When things don't go as planned ~ Pre-eclampsia part 1

Now I'm ready for my last pregnancy!
It was April of 2005 and we were in the process of moving from Kansas to Oklahoma. Right after we moved I found out I was pregnant. Just a few months before I had my third miscarriage. One day I started spotting and I remember being terribly scared for the baby. I had spotted with one other pregnancy that didn't end in a miscarriage so it does happen. But for me it was 2 spotting out of 3 ended bad. I immediately laid down and put my feet up. I called my husband and I prayed continually for the next couple of days. I didn't have a doctor yet, but I did end up calling my last doctor. He was over an hour away, but at least I knew him. I couldn't get in right away but there really wasn't anything he could have helped me with at that point. I quit spotting after a couple of days and God blessed allowed me to carry him to almost full term.

The rest of the pregnancy was pretty uneventful. I only seen the doctor who was an hour away a couple of times and I realized it was just to hard for me to travel that far to see him. The move had taken its toll on us financially and we had no extra money to spend whatsoever. I'm a pretty shy person and going to a new doctor didn't thrill me at all. Finally I picked one and I had 2 or 3 visits with him. He told me I needed to pick out a pediatrician and get Samuel's records to him in case the new baby had the same problem that Samuel had when he was born. At that visit I told my doctor that I was swelling really bad. He made some joke about how much more swollen I would be in a few weeks. That kind of irritated me because I had been through several pregnancies and I knew my body, and even though I would swell up a lot, this was much more extreme. I went home and continued to teach my kids, sometimes having them put lotion on my feet to give me some relief. Not quite a week later I weighed myself. I had gained 9 pounds in 6 days! I called the dr.'s office and told the nurse that something couldn't be right, she agreed and had me come right in.

They did the normal urine test and blood pressure, then he told me that he was pretty sure I had developed preeclampsia. He told me he wanted me to do an overnight urine and bring it in first thing in the morning. He said it was pretty serious, that I would probably deliver in a couple of weeks or so. Well I went home did the lab stuff and showed up in the morning. He came back in and told me he would like to put me in the hospital right then to monitor the baby and my blood pressure. He said it wasn't real high yet, but that he had a bad feeling that I was going to be like a time bomb and suddenly explode.

So I called my husband and told him what I had to do. I drove home and took a quick bath to try to relax and get my Mother-in-law to come down to watch the kids. I stayed in the hospital until 4:30pm or so. They had started me on an IV gave me some medicine to relax me, my memory is so bad anymore I can't remember what they gave me. Next the doctor called me on my room phone and told me that I had to options. He said that my blood pressure was continuing to rise in spite of the fact that I had been in bed all day and he wanted to get the baby and me to a hospital that could handle premature babies. He told me I was going to have the baby within 3 days. My options were to take the chopper to Tulsa or ride there by ambulance. He said if it where him he would choose the ambulance. I figure I'd go with his recommendation, so while waiting for the ambulance they gave me one steroid shot to start helping the babies lung develop.

The paramedics arrived and they got me loaded up on the ambulance. My husband said he would go home and wait for my mom to get there so they could ride to Tulsa together. The paramedics were very nice and visited with me on our 50+ minute ride to the hospital. I would watch the blood pressure machine and it continued to rise, but I wasn't worried, I know the only way I was being peaceful was that God was keeping me together. It really felt this was just another adventure in life and I was cool with it. Labor pains started on the way there. I got to the hospital they got me right upstairs and this specialist, who my old doctor turned me over to, came into my room with a portable sonogram machine. He immediately checked the baby. He said he estimated him at about 5 pounds and told me they were going to have to get him delivered asap. He said he might let me deliver vaginally but would have to see. He left the room and when he returned he looked at my stats and told me they were going to have to take the baby by emergency c-section. He wanted to put me under all the way, but after talking with the anesthesiologist he told me it wasn't safe to put me out and that they would have to do an epidural. So they take me right to the operating room, the neonatal staff is all set up and ready to take the baby up to the 7th floor. I get my epidural and am laying there with everything all ready for surgery. My husband and mom haven't showed up and I was started to worry. My head started pounding so hard that I could barely stand it. They kept poking my stomach with a needle to see if I could feel it and I could feel it. It seemed like he was started to doubt whether or not I could, he said I would feel pressure but nothing sharp. I mustered up some energy and tried to sit up and I point blank told him I could feel it and needed more medication. I think that is when I started to worry. I must say that I would rather have a baby naturally any day over a c-section. I had some friends who had had them and not one told how awful they are. I realize that my experience in a whole might have been what made it so bad, but it felt like they were pulling and twisting my insides right out of my body and a lot of pressure too. They had me cut open and were just starting to take Ezra out of me when my husband walked in. I was so relieved that he made it in time. They took Ezra out and from clear across the room they got my attention so I could see the baby. I could barely focus on him, my blood pressure was so high I literally thought my head was going to explode. I can't remember exactly what it was but it was well over 230 and I'm not sure if that was the top or bottom number.

