It was 3:45 on Friday morning. I was back in bed after one of my usual middle-of-the-night waddles to the bathroom, about halfway back asleep. And then, I felt something.
trickle, trickle
I immediately knew what was happening, and my first thought was, save the mattress.
OK, stay perfectly still. Carefully move the pillows out of the way. Gently roll the hips off the side of the bed. Start to stand up.
GUSH.
My OB said there’d be no missing it if my water broke, and holy wow was she right. Woke M and had him get me some towels, which were soaked alarmingly fast. This was a totally new experience for me – my water didn’t break with my last pregnancy. But damn, it just keeps coming and coming… especially when you’re carrying as much as I was.
Our first call to my sister-in-law didn’t wake her up, so the lucky winner of the middle-of-the-night contingency lottery was my friend Rebecca, fellow mom to 3.5-year-old twins, and only four weeks less pregnant than me. While we waited for her to arrive, I just kind of stood there, soaking towels, and trying to calmly tell M what to do next. We debated waking the kids to warn them that we were leaving, but worried that it was close enough to morning that they might not go back to sleep. Decided to just leave them be.
Contractions started slowly on the short drive over to the hospital. I dripped my way into a wheelchair while M parked the car, and up we went to Labor & Delivery. From that point on, it was pretty standard surgery prep. An IV, some antibiotics for group-B strep, and the various pre-op indignities. When you show up in labor for a repeat c-section, they don’t wait around.
It was, of course, all quite surreal. Sure, logically I knew that I was very pregnant, that the arrival of my third child was imminent, regardless. But still, it’s very strange to sit there and wait for surgery, wait to meet the baby.
Being my second time at this particular party, I felt overall a lot more relaxed and lucid. While I’m sure it was helped by the fact that I had gotten some sleep before heading to the hospital (not so much last time), I also was just more calm, more aware of what was going on and what was coming next. Even if I was shaking a little with anticipation.
Rolled into the operating room, stayed as still as I could for the spinal. Wow, is that a strange feeling, as the entire lower half of your body goes numb. This time, I had a bit of a reaction that I hadn’t had before. It felt like the numbness was creeping all the way up my body, ears ringing, a little nauseous. The anesthesiologist noticed it before I even put it into words, and put a few doses of something into my IV. A minute later, I felt significantly better.
They started the surgery so quickly, I was worried they were going to completely forget to retrieve M. But there he was in his blue paper scrubs. Again, I felt so much more with it than my last c-section. No pain, just lots of strange pressure and other sensations.
At 6:53 in the morning, out came Eleanor Margaret, along with another tidal wave of fluid (seriously, it had been going for three hours, how was there still more fluid in there?).
She didn’t cry.
In fact, I learned later, she was not particularly inclined to breathe on her own, either. The nurses did the first few breaths for her, and when she decided to join the party, she sounded like she was under water. Not surprisingly, I suppose, she had a ton of fluid in her lungs. Apgar scores were a highly unsatisfactory 5 and 7.
I got to see her, briefly. M got to stand with her while the nurses worked, and she weighed in at an impressive 7 pounds, 11 ounces (at only 37 weeks, 6 days). But then, while they were still putting me together, off she went to the special-care nursery.
To say I was disappointed to return to my recovery room without a baby would be a dramatic understatement. This was, to say the very least, not how I was hoping this would go.
I was wheeled in to see her on my way over to my postpartum room. Her head-full-of-dark-hair was under a plastic bubble, with some extra oxygen and humidity blowing on her. Color was better (not purple anymore), muscle tone slightly improved. Breathing on her own, but you could hear her trying to work through all the gunk.
The short summary, 36 hours later, is that she’s doing a lot better than yesterday morning. She’s still in the NICU, and I’m re-acquainted with the hospital-grade pump. I’ll be back later to talk more about what we’re up to (why yes, my hospital got wi-fi since I was last here, can you tell?). But in the meantime, I just wanted to introduce you to my my new daughter, Eleanor Margaret.
She’s quite something.
