Hospital stay

Aug. 31

Saturday evening, Marla noticed that my urine was very dark brown. My blood pressure had also spiked a bit on the two readings they took. Two evening nurses, Lindsey and Danielle, came in to tell me that I had preeclampsia, that I would have to get magnesium through my IV for the next 24 hours, that I could not get out of bed because of a risk of seizures, and that I could not eat anything for the next day as well. I burst into tears. I had just eaten toast and soup earlier after not having been allowed to eat once I had the epidural, and I had already been confined to bed for 24 hours. 

Nathan had just walked in with a chicken sandwich and fries for me. 

“Can’t she have a quick bite?” Mom asked. 

“No, we have to start right away,” they said. The nurses were apologetic, because they had thought the doctor had already told me this information. I also had to stay an extra couple days, meaning I spent a total of five days at the hospital until the next Tuesday, 

Later, Lindsey came to tell me that after the first heavy dose of magnesium, if I did OK, the doctor said I could eat something. I threw up later and wasn’t interested in food until the next day anyway.

Danielle stayed with me during the day on Sunday, and Mom slept in the room with me at nights. It was so nice to have their support. Lots of people visited me. Danielle and her whole family came in, Tricia came from Westminster to see me, Johanna showed up, Chloe came to see me as well. I had a nurse named Molly that day who said she was going to boss me around a lot. She got me breast pumping regularly and made me breathe into the breathing apparatus that makes sure you don’t get pneumonia.

Early Sunday morning at around 5 a.m., I had Lindsey help give me a sponge bath so I would feel a little human. Then that evening when she was back, I had her help me to the edge of the bed and I waited until 8:30, which is when they stopped the magnesium and I was allowed to get out of bed. She and Danielle took out my catheter, then Lindsey had to help me up; my legs were crazy wobbly, and she helped me to the bathroom for the first time in two days.

Danielle wanted to get back to work, so she arranged several friends to come visit me on Monday! Jenny Sparks came for a few hours, followed by Chloe and Saja Hindi. It was amazing. When Jenny showed up,  Danielle arrived a few minutes later. They started making my bed and pulling out baby clothes. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Surprise!” Danielle said. “I thought we could do baby photos so I told Jenny to bring her camera!” We dressed you in different outfits and posed you while Jenny took the most precious photos.

When Saja and Chloe arrived, I was still sleeping, but they sat and held the baby while I slept for awhile. Emily was my nurse this day. She was another very special lady who took good care of me and even asked to re-wash Gracie’s hair. (Someone had given her a bath the day before, but she still had matted blood in her hair). Emily washed her, changed her, and put her hair in a mohawk style that lasted all week until I finally gave her a sponge bath. 

On Tuesday, I had the day to myself while I waited to be discharged. My nurse, Amy, did the paperwork and loaded me up with supplies, formula and bottles and diapers and wipes. After one last check from the doctor around 4:30 pm., I took Gracie home!! And I can’t believe she’s mine! And now our adventure together begins.

Having Gracie

At around 3 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 30, I went to the bathroom and felt some additional fluid come down my legs. I remember standing frozen in the bathroom for awhile, unable to decide whether I should call the hospital or not. It seemed terribly inconvenient to wake everyone up (my family) in the middle of the night if it wasn’t a real thing. The Internet said that amniotic fluid would pool if it was really that. So I went back to sleep. I woke up later, and felt more fluid. I called the clinic (which is attached to the hospital) who asked me to come in to check to see if it was amniotic fluid. 

I went upstairs to tell my mom I had to go to the hospital just to check to see if my water had broken. 

She said sleepily, “Ok, you don’t need me to drive you, do you?” 

“... No, I’ll be fine. I might be back in a half hour!” I told her. I wasn’t even having contractions. 

I arrived at around 7:30 a.m. and a nurse named Marla did the test. “Congratulations, your water has broken,” she said after a few minutes. “You’ll be staying here!” Gracie just couldn’t wait until that evening, which is when I was scheduled to be induced at 7 p.m. She had to decide things in your own time table.

I started texting and calling people to let everyone know. I had also sent Danielle a text the night before with the contacts of the people I wanted to be updated. She acted as my communication liaison to let people know updates. 

