I have wanted to start this post for months but every time I sit down to write, I wind up in tears… tears of sadness, happiness, anxiety, humbleness….  Mother’s Day 2015.  I was 31 weeks and 3 days along…This day hold so many emotions all wrapped into two tiny little packages.

So much happened in 12 hours and if you can relate in any way, you know this will be an extremely long post.  I don’t want to miss anything so I am breaking it up into at least 2 parts.

We started the day with Zach bringing one of our pups, Beau, to the hospital to visit me – if you are on hospital bedrest and have a dog, ask your doc to write you a script for them to come!  While Zach took Bobo home, I took a shower (I was allowed to do this by myself but had to have my mid-line wrapped so it wouldn’t get wet and had to sit for most of it).  Later that morning, I was wheeled down to a room on my floor for a Mother’s Day brunch with my wonder family who brought all the goods.  The food and company was wonderful and we got to celebrate my mom, step-mom, sister, and me and the wonderful gifts that made (or soon-to-be making) us moms.

Somewhere towards the end of brunch, I started having some back pain but chalked it up to how ridiculously ginormous I was and being out of bed, sitting, for a couple of hours.  Around noon, we wrapped things  up and I went back to my room.  Something felt off – my back was hurting, I just wasn’t feeling right.  If I can give any mom advice, it would be to trust your gut.  Always. Trust. Your. Gut.

Olivia, my God-sent nurse and friend, came in, took one look at me and said, “Do we need to hook you up?” This was her nice way of saying, “I can tell something is wrong, let’s take a good look at the babes because I don’t have a good feeling about this”.  One of the main purposes for me being in the hospital (aside from being seconds away from the operating room) was that I had the ability to be CLOSELY monitored and could be hooked up in seconds to see if the babes were in distress and to monitor contractions.  I had three monitors on my belly: one for each girl and one to monitor uterine activity.

I was having contractions… and not little ones.

While this wasn’t TERRIBLY uncommon seeing as though my body was going to start preparing for delivery (which we knew could never happen because of the vasa previa) with practice contractions, it wasn’t something anyone wanted to happen because of the risks of a rupture for Lila.  Olivia called my doc immediately and they gave me a round of oral tocolytics (meds to stop contractions). This was the second time I had been given these, but it felt different.  The first time, I got the meds, and within 15 minutes I was sleeping and the contractions stopped.   This time, it didn’t touch the contractions, and in fact, they continued to get more intense, last longer, and happen more frequently. Praise God, the girls didn’t seem to be bothered too much by them.

I tried to rest and sleep but it just wasn’t happening.  We turned the TV on, but every 5 minutes I was whipping out the magazine to fan myself and breathe through the contractions.  In fact, I was starting to become so uncomfortable, I was sweating through them and Alexis (another of my fav nurses) got a box fan in the room that Zach could turn on during the contractions and off when they were done. They gave it two hours and ordered another round. They said they would give the second round 30 minutes to work but then we were going to need to look at the next step.

Olivia came in at some point and I knew from the look on her face that they were worried.  I had been staying in the antepartum unit (housed for women who were there long term), but was down the hall from the Perinatal Intensive Care Unit (PICU). She told me they had to send me down to PICU because the contractions were only getting worse and we had to keep the girls safe, but hopefully we would do the “mag” (magnesium sulfate – tocolytic through IV), they would monitor me for 24 hours and then send me back to antepartum.  Olivia had this way of making my anxiety manageable and assuring me that my girls would be okay.

Olivia told me this was the time to be strong for my babes, so I quickly dried my tears, put my essentials on my bed and they wheeled me down to PICU.

PICU is it’s own beast that certainly deserves it’s own post.  Too many details, too little time as I hear a squeaky little ducky getting up from her nap!

To be continued…

xoxo,

 Lindsey