February 9, 2010
today was the day of the stent removal, which i have been SO freaked out about. back in december when this all started they placed the stent in order to relieve my hydronephrosis symptoms that they thought were being caused by a kidney stone. usually they would just do an x-ray to check and see if there was a stone but since i was pregnant that obviously wasn’t an option. i did have a few ultrasounds and they couldn’t see any stones on them and when i had the surgery to place the stent they didn’t see stones, so we assumed that the problems i was having were from my growing uterus sort of cutting off the circulation of my ureter.
before my appt this afternoon i went and had an x-ray to bring to the doctor’s office with me (i brought my mom with me for hand holding and moral support btw, i cannot do this stuff alone and i thought i’d give carl a break). after the doctor looked at the x-ray he let us look at it too, we could see the stent, it was looooong, and right next to the stent half-way down my ureter was a kidney stone. the doctor said i had two options, he could take out the stent which would allow the kidney stone to pass or i could have surgery and have it removed. of course after my december experience the idea of passing the stone myself didn’t sound too appealing but the doctor told me that if i were his daughter he would tell me to just pass the stone, so… after some tears and convincing i agreed.
the actual stent removal wasn’t too bad, everyone had been trying to convince me that it wouldn’t be but after all the shit that’s gone on i couldn’t help but think of the absolute worst case scenario, that the stent would be crystallized and they would have to surgically remove it and rebuild my ureter and i would be incontinent for the rest of my life, but, it wasn’t crystallized and it slid right out, a little discomfort but the whole thing took about 30 seconds.
next i was worried about the impending horrible pain i would have to endure passing the stone, there’s no way of knowing when it will pass, how long it will take or how bad it will hurt. they gave me a strainer so that i would know when it passed. when i got home i went to the bathroom to try out the strainer, i held it under my pee stream and when i was done there was the stone!!!! hooray!!! it’s all over! the baby’s out, the stent is out and the kidney stone is out!! now i can finally focus on getting better and taking care of my baby, i am SO fucking relieved.
i wouldn’t say this is the cutest picture of louise, but it is pretty funny!
February 9, 2010
she’s not really a fan but no surprise there, i think when she can actually be IN the water it will be a little better but we have to wait until the umbilical thing falls off for that.
this weekend was rough, we had carl’s daughter and my mom also arrived on friday to help out for a few weeks. carl’s daughter has been SUPER excited about the baby coming and dying for this past weekend to come so she could spend time with the louise, but on friday after she held her for about an hour she told us that she had a sore throat. of course we had to tell her that if she was sick she wouldn’t be able to hold the baby and she had a really hard time with that all weekend, she just wanted to help and be involved with the baby sooooooo bad and she couldn’t, needless to say there were some tears.
and now carl and i are spending some much needed quiet time together… well, sort of, the baby’s sleeping in our bedroom, carl’s in his office and i’m watching trashy tv and blogging, ahhhhhhhhhh. i am going to the doctor tomorrow at 11am to get the stent out, i am very happy and also very nervous since there will be no anesthesia. the baby had her first doctor’s appt today, we were shocked to find out that she’s lost seven ounces even though she’s been eating like a little piggy! the doctor said that it’s normal for babies to lose weight in the first week but had us make an appt for next monday just to make sure she’s putting weight back on. i guess since louise is sleeping and i have an appt in the morning i better go to bed, hopefully the stent will come out nice and easy exactly like it’s supposed too.
February 7, 2010
baby louise HATES having her diaper changed. she doesn’t cry much, only if she wants to be held or fed or if she needs her diaper changed, and if she needs her diaper changed she cries through the whole thing. i’m not sure exactly why she hates it so much since i can’t ask her, but i’m guessing it’s kind of scary because she has no idea what’s going on and also because the wipes are freezing cold, so… i bought a wipe warmer today. isn’t that silly? i hate how she cries during diaper changes though, i’ll try anything to make it better for her. the other thing i hate about diaper changes is her umbilical thing that hasn’t fallen off yet, i know it doesn’t hurt her but it LOOKS like it does and it gets caught on the diaper sometimes even though we fold the diaper under to avoid it.
i wish that i had known louise would be too small for regular newborn clothes so i could have bought some premie stuff for her before she came. i can’t find socks small enough to stay on her tiny feet, not that socks normally stay on a baby’s feet anyway, but they usually stay put for a little bit. and the only clothes that i want for her right now are onesies with cuffs that fold over her hands, pants that have feet and pajamas with feet and hand cuffs. her little toenails an fingernails are so sharp, she is constantly scratching at her face and her feet get tangled up and scratch each other. we have the mittens but they come off about ten seconds after you put them on. so for those of you who haven’t had your babies yet or been placed or matched yet, those are the clothing items i recommend you have on hand in the beginning! louise weighed 6 lbs 10 oz and was 20 1/2 inches, so if you have a smallish skinny baby like her newborn clothes will be too big.