The nurses admitted me, put me in a room, and started me on low doses of pitocin about an hour later. They still started the induction process since I wasn’t having contractions yet. They started with 2 milligrams an hour and then increased it every half hour until it reached 20. That was much later in the evening. Heavy contractions didn’t start for hours. In the meantime, Mom and Danielle arrived with Emmet. We spent the morning stuffing envelopes for Mom’s 70th birthday party in a month, which the nurse observed with amusement when she came to check on me. I had light contractions but could talk through them. Marla became my “labor nurse” for the afternoon. “This is what we call pre-labor,” she said, observing us all chat and laugh. Later that afternoon, contractions got heavier. I walked around a bit and I leaned on an exercise ball at the end of the bed. Mom had gone to get food and Dad sat on the couch watching me pant through contractions that had gotten much more painful. “You’re leaking,” he observed solemnly. “Then get me a towel!” I panted. Marla said I had now reached “active” labor. They avoided checking my cervix yet though because of risk of infection since my water had broken. 

Eventually, I got an epidural. Marla had me lean over a pillow on the edge of the bed. She held my shoulders and gently told me it was OK, to hold still… as the anesthesiologist inserted the needle into my back. It hurt, but not as bad as I thought it would. Now, I was confined to bed. 

That night was VERY long. I met my night nurse, Lindsey. She was on that night and for the next three, since she had the Labor Day holiday. I would feel OK for awhile, and then would want to change positions. My low right back started hurting but when I’d move to a side, the epidural would work on one side of my body but not the other (gravity!) so I’d be hurting until I changed positions again. It was hard to be comfortable all night. Mom and Danielle slept in the room until Mom had had enough. There was only a hard couch and a chair so Danielle stretched out on the couch and Mom slept upright on the chair until the middle of the night, when she announced, “I’m going to sleep in the car!” I was so hoping to have the baby that night, but it just didn’t happen. 

In the morning on Saturday, Aug. 31, they checked my cervix and found I was fully effaced and my cervix was complete on one side but not the other. Basically the baby’s head was lodged to one side of my cervix. Marla was back with me that day. Even though she was charge nurse, she requested to have me again since she had started with me. The doctor said we should use this red peanut exercise ball between my legs and I should rotate from side to side every half hour to move the baby into position. They did that for a couple hours. Finally, around noon, I started feeling the intense need to push that they had been waiting for. 

Marla told me that during each contraction, I should push for 10 seconds as hard I could, then relax, and do it again twice more. I pushed for three hours, and was so tired and exhausted by the end of it. In the middle of that time, they had me stop and do a “breathing treatment” because the doctor could hear me wheezing quite a bit. I had to breathe some medication through a tube. After three hours, my doctor (Ellie Coonrod) told me I had three choices. My baby’s head was stuck behind my pelvis and seemed unwilling to move around it to come out. 1. I could continue to push and see what happened (even though I hadn’t made progress in an hour). 2. She could try suctioning or forceping the baby out (she didn’t think she’d have much success with my baby though) or 3. They could do a c-section. 

I was waiting for that one. I wanted an out. I was done pushing. They prepped me for surgery and Danielle came into the operating room with me. C-sections are weird because you don’t feel anything, except your body being jerked around. After around 30 minutes, they asked Danielle to get her camera ready and she took pictures as Gracie was pulled from my belly. They lowered the sheet so I could see her looking all gooey and bloody. Danielle and I both started sobbing. They cleaned her up and put her near my head. I cried and she just laid there, blinking her little eyes.

Something weird happened as she was lifted out of my tummy where I suddenly was having a very hard time breathing, like my lungs were collapsing. I started panting and wheezing and panicking. The nurse told me to breathe, just breathe, and I was like, “I can’t!” I tried coughing and couldn’t even complete a cough. My sister said she felt the same during her c-section. Eventually the feeling went away. They sewed me up and I was wheeled back to my room. They put Gracie on my chest and I got to hold her! I cried so much.

Gracie was born on Saturday, Aug. 31, 2019, at 4:12 p.m. at Banner Health Center in Fort Collins, about 31 hours after I’d started pitocin Friday morning. She was 8 pounds 11.5 ounces and 21.5 inches long. As the nurses pulled her out, they exclaimed at her full head of hair and how big she was. To me, Gracie was so tiny and precious, but all that hair! It was amazing!

