You may have noticed that I've been absent for a little over a month. In July, Hubby and I had our first baby. A beautiful girl, and while she is truly a blessing, it was a rough road for me when she got here. A warning in advance, this post might be a bit too graphic for some readers. There's a bit of blood involved.
My pregnancy was easy. My labor was easy. My delivery was easy. It was about twenty minutes after our little girl joined our family that things went downhill. Fast.
My doctor had just delivered the placenta and there was, in my opinion, a lot of blood (but what do I know of these things?). The doctor wasn't worried, so neither was I. I was holding my baby, taking in how miraculous birth actually is, when I started to get really light-headed, as if my blood sugar was dropping. No biggy. I'd felt like this before prior to pregnancy. It wasn't anything that a little food couldn't fix. But when I told one of the nurses that I needed food because of my blood sugar, she looked a little surprised and skeptical. After that, my symptoms multiplied rapidly.
I will try and describe what happened the best that I can, but everything happened so fast, and I wasn't really conscious for some of it.
"I can't breathe," I said to the nurse as my airways tightened up. It felt like I needed my inhaler, but I hadn't brought it with me. Then there was the murky darkness that was creeping in at the corners of my vision. Then it all went black. I couldn't see and I couldn't breathe. The nurse was hooking me up to oxygen and I was still bleeding.
I laid back in bed, finally closing my eyes. After all, what was the use if they weren't working when they were open? And I was so tired. So I just laid there. At this point, there were about eight nurses in the room with the doctor and everyone was scrambling around, going in and out of the room, not telling my family (who were all waiting outside in the hall, watching staff enter and exit in an emergency fashion) anything except, "She's bleeding a lot."
GREAT thing to tell the mother of the girl who just had a baby.
Anyway, back in the room, my doctor gave me a few pills. Let me tell you about these pills. They're the pills that they give you when they induce labor. But when you take them then, you only take a quarter of the pill every four hours. It helps get contractions started. I had all of these pills at once, in an attempt to stop my bleeding.
But it just kept coming.
I had three IVs going at once (when all was said and done, I had five bags of fluid pumped through me), a fourth one a male nurse was trying to start, but had no room. He was going to go for my foot, but we ended up not needing his IV. A needle of something was jammed into my thigh. And it hurt like heck.
The nurses kept trying me to do things, to show them I was responsive. They wanted me to talk. To lift my arm. But, come on, people! I'd just given birth and lost a lot of blood. I totally could have done those things, but I simply didn't want to. I was too tired. I remember thinking, "I'm okay, I don't know why they're freaking out. I just don't have the energy to talk or wiggle my finger." According to Hubby, I lost consciousness a few more times before everything was said and done.
Eventually, I was okay. After losing almost two liters of blood in around twenty minutes.
That's a third of a person's blood volume. That's more than what someone loses in surgery. That's how women died during child birth, and still can today. That's some scary crap.
I was lucky I had an amazing doctor present and a great staff. And I thank God everyday that things didn't take a different path.
I had to stay in the hospital a total of three days. I had to have a catheter. I couldn't sit or stand on my own without getting dizzy, out of breath, or passing out. Walking was out of the question for the first couple of days. I couldn't walk more than a few feet without breathing like I had just ran a marathon, and my heart beating like it was trying to get out of my chest. I was pale, my lips were white, and the skin around my eyes was purple.
The first week home, I was on bed rest. And towards the end, I was feeling better. Far from 100%...maybe more like 45%...but I could feel myself getting better. The second week brought me to about 65%.
Then, about 1 a.m., when I was getting up to feed my baby, I passed a large clot. I was warned that I would probably pass some clots, but this was the size of a softball. And not supposed to happen. So, our little girl's first outing was to the ER, where they couldn't find anything really wrong with me, but gave me a blood transfusion. I felt amazing after that, and thought the worst was behind us.
The next weekend, I started bleeding again. Heavily. Now, for all of you out there who haven't gone through pregnancy, every woman bleeds for up to 6 weeks postpartum. It's normal, and fairly light. What I was going through wasn't normal. So, once again, I woke Hubby up in the middle of the night, we bundled baby up in her car seat, and we left for the ER. The entire trip, I was praying, "Lord, don't take me from my husband and my baby." Going through something like that, it's a very rational thought to have.
This time around, they did a couple of ultrasounds, found several blood clots inside my uterus, gave me some medicine to induce cramping to try and flush them out, and made an appointment with my doc for the next day to get a prescription for that same medication.
So I went in, everything looked good. I filled my prescription. I was still bleeding a medium amount, but my doc said that would be "normal" until my body settled itself. I camped out on the couch. Hubby had to go back to work that week and my mom had been with me all week. I passed another large clot, but I tried not to worry about it.
Then I got up from the couch and immediately lost another liter of blood. All over the couch, all over the carpet, all over the bathroom floor, where I managed to make it to. It covered my legs. I was light headed again. My legs were tingling. I was talking and thinking slowly. I was so cold. I could barely stay awake. It looked like a crime scene inside my home.
I had to lay on the bathroom floor, covered in layers of towels to try and get warm. Hubby came home, I called my doctor. The bleeding had stopped and I wasn't feeling worse, so we toughed it out at home. And things turned out okay. But, man, am I glad I had my mom there. I can't even imaging going through that alone, and with a newborn.
So, I'm better now, six weeks later. I'm working on getting my endurance back. My lips are back to pink and I'm not short of breath from walking from the kitchen to the living room.
But I look at my beautiful little girl, and know that I would do it all again. That she was, and is, totally worth it.
That's why I've been neglecting my blog. Dealing with all of that, and then just a normal newborn. It's hard to find time to do much other than feed the baby, sleep, and try to keep up the house. I promise to do better, though. She's starting to get on a sleeping schedule, so I should have more time to do the things I want to do. Like work on the sequel to Caste!
I'll put that update in another post for tomorrow! Happy Tuesday, my friends!
--Me