Now, I had been strong all this time, I had been told that as soon as the baby is delivered I would be better. But the valley for me had just begun. My blood pressure was so high, they kept telling me that relief was in sight. I'd delivered the baby and my body would be back to normal in a matter of hours. Lesson learned: it can take months to get the poison out of your system. and it is normal if you don't immediately get better so don't panic if this ever happens to you. Well I'm not sure of exact details but they kept giving me all kinds of medicine to bring my blood pressure down. And, when I would start to feel half way like I was going to live, my doctor would change the medicine to a different type to see if that medicine would bring my blood pressure down better.

Medicine can do some awful things to a persons mind and well being. I couldn't even close my eyes to rest because when I did I saw a demonic type face made of fire. I know that sounds weird and I am a saved, born again, child of God. I literally stayed up for what seemed like eternity, continually praying for God to deliver me from this hell that I was suddenly cast into. I had Ezra on a Friday night, I was very optimistic at first, I knew I had to give it some time, but I really didn't know what I was fighting and what to expect.

The nurses I had were not any help at all. The day after he was born I kept telling my husband and my Mom that I had to go to the bathroom. I was still hooked up to the catheter, so even though they had a nurse come in a couple of times throughout the day to check on me, the nurses told me I was fine and all was working well. Finally I was in so much pain, I told my husband that it felt like my bladder was going to burst and to get someone in there. This one nurse came in said everything was fine, I kept insisting things weren't fine and finally she looked by the bed and saw that the tube was pinched. When she unpinched it the bag immediately filled to the top! I'm not sure how long I went with it pinched but probably 12 hours or so. Next I wanted to try and get up, but I was very weak. This one nurse came in and asked me if I wanted to try and use the bathroom. I said yes, and she came over to help me up. When I got up I felt a little dizzy and very weak. I held onto her and she asked me if I felt like I was going to fall down. I told her I wasn't sure, she told me that I was not to hold onto her and that if I was to fall she would let me fall to the ground. So I got back into bed.

After you have surgery it is very important to get back on your feet as soon as possible. Every day you wait makes it that much harder to bounce back. I was feeling so weird with all the blood pressure medicine that I had them back down on my pain medicine and refused the strong stuff. I have a very high level of pain tolerance, I always have, but I did learn through this experience that you don't want to go off pain meds all the way because then the pain will hit you very hard all at once!

I wanted to get out of bed at least to stand, but no one would ever help me. My husband never got me up, because he was afraid I'd get hurt. Finally after getting to where my hair was nothing less then a grease pit, I finally got to take a shower. I'm not sure how I managed to get through it, I was in such a fog and terribly weak, just to pick up the shampoo bottle was a major undertaking for me. The nurses told me the same thing, if you go down, we won't catch you. I have never had a nurse tell me that before but I had numerous nurses tell me that at this hospital. I can't remember what day for sure that I got my shower but I'm thinking Tuesday or Wednesday. While taking the shower I was freaked out by the way my forehead felt. I thought my forehead had changed shape and that it immediately went straight back after my eyebrows! I felt that way for a couple of weeks. It was totally weird to me, I would rationalize in my mind it had to be normal, but I would feel it and then I remember telling my husband my forehead was definitely different. He assured me it was normal, but for me it was hard to believe.

I would lie awake at night watching the clock tick through every second, praying every second. My condition just kept getting worse. Wednesday, I finally tell my husband that the noise in my room is driving me insane. My room was as far away from the normal mom's room as possible. They put me on the end of the hallway next to their washers and dryers. The noise from them whining was driving me farther insane! My husband requested another room. That night they came in and got me and took me down to the opposite end of the hallway. They wanted to keep me away from the healthy mom's who had their babies with them. After they got me settled, I remember how blessedly peaceful the room was. It had a lovely view for my husband to enjoy too. Then the nurse came in and said the doctor wanted to try different kind of blood pressure medicine. I'm no doctor, but I believe I would have been better off if they wouldn't have kept switching stuff around on me. I also have a horrible history of being allergic to certain medications. Anyway, within minutes after she injected it into my IV I felt like I was going to die. I was so afraid I was having some kind of heart attack or something that they had the doctor come in. He told me I was fine, but then after waiting a little bit and not feeling any different I kept getting this urgent voice in the back of my mind telling me not to lay there. That I must insist that something wasn't right. So I did. The doctor couldn't get a heart doctor to come into my room. They are only allowed so many patients in one day and they had all met their quotas (what!)

