Thank you all for your support for my dad. I talked to him today and his speech is a bit slower - until he notices it and picks it up, probably so I won't worry. He's having a hard time with words and numbers still and my brother (who is 10) announced to me that he has a brain injury. He was going to have a checkup yesterday, but now it's at the end of the week, so I'll update as I know more.
I really meant to post this a long time ago, but I had completely forgotten how fast the days go by when living in 1.5 to 2.5 hour increments. :) So without further ado, here is the story of Natalie's first day (which was one month ago today!).....
Everything started on Friday morning, January 6th. I had my weekly appointment in the morning, so I slept in and lazed around until I needed to go. Just before leaving, I used the bathroom in hopes it would help me on the scale and I found, without going into great detail, I was starting to make progress!! This was incredibly exciting to me because all week I'd been having intermittent, but short lived and terrible, pains down my legs and in my lower abdomen and I was just hoping against hope they were doing anything to get this baby closer to arriving. Then I rushed out the door and called Dennis on the way to the doctor with the news.
I get to the office and they take my blood pressure, like always, as soon as I get in my private room. It was 140/80-something, which is unheard of for me (I generally run 115-120/65-70) and it was higher than the previous week, so they bring me straight to the restroom to do a urine collection to check for pre-eclampsia. Ummm.....wait, so I know pregnant people go quite frequently, but twice in 30 minutes (and once under duress), was a little nerve wracking! After they got the specimen, I went back into my room and the nurse comes back and wants to check my bp again. Great. I was JUST freaking out about this collection thing and now they want to see if my bp is lower. Not the best timing in my opinion, but oh well. I thought about vacations and babies and everything I could muster to be peaceful and my bp only dropped a few points. Then the doctor came in and told me my collection had a trace of protein, which wasn't terribly concerning, but that she wants me to stay out of work until Tuesday when I can get my bp checked again.
Sweet....but the timing couldn't have been much worse. It was month end close for December at work and as an accountant, that's the prime time for busyness. So I called my manager, gave her the scoop and told her about the open items I could think of that needed to be done for the close. Then I made a quick stop to the grocery store for a couple of Red.Box movies, snacks and magazines to be my companions for the next few days, got home and plopped down on the couch. I will just interject here that I don't know how women are on bedrest for weeks and months at a time. For the afternoon I had my feet up, I was chomping at the bit to do some of the things around home I'd been wanting to do! But the time for that was over!
Fast forward to the evening, Ryan is in bed and I call a friend to see if they wanted to come over the next day. Then I call my sister-in-law and give her the rundown of the day's events and just as she was in the middle of telling me something, I felt two really hard, almost violent, pops in the back of my belly - one right after the other - and it startled me quite a bit so I re-adjusted myself on the couch and that's when it came - the gush.
It was smaller than the gush which occured when Ryan was on the way, so I was not completely convinced at the time about the water breakage. I kept moving around and nothing happened so I figured I had just gotten a roundhouse kick to the bladder and had an unfortunate (but common) incontinence episode. I'm still curious about what happened, so I head to the bathroom to check things out and check for blood and such. no blood, but no incontinence signs either.......and no additional gushes. I finally come to the tentative conclusion that my water has probably broken and she has maybe dropped and plugged the hole with her head. As a side-note, as I'm doing all this self-assessment, my dear sister-in-law is chatting away because I didn't want to sound the alarms too early! I finally tell her that I think my water has broken and as soon as the words come out, I felt a little frantic. It was very strange. I told her I would call her back, but if it was actually my water I probably wouldn't call her back and maybe Dennis would, I really had no idea what I was saying at that point, but there was a lot of squealing and laughing on both sides of the phone. :)
So I got off the phone and at about that time (and about 10 minutes after the initial gush), those horrible, terrible pains in my abdomen/legs came back. With ferocity. But they didn't last long so it didn't cross my mind for a second that they could be real contractions (denial is a powerful thing people!). In between pains, I made my way to the basement where Dennis was on the computer. I told him what I thought was going on, but reassured him that it probably was a false alarm so don't worry about getting worked up about anything. Then I started up the stairs and as I lifted my left leg to get on the first stair, there was another gush. I told Dennis this was the real thing and we needed to start getting things together............
Part 2 on the way!
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