Grace recently celebrated her second birthday and it got me thinking about everything that happened around her arrival. Of course, there was the eight years of fertility treatment,... but there was also a very traumatic pregnancy. I spent the first four months of it horizontal in order to allow progesterone pessaries to be absorbed by the placenta. I spent the next four and a bit months injecting myself with insulin four times a day. But as we celebrate Grace's second birthday, it's the saga of her arrival that makes me shudder. I am reposting the original entry from my old blog that I posted a few days after arriving home from hospital.The Saga
We were all set to have a planned caesarean on Tuesday 16 August. On Thursday, 11 August I met with Dr Molloy for my last appointment before delivery. He gave me final instructions, checked some blood tests etc. I had a hypo on Wednesday, and then another one again on Thursday morning before the appointment. Dr Molloy told me if I had another hypo (extremely low blood sugar level) to call him as they are an indication that the placenta is failing. Despite eating after I left his office, my blood sugar dropped from 6.9 to 2.9 in less than half an hour. It was frightening because I felt the sudden drop in blood sugar as a kind of light headed dizziness and nearly drove off the road.
I sat in McDonald's carpark sucking spoonfuls of honey and freaking out. When I rang Dr Molloy he told me to drop everything and go to hospital where he would meet me and do an emergency caesar. It was amazingly quick. Eating honey didn't interfere with the anaesthetic and within an hour I was on the operating table having my baby delivered.
The whole process was quite surreal and it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to panic. I had a spinal block and the drugs they gave me for it were very happy drugs and the fourteen+ people in theatre were all talking to me constantly. I felt like I was just having a big chat.
Scott and I were pleasantly surprised to find out we had a baby girl. She was so sweet that I did fall in love with her instantly. I know some mothers/fathers had warned me I might not love them immediately,... but they're full of crap. I loved Grace absolutely from the first moment I heard her gorgeous little baby voice.
She was born at 37 weeks. Because she was very small (2.6kg or 5 pounds 11 ounces) and just a little early, she needed to spend time in the special care nursery. Grace was in a humidicrib for the first 24 hours, and she was fed through a gavage tube (down the nose into the stomach) for the first three or four days.
We spent a week in hospital, which is a bit longer than normal. That was mainly to give Grace longer to get a handle on feeding etc. It also helped me because I started to develop an infection in my stomach. I had (and continue to have) constant fevers/shivers caused by fluid pooling in my stomach. I have been put on antibiotics, but I have to just put up with the pain and inconvenience of having this fluid pooling in my stomach and draining through my caesar wound until it is completely drained in two or three weeks.
Basically, I am tired and overwhelmed from the entire process and I apologise to all those people who I promised would receive baby photos before now. Unfortunately, the emergency nature of the caesar meant that Scott had to manage his work at Mincom and Harris R/C as well as being at the hospital for me and doing all my washing etc. All the emails got done in a terrible rush when he had the chance to send them, and I'm only now replying to them all.
