night and day – a birth story

Truth be told, I was not unhappy about the prospect of getting induced. At a (low-key) party the Friday before SB was born, a friend who had a baby last year told me about how she and many of her fellow birthing class moms had bad experiences with it and would decline an induction next time round… and I’m sure there’s something to it, but also, my baseline for “terrible experience” is leaving the hospital without my babies. I’d take any physical discomfort over that. Plus, the total lack of control I had over C’s bag of water breaking and her birth a few days later must have left deeper scars than I’m aware of, and so I welcomed the thought of experiencing all this in a much more controlled environment.

But then the next day I woke up and had what I can best describe as cervix cramps. They weren’t really painful, so I wasn’t sure if they were productive, but once I bothered to time them I was a little surprised that they came every 5 minutes. A few weeks earlier, my doctor had told me that – once I was full term – if I had contractions every 5 minutes for at least an hour I should head to L&D. But these “contractions” (I didn’t even feel anything contracting) felt way too weak, and somehow I was paranoid of being sent home for not being sufficiently dilated – it just seemed too much hassle to head over to the hospital only to be told to go back. Despite grand plans of what I wanted to do before the planned induction I didn’t feel like doing much during the day, so we just hung out, went for a short walk, re-packed the hospital bag and timed contractions every now and then. Initially even timing them wasn’t easy, as I wasn’t necessarily sure something was a contraction until it was nearing its peak – to give you an idea of how not-strong they were. Gradually they grew more intense, but I could still comfortably talk through them even when they were 3min apart. Then, less comfortably but still talking. This was probably around 9pm and I called L&D, to get their opinion. They didn’t seem too interested in the spacing (perhaps because I was the one who was calling, and clearly still able to communicate?) and concluded I was probably in early labor. As I wasn’t planning to get an epidural, they recommended I stay home, but call again or come in once the contractions got too much to talk through.

We started to play a game, but now things were picking up and I had trouble concentrating on my moves. Around 10 we decided to go to the hospital, though until we had everything assembled and were ready to head out it was probably 10:30. Walking towards the car, I felt something moist come out of my vagina – first I thought my water may have broken, but there were no huge amounts of fluid (irrationally I was worried about making a mess in the car…) On the upside, if it was my waters that’d mean we’d get admitted regardless of how dilated I was.

By now contractions were intense enough that I closed my eyes to breathe through them. Initially I thought about counting how many contractions it took to get to the hospital, but quickly gave up. Many, despite streets being empty. Yet we got there without anything exciting happening.

The way from the hospital entrance to L&D never seemed to take longer, what with stopping every 2-3min to get through a contraction. Except for a few nurses the place was strangely deserted. I was assigned a triage room and asked for a urine sample. Once I went to the bathroom I saw that the moisture from earlier had been the mucus plug. Cleaning myself enough to give a clean-catch sample took 3 fairly painful contractions (maybe I just shouldn’t have bothered). H had been getting worried why it took me so long, while I was glad about anything I didn’t need to do or explain. Back in the room they put me on monitors – I was grateful to hear SB’s heartbeat, because with all the contractions I’d had a hard time feeling her move around that day. We’d been promised a doctor would be in, but that took a while. I started to feel lots of pressure with the contractions, which were coming every 2 minutes and quite intense. H went to find the nurses again – somehow they didn’t know where the doctors were (?!) but perhaps his insistence helped, because 5-10 minutes later a nice young doctor that I’d met at a previous testing appointment came in. She checked me and was, I think, a little surprised to find that I was 8-9cm dilated and that my amniotic sac was still intact but bulging out – this probably explained all the pressure I was feeling. Her supervisor came to also check me and reached the same conclusion. Now the plan was to get me into a labor room as soon as possible and break the bag there – once it broke, the baby might come out rather quickly, they thought. Just a quick ultrasound first to make sure baby was still head down (she was).

My right leg really hurt even with light pressure on it, so I was glad when the nurse offered to wheel me into the labor room. (So much for my plans of being active during labor.) I think it may have been the same room as where A&C were born, while H thinks it was the room next door, albeit with identical layout. (And his account on such details is probably more reliable here ;) The familiarity was strange, basically the only difference seemed to be that it was pitch black outside now, and that I was rather hazy from the contractions – although I am glad that my birthing class taught me to pay attention to the times between contractions, when there is no pain, and to rest during those.

