The past two weeks have been intense. This mama is tired. Let me recap:
January 16: I received a call at work from my mom that went something like this, “Hi honey, this is your mother (she starts all of her calls to me at work like this). Just thought I’d give you an update on what’s going on. Your dad and I are at the hospital in Meridian. Your dad has been having chest pains for the past 10 days and went to the doctor this morning. He was advised to come here to the emergency room. They did an angiogram and found some narrowing in his coronary arteries, so they have placed two stents. We’re doing fine.”
After some overly emotional pregnant panicking on my part, I pulled myself together enough to talk to my dad and he assured me everything was fine. I decided against rushing over to Meridian that night since we’d be headed that way the following day for a routine doctor’s appointment to check in on Moose.
January 17: Routine appointment with my doctor. Everything looked great; blood pressure was good, weight gain was appropriate, baby’s heart rate was right where it should be. We left the appointment feeling reassured and headed to the hospital to meet up with my parents. My dad was being discharged. We grabbed a bite to eat together, then they headed home and we ran a few errands.
January 18: I was up early to prepare for our flight to Seattle to attend the gift show to make purchases for the drug store. Went to the bathroom and noticed that things in the toilet didn’t look quite “right.” Brushed it off as concentrated first morning urine and went about my business getting ready. Went to the bathroom again and decided the urine had a definite pink color. I had just finished reading the “Things to Never Ignore During Pregnancy” list and decided this was worth waking Adam up for.
- “Um Ad, I just went to the bathroom and it’s kind of pink.”
- “What? Uh huh, okay, sure.”
- “Ad, we might need to check on Moose.”
That did it! He sprung out of bed and took a look in the toilet. Sure enough, he agreed things didn’t look right. I decided it was worth a call to the on-call doctor. While waiting for the call back, I tried not to think of all the “what-ifs?” and instead focused on getting Adalyn ready for her stay with Oma and Papa, as well as finishing up our last minute packing.
Forty-five minutes after my call, I finally received a call from Dr. Shrum who had been in a c-section already that morning. I explained what was going on and she assured me there was no need to panic, but that I did need to have it checked out. Since we were still trying to make it to our 11:00 am flight, we decided it would be fastest to get checked out at the local clinic. Being a pharmacist does have it’s perks; I was able to call one of the clinic providers on his cell phone to explain the situation to see if I could be seen immediately and as quickly as possible. Even though he was out of town, he gave the clinic staff the heads-up that I’d be there as soon as they opened.
Everyone there was very accommodating! They got me right in and checked everything they could think of. We got to hear Moose’s strong bounding heartbeat early on in the appointment which was very reassuring. They checked my urine and found blood and trace protein, but nothing else. No signs of infection or anything. My cervix was closed, and there was no bleeding. In short, they couldn’t find anything wrong, except blood in my urine. We never have come up with a reasonable explanation for it, but since Moose was okay, we decided to go ahead with our trip. We ended up having to reschedule our flight, but it only delayed us about 2 hours and it was a seamless transition.
We spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a merchandise-buying frenzy, more overwhelming than any Black Friday shopping spree I’ve ever been on! We finally arrived home at 11:30 Sunday evening, just in time to catch a few zzz’s before another exciting work week!
January 25: Received a text at work from Roger: “Mom in McCall hospital. Broken femur.” What?!
My mother-in-law Carol fractured her right femur in a skiing accident at Brundage Mountain. She was transported by ambulance to the McCall hospital, but because they didn’t have the right hardware, she was flown to St. Luke’s in Boise for surgery that evening. The surgery went well and she was alert and oriented when we visited her that night. She even told some pretty funny stories! She was up walking with a walker Saturday morning and returned home Sunday evening. Pretty miraculous if you ask me! She seems to be in a good spirits and appears to refuse to let this get in the way of what she already had planned.
I told Adam that this pregnancy couldn’t take any more excitement or hospital visits! Between his finger accident in October, my Dad’s hip replacement in December and stent placement last week, as well as Carol’s accident this week, we’ve had enough stress!
January 28: Woke up to a whiny toddler with a fever. Her dad stayed home with her while I worked and attended my P.E.O. meeting.
