Emergency C-section scar

 I am always curious to see what other women's ceserian scars look like. So here is mine.

It was an emergency c-section. It was a matter of life and death. They had to get her out of me so I could breathe. Poor little thing. Yanked out of there, 5 weeks before her scheduled arrival. Made to have a birthday close to Valentine's Day instead of Saint Patrick's Day. Lots of red hearts in her future, not green clovers.

The scar is about a centimeter above the hairline. Reaches almost from hipbone to hipbone. Is almost straight but not quite, kind of curves up on one end. Draw two eyes above my navel and you've got a face with a smirk on it.

That is where my daughter came out. Where they cut through seven layers of me to get to her. While I struggled for breath. While my body fought to keep going. How I wish I would have been able to give her that extra month inside of me. Time to plump up and get ready for the colder temperatures in the outside world. She was taken so early that I never felt her hiccup inside me. I experienced that with my son, and I miss that with my daughter.

I say 'taken' because that is what it feels like. I don't feel like I gave birth to her. It wasn't my doing. I didn't have contractions, I didn't feel any pain. Someone else was making decisions, granted, they were medical professionals, but still, someone else.

Even after I'd gotten home from hospital I'd still put my hand on my belly to feel the baby. The baby that was sleeping in the crib or feeding from a bottle, nestled in her grandmother's arms.

I don't mind the scar. It saved her. It saved me. And it's not too bad looking.

Happy

Here is a picture of me and my husband, at the hospital after I woke up, and you'll notice the feeding tube in my nose.

Now I know it's not the most flattering picture of me ever taken, but give me a break, I just almost died. So considering, I think it's actually a very nice happy picture. Plus it was taken by a person I will always hold very dear to my heart. My perfusionist, a wonderful woman and we have kept in contact. She does amazing work and saves people. I am so thankful to her. Keep up the good work girl!

To be continued...

A year ago today

A picture of my baby girl, taken exactly a year ago.

 Taken by the lovely nurses in the NICU. By that time I had been airlifted to another hospital. It feels weird to me to see pictures of her from when we hadn't met yet. She's just this cute little baby that I didn't have a connection to yet. I know she grew inside of me but I hadn't had physical contact with her. Physical contact, touch, skin touching skin, these are extremely important things, and you don't really realize it until you haven't got it, or you missed it.
I never saw the NICU she was in. I never met the nurses that took care of her. But I am forever grateful to them, they took care of my baby when I was not able to do so. I will carry them forever in my heart.


To be continued...

A year

Today is my daughter's first birthday. A year since I lapsed into unconsciousness, a drug-induced coma. The memories I have of her birth are non-existent. I was unconscious when they cut her from me. There were no contractions, there was no pain. Only darkness.

She arrived into this world into a sterile room full of strangers. Medical professionals and wonderful people, but strangers nonetheless. I did not hear her first cry. Or her second, or third, etc.

It is absolutely heart-breaking to me that I could not breastfeed my daughter. Apparently my breast-milk did soak through a couple of hospital gowns before my body stopped producing it altogether. I was still breastfeeding my son (3 years and 2 months) when all this happened. So this is how he was weened. Not only did his mommy disappear, but the comfort of his mother's breast stopped as well. How hard it must have been on my little boy. People can call me a tree hugging hippie if they want to, but I fully intended on breastfeeding them both after the second one was born. What a wonderful bonding experience that would have been. I'm sure some people are icked by that. I also don't find it weird at all if a woman breastfeeds a baby that isn't her own. We're just mammals and this is just milk. No reason to get all weirded out by it. I am bummed that I missed doing this for my baby girl.

She saw so many people before she saw me, her mommy. My mom became her mom, and she took such good care of her, and my son. I do not know how my mom functioned at all, knowing her daughter was fighting for her life. But she did exactly what I would have wanted her to do, took care of my babies, kept them fed and warm and safe, and as happy as they could be under the circumstances.

I missed my daughter's first month of life. While I should have been breastfeeding her, changing her diapers, soothing her, studying her and learning her quirks, being frustrated from the lack of sleep, being blissfully happy with my family, crying at the drop of the hat because of all the hormones, kissing her little peachy fuzz hair, tickling her little baby toes, hugging my babies...

instead of all that, this is what I was doing

 and it was hard, and it took a big toll on my body and my mind.

  I am so sad that this is my daughter's birth story, and that I will be reminded of it every year on her birthday. But I am so happy that I'm alive and that she's alive and that we are both healthy, and that is what truly matters. Everything else is just secondary, but it doesn't stop me from having feelings about it.

To be continued...

Picture

ARDS

My pneumonia was what led me to have ARDS. Which stands for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. It is described as a life threatening lung condition that prevents enough oxygen from getting into the blood.