The question of pain relief came up again – the options were an IV analgesic that would have to be discontinued 30min before delivery (because it makes the baby drugged and sleepy, too) or laughing gas (N₂O), which dissipates from the body so quickly that it can be used through delivery. Worried that the last part might be the most painful, I wasn’t particularly interested in pain relief I’d have to discontinue before long, plus I was wondering how they’d figure out when “half an hour before birth” would be. So N₂O it was. They gave me a mask to push onto my face whenever I needed it, and take off once the contraction was over. It did dampen the pain somewhat, although I could definitely still feel everything. Subjectively, the main drawback was that this occupied my left hand, and they were busy poking an IV into the other, so that I had no free hand to hold my husband’s.

Still in search of ways to relax, I asked soon after this whether I could go into the tub. The nurses probably gave me a skeptical look, but I was too busy to care. I could, I was told, but the N₂O couldn’t. And I’d have to get out when it looked like I was about to deliver (they don’t do water births, sadly). So they started filling up the tub. The next contraction was so intense that I moaned. Once it was over, I announced that perhaps I wasn’t going to get into the tub after all. Everyone agreed.

Around this time the doctor came back in, with her equipment to break the amniotic sac. She was getting ready, preparing to intervene after the next contraction was over. I was feeling more and more pressure and the urge to push, but was told not do. At the peak of the next contraction, the amniotic sac broke from all the pressure. For a short moment, relief, then again lots of pressure. It must be her head, I thought. And indeed, with that same contraction, Strawberry Baby’s head emerged from my body.

H later told me that he, along with one of the nurses, was the first to see her head. The young doctor was saying “wait, not so fast” and frantically trying to put on her second glove. There was a call on the intercom and, when I “came back” into the room, suddenly there were a dozen people or more, including the midwife who was present for A’s delivery and the doctor whom I saw in my twin pregnancy. And someone else.

All the pressure was gone. After what felt like a few anxious seconds I heard SB cry, then they put her on my chest. Surreal is the closest I can come to describe it. A moment ago I had still been pregnant. It wasn’t even 1am, we had been at the hospital for at most two hours. And yet here she was, my precious little girl.

intermezzo

Thanks for all your kind and thoughtful comments on the anniversaries of having and losing A & C. I didn’t manage to post on Wednesday, but I did think of all your babies lost far too soon. And of my own, of course. It is strange to have their actual anniversary, and this “public” anniversary, so close together. Last year I was still in a complete haze. I’ve been out at night again (in part simply because it gets dark earlier), looking at their stars, remembering those nights one year ago.

Strawberry Baby is still tucked inside and enjoys kicking my ribs. We had a growth ultrasound last week, which I thought would be reassuring around all these anniversaries, but ended up freaking me out because one of the head measurements was in the 2nd percentile or so. The MFM in charge of the ultrasound clinic that day didn’t think this was anything to worry about (“these numbers and percentiles make it look way more scientific than it really is”), but I guess it’s too easy to concern a mother who has lost a child (or more). So I read some papers and learned that (a) girls tend to have significantly smaller heads, and (b) nobody gets really concerned unless the head is 2 standard deviations smaller than the mean, or even 3, depending on how conservative one is (because, y’know, we can’t all be in the 50th percentile). And we’re not even at 2 stddevs. So I was mostly reassured, but still brought it up with my doctor. Who hadn’t even noticed, but went back to look at the numbers and said that, as long as it’s not 2 stddevs below the mean, he’s not concerned. He also explained that (counter-intuitively for me) with increased gestational age ultrasound becomes less accurate. Mainly because it is difficult to measure larger 3-dimensional objects correctly when you’re looking at a “slice” through them – chances are that your slice isn’t quite in the right place.

What he remains concerned about is my blood pressure – I suppose it doesn’t help that it was 140/90 in the office, even though at home it hovers around 120/80 and it’s usually pretty good at my non-stress-test appointments, too. My liver enzymes and platelets and urine remain fine, fortunately. It’s not so much what he says, but I can see in his face that he worries. For a while I thought, well, he’s an MFM, being worried is his job. But it’s not that. I finally remembered the first, and really only, time I’d seen him worried – at the anatomy ultrasound with the twins, when my cervix was already so very short. The situation is different now in that we actually have options for what to do. I will be full term in 2 days (incredible), so I’ll be followed closely with twice-weekly NSTs in addition to the usual weekly appointments, and he’s thinking about induction at 38w or so, depending on how things develop. (There seems to be a difference in recommendations at that point between gestational hypertension and preeclampsia, but I didn’t quite get it.) Which is rather soon – but of course I’m happy to do anything that helps keep Strawberry Baby safe.

(This was supposed to be a short post. So much for that.)

one year

I can’t quite believe it’s been a whole year. I remember it like yesterday, but I also feel like some time has passed now. It’s still hard to wrap my head around any of it though. Not a day goes by on which I don’t miss them.

I keep thinking about how much they changed me, but it’s a difficult question. Because while I think that a lot of how I am at the core is still the same, losing A & C has certainly reshuffled my priorities. And in part I simply haven’t figured it out yet.