What happened next, I'm not sure if its what helped me in some unknown way, or if I would have known what was going to happen if I would have been better off staying there in my room.

He told me that the only way to get the care I needed was to take me to the emergency room. I'm hurting in my chest, felt like a million pounds were on my chest, I couldn't be calm for anything and I really was trying to be. I wanted more than anything to get better. I wanted more than anything to be able to go and see my son whom I had never really got a good look at. I wanted more than anything to be a new Mom who had just had her baby and could be a part of his life. Even if he was born to early I would have loved to have been up there watching over him, knowing everything about how they were caring for him, but I still didn't have the help I needed to recover. But that was soon to change.

I really didn't feel like I had a choice, he couldn't help me and I didn't want my pride to keep me from getting the care I needed. I thought of all my kids waiting for me at home... I had to get better. So, a nurse comes in and sets me in a wheelchair. I only have my hospital gown on. Nothing else, not anything remotely modest, in my eyes. Next she looks around and then goes and gets a cart. Then she started loading the cart up with all my belongings. I asked her why did I have to get my stuff and she told me I was being discharged from my doctors care and therefore was being discharged from the hospital! She wheels me down to the emergency room in front of a lot of people and drops me off there. This nurse gets a room for me, remember this is the emergency room, the rooms don't have comfortable beds just a ambulance type bed/gurney. I get down there around 11pm, The on call ER dr. comes to see me, decides to do a MRI. I have to sign a waiver saying I'm not allergic to Iodine. That in itself scared me because my body was already so out of wack. They ran some test on me, and everything came back normal except that the MRI picked up the beginning stage of pneumonia.

Then the nurse comes back in and tells me that she has in her hands a medicine she has used a lot in the past with people with high blood pressure and she assured me that this would be the turning point for me. She said she had never given it to anyone who's blood pressure didn't lower drastically. So she injected it and the wait began. Finally after an hour I remember looking at the blood pressure machine and my blood pressure was 180/115. She seemed down and I asked her what was wrong. She said it took it down some, but it didn't do what she thought it would do. She said she didn't even know of anything better than what she had just used.

I believe that hearing over and over from doctors and nurses about how I should be getting better, did very little in helping me. I think I started worrying if I ever would get better. I really started to believe that my life as I had know it was over. I started to believe that I would never be able to fully function again and that I would never be able to take care of my children and be the mom I should be to them or the wife I should be. Depression started creeping in.
Well just so you know this is the fifth night after Ezra was taken my c-section. I still had the staples in my stomach and I had never walked to the bathroom since my surgery. Bed pans were all I knew. Another view into that night, imagine being on a bed hardly long enough to lay fully out on. One maybe two inches of padding on a hard board. One hard bend in it to push your head up, and very, very narrow. I was laying on that thing in the only way I could. I couldn't really move and the bed was starting to feel like I was laying on hard bricks. My stomach started hurting terribly bad, my heart is pounding in my chest and ears, no peace was to be found. I am not exaggerating in saying that I watched the second hand go through every minute of every hour of that night, except for when the nurse came in to see me. It then hit me that I needed to go to the bathroom. Task #1 I couldn't go on the bed pan, one there was no privacy. So I couldn't put it off anymore, this wonderfully nice nurse helped me get out of bed and with a walker to hold onto, helped me walk around the corner to the bathroom. I made it! Then she left me on the stool and closed the door, because I am really, really bad about using the bathroom when someone is in there with me :-) I made up a rhyme to help me concentrate and let me tell you it was a battle; but I finally went! So she helped me get back to my bed. Then I had to go again! So I was successful a second time. Then probably from the exertion of getting up and walking to the restroom for the first time I was in horrible pain. I told the nurse I was in terrible pain and then she went white. She said that since I didn't have a doctor and wasn't officially a patient of the hospital anymore, I didn't have any way to get pain medications! Morning came and her shift ended, I ended up with this nurse who became my advocate for me. Breakfast time came and went, I was still in a lot of pain. Now on top of that I was also getting hungry. No room... no food. She called up to the floor I should have been on. I heard her out there saying it was inexcusable and that she didn't care if they didn't know what to do with me, I needed to get into a room and get proper rest and care. Every so often I would hear her calling up to them. They told her they had no room for me and that none of them could really take care of me anyways. Finally, she got through to someone who said that I could go the the floor up about the maternity ward. Hope was finally in sight, after over 12 gruelling hours in the ER I was finally going to be admitted back into the hospital. Only one problem. They had to get me a doctor. Well they admitted me back in under the care of a cardiologist. So even though I had missed breakfast and lunch, the nurse whose care I was under found me a meal to eat!

