I posted this on a bulletin board for women who had difficult / traumatic birth experiences. I really didn't know that this happened. I honestly believed that there was no safer choice than having your baby in a hospital with an OB. In all reality, this probably was the safest place for me. The same complications would have existed at home, so location really was immaterial. If we'd transferred from home, it probably would have taken longer to receive a diagnosis. I would have waited for the ER doc to figure out what he needed, and waited for him to call in an OB and anesthesiologist.
I still have a lot of questions. I still struggle with the decisions that were made, but here's the story I knew at the time.
My daughter was born May 11th. I've never told the entire story of her birth to anyone, and until this week I never realized just how bothered I am by how it happened.
I had the easiest pregnancy until I reached my 24th week when I was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes. Changing my eating habits was very difficult at first, but after a couple of weeks I had it down pat. At 34 weeks I began to experience pregnancy induced hypertension, and my doctor placed me on modified bed rest. By the time I reached 37 weeks it had progressed to pre-eclampsia, so I agreed to be induced the following Friday.
Things started in a pretty typical manner. The doctor broke my water, and they started me on pitocin. However, things started to change rapidly. My blood pressure started climbing, so they had me lay on my left side for what seemed like forever. Things didn't improve, so they tried to roll me over to the other side. However, as soon as I got to my back my blood pressure started to decrease. The contractions started to settle into a steady rhythm, but my blood pressure started to climb again. At this point, my doctor wanted me to have an epidural to reduce the blood pressure, so I complied with his wishes. Unfortunately, the epidural didn't really work. It resulted in slowing labor to a crawl and putting my leg to sleep, but I didn't receive any pain relief from it. Finally, around 9:00 pm I had the urge to push. I pushed for two hours before I came to the realization that after being on bed rest for a month I simply didn't have enough energy to push my peanut out on my own. The nurses finally tracked my doctor down, he wasn't responding to his pager, and he gave me a little help with the vacuum.
My daughter was born at 11:32 pm, but that's the beginning of the story. The placenta didn't detach right away, so the doctor was stitching me up while he gave my uterus time to work on expelling it and the nurses were cleaning up my daughter. At midnight, he once more gave the umbilical cord a tug. I nearly jumped off the bed the pain was so intense. Instead of the placenta detaching, my uterus flipped inside out and started to come out through my cervix. The doctor asked the nurse to call the c-section team. Unfortunately they had all gone home after I had delivered, so they had to be called back to the hospital. I started hemorrhaging and my blood pressure dropped as I started to go into shock. Things get pretty fuzzy about then, but I do remember my doctor once more asking for the c-section team with a hint of panic in his voice. People started streaming into the room, and they rolled me into the operating room.
When I came to, I was back in the delivery room with my husband, and I had the worst case of the shakes. I'm not sure what they were pumping into me at this point. I had one IV line in my hand when my peanut was born, but I had seven lines in my hand when I came to in the delivery room. (I found out later that they had left my husband alone in the delivery room with my daughter, and they didn't tell him what was happening. According to him, the room looked like the nastiest crime scene he'd ever seen on CSI.) At this point, my husband was so overwhelmed that he called a friend to come and sit with me so he could go home, get some sleep,and begin to deal with all of the emotions the day had brung. Finally at 5:00 am I was up to actually holding and naming my daughter. After some time with my peanut, our friend called the grandparents to tell them that my peanut had been born. When the doctor came to do rounds, he told me that he had managed to save my uterus and the placenta had to be manually removed. It turned out that the placenta didn't detach properly, and it came out in twenty pieces. It was also the first time my doctor had experienced a uterine inversion. Apparently it is a very rare complication.
While every decision was made with my and my daughter's best interest in mind, it was an amazingly difficult time. I'm struggling to focus on being grateful that I'm still alive and my body still has all its parts.
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