We didn’t really know what to do with this day. Cake kind of seems weird without them here to enjoy it. I didn’t want to do anything with others as my own feelings are complicated enough – maybe I just wanted to be “allowed” to cry whenever I had to.
Initially I had thought about going to the beach where we scattered their ashes, but H is terrified we could get into an accident and something might happen to Strawberry Baby, and I’m not all that comfortable driving anymore anyway, so we stayed and just went to the water here.
I feel kind of bad about not doing much for them today. We’re planning to go to said beach once Strawberry Baby is here. She has been kicking me reassuringly all day long, sweet girl. I wonder if she knows or feels that her mom is having a rough day.

I’ll leave you with another picture of our precious firstborns. And an extra picture of C – by the time the professional photographer came, it had been over 30h since she was born, and time was starting to wear on her little body. But she was a truly beautiful baby. They’re both very much loved and very much missed.

Today

Today a year ago, I lost my mucus plug in the morning. I freaked out, but the nurse tried to convince me that I needn’t come in (and perhaps they couldn’t have done anything anyway). A couple hours later, C’s water broke. Our poor little girl was all curled up on the ultrasound. It was heartbreaking – and the slim prospects of survival they were giving us for either of our twins didn’t make it any better. It was one of the worst days of my life.

This morning (my time zone), my brother’ girlfriend delivered their daughter, overdue and 9.5lbs, but healthy and alive. She is my dad’s first* living grandchild, and I wonder how he feels about it. He’s not one to talk about emotions but was clearly devastated by the loss of A&C. I’m happy for them, really, but I wonder how I’d have taken this without Strawberry Baby kicking me reassuringly.

* My MIL wrote an email about this baby being my dad’s first grandchild. H was very offended.

it’s more like a wish list

Before reaching 24 weeks, I wasn’t willing to deal with anything birth- or baby-related^*. So despite the suggestion of my book or app, writing a birth plan was out of the question – even though I had found out to my own, and particularly to my twins’s disadvantage, that birth can happen before that milestone. But then again, whatever was in the birth plan usually isn’t particularly relevant in such situations.

When I was pregnant with the twins I really wanted to try a vaginal delivery. Not sure why this seemed so important… Well, I did have that. Turns out this wasn’t the important part after all.

Now my top priority is to get Strawberry Baby here alive and well. One might think this doesn’t take a “birth plan”, and perhaps it doesn’t. While many people may be able to plan a pregnancy, birth is another story. After feeling slightly ridiculous for trying to plan something that can’t be planned, I renamed the document “birth wish list”. It starts like this:

Everyone alive.
Preferably healthy.

I did come up with a surprising number of details, like skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding and our preferences on circumcision in case Strawberry Baby has fooled us all along – but most of these refer to the time after delivery. For labor itself, there’s not much. I haven’t even made up my mind regarding pain relief, as the thought of a needle near my spine scares me. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, I suppose. In part I’m sure it helps that the hospital staff was wonderful when the twins were born, and as we’re going back to the same ward I’m just hoping to have similarly positive encounters. In part, really, as long as I have a living and breathing and healthy Strawberry Baby in my arms afterwards, I don’t care so much about the details.

^*I did collect nursery inspiration on Pinterest, but it was kind of a secret guilty pleasure

#MicroblogMondays: rearranging

We had this awesome plan of hacking a Swedish crib into a co-sleeper and placing it next to my side of the bed – but it wasn’t until we had assembled said crib and taken measurements that we realized the room is literally 2cm too narrow for our plans. Briefly thought about switching our and Strawberry’s room, but that would have been a lot more work than what I feel up to… and fortunately by rotating the beds we have just about enough space. It sure feels like Strawberry Baby is rearranging her quarters, too.

A crib makes the anticipation of bringing home a baby soon even more real than the car seat or stroller. It’s also scary – the fear of the unimaginable pain of coming home to an empty crib is hard to ban completely. At some point, A&C’s blanket and hats were in the crib, underlining just how tiny our beloved twins had been.

Bonus picture: The crib mattress cover has stars! Which weren’t in the online description, but are always welcome.

Part of Mel’s MicroblogMonday movement.

Days

I gave this magnet to my husband recently. Mainly because he’s been depressed about his career prospects, but it seems applicable for this part of our journey, too. (Also, I showed it to him first as I wasn’t sure whether he’d find it amusing or annoying.)

