Sunday morning April 28 at about 3:00 am I woke up with very different feeling contractions. These felt more like cramps and so I got up and sneaked out of bed to call the hospital to see if I should come in. I was told to take some of my medication and wait to see if that knocked them out. If nothing had changed in an hour I needed to come in. An hour later nothing had changed so I woke up Shawn and we headed in to Labor and Delivery once again.
We checked in and they tried giving me a shot of Terbutaline. This had worked in the past but this time it just slowed the contractions down for a few hours. The next step was just to pump me full of as much Niphidapine as my little blood pressure could handle. In the meantime, my family was kind enough to swing by and provide a little entertainment and comic relief.
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| Beating everyone at Settlers of Catan WHILE contracting every three minuets |
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| Dr Jared checks on things. He concludes that I am pregnant! |
By early evening the nurse came in and said the doctor on call wanted to see if I had dilated at all. When she checked me I was dilated to a three (instead of the tight two I had been earlier) so we earned ourselves a night stay at the hospital.
At about 2:00 am our nurse came in again to deliver the "good news" that we were being discharged in the morning. I instantly broke down crying. My contractions were more intense then when we originally came in and I was totally maxed out on their "magical" contraction stopping medication. I practically begged her and told her they simply could NOT send me home like this! She adjusted my monitors a little bit and was surprised to see that I was indeed contracting every 2-3 minutes. She left the room in a bit of a rush and said she would be back after talking to the doctor.
With in the first 6 hours Kimber no longer had to be intubated and within the first 24 hours was off all oxygen and breathing room air. We have been blessed with no major medical concerns. The hardest part is being patient while watching her grow! We can't wait to take her home!
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| Our nurse Brooke was awesome and helped Shawn understand the terms "dilation" and "effaced" by using some of the teaching models they use with students. |
A couple minuets later she returned. She wanted to check my dilation again. If anything had changed she informed me that they would need to move me to a delivery room because if Kimber decided to come she would come fast. She went to check me and just stopped. She very very slowly pulled back her hand and informed me that my water was bulging. She THOUGHT I was still a three but wasn't going to try to verify at all because she was afraid of breaking my water. They did a quick ultra sound to make sure Kimber was still head down (which she had been in every ultrasound since about week 20). She was. Another nurse came in and verified, head down. They moved us to a delivery room to play it safe and said they were going to try really hard to help me last until morning so that my personal doctor (who was off for the weekend) could come in and make the final call.
Shawn called my mom at about that time so that Troy could come help him give me a priesthood blessing. The only part of the phone conversation I heard was, "She's contracting really bad and they think her bubble could burst? and the baby would come really fast after that so they moved us into a delivery room just to be safe..." By the time they got there I was officially in pain. Troy looked at me and said, "Well Lyssa, it looks like your tail is kinked and it's time to get you in the barn..." These Cache Valley boys and their cattle talk....
The nurses kept asking me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. Well, when you've never been in labor or had a child before you have no idea where ten is so how am I supposed to rate my pain?! My mom and Shawn were almost laughing because I would have a contraction that would take me to tears and then the nurse would ask me to rate it and my response would be, "I don't know.... maybe like a 3?" I explained later that I didn't think I was in labor and if I wasn't in labor yet then this was going to get a lot worse before it got any better and I needed to save my numbers! My biggest concern was that I would reach 10 and THEN they would tell me that labor was just beginning.
I eventually allowed the nurse to give me a half dose of fentanyl so I could sleep for about an hour. By this point I had been up for a full 24 hours.
The next morning (or a couple hours later) Dr Craig came in to check on me. When she walked in the room she commented, "Ummmm, you look like you are in active labor...." After checking my dilation she told me I was dilated to a 5 and was 100% effaced but that her major concern was that she felt little feet, not a head. She called for an ultrasound machine and sure enough Kimber was now a breech baby. Dr Craig tried to manually flip her (ouch....) but we haven't been able to convince this baby to do anything she doesn't want to since the very very beginning. (I would be so grateful for this fighting spirit in just a few minuets) We were trying to decide if we should just wait it out and see if she decided to flip again on her own or if we needed to set up for a c section when Dr. Craig asked to see the ultrasound one more time. It was then that she noticed that her cord had prolapsed. She was ripping off her gloves as she told me, "Well, not only are we going to have a baby today but we will be having it by c section." Just like that people started coming out of the wood works. I honestly have no idea where they all were hiding but with in seconds the room was filled with people taking my blood, asking about allergies, and explaining what was all about to happen. Shawn changed into some scrubs and we were whisked away.
Everything seemed to happen SUPER fast after that. I had a spinal block done just before they laid me down on the operating table but there wasn't enough time for it to take full effect, so while I didn't feel any sharp cutting pain, I did feel a LOT of pressure. Like getting run over by a truck kind of pressure. To my surprise Shawn wanted to watch the whole thing. When I asked him to describe the process later he looked at me and thought for a minuet and then said, "It was a lot like skinning a deer, but then they pulled out a tiny human being?"
And a tiny human being she was! 3.95 or officially 3 pounds 10 ounces and 16 inches long. She had a full head of dark hair and later it would occur to me that I never imagined her any other way.
We had had a NICU nurse come talk to us when it was looking like the contractions weren't going to ease up at all and so I had thought I was prepared for a different delivery experience than I had been imagining for the last 7 months but when the moment came the reality hit. I was allowed a quick peak at my baby girl and heard only one of her squeaky cries before she was rushed off to get hooked up to medical equipment that would keep her alive for the first few hours of her life. I didn't even get to hear her measurements above the commotion of all the doctors and nurses doing their thing to make sure my baby and I were stable. It tugged at my heart and got those brand new mother emotions stirring when she was whisked away and I was left in a suddenly quiet OR with only the sounds of medical tools clicking as the doctor put me back together. From the time Dr Craig has started ripping off her gloves in the delivery room to the time of birth was a maximum of 40 minuets. What a ride!
I was sent to a recovery room where a wonderful nurse worked to get my pain under control. I was so grateful when she called down to the NICU to check on the baby and was even more thrilled when she asked if she could bring the mother down to see her on our way to my hospital room. I am so grateful to that nurse who shuffled furniture and medical equipment in that tiny room just so that she could get my bed close enough to allow me to hold one of my Kimber's tiny feet.
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| The Kimber Nielsen pit crew! |
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