What’s comin’ will come and we’ll meet it when it does.
-Hagrid
Within a couple days I was on the max dose of my BP medication every 8 hours and receiving steroid injections “incase” I had to deliver. I wasn’t going home anytime soon. A different doctor had come in and told me it was important to keep my BP down. They didn’t want me to deliver early because heart issues on preemies are hard to fix.
I really didn’t need to hear that. I was literally as calm as I possibly could be considering they were poking me with needles every, what felt like, 3 hours, staying bedridden thanks to a very uncomfortable catheter, stuffing multiple medications down my throat making me feel more and more nauseous every second, and dealing with the most severe headache that happened every single time I took my BP medication and never let up – even by the time the next dose came around. Asking me to “keep that baby in” was making me feel like I had more control of my body then I knew and I wasn’t doing a good job.
I was crying every couple hours. I was in pain and just wanted it all to end. I couldn’t take it anymore. I told my husband how scared I was and that I didn’t want to die. The doctors and nurses were coming in every hour or so and things just seemed to be getting worse and worse. There was never good news. They finally decided to put me on a magnesium drip because my blood pressure was just not going down and staying down. They were afraid I was going to have a seizure and needed to make sure that didn’t happen.
Overnight, while on the magnesium drip, a doctor came into the room to do his routine exams. He heard something in my chest that made it necessary to schedule an x-ray first thing in the morning and some blood work to make sure I wasn’t receiving too much magnesium.
Come daytime, it was discovered that there was fluid in my chest and my saturation levels had dropped into the upper 80s at one point that night. They couldn’t wait any longer. Fluid in the chest is a HUGE problem. It’s called pulmonary edema, mine specifically they called “frank pulmonary edema”, and was not good for me (or anyone) at all. It was determined I had to deliver immediately. I told them I’d still like to have a vaginal delivery and they said that I should be able to still have that as they rolled me away to labor and delivery.