6.25.17
“Our next goal is 28 weeks, which we’ll celebrate with the GR 4th of July fireworks. I’m not super optimistic about tonight given my day, but I’m hopeful we can hold off another week. Time will tell.”
The 24th marked 27 weeks pregnant – a 90% chance of survival for our baby girl, and the last week of this terrible trimester. To keep myself in good spirits, I’d been keeping a countdown in my journal to three dates: My baby shower on the 25th, getting into the third trimester on July 1st and viewing the Grand Rapids 4th of July fireworks from my corner suite with a view in the hospital, which happened to fall on July 1st as well.
I’d made it to the day of goal #1 – my baby shower. There was a lot of talk around how baby showers should be handled when the mom-to-be is a hospital patient limited to an hour or so of wheelchair privileges. I’d always imagined my baby shower would be thrown in a house and we’d measure my 8 months pregnant belly with yarn and eat chicken salad sandwiches while trying to get each other to say the word “baby” in order to win some sort of game, but here we were… 6 months pregnant, confined to the hospital and uncertain I’d last much longer.
In fact, the very morning of the shower I’d lost more clot, causing irritability and discomfort, threatening an L&D visit and making me sweat while saying to the nurse, “You know I can’t go to Labor & Delivery, right? Today’s my baby shower.”
My usual morning monitor time expanded from one hour to two and I gulped styrofoam cup after styrofoam cup of water in attempts to ward off contractions due to irritability, but knowing full well that a full bladder can cause them too. I was trying to pick the lesser of two evils in this moment.
Whether the water helped or not, they took me off the monitor and sent me over to the cafeteria of the children’s hospital for my baby shower by 1:00 pm where my extended family and my best friend were waiting for me. My sister-in-laws threw a, all things considered, relatively normal baby shower. We ate. We played games. I opened gifts. We had cake. We talked about what baby’s room will look like. We dreamed about what she’ll be like someday. For an hour and a half, we just celebrated the life that would come at the end of this without thinking about the threats we were facing and the crappy phase we were navigating.
Despite my morning, my afternoon was beautiful. And then my sister-in-law packed up all my gifts and brought them to my house. I wouldn’t unpack, open or even see them again until baby girl arrived.
Going back to the hematoma/previa situation. My ultrasound on the 23rd revealed no significant change despite the clot loss throughout the 21st and 22nd. While we’d hoped, given the amount of clot lost, the hematoma would be gone, we realized with this ultrasound just how large it really was. Therefore, our view of the hematoma/placenta was still a literal grey area. Previa or not, the makeup of my womb was still not good.
In the stats:
Gestational Age: 27 weeks, 1 day
Days of blood: 60
Days of bedrest: 81
Pre-Hospital Stay Doctor’s Appointments: 8
Ultrasounds: 7
Days in the hospital: 31
IV starts: 6 (12 IV pokes)
Magnesium drips: 3
Trips to Labor & Delivery: 5
Sets of visitors: 53