Bumpblessing4
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Where to begin? I've had three babies before, always at term and by vaginal deliveries, so I wasn't expecting to deliver my baby (whose gender was unknown until his recent birth) for at least another 4 weeks. But then last Wednesday at 35 weeks 0 days (just three days after my baby shower), I was at work and noticed that I hadn't felt much movement that day. By the time I had gone 9 hours with only about three light "maybe movements," I became scared enough to call my OB's office, even though I tried to tell myself that I was overreacting, because the baby's heart rate was still excellent at 150 when I listened. But I recall learning that movements were also important to follow, and I couldn't remember going that long without feeling movement when I was pregnant with my other three children. The nurse asked me if I had tried lying on my left side, and I said, "No, I'm at work." She then said I should probably go to L&D for some monitoring, just to be on the safe side. I went to L&D and told the triage nurse that I was probably overreacting. She hooked me up to the monitors and we heard baby's heart gallop right away. She said, "Feel better?" But then told me we needed to watch for longer to look for heart rate variability/accelerations. While we waited, she told me that she had come to L&D with the same concerns I had twice in each of her two pregnancies and that everything was fine. But then after a while, she calmly said that my baby's heart rate wasn't varying, so I would need an ultrasound for a biophysical profile since I didn't pass the fetal heart tracing assessment due to lack of variability (she would later confess that she told my OB to come to L&D because she had never seen a fetal heart rate tracing like mine in all of her 13 years of L&D nursing). My OB ordered a stat ultrasound but then went to get the ultrasound machine herself when she thought the ultrasound tech wasn't coming quickly enough. My baby took two practice breathing movements on the ultrasound in 15 minutes (and only 2 in 30 minutes are required) but he moved just one limb one time and she assessed that his tone was poor. She did say that we need to carefully consider whether or not we should deliver, since my baby was still premature, but she later told me that she had already reserved an OR. I remember telling her that I was afraid to go home and to "hurray" to help my baby. I told her that I just knew something wasn't right. Soon enough, I was swarmed by nurses putting in an IV and drawing stat labs and anesthesiology asking me to sign consent forms for surgery. They had a spinal block in within 5 minutes, and I thought, "There's no turning back now. I hope I'm not overreacting and bringing my baby into this world too early." Soon afterward, I heard the sounds of a weak cry. No one said anything until I heard a nurse ask, "Is it a girl or a boy" and then someone answered, "It's a boy and he's peeing!" My husband had driven 72 miles an hour on a small back road to get to us, but got to the OR two minutes after our baby was born. I got to reveal the gender to him. Then he got to hold Ryder for just a minute before they whisked him away to the NICU. What I saw before he was taken frightened me. His eyes were closed and he was quiet. But most concerningly, he was as white as a sheet. I later found out that he was severely anemic with a hemoglobin and hematocrit of just 4 and 17 (newborns are usually at 17 and 50). Everyone said that he would have died had we not gotten him out when we did or soon afterward. The nurse who took the call about his critical lab results said that the lab tech told her, "These results can't be right. They're incompatible with life." Ryder received two blood transfusions while we waited for the results of my Kleihauer-Betke test to see if the neonatologist's suspicion was correct. He believes Ryder was in trouble due to fetal-maternal hemorrhage which is when the baby's blood goes backward into the mother's bloodstream through the placenta. The test results later came back positive and Ryder's case was severe. A healthy baby his