She’s here! She’s here!

……………and she has been here since April 30th.

Sorry about the delay, we have been a little busy. Let’s rewind to Monday, April 29th at about 2 P.M. It was 38 week check up time!

D was getting excited to see Evie on the ultrasound screen, as he always was and I was mentally preparing my speech for my doctor on all of the reasons I wanted to be induced on my due date (if Evie had still yet to make her arrival). We got called back and the nurse was running through her checklist of everything that needed to be done before the doctor came in. While she was taking my blood pressure, she furrowed her brow and a very concerned look situated itself on her face.

“It’s high. It’s much, much too high. Have you had any headaches? Seeing stars? Anything like that?” she asked.

I told her everything was my new norm.. just 9 months pregnant and swollen, nothing new to report. She told me to sit and take deep breaths, she was sending in another nurse to take my blood pressure. The second nurse came in, took my reading, also looked concerned, and left. My original nurse came back with an automatic blood pressure cuff and hooked me up. Same reading.

“Well, lets let you sit here for about ten minutes and relax, then I will come back and we will check one more time,” she said.

“You did just eat a massive cheeseburger babe. And then we hustled back here. I’m sure you’re fine,” D said. As if cheeseburgers cause high blood pressure. Men. Jeez.

My nurse returned about ten minutes later and took my blood pressure twice more, once manually and once with the automatic cuff. She turned the automatic display so we could see it and I was taken aback.

“This is the lowest reading I’ve gotten so far. You’re okay. Don’t panic, but Dr. W is probably going to send you over to the hospital, okay?” she told us. We both nodded (I won’t tell the reading because I know seeing it written out will stress my Mom out all over again, but let’s just say it was HIGH).

As I was getting un-dressed and putting my various paper drop cloths on, D was standing beside me trying to make light of our suddenly serious situation.

“Hey Angela, you’re about to go to the hospital, but DON’T PANIC..”

“Hey babe, babe, DON’T PANIC!”

“Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, DON’T PANIC!” (If you don’t understand this reference, we can’t be friends).

Finally, he was distracted by a speculum sitting on the counter beside his chair.

“What THE HELL is that used for?” he asked, his eyes widening in horror. If you’ve ever had a pap smear, you know what this is. If you haven’t.. well, consider yourself lucky.

(Story Time: The Sunday before this appointment Lee was playing in our living room at home, pushing his toy dump truck in circles around the coffee table. At one point, he stood up and turned, still holding the dump truck against his chest and became wedged between the table and the couch. He looked up, caught D’s eye, and exclaimed, “OH NO, MY BODY!!”)

So, when D motioned to the speculum in horror, the first thing that popped into my head was, “OH NO, MY BODY!!” – – this quickly became the phrase we used over and over again throughout our unraveling adventure in an attempt to calm the other down or make light of our current situation.

Sure enough, Dr. W came in, checked out Evie, reassured us she was fine, and sent us to the hospital to have my blood pressure monitored for an hour. “We’ll make a decision based on those results, but yeah, we are either having a baby today or tomorrow,” he said matter-of-factly.

And you know the second the door closed behind the doctor, D looked at me and said, “OH NO, MY BODY!”

We did as instructed. We went straight over to the hospital. I was hooked up to a fun machine with a giant monitor that took my blood pressure every ten minutes and then threw the unsettling number back at me until an hour had finally passed. The hospital nurse came in and told us she had called Dr. W with my results and he wanted me admitted immediately and hooked up to a Magnesium Sulfate IV with Cervidil to follow soon after to start softening my cervix. As I was being admitted and various people were hooking me up to various machines, D ducked out to run home and grab the essentials (spare clothes, phone chargers, etc.).

And that’s when the crazy started.

Contractions. Strong contractions. Consistently-timed contractions.

I asked the next nurse I saw to hand me my phone and I sent D a text telling him I was having contractions and asking him to please hurry back. I think he made the 20 minute drive it should have taken him to get to me from where he was in about 3. I could actually hear his boots sliding down the hallway he was coming so quickly.

About an hour later, my Mom stuck her head in the door. And together, the two of them braved the next 12 hours of me on that horrible, horrible medicine. I was burning up, shivering uncontrollably, and throwing up everything I was allowed to ingest, which, luckily for them, was only ice chips and Tylenol. I’m not quite sure I could ever thank the two of them enough for putting up with me that night. Guys, it was bad.

At 8:30 the next morning, Dr. W popped in to break my water. The next two hours were relatively calm. The three of us were taking turns distracting each other and timing contractions. Soon after 11 A.M., I told D that I was feeling the urge to push and asked him to go grab a nurse to check how dilated I was. The last time she had come in to check I wasn’t even halfway yet, but this time, I was fully dilated.

Evie was ready and she was coming. She was so ready, in fact, that the team of nurses I had in my room told me to stop pushing because Dr. W was running late. They hadn’t called him in yet because they thought I still had a while to go. SURPRISE!

And let me tell you, not pushing when you are feeling the urge to push while you are IN LABOR is no easy task. I’m surprised I didn’t break D’s hand. And, you guessed it, he hit me with an, “OH NO, MY BODY!”

I pushed through two more contractions once Dr. W was in the room and she was here.

Our baby girl was born at 11:59 A.M., weighing 7 pounds, 9 ounces, and measuring 19 inches long. And with a FULL head of dark hair.

She was placed on my chest and she immediately snuggled in and closed her eyes. I kept poking her and moving her around because I wanted to see her eyes and I wanted to hear her noises, but all she wanted to do was sleep and she quickly became very annoyed with us. She was so calm. So, so, calm. No crying, no screaming, she would simply stare at us.

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Unfortunately for me, I needed to be put back on the magnesium for another 12 hours to try to lower my blood pressure. It wasn’t as bad as the night before because I wasn’t also having contractions, but I would not say it was a pleasant experience.

We are now comfortably at home. Evie was three weeks old this past Tuesday. At her 2 week check-up she had already grown 3/4 of an inch and put on nearly a pound!

She is absolutely beautiful and magnificently perfect and, yes, Lee Thomas is THE BEST big brother and he is completely obsessed with her.

More to come soon…

xxx A