February 6, 2010
i hope i haven’t scared anyone too much with my birth story! it was really hard but i wanted to be honest about it because it seems like people only talk about the good births and not the hard ones. i think the majority of you who are going to be giving birth soon (or not so soon) will have a much better time than i did, i mean it’s still gonna hurt, but not like mine did! and in all honesty the last couple months of my pregnancy were hard and i had a difficult birth but now i have a beautiful baby that i wouldn’t have if i didn’t go through all of it, obviously it was worth it.
when i was still in the hospital i tried breastfeeding for the first couple days. ultimately i decided it was too much for me after all i had been through, i couldn’t handle the added stress of trying to force milk out of my boobs when there was none in there. my milk finally started coming in on thursday. my boobs got REALLY full yesterday and they HUUUUURT! SO BAD! i just sat on the couch and cried for about an hour last night. i’m not sure if the stimulation i did while still in the hospital had something to do with why i got so engorged or what, but today they are starting to feel better, they still hurt, but not like yesterday, holy crap!
baby loiuse is doing excellent. she’s a good eater and she sleeps a lot, my husband has been the one who has taken care of her the most so far while i’m recovering and he’s been doing a damn good job. he’s had some practice since he already has a twelve year old daughter.
and lastly foe today, we signed the closing papers on the house and got the keys yesterday!! finally, after five long months, the house is ours!!!!
HOME!!!!
February 5, 2010
ok so after the decision to go forward with the c-section was made things went pretty quickly. i felt relieved knowing i wouldn’t have to continue be in labor for and unknown amount of time. things definitely get a little foggy here because i got a lot more medication. they wheeled me into surgery and gave carl some scrubs to put on so he could be in the room, once we were in the or things went really fast. i was really scared to be awake because i was pretty queasy by this point but that’s just the way it goes. i could feel them working on me, pressure and tugging but no pain at all, carl was taking pictures, even a couple over the curtain of the surgery (i still haven’t been able to look at them). suddenly i heard the baby crying! i started crying of course, they came over and showed her to me and then started cleaning her up and cleaning out her nose and mouth. after the baby was out they took her to the nursery and carl went with while they finished closing me up.
this is where things started to get bad. after the epidural wore off i was in an excruciating amount of pain, i laid in the recovery bed and cried and cried and cried while they tried to find something to that would work. they never really found anything and i was so miserable that i didn’t even get to see the baby until the next day. it was awesome the next day when i finally got to hold her and spend some time with her. i continued to be extremely uncomfortable for the rest of my stay in the hospital since they never really found anything to control the pain BUT… as soon as louise was born all the problems i was having with hydronephrosis and the stent disappeared so that was quite a relief!!
so that is the majority of the birth story, of course i have more to tell about being in the hospital and trying to breastfeed and what not but i’ll have to get to that later. if anyone tries to tell you that having a c-section is easier than a regular vaginal delivery i would have to say it’s not true!!! the recovery is a lot harder than i thought it was going to be but after twenty hours of labor and no idea of when the baby would actually come i had to do it, i hope everyone else has easier labors than i did.
February 3, 2010
so after that it gets a little blurry, i just laid in the bed and labored for a while, it hurt really frikken bad, at one point i was throwing up which is pretty common when i am in a ridiculous amount of pain. they asked me if i wanted something for the pain, i was like ummm, give me the drugs NOW. they put something in my iv, i can’t remember what it was called but i can tell you that it sucked, it did nothing for the pain and it made me feel like i was tripping on acid or something. when they asked if i wanted more i said no way.
after about six hours they finally checked my cervix again to see if i’d made any progress, i can’t even explain what kind of hell it is to have your cervix checked when you are in labor and haven’t had an epidural. i was still only dilated to 1 cm but they decided to go ahead and let me have my epidural anyway. i had a really great anesthesiologist, i was pretty scared about the whole needle in the back thing and i’m not going to lie, it was unpleasant, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as i thought it was going to be, plus, after a couple of minutes all the pain i was in was gone, it was amazing, i was so happy i thought “maybe i can do this after all.” every time i had to use the bathroom to nurses would come, one for each side of me, and help pull me up, i had to lock my knees and then they would shuffle me to the bathroom, i had to walk without bending my knees because your legs get all numb from the epidural and if you bend your knees your legs can give out.
