I went in to the hospital for my ultrasound on Friday, April 13th. The technician was very quiet during the whole thing, and she kept measuring the same body parts over and over again... I knew from all the ultrasounds that I had with the boys, that this was weird. She asked me when my due date was, and if I had other ultrasounds to comfirm this and who performed those ultrasounds... she got up to check my records and she asked if I had a history of high blood pressure... I told her yes, and she asked me to lie on my side while she contacted the doctor about her findings... I remember telling Aaron that something was wrong, that this was nothing like all the times I had ultrasounds done with my boys.
The doctor came in and she went over the ultrasound results and then came to talk to me. She said that the baby wasn't growing properly, that it hadn't grown really since the last ultrasound that was done three weeks before. She said that the amniotic fluid was very low, and that meant the baby's kidneys weren't working as well as they should be. She also said that my lab results from the 24 hour urine were back and that my protein was dangerously high, meaning my kidneys weren't working properly either. She said that things looked serious and I was to go be admitted right away. She said I would remain in the hospital til the baby was born.
When they got me to my room, the took my blood pressure and they found it to be incredibly high. They said they didn't know how I was even walking around, that I should have stroked out by then. They gave me and IV and then some medication to bring my blood pressure down through the IV. They gave me dose after dose trying to get it to a safe range. Then they moved me up to labor and delivery where they hooked me up to the contraction and heartbeat belts. I made arrangements for my boys to go stay in New York with their father. I was still hoping I'd be there for weeks and weeks, not just days. I knew I couldn't take care of them from the hospital, and I really wanted Aaron with me, nowhere else.
The doctors came in and out, giving me oral medicine as well as IV medicine to try to keep my pressure down. I had to lay on my left side, and they took my blood pressure sometimes as often as every 3 minutes. They kept the lights dim, and they padded the sides of my bed, in case I had a seizure. They didn't want me watching TV, they said it would be too much stimulation. For a few days they had me on a liquid diet. The nurses came in and took my blood every four hours to monitor my platelet count and my kidney and liver functions. Unfortuntely, these kept dropping as my pressure kept rising. They put me on mag sulfate to prevent seizures.
My body wasn't responding to the medication they were giving me. I was getting horrible headaches, and even the Tylenol with codeine they were giving me wasn't helping. They were hoping to keep me pregnant as long as possible to give the baby the best chance of survival, but my body was shutting down and she wasn't getting enough blood and oxygen and nutrients through her umbilical cord to grow.
My platelet count got so low that they would have been unable to give me a C-Section if I needed one. It was even too low to give me any pain medication like an epidural. Finally they decided they needed to induce my labor even though there wasn't much chance of the baby's survival. They needed to do it in hopes that I at least didn't suffer from any irreparable damage.
They induced me at 7 pm on the 16th of April. They used this gel that they put on my cervix to soften it and dialate it. They gave me demerol for the pain so I was very much out of it. I slept most of my labor and didn't realise how long it had taken til I had gotten home from the hospital. I woke up in a ton of pain, feeling a lot of pressure. It was close to 3pm on the 17th. They checked my cervix and found me to be complete, they had checked me about two hours earlier and I was only at 3 centimeters and they said because she was so little I only had to go to about 7 centimeters... but before they even knew it I was at 10.
They wheeled me into a delivery room. There were tons of doctors and nurses in there, for me and for the baby, in hopes they could save her. They put the doppler on my belly to listen for her heartbeat, but they couldn't pick it up. The nurse said maybe she was too far down in my pelvis to be heard, and they got out the ultrasound machine. They checked with that, but her heartbeat was gone. All that labor was just too much for her little body. The hardest thing I have ever had to do was push her out, when I knew I would never hear her cry.