 

Over the last days I have done so many thing I’d been looking forward to, yet sometimes feared would never happen for me. 
Granted, some days we were preoccupied with concerns about whether or not I might be developing preeclampsia, but as my blood pressure has stabilized at around-120/low-80s and my 24h protein came back at 200 (neither really great, but still below any official thresholds) while my liver enzymes are at the lower range of normal (which is good!), I’m hoping we can at least delay, if not fully avoid that part.
But. I folded tiny laundry. Onesies that we actually bought for Strawberry Baby. We have stacks of gDiaper* inserts at home. We decided on and ordered a crib, and even some other nursery furniture. When I brought up the nursery issue two months ago, H didn’t want to set up one – his official point was that she’d sleep in our room anyway and wouldn’t need that much other stuff. And that he wanted to keep this room set up for watching movies with his projector. How much he really believes in the latter and how much of this was self-protection I don’t know, but somehow (without poking from my side) he picked out some dressers and asked if we wanted to get these. 
Lastly, we even bought a stroller and a car seat! In a real store, not “just” online. All this makes the thought of bringing home a baby very real. For the last step we managed to find the sweet spot between my renewed drivers license finally arriving** and, well, getting the car seat before the baby arrives. Because while I’m happy to keep her inside for another 6 weeks, my MFM (who is very sweet and very thorough and might be more worried about preeclampsia than I am, though he probably has the better perspective) said that, if my labs were to start looking bad, they’d recommend delivery at any point after 34 weeks. Which is tomorrow. Whew. Strawberry and I get to do weekly testing, which I first thought would be a nice reassurance, but really, they should call it stress-test for the parents instead of nonstress-test for the baby. I don’t like nurses coming in to “wake up” my baby or bug her with a weird “baby alarm clock” so that she starts moving and her heart rate goes up. But of course the main goal is to keep her safe, inside or out. 

* They seem like the most realistic approach for me right now, with a husband that’s highly skeptical of any non-disposable options and no washing machine of our own (there’s a couple in the building we can use, but it’s not free). Plus, they’re cute :)

** If you’re here on a visa it expires with the visa. Which for me is every year. So then you get to send in all your paperwork on the visa extension and get a renewed license. I just wasn’t counting on that taking 2 months.

An unexpected turn of events

Or perhaps not that unexpected – my doctor was worrying about this all along. My blood pressure has always been a bit high in their office, but as long as it was fine at home I blamed that on anxiety. However, now it’s creeping up even at home…
It would seem a bit ironic for my cervix to hold up marvelously but have other parts of my baby’s support system waver. I hope we can hang in there a little longer, but in the end Strawberry Baby’s well-being is the most important.
Stay tuned. Maybe at least I’ll get back to blogging more regularly.

this time last year

I haven’t had any possibility to compare to the same stage in my last pregnancy for a while, but, as we were so lucky to get pregnant again so quickly, there still is a temporal overlap. And I remember looking at Labor Day sales last year. There was a cute little hat with stitching like a baseball, it would have been adorable. But somehow I didn’t want to buy anything yet. This still makes me wonder if some part of my subconscious knew.
This year, much further along, I allowed myself a few purchases. Friends have generously asked if we want their baby clothes (“but you’re having a girl, and ours is a boy!” – no problem. We’d love to.) If I can work up the energy I also want to explore garage sales in the area. But it was fun picking out a few things, showing them to H, who mainly rolled his eyes, before actually ordering. We even went to a local store last weekend, to look at strollers and car seats. H was heartbroken whenever he thought about the double stroller we had considered for the twins, but bravely came along. The owners were extremely helpful, so in a few weeks we’ll hopefully go back and buy some basic baby gear. It’s still kind of hard to believe, but getting more real.

morphing

Despite growing evidence to the contrary, I still don’t feel big. In some ways I feel amazed to be here, but at the same time over the last few weeks I’ve started to trust my body more again. The pelvic pressure is still around, but fortunately not getting worse. My cervix has been looking great through all this – nobody can quite tell if it’s the singleton or the progesterone, but I’ll happily take it. And I’ve slowly been moving from “if everything goes well…” to “we should probably start buying a few things over the next weeks”. Which is a huge change. Much as I love my milestones, it didn’t come quite with them, but in between, no doubt facilitated by all the good news we’ve been getting throughout this pregnancy. Even before I reached 24 weeks, after my husband brought up again how much he’d love to go home for Christmas, I talked about this with a fellow expat who has two young sons, and said that her trip when their youngest was 2.5 months old worked quite well. And my first thought was not about all the what-ifs, but that – we’d need passports. Shortly afterwards I started to worry about vaccinations, and I’m certainly not going to buy plane tickets before she’s here safe and sound and we have talked to a pediatrician whether this is a good idea at all, but… well, I’m not sure I can accurately describe how much of a big step it is to think that, likely, we will have a living baby with us by the end of this year. And how grateful I am for this.