A Zippy Delivery

10am At the Maternal Observation ward, they hooked Stephanie up to the same fetal monitors as at the doctor's. Her blood pressure was a little high, but the headache had gone and the graphs were looking good. They monitored her for almost 2 hours. We felt like they were about to let us go home. But the OB had called to order a blood test so they came and drew some. Our nurse came in with the results and said "There's a 99% chance you're going to have to deliver today." They diagnosed her with HELLPs syndrome, which best I can tell is an extreme form of preclampsyia with a combination of low platelets, high liver enzymes, and some other stuff.In a nutshell, it can be life-threatening to both mother and baby, and the only remedy for it is to deliver. Stephanie's platelet count put her in the moderately severe category. The nurse said usually they see other symptoms like blurred vision, swelling in the legs, and really high blood pressure. Stephanie had shown none of them except the one high pressure reading in the morning.

(In reading about HELLPs, 65% of patients exhibit a "band of pain" around the upper abdomen, which sounds exactly like what Stephanie had during the latter part of her pregnancy. Also, preclampsyia can lead to smaller babies, since the higher blood pressure means less blood and nutrients get to the uterus. I'm disappointed these two factors didn't lead her perinatal doctor to diagnose this earlier. But I also discovered that HELLPs is a very rare syndrome, occurring in around 1/2% of all pregnancies. Also, as I said above, the only thing they could have done would be to deliver the baby, and then she might have been in worse shape if she hadn't gotten those extra few days or weeks to develop. So while I'm obviously not happy about what happened, I'm thankful that they are both okay and nothing worse happened.)

So we sat there and waited for them to come back. We let what she had just told us sink in. I realized that I had neither my camera, Stephanie's cell phone (I had been planning to stop at tmobile and buy a prepaid phone on the way home from the dr visit that morning.), my parents' work phone numbers, change of clothing, someone to watch the dogs, etc. But things happened so fast I didn't have time to even use the phone til after they took her into delivery.

1pm They decided who would be delivering and wheeled Stephanie next door to labor and delivery. The c-section was going to be done under general aenesthesia in the interest of time. An bunch of nurses, technicians, aenesthesiologists and doctors started coming in. They were prepping Stephanie, giving her magnesium sulfate to combat the high blood pressure and other problems (this made her feel hot and nauseous), explaining things to her, talking to me while I was trying to listen to what they were telling her, trying and failing to get an IV started in her, asking each other who was doing what, asking where was the doctor, oh wait the on call doctor is not doing it but her OB is coming in, calling for spare blood due to the low platelet count, calling the O.R., asking me which NICU the baby was going to after delivery!

This worried me a little bit. I was getting a little scared by what seemed to me like chaos. I asked, "Who is running this show, anyway?" The charge nurse--a large and stern woman--sat me down and explained each step. She had just come in and I think realized how hectic it seemed to me. The reality is probably that they had just bumped us to the head of the line and paged a lot of people from all over to come cover this immediately. Either way, I felt better after I knew the gameplan. (I learned from a nurse afterward that no one in the O.R. even knew that the baby was breach until the OB saw her.)

2:30 Word came in that the doctor had arrived and the OR was ready. They whisked Stephanie off. Suddenly, I was all alone. The room was strangely silent. I made a quick call to Stephanie's mom. She told me she was on her way. Then, I waited.

2:45 The neonatologist came in to tell me they were stabilizing my little girl and then would transport her next door. I interrupted, "It's a girl?" She said, "Oh, you didn't know? It's a girl!"

3pm They wheeled the baby out into the hall on the way to the children's hospital next door and waved me over. I got to see her for about 10 seconds. But I was amazed that she looked perfectly normal and pink. I had been steeling myself for a premie and possible issues, but she looked very normal, just really small.

3:01pm I started calling people on the phone. My brother, my mom, anyone I could find a number for.

3:10 I met our Obstetrician for the first time. She told me Stephanie was fine and would be in recovery for the next 2 hours or so. She looked at me and asked if I needed anything, maybe some orange juice? I said no, I was fine, but realized I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since 7am. She said, "I'm going to bring you some orange juice," and I was glad.

5:00 They brought Stephanie back down from recovery. I shared the news with her.

8:00 I finally got to go over to the NICU and see my daughter. Stephanie was still in recovery and wouldn't be able to go next door and see her daughter for over 2 days. This was really hard on her. I took lots of pictures to show her, and got a good movie clip of the baby crying, but it was still tough for her to wait that long. It was quite a moment when she was up to sitting in the wheelchair and I got to take her across to see our baby girl.

All day long, people had been asking me what her name was going to be. I kept telling them, well we really weren't expecting to have to do this today. Luckily it was a girl because we had no idea for a boy's name. But we knew if it was a girl what we probably wanted to name her. But I wanted to wait until I could discuss it with Stephanie. We did have a backup, though. Since we didn't find out the sex before, we had given him/her a nickname, so we could stop saying "it" or "he/she" all the time. We just called her Zippy.