Eight months pregnant

August 2019:

I’m officially living with my parents again. That’s been weird and full of emotions. Sometimes it’s just fine and other times I get antsy and anxious, because I’m getting used to this being the new normal. It used to be easy to escape to my room when I needed alone time. Now there are always people around! We have family dinner every night and then have to clean up after. Clean up was easy for just one person. Having my basement room has made it easier. And I knew that my life would be changing to include a baby! I couldn’t be teaching her bad habits like eating dinner in front of Netflix!

Also, just feeling like it was OK to live with my parents again and have a baby as a single person took some time. I still struggle a bit with it. It’s going to be hard, being alone and not having a husband to take ownership in this with me. That is a scary thing. But every time I started to doubt, I thought of the little person inside me that I finally got to meet, and I thought of how awesome my sister and brother and parents and friends are. So I take a deep breath and move forward. Until the next tiny panic attack, when I go through the thought process again. :)

I’ve implemented little changes into my parents’ lives like a whiteboard to write messages on when we’re out, and a “clean/dirty” magnet for the dishwasher. I also organized the refrigerator to make sense, since it always seemed to be stuffed with old produce. I’ve started a project to organize all dad’s tools in the garage. He has screws and nails and random metal things and screwdrivers all over the place. And I’ve started organizing dressers and drawers around the house. Mom love/hates it.

My basement bedroom got finished, the baby room got finished and I started school. That was challenging. It’s hot and there’s no AC and I felt as heavy as a house and every time I did any moderate activity, my hips hurt for days afterwards. 

I loved my students. They were adorable. They brought me presents and said they would miss me (once I told them I would be leaving in only three weeks). It got harder and harder to teach, but my students were troopers. I planned to work right up until Aug. 30, and then I decided to take that day off, to make sure everything was ready for the baby before I was induced that evening. My boss came to do an evaluation on my last day, Thursday, and I told him, “Really?” And also “YOU’RE my evaluator??” because usually I get the dean of students. “I’ve avoided having you as my evaluator for three years!” He laughed. I stayed at work until 5 p.m. that day frantically trying to get everything ready for my substitute. Then I drove home, feeling freedom and relief that the sub would be ready, and that I was about to start something new.

Baby room:

Basement Bedroom:

Baby shower!

My baby shower was June 29. It was another special event. My mom and sister planned it and we hosted it in my parents’ backyard. Danielle bought a “baby’s First ABC Book” from her friend at SamanthaBDesign.com as an activity to do at the baby shower. We also had people decorate diapers and cut out shapes for the tree in the baby’s room. We made three types of crescent sandwiches: cucumber and dill cream cheese, ham and brie with honey mustard, and egg salad with bacon. People from lots of walks of life were there; childhood friends, a friend from when I worked at Oshkosh, several from my time at the Reporter-Herald, a mom and her daughter from my bible study in Westminster, and a couple from CSU grad school. It was wonderful. Mom and Danielle did a great job planning it.

July 2019

Aunt Pat visited from Nebraska for a week. It was so nice to have her here! She came to the baby shower and in the week following, she helped me organize all the baby clothes and even helped me move out of my house.

I attended a baby class on July 6 with Mom. It was eye opening and a little nerve wracking. I never had to watch Danielle be in labor since she had C-sections. So I have to go through that whole process! People say it’s just a day and then you don’t remember the pain anymore because you have the baby. I hope that’s true. :)

Gracie was a pretty quiet baby and it took me a long time to feel her kick, not until around week 28. Partly that was because I had an anterior placenta, which cushioned her blows. It felt like a rolling in the stomach, balump-balump! Then just a couple weeks into July, I pressed my hand below my breast and felt her push back. Oh wow, she was really in there! When I went to one of my prenatals, the doctor felt for your heartbeat and laughed because you kept moving around. “Little stinker, she just kicked the dopple!” she said. Then, I started to feel her all the time, especially when I sat still. They weren't sharp jabs, just pushes here and there in random places, like she was stretching out.