January 29: Whiny toddler wasn’t feeling any better and complained that it hurt “here (throat) and here (nose) and here (legs) and here (teeth).” Her dad stayed home with her again, this time taking her to the doctor. They decided it was herpangina, a general term referring to sores in the mouth, most often caused by cocksackie virus. Unfortunately, this is her second round of it! The first time she had it was a few months ago and it was awful! She was sick for a full week and refused to eat and drink for several days. Her mouth was full of sores and she was just plain miserable. Fortunately, this round hasn’t been as severe. She is still complaining occasionally that her mouth hurts, but she is eating and drinking and playing like a normal two year old.
I had a meeting that night after work in Nampa. As I stepped out of my car to head in to the meeting, I slipped on some ice and fell flat on my back! All I could think was, “And the pregnant lady goes down!” It took me a minute to stand up and my tailbone has been a little sore since. I just hate it when I do dumb stuff!
January 30: Twenty-eight weeks pregnant and a day off from work for me! Wahoo! A couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to to cut back at work and stay home Wednesdays, and this was my second Wednesday off. It worked out particularly well this week since the Toots wasn’t quite ready to head back the babysitter’s house yet. I had a productive yet relaxing day but by that evening I wasn’t feeling too well. I forced myself to eat a grilled cheese sandwich (my constant pregnancy craving this go-round) and tomato soup. Although after I finished it, I was wishing I hadn’t. I went to bed early and slept through the nausea.
January 31: Unfortunately when I woke up, the nausea was still there. I went to work not feeling well at all. Eventually I was experiencing some back discomfort as well as overall malaise. I decided I should call my doctor “just to be sure” especially after the recent pink urine incident. I explained my symptoms to the nurse and she said she’d talk with the doctor and get back to me. I was NOT expecting her to say that the doctor thought I should make the drive to Boise to the Labor and Delivery unit of the hospital to be sure I wasn’t having contractions, but she did.
“Ugh! Really?! I feel so silly! It’s probably nothing! I’d feel if I was having contractions, wouldn’t I?! I can’t leave work! Roger has to stay with Carol to take care of her.”
And then Conservative Jen stepped in; “You’re going to feel pretty awful if you end up delivering a baby at 28 weeks gestation because you didn’t listen to your body.”
Ad ended up calling Roger who covered for me at work while Ad and I headed to Boise. At first I think he thought I was overreacting, but when I told him what Conservative Jen was thinking, he agreed that it would be best to do what the doctor felt we should. We had a nice talk on our way over and spent most of the drive discussing potential names for our Moose. We still haven’t decided on anything! Moose is a nice name, right?
We got checked in at Labor and Delivery, they checked my urine, and hooked me up to the monitors. Moose had a nice strong, bounding heartbeat, at just the right rate, accelerating at all the right times. And sure enough, I was contracting consistently, every minute or so, for 30 seconds at a time. The nurse explained that true contractions last at least 50 seconds, but at 28 weeks, any type of contractions are undesirable. She assured me that they’d figure out what was causing them and get them stopped. She figured the most likely cause was dehydration, since I admitted I hadn’t eaten since 8:00 the night before, and really hadn’t been drinking water like I should be.
The nurse seemed perplexed, and a little concerned, when she came back with the results of my urine analysis. My urine was dilute (no dehydration) with no leukocytes or nitrites (no infection) and no blood (no relation to what was going on 2 weeks ago). She said she had been in touch with the doctor who would be coming to visit with us shortly. We were surprised and a little worried to hear that the doctor felt it was necessary to come talk with us in person.
Dr. Shrum was there shortly and we went over everything that had been going on. Again, we never were able to pin down the cause of all my symptoms, but the doctor felt unconcerned enough about the contractions that she sent me home. I was given strict instructions to eat (since I refused to take anything for the nausea), but luckily there was no mention of bed rest.
On the way home I looked up causes of pre-term labor. Among the hundreds of explanations, it listed chronic stress and occupations involving more than 40 hours per week on your feet. I suppose I probably fall into those categories.
February 1 (today): It’s a new month and I’m feeling better! My appetite has returned and I worked a full day with no major symptoms. I’m determined to keep this baby where he’s supposed to be at least another 10 weeks and continue to fulfill my obligations at home and work until then. We’ll have no more unexpected hospital visits and all of my family and friends are expected to do their parts to make sure this happens.
Here’s to a relaxing, uneventful weekend! Cheers!