I will never forget that nurse. She was a large, heavy set woman. She came into my room and told me that I should already be up and about and I was very behind where I should be, but that was all going to change! She said she wanted me to page her every time I had to use the bathroom. She said she did not want me walking anywhere without her. She held me with one of my arms and another nurse came in and held my other arm. She told me not to worry, she would not let me fall! She walked me to the bathroom and walked me regularly throughout the day around my room. She told me that she felt like it was an unspeakable thing that I had never been up to see my son. You could tell she was horrified by what I had been through. In fact I became the talk of the floor. No one could believe what I had to go through, no one had ever heard of a patient getting discharged who still needed so much care. That evening I asked the nurse what I was suppose to do about my staples. She couldn't believe I still had them in. Somewhere in the night my old doctor came in to see me. He was red with embarrassment. He apologized over and over for the way I had been treated. He removed my staples and asked me to forgive him. He also told me that the maternity ward had nurses who did not know how to care for a high maintenance patient. So he became one of my doctors again. I had him and a team of heart doctors.

That night, at midnight,after getting up through the day, I was determined to go up and see Ezra. My parents bought me some new slippers and they bought them way bigger then my feet, but my feet were still way to swollen to wear them. I went up in a wheelchair, so the big men's socks my husband bought for me worked fine :-)

I still felt incredibly weak, but seeing Ezra made my world stand still. Wow! What a beautiful baby boy! What a blessing from God! God is so good, He brought me through all those horrors to this quiet peaceful place where time seemed to be on hold. The Neo-natal nurse was getting ready to feed him. She fed him for a little bit, then she asked me if I wanted to feed him! So on Oct. 20th I finally got to hold my son! She handed him over and I was so afraid I would do something wrong. My arms felt like rubber, but when she put him in my arms I couldn't believe how light he felt. I asked her how much he weighed and she said 2 lbs. 3ozs. He had lost a couple of pounds since birth. His birth weight was 4 lbs. 3 ozs. and 15 or 16 inches long.
I couldn't stay up there very long, I was afraid I would pass out, but it was such a wonderful moment to remember.

I'm going to post this,as this post is getting really long. I'll work on the next part and post it whenever I can finish it!

This is the first picture I got of Ezra. They took this pictures after they got him situated in the neo-natal clinic. They gave it to me the day after he was born.

This is the second picture (and last) the hospital took of Ezra to give to me. This is day 2 and he has been taken off the respirator!

The nurse getting Ezra out - the first time I personally saw him upclose!

This picture is taken later that day in the afternoon, 10-20-05

A picture of Ezra and I on 10/20/05.

Ezra 6 days old.

Daddy and Ezra day 6.

When things don't go as planned ~ the background

I have been working on the following post for well over a month now and I'm not sure of the best way to post it. It is getting rather lengthy, so I am going to break it up. That would help me as I'm not done yet, and would feel better if I could post some of it. I wanted to write about my experience with preeclampsia, in case there is someone out there who could be helped by reading this.

Before I got pregnant with my last child I had had 7 healthy children and 3 miscarriages. I did have one of the miscarriages right before my last child. All of the healthy children were healthy pregnancies. I did start having complications with two healthy ones that were born before my last one.

(note: I wanted to post some newborn pictures of Nehmiah, but couldn't find them, so I will post some later)

It all started with Nehemiah. He was born close to his due date, but not late. He was a big baby 9 lbs. 3 ozs. My pastor, his wife and a couple of missionaries who were in town for a missions conference had come to the hospital and came in right after he was born. I started feeling uncomfortable and as soon as they left I asked to go to the bathroom. My husband walked our company out and I got up and started feeling funny. I sat down on the stool and a massive amount of blood and blood clots come out and I felt like I was fading out of reality. So I called for the nurses and 2 of them came in. They got me right to my bed and as I was laying down all I remember was being all cold and peaceful, except for the hollering going on. Next I remember my husband looking right into my eyes, looking very worried and scared, I could hear him talking to me but it was so far away and I couldn't move or talk by then. My uterus couldn't clamp down (something like that) and my blood pressure dropped way down. They got the doctor back up to see me and he had them get some medicine that he injected with a needle into my abdomen, to get my heart beat to go back up. Next he cleaned out my uterus in case something was still in there. After he was done 2 nurses took turns massaging my uterus (pushing down on my stomach and rubbing) which by then I was coming to and it was getting to be a bit more painful. If I remember correctly I was all better about two hours later and finally got to just lay down, rest, and enjoy my new boy!