then they started the petocin to try and move my labor along since things were going pretty slow. as the contractions got stronger the pain started breaking through the epidural and as they increased the strength of the petocin the baby’s heart rate started dropping so the they laid off the petocin and i would start to feel better but then they would start increasing it again when the baby’s heart rate stabilized. this happened a couple of times and my pain got worse and worse until i felt like i hadn’t even had the damn epidural, my cervix just wasn’t cooperating.
after twenty hours of labor i was dilated 6-7 cm, they thought that it was possible that i could have the baby within the next four to six hours but of course there was no guarantee and at that point i just couldn’t take it anymore, i told the doctor i didn’t have anything left in me and we decided it was time for a c-section…
more tomorrow…
February 2, 2010
holy crap. it has been a loooooong three days! i’m still here in the hospital, if i hadn’t had a c-section i’d probably be going home today, but i did, so i won’t be getting out until tomorrow or wednesday. my husband went home for a couple of hours, he’s been here with me the whole time so he was in desperate need of a shower and some clean clothes. he also had to make a few phone calls to get utilities set up in our NEW HOUSE!!! we finally found out yesterday that the house is ours for sure, we will be closing and getting the keys on friday afternoon, hooray!!!! soon baby louise will have her own room and we will be able to put all of her stuff away! what a relief. it’s going to be hard though, obviously i won’t be able to do any of the actual moving since i just had surgery. anyways, on to louise’s birthday…
i guess i was feeling sort of weird all day on saturday, but it wasn’t until about 11 that night when i started having these little gushes that i thought, ok, i have never peed myself, i think that might be my water. the thing about it is that i thought when your water broke you just had a big huge gush of water and that was it, and i guess some people do, but not everyone, my water leaked the whole time i was in labor, there was almost constantly fluid coming out, not really a pleasant feeling! well around that same time i started noticing some cramping which obviously was contractions. but i didn’t quite realize all of this until about 1am, i said to my husband, ummmmmm, i think i might be going into labor!!!
we kind of shuffled around the house for a little bit getting things together, i didn’t have a bag packed because i was scheduled to be induced TODAY, two weeks early!!! i really didn’t think she’d decide to come before that. we got in the car and away we went! we got to the hospital at about 2am saturday night/sunday morning. they put us in triage to make sure that i was really in labor, the nurse checked my cervix which hurt REALLY bad, i was dilated to1 cm. they also took a swab of the fluid to make sure it was amniotic fluid, obviously it was, so we finally got our own labor room… i will write more later, it may take me another post or two to get it all out, i’m still too tired to write the whole story all at once! hopefully i’ll be able to get back to it a little later today.
January 29, 2010
my doctor’s office got the results of the amnio today, the baby’s lungs are ready to go! we are checking into the hospital on monday at 5pm and being induced the next day, i am SO nervous. the thought of labor is terrifying to me for some reason, but i am also really excited to meet our baby!
January 28, 2010
i am home from the hospital and so glad the amnio is over! the morning wasn’t too bad, i felt pretty good considering that sometimes i can’t get out of bed. we got to the hospital and had a really great nurse getting us ready. she put me on the monitors and we were able to see that i’m having mild inconsistent contractions which i wasn’t too surprised to hear and they weren’t concerned about. my doctor arrived about fifteen minutes after we got there, she pushed around on my stomach a little and then used an ancient ultrasound machine to look and see where the baby was to avoid poking her and also to find a good pocket of amniotic fluid. she made a little mark on my stomach where it looked good and then cleaned the area with antiseptic, next she injected a little local anesthetic to numb the skin in that area and then she inserted the needle. it was fairly unpleasant but not terribly painful, the problem was as soon as she put the needle in the baby moved her arm right where the doctor was trying to draw the fluid, so they jiggled things around and tried to get her to move, that was definitely unpleasant and she wouldn’t move so she had to take the needle out and poke me again which really made things start to suck, but then just about thirty seconds later she was done. i stayed for about an hour afterward so they could monitor me and make sure the amnio didn’t cause any complications, which it didn’t, so finally we were free to go!
i was supposed to go right home but i decided since we were out i wanted to try and get a few last minute things done. we went to target to get some more bottles but decided to hold off because my step-sister is giving me her breast pump and everything she has to go with it, bottles, milk storage bags, etc. her baby was allergic to her breast milk so she barely used it, another $250 we don’t have to spend which is great for us! i also got a pair of baby tights that are so cute, they look sort of like this…
they have the little mary jane shoe print but the leg part is pink with white polka dots, they are soooooo cute! then we went to penney’s where i got some house coat/night gown type things to wear in the hospital because i HATE hospital gowns and then to the motherhood store for a nursing bra and a nursing tank top. and then i was very tired and sore so we came home and now i’m going to take a nap.
i wouldn’t say this is the cutest picture of louise, but it is pretty funny!
