it’s taken me a full month to get this up… our little miss maisley is a month old and time is flying. she is beautiful + healthy and we are home!

*****

i’m currently writing this with the sweetest, most precious little surprise-miracle sleeping soundly on my chest while we do ‘skin to skin’ time in the recliner next to her isolette in the neonatal intensive care unit {NICU}… a place all too familiar to us. somewhere we thought we were totally going to avoid this go round. but here we are, 7 days new and yet weeks away from our due date. growing, learning to eat, getting these bilirubin numbers down and maintaining body temperature.

our itty bitty miracle who surprised us 6 weeks early, maisley genevieve

friday march 22

i woke up feeling ‘off’…and i wish there was any other way to describe it, but, i just was off. my back was hurting. i had some cramping…but. all things a little bit normal for being 34 weeks pregnant + 3 toddlers. a girlfriend and her kids came over for a coffee playdate and we went about our day as usual… we had piper’s PT in the afternoon and the kids were being crazy, then we met up with my sister + fam for dinner. we decided last minute to stop for ice cream on the way home and i’m so glad we did because it really was our last little outing as a family of 5 and we had the best time.
by the time we got home, i was having noticeable contractions and told zach i needed to sit down and track them because they seemed to be too ‘regular’ for my liking. i had posted on instagram about using the bloom life contraction monitor {you can use code LINDSEY10 for $10 off your weekly rental} so i stuck it on to see what was going on… needless to say, contractions were every 4-5 minutes and lasting 1-2 minutes. not exactly what i was hoping for. i texted my friend who was a l+d nurse to see how much benadryl i could take, remembering that my doc had me do that at some point with miller when i was having a few contractions… i chugged some water and was going to hop in the shower and try to sleep it off but thought i should probably call my doc, too.
the doctor on call {who i didn’t know at the time} told me i really couldn’t ‘do this at home’ like i was hoping to and that i needed to come to triage in labor + delivery fairly quickly to get checked out. again…not in my plans, i had other stuff to do and having a baby wasn’t an option at this point. i hopped in the shower, then started having diarrhea and needless to say, finally decided to follow doc’s orders and come in….unwillingly, because seriously, we weren’t having a baby.
i didn’t pack a bag. or a change of clothes. or anything. i refused to let zach come with me because we didn’t have a quick option set in place for the kids…and truly, we weren’t having a baby. my plan {clearly i’m a doctor} was to go in, they were going to tell me i was crazy, and then send me home. maybe give me a bag of fluids. i did at least let my sister meet me there just in case they did anything.

we got to the hospital, hooked up to the monitors and needless to say, i was contracting every 3-4 minutes. a cervical check was done and i wasn’t really making progress but as the doc was watching the contractions from home, he called to say they needed to admit me to PICU {perinatal intensive care unit} and administer magnesium… the dreaded magnesium. it was the only thing i didn’t want, only because i had been on it for 4 hours prior to the girls being born and it was the worst, ever.
while i was still in triage, we got the IV hooked up and i knew enough to ask for anti-nausea meds before we started the ‘mag’ to try to curb what i knew was inevitable..the worst flu comin at me head on.

saturday march 23

about 1am i was moved into PICU and christine stayed with me until zach showed up. he had to get the kids packed up and headed to my mom’s house so he could come be with me.

the goal for picu:
– 2 rounds of steroid shots, 24 hours apart to help maisley’s lungs develop, just in case she had an early arrival
– 24 hours on magnesium to protect her brain, then re-evaluate.

the other bonus of the magnesium is that it’s supposed to stop contractions. supposed to.

i remember looking at the clock around 330 and feeling exhausted but my contractions had significantly slowed to about 3 per hour and i was able to close my eyes and get some sleep.

the magnesium does weird things… it’s like the worst flu you’ve ever had. hot flashes paired with nausea. dizziness. overall… i felt terrible. i’ve had to double check almost all of these details with zach or my sister because quite frankly, i remember almost nothing of the entire night and day.

the doc called my nurse for an update around 6am and everyone was hopeful that the mag had worked and i would be getting out of there. until 615 when i got up to pee, took this picture + got back into bed…and then all hell broke loose.

when the doc came in, he wasn’t super thrilled with where things were going and basically said we would either be going home if we could get the contractions to stop or we would be having a baby. he said he’d check back but we were in the right place…and we were. i apologized for being such a witch on the phone, arguing with him whether it was the right call to come in and clearly, he had made the right call. with placenta accreta on the table, he was prepared for a hysterectomy and very confident maisley would be okay with 34 weeks, especially with the mag + steroids.
we talked about the details, the specifics of the hysterectomy and plan in case there wasn’t an accreta. he asked about a tubal ligation and i said that if once they were in there, if it wouldn’t be safe for me to be pregnant again, i wanted my tubes to be taken out. no, we can’t get pregnant on our own…but we have at one point and we didn’t want an ‘oops’ in 4 years if in fact, it wasn’t safe for me. if he opened me up and it would have been safe for me to be pregnant again, i did not want the tubal. we were on the same page and everyone understood the plan.

by 730am, contractions came back full force and with a vengeance.
quickly returning to appx. every 3 minutes and lasting 1-2 minutes….my blood pressure was out of whack and they thought i wasn’t tolerating the mag well so they stopped it and did a tox screening to see if i had too much in my system. when the bloodwork came back and showed i wasn’t in the toxic level, the doc ordered another bolus round of the mag..only this time it wasn’t slowing down.

the only thing that sounded tolerable was iced coffee and with as awful as i was feeling, they didn’t want me getting a caffeine headache on top of it all so we got the go ahead for a coffee.
coffee + puking. it’s a good combo.

the doc came in about 430pm and as soon as he walked in, i had a contraction {which were still occurring every 3-4 minutes} and he immediately said, ‘oh my gosh, is this was you have been doing all day?? nope, you can’t do this anymore… it’s time to meet your baby girl.’ it was the first time i felt pure relief. i had gone from complete denial the night before {arguing with the doctor that we were NOT going to have a baby right now} to basically begging him to deliver her. i was ready to plead my case so when he made the call, the tears of relief came. i was scared, but i knew something was wrong.
it was time to meet our little girl.

they prepped me for surgery and then at whatever point, my mom came, one of my best friends, and i think my stepdad. it’s really all a blur and at whatever point, my stepmom had switched and got the kids so that my mom could be at the hospital while my dad and step mom had the kids.
i have zero recollection of most of the day. i had no idea who was there, i was exhausted from laboring for so long, being on the mag and antinausea meds.
it was a blur.

they wheeled me back to the OR, prepared with 6 units of blood for the potential accreta + hysterectomy and that familiar ‘clean’, sterile smell filled the OR. i transferred myself to the OR table and leaned over my big belly as far as i could while the anesthesiologist stuck the needle in my back. i personally don’t think the epidural is anything compared to the contractions + mag, but then the nausea hit and i was vomiting again. my blood pressure tends to drop immediately so it takes a minute to get stabilized. by the time zach came in, i was coming to again, he held my hand, kissed my forehead and said,
‘i love you babe. you’ve done an amazing job. you’re an incredible mama and i can’t wait to meet this sweet girl.’

maisley’s 3rd trimester update
lila +  piper’s birth story part 1
lila + piper’s birth story part 2 {PICU}
lila + piper’s birth story part 3 {the arrival}
miller’s birth story part 1
miller’s birth story part 2