The doctor said that having multiple pregnancies might have weakened my uterus, but he mainly thought that he was big for me and that my uterus was just floppy afterwards because of that. He said he felt like it would be safe for me to have another baby. I was weak for a couple of weeks, and other than developing a problem with dropping dishes a lot, nothing new came from that.

We ended up moving about 2 hours away and were living in a camper when...
Next came Samuel, the doctor wanted to take him early so I wouldn't have the same problem. Even though I had moved away I wanted my same doctor and my in-laws lived close to that town so I went to stay with them the week they induced me and my husband met me down there the night before. I think he was due in the 20 something of May. So we picked May 16 to induce him. He was born 7 pounds 5 ounces. Labor and delivery went well with him. He seemed healthy and I was feeling fine so the next day he sent us home (which was my in-laws home). That first night he cried and was fidgety the whole night. It was a very long night for me I was sore and very, very tired. Since I had been released before he was 24 hours old I had to see the doctor one more time before I could leave to go to our real home. When we got him there he was as orange as a pumpkin. He sent us for lab work and then asked us to wait for the results. They put him right back into the hospital. He said he had severe jaundice.

Rebekah, Kati, Nehemiah, Zachary and Elizabeth 5 months after Samuel was born.

Well I stayed in the hospital with him and thankfully my mother-in-law was able to take care of the other children (who at the time were 15, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 0 ). He ended up spending a total of 12 days in the hospital. Every morning they would stick him for blood, it was horrible watching them. Sometimes it would be more than once a day. He seemed way to little for needles. He had to spend all his time in an incubator with lights on him. They couldn't get the levels to go down so they made me quit nursing him for 24 hours. I fought them on it, I really didn't see the point but they said my breast milk could be causing it. So after a couple of days that's what they did. So there I was a new mom, away from my kids and husband, wasn't allowed to hold my baby unless he was eating and then I had to quickly put him back.
Finally they released him to a pediatrician that my Mom had picked out of a phone book in Wichita. He needed to be under the care of a specialist and to get that I needed to have a pediatrician to refer me to him. There was only one hematologist that specialized in children so that was who we ended up with. Oh and the first visit to the pediatrician was a nightmare in itself. The nurse (which I quickly found out wasn't a nurse) had to take blood from his foot. She couldn't get any blood to come out and is sticking him over and over. I showed her a trick this lab tech had showed me to get the blood to come easier. Well she tried it for about 30 seconds then quit and went back to her old way. Her reason... it was just to hard to hold his feet in that position... she was too tired.....! It took her about 45 minutes to get a little tiny vial of blood. I'm a very easy going / forgiving person, but that was the first time I ever truly wanted to punch her and grab my baby and run.

We found out he had hemolytic anemia . Every week I had to take Samuel to the lab to have his blood drawn. Then, when he was about 6 weeks old, his levels dropped to a dangerous level (can't remember all the correct terms) and he had to have a blood transfusion. I was a bit nervous of him having to take in someone elses blood, but the doctor said we wouldn't have enough time to get the blood drawn and tested, so we had no choice but to proceed with it. I thought having his blood taken was bad, but it was much worse getting the IV started. It took at least 3 tries to get it started, his veins were so tiny compared to the needle they were using. In a couple of days I took him back and his levels were much better.

He got critical one other time, but the doctor saw some good numbers in the lab and had us wait over the weekend, then we came back to have it checked out. His levels were rising back up on their own! He never had to have another transfusion, and eventually we went from every week to bi-weekly, then to monthly on the lab work. When he was a little over a year old we met with the doctor again and he told us that we could do lab work to find out which part of his blood was causing it, but he felt like he might not ever have any more problems with it and the test took a lot of blood. He gave us symptoms to look out for, such has bluish lips, yellow eyes, ect.. but praise be to God, Samuel has never had anything more to date.

Kati and Samuel at a little over 24 hours old.







Samuel on 2nd or 3rd day looking a bit more orange.





Samuel back in hospital under/on top of the light.