Tuesday, January 12, 1999

My cervix was unchanged this morning so the doctor said that they would play around with the dosage of the Magnesium Sulfate and Terbutaline and hopefully manage to hold off labor until 34 weeks (I was only 32 weeks).  He tried to do an amniocentesis to see if the lungs were developed in the event we had to go early but there wasn’t a good spot to draw up the amniotic fluid so we weren’t able to do the procedure.  Around 12:00pm I had a whopper of a contraction and rolled on my back to try to breathe through it.  Seconds later my water broke.  When the doctor got there he confirmed it was amniotic fluid and said that I was 2cm dilated and 50% effaced.  The doctor decided it was no longer safe for the babies to be inside me.

I was transported to another hospital that has a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).  When I got there the doctor decided to hold off until 6:00pm to let the food on my stomach settle.  While we were waiting for some blood work to come back the doctor did another exam and said that I was 6cm dilated and that we had to get the babies out immediately.  The anesthesiologist started my epidural but had a hard time getting it in so he had to do it twice (lovely experience).   I was whisked away to the OR and John was sent to get ‘gowned’.  The surgery began fine and I wasn’t able to feel the incision at all BUT when the doctor got inside and was trying to get to the babies, the epidural wore off.  They stopped the surgery and put more drugs in my epidural and started giving me nitrous oxide (laughing gas).   I have never breathed so deeply in my life as I did when he put the mask on for the laughing gas!  Surgery got back underway.  Suddenly my doctor says with his Spanish accent, I-car-rumba.  John’s thinking that this was not a good word to hear during surgery on his wife!  Turns out the babies wanted out because there was a severe placenta abruption.  When they got to the abruption, John said that he could hear a water fountain noise and he looked around the drape and it was blood.   YUCK!

Because of the abruption, when Carter’s membrane ruptured he swallowed and inhaled a lot of blood so they had to suction his lungs and put him on a ventilator.  Also because of the abruption they had to put a tube in his umbilical cord to supply nourishment.  Nathan was higher in the womb and since his membrane didn’t rupture, he was healthy and breathing room air.  Both boys came out screaming and had good lung development which we attribute to the steroids that I took.

The boys were taken to NICU and the doctor finished putting me back together which unfortunately I started feeling.  They gave me some more nitrous oxide and then told me not to go to sleep – yeah right!  After I got out of recovery and was in my room John was able to go see the boys.  I wasn’t able to see them until 11:00pm because of the drugs that they had given me during surgery.

John and I are so far past cloud 9 that they don’t even have numbers!

We have had an outpouring of good wishes and wonderful baby gifts and I thank each and everyone of you for sharing this experience with us.  Now if you would each just take turns changing diapers, we would have it made!   I’ll try to keep this page updated as much as possible but as you can imagine, I don’t have much time for playing on the computer.