The air sacs in the lungs become full of fluid. They took x-rays every single day of my lungs while I was in the coma. I've seen the first picture and the lungs were completely white, except for a little part on the bottom right. White is fluid. My lungs were shutting down.


About a third of people with ARDS die from the disease. The lucky survivors regain normal lung function, other may have some lung damage. In my last x-ray, taken a month after I was released from the hospital, my lungs were black (healthy), and only a little part on the bottom left, was white. That may be healed now, I do not know.


People who survive ARDS may have memory problems and problems with thinking after the ordeal. This is due to brain damage that may have happened when the lungs weren't working properly and the brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.


I was extremely groggy with all these drugs in my system when they woke me up. This is what I saw on my wall to my left and I was so confused, so very very confused, and it took me many days to crawl out of that confusion.

 To be continued...

Premature baby

She was born 5 weeks prematurely.
She was 5 lbs 15 oz (2693 gr).
She was 19,5 in (49,5 cm).

She had trouble breathing when she first entered this world.
She stayed in the NICU for eight or nine days.
She had a feeding tube up her nose while she was learning how to drink from a bottle.

She was taken care of by people I have never met.
So many strange hands held her before her own family held her.
So many strange hands and family and friends held her before her own mother got to hold her.

She was released from the hospital when she was able to hold her own temperature steady.
She came home to her distraught grandmother and her confused big brother.
Her parents were at another hospital, the mother fighting for her life and her father fighting along with her.

She was well cared for and loved and wanted for nothing.
Her grandmother became her mother.
Her other grandmother came as well.
Even her aunt flew out to help.
She is a lucky little girl.
But she was still a little girl who needed her mommy and daddy, and her big brother also needed his mommy and daddy.

Her first month of life was robbed from me, her birth was robbed from me, I was robbed from my son.

My husband had to decide her name all on his own. We had not firmly talked about names, we didn't even know the gender. I know he didn't want to name her after me because that would mean that I wouldn't make it. And I needed to make it.

All this happened, and I had no idea. I was in another world fighting for my life. I didn't consciously know it, but every single cell in my body was screaming and fighting and clawing its way towards life and health and my family.

I was put on full life support. Machines were keeping me alive. My vital signs were not stable enough to move me to another hospital. A hospital that had a machine that just might be able to save me. They wanted to airlift me to that hospital but the crew on the chopper would not accept me with those unstable vital signs, said that I would perish on the way.

Miraculously on Saturday (I was admitted on Monday) I was stable and they whisked me into the chopper and flew me to the hospital. I do not remember the flight. My husband had to drive to the hospital and when he arrived there was a team of medical experts ready to explain to him what they needed to do and what he needed to sign in order for them to do it.

To be continued...

Contagious

They didn't know if I had H1N1 (swine flu), their samples were somehow compromised. My husband and son also had samples taken, they both had the flu but not the same type as me.

At one point they even suspected I had H5N1 (avian flu). I was put in complete isolation after they stitched me up. I have no memory of this.

My husband got a friend of his to stay at the house with our son (asleep for the night), so he could come to the hospital to see me and our new baby.

Honestly I think people were brave to babysit for us, because the doctors at that point didn't know what I had or how contagious it was. I am so grateful to our friends who watched our son so my husband could come to the hospital. I think my husband did try and ask this favor of our friends who don't have children yet. I understand it must have been really scary, because you don't want to get sick yourself and you absolutely don't want children catching anything potentially dangerous.

The night our baby was born, I was apparently conscious after the surgery. Because I was in isolation they brought me a computer and showed me my baby via web cam. I have no memory of this. When my husband arrived at the hospital I was unconscious. He did not get to see me awake but he went to the NICU to see our baby for the first time, and hold her for the first time.

 I don't know when this next bit happened because I do not remember it, but apparently I woke up at one point, ripped out my tubes and IVs, stood up and started walking out of the isolation chamber. I was going to get my baby, my baby needed me, I needed my baby, some base nature as a mother made me do that. It took a couple of nurses to hold me back and I wouldn't budge until one of them said to me that I had to get better for the sake of my children. I had to take care of me first before I could take care of my children. They were in good hands until then. This calmed me down and they re-intubated me and this time restrained me to the bed so I could not rip out all my leads again.


It is extremely weird to me that this happened and I do not remember it, at all.


This was a Tuesday. I got progressively worse as the week wore on. They put me in a prone positioning bed, it takes pressure of the lungs to try and give them the room to heal. My body was so full of fluid I was unrecognizable, all puffy and eyes sunken in. When my mother arrived she said she was afraid to touch me for fear of my skin just bursting underneath her fingers.


To be continued...