the morning. Then went to bed for what we imagined might be our last night alone in our apartment, and very likely the last night as just the two of us.
On the morning of Wednesday, July 1 (Canada Day!), Jonathan called our OB's office bright and early at 8 a.m. to make an appointment to see her. We wanted to tell Dr. Haskins what had been happening while she was gone on vacation and get her opinion on what she would recommend moving forward. We finally heard back from her office just before 10 a.m. and her receptionist told us we could come in to the office at 3:45 p.m. for an appointment. We were surprised that it took the office so long to get back to us, and also that the doctor was fine to see us later on in the day, but were grateful on both accounts as it reassured us that she probably didn't think our situation was dire since she wasn't asking us to come in right away. With the appointment made, we continued on with our day. We added a few more items to our hospital bag, and Jonathan was able to set up a time to test drive a car around noon. When we got back from the test drive, we relaxed for a bit, ate a meal and then did some final chores before heading out to the doctor's office. We brought with us everything we wanted to have at the hospital since we weren't sure if Dr. Haskins would send us right over to the hospital after our appointment to be induced or not.
At the appointment, my blood pressure was amazingly low for what it had been most of the past few days, 136/92. I was so surprised since the day was warm and we had driven to the appointment in our car that still had no working A/C. The nurse taking my BP told me she had been instructed by Dr. Haskins to have me lie on my side in one of the exam rooms for 5-10 minutes after taking my initial blood pressure and then would take my BP again and see if it had changed, but because this initial BP was so good, she asked the doctor if I needed another BP taken. Dr. Haskins said no, so we went straight to an exam room to wait for her. A few minutes later, Dr. Haskins poked her head in and told us she needed to go across the road to the hospital to catch a baby who was nearly ready to be born, and asked if we could wait until she got back. We really wanted to talk to her that day and said we didn't mind. We moved back out to the waiting room until Dr. Haskins came back in about half an hour and then went back to the exam room for our appointment.
We had a great talk with Dr. Haskins and were so glad that we had waited to see her again and discuss things with her before just going ahead and being induced like we had been recommended to do on both Monday and Tuesday evenings. Jonathan and I mentioned that we'd ideally like to wait as long as possible before inducing so that the baby could continue growing and maturing as long as possible, but Dr. Haskins told us that actually, in pre-eclampsia patients, even ones with just mild pre-eclampsia, babies usually actually lose weight in utero rather than continue to gain since the blood vessels in the placenta can constrict, which means decreased nutrient flow from the mother to the baby. Once we heard that, our reservations about induction lessened dramatically. We were still nervous about the procedure for several reasons, but we certainly didn't want this baby - already small at the 25th percentile in an ultrasound the previous Thursday - to get any smaller. Dr. Haskins also told us that the stress of pre-eclampsia, while potentially harmful to mothers, actually often helps babies' lungs mature and babies usually do great after delivery. Then she talked to us about the different options we had, and gave us her suggestion, which was that in this situation, even though the only thing amiss was my blood pressures, she would recommend induction sooner rather than later, before anything drastic might take place that could potentially mean even more interventions and/or health risks to me and/or the baby.
Next she checked my cervix, which was 2.5-3 cm dilated and really soft, "like warm butter on a summer day." (What a visual! Jonathan said he remembers her saying I was 95% effaced, but I don't recall that. I might have been thinking about the soft butter comment at the time, though.) Dr. Haskins ended up stripping my membranes in an effort to try to kickstart labour naturally, and then told us to discuss what we wanted to do while she went to do a quick ultrasound for another patient. Jonathan and I talked and finally decided that if I would ultimately need to be induced, we might as well start it going sooner rather than later since Dr. Haskins was going to be the on-call doctor for the next three days and we would prefer her being the doctor to be with us during delivery. When Dr. Haskins came back, we told her we would be fine to go in to the hospital the next morning to start the induction. She told us she thought that was a good decision, and called the hospital right away to see if they had a time slot and scheduled the induction for 7 a.m. Thursday morning. She said she would be at the hospital at 7:30 a.m. to check on us. We left the office around 5:30 p.m. and went home to eat supper, relax, and get some more last-minute things done, and then went to bed a bit earlier than usual to ensure a good night's sleep before our lives would suddenly be very different.
Next up: Lauren's birth story
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