Continuation of “I remember“.

By the time last Christmas rolled around we were holed up on the 3rd floor of OB Triage for a full week. Mistakenly we were told that the average triage stay was less than 72 hours. We were there already a full week which didn’t sit well with us at all. Being on bed rest, fighting for your babies’ lives, you do not want to hear anything negative that could cause more stress.

When we first arrived in triage on December 19th, Tobie was contracting 15+ times an hour. It took a few hours to stabilize her. The doctors were able to get her contractions down to a more manageable 4-6 an hour. We later learned that Tobie was on one of the highest Mag doses they give. Every day we saw new doctors and nurses rotate in and out of the room. Each new nurse would be very impressed that Tobie was able to function as much as she was considering she was hooked up to a very potent muscle relaxer. Once everyone found out Tobie was on bed rest in the hospital, they would bring her books and sudoku. It’s funny because of the dose of Mag Tobie was on, she was basically seeing double vision her entire stay and really couldn’t read or do puzzles.

Our situation was pretty dire. Each day we would try to keep Tobie’s thoughts on anything but the reality of our situation. As you can imagine it was pretty futile as being strapped to a bed in a strange place with strange people poking and prodding you every few hours, and only being allowed to get up to go to the bathroom makes it difficult to focus on anything else but the reality of your situation. We were living that old adage “one day at a time”. What we didn’t know at the time is it would become our motto for all of 2006.

Contrary to what you think, being on bed rest is hard work. The emotional and physical stress takes a toll on your body. After a few days of being immobile, Tobie’s lungs started accumulating fluid from not taking deep breaths. Each day she would have to breath into a little apparatus to exercise her lungs. Another problem with being on bed rest is blood clots. Tobie would have to wear these leg air message boots around her calf muscles to keep the blood circulating. While they felt good for a little bit, having them on for hours at a time was a pain.

This is a little TMI. One of our first major issues was going to the bathroom. With all the drugs Tobie was on, she was pretty backed up. Normally this would make for some great comedy, but the reality of our situation it was pretty scary. The last thing you wanted her to do was push while on the toilet. I think each nurse had a story about some patient delivering while on the can. Luckily being in the hospital, you have access to lots of medical aids to get the job done. That’s all I’m gong to say about that.

When you are on bed rest in the hospital, you look forward to anything that breaks up your day. Tobie’s family and friends would take turns coming to visit. It was RSV season so technically Tobie’s little sister wasn’t allowed in the hospital. We received permission from one of the nurse’s that we could sneak her in on Christmas. Tobie was really excited to see her. We were even going to dress Tobie in street clothes on Christmas as she had been wearing the hospital issued gown and underwear for the past 6 days (yes she changed her underwear a few times since being admitted, sheesh).

Unfortunately things didn’t go the way we planned on our first Hospital Holiday. Tobie wasn’t feeling right all Christmas morning. As the day progressed, Tobie started to feel more and more pain. We decided to cancel family visits that day as we didn’t want to make the situation worse by the high level of emotion that came when her family would visit. Tobie ended up in so much pain that day they gave her morphine. I know I could have used some at that time, but apparently you have to be a patient for them to prescribe narcotics. It’s kinda funny now how we freak out about Tobie taking Tylenol or drinking a soda given how many drugs she had to take last pregnancy.

There are tons of good doctors and nurses in the medical community, but it’s the ones that actually talk to you and empathize with your situation that make a select few great. It would make our day when we had one of these great nurses or doctors. One of our favorite doctors talked about the power of a positive attitude. In our situation it was crucial Tobie had a positive attitude because any stressor could push us over that point of no return. Unfortunately from time to time we would have a doctor or a nurse that wasn’t the greatest when it came to “bedside manner”. It really felt like these medical professionals were just picking up a paycheck. I have a lot to say on this subject, but I really wanted to write a post about how great the people are that took care of us before I talked about the negative. We’ll save that for another rainy day. The reality of our situation was if we delivered before 24 weeks, the hospital wouldn’t do anything to save our babies. We knew this. We were told this when we were first admitted. We just didn’t need to talk about it each time a new doctor or nurse would start their shift with us. If there is one thing I have learned from being in the hospital is doctors like to show how smart they are by talking. Sometimes less is more if you know what I mean. Eventually we had a nurse put a note in Tobie’s chart that we’ve been informed of everything and only to talk about positive things. In all honesty, we had just one doctor that we couldn’t stand. He was no McDreamy. We nicknamed him “Dr. Sunshine” for his sparkling demeanor (read: sarcasm).

Christmas came and went. New Years came and went. We had now made it 3 weeks. Each day on a whiteboard in our hospital room, a nurse would update it with how many weeks gestationally the babies were. 23 and 1, 23 and 2, 23 and 3. We were almost to 24 weeks. Ahh 24 weeks, that magical day in a pregnancy where your baby is VIABLE. Viable is such an ugly word. It’s cold and callous, and just down right unfair. We finally hit 24 weeks. We were given the first round of steroid shots that would help the babies’ lungs develop if we were to deliver early. Normally you are given 2 rounds. Each shot needs 24 hours to work its way through your system.

We were feeling pretty good about making it to 24 weeks. It was a big accomplishment for us. You could tell a lot of the staff was giving us lip service about our chances of making it to 24 weeks, 28 weeks, and so on previously because when we did make it to 24 weeks that reaction was: I didn’t think you would make it this long. They basically didn’t think we had a shot at making it to 24 weeks because that’s how bad our situation was. As soon as 24 weeks hit, we started talking about making it to 28 weeks. Could we do it? The past 3 weeks weren’t that bad, were they?

We had Nikki fly in from Ohio to spend the weekend with us. I had picked her up from the airport and we had dinner in the usual spot, 5th floor, room 510 Pod A Maternity. The plan was for her to spend the night with Tobie and I would return in the morning. When I was getting ready to leave for the night, Tobie wasn’t feeling so hot. You could sense something wasn’t right. I put her contraction monitor just to double check things. She had a few contractions, but nothing out of the ordinary. Tobie left the monitor on and I told the nurses on the way out to check on her in a little bit. Since Nikki was staying with her and the contraction monitor wasn’t showing anything crazy, I went home feeling everything was okay. That is until my cell phone rang at 2 in the morning.

To be continued…(again)