Getting ready to move

More in June:

Around March and April I started looking for a place to buy, because my roommate was moving out of the condo I shared with her. Then it turned out that my landlord was willing to sell my condo to me! I closed on it June 12. Later, I decided to move in with my parents for one or two years and rent out that condo to others to pay the mortgage, while getting the support I need with the baby. :) My parents decided to renovate the basement for me to live in. On several occasions, Danielle, Nathan, Ben and I came over to our parents’ house to clear out the garage and basement. We got rid of junk and organized junk and got it ready for renovation. (So many tubes of wrapping paper and tissue paper and why are there so many jars?)

I now own a place! On July 5, my family helped me move half my stuff into a storage unit, and half to their house. Boxes were everywhere. The basement wasn't ready yet, so I was staying in an upstairs bedroom until that was finished. The lower bedroom that used to be mom’s office has been repainted as the baby's room. 

And let me pause for a moment to say that my parents are amazing. I've gently suggested several changes to their home, and Mom's first response was always. "Nope. No thank you. No way." And then she'd cave when she saw the wisdom of the plan. Because she loves me and it was the smartest thing! First, her office was the downstairs bedroom (which used to be our playroom when we were little and then my bedroom in high school). I suggested she could maybe move her office to an upstairs bedroom so that this room could be the baby room. "No," she said. Because the office is her baby. "That would be way too much work."

"Well, maybe we could do that," Dad said.

Mom finally gave a big sigh and gave in. Danielle and I came over one day to clean out her office and help her throw stuff away and suggest that maybe she didn't need QUITE so many Jehovah's Witness literature (to convert them to Christianity when they come to the door). Then I suggested, maybe we could install real carpet in the baby's room instead of the piece of carpet now lying over the old yellow linoleum that originally came with the house 40 years ago. And also, I suggested, maybe we could get the shower working again in the dowstairs bathroom that has always been a storage closet since my parents' moved into this house, so I wouldn't have to share my dad's shower. That one was another firm no - more an overwhelmed sigh at everything that had to get done, and then she surprised me by having it fixed the very weekend I went into labor! (More on the shower later)

Danielle and I came to help paint the baby room one day and it was like the work kept going on and on. Mom had agreed to install carpet, so we ripped up the old carpet that was just laying on top of old yellow linoleum, then we realized we really should get rid of the popcorn ceiling, so we scraped that down. Well, they scraped and I applied water since I was feeling baby more and more! And we never got to painting that day. Then Mom paid her handyman friend to actually paint the room, which was AMAZING so we didn't have to come back and paint. He also ripped up the yellow linoleum. 

I came back one day and painted a big white tree on the wall, which is where we’d add decals of leaves and butterflies that we’d have people cut out at my baby shower.

My family helped be at the condo a few times to paint and clean. I also met with a property manager and decided to use her to relieve the burden on myself. And then I hoped desperately to fill the place.

Starting the summer...

June 2019

My app said Gracie was the size of a jicama (about 3 ¾ pounds)! I bet everyone can visualize that now. That’s apparently a white-fleshed, edible tuber, used in Mexican cooking. (So my Mexican cousins might get it. :)) 

I started having to use the restroom a little more often towards the end of the school year as well. We had several in-class parties where some kids brought gifts. The school year ended and this crazy busy summer began. My wonderful roommate Christy moved out and before she did, we went camping. That was great… and hard because I’ve started to feel like a beached whale, so sleeping on a blow up mattress near the floor wasn’t great.

My family went on two mini trips right after school got out, one to California to see our cousins and a couple uncles, and one on Tour de Nebraska. We brought the nephews with us on the bike tour. I didn’t bike this time, just hung out with the family. It was a little hot and we walked a lot and my feet started swelling often and I was feeling large! Also my hips ached, my lower back ached… Basically my body was miserable. Then I saw this overweight, pregnant woman sitting on the grass at an event in California, and she looked HUGE and I was like, oh great, I have that to look forward to.

California

Tour de Nebraska

Sleeping was often a struggle. I had nights where I tossed and turned because I couldn't get the pillows, right. I bought a maternity C-shaped pillow, which seemed to help for awhile. Later, I started stacking pillows up high so I could sleep at a more upright position. That also helped because also, my BOOBS WERE SO HUGE and I found myself feeling strangled in them and also like it’s too hard to struggle out of bed at night if I’m flat. Also, I went to the bathroom 3-5 times a night, depending on how much water I drank close to bed time. And my feet were always super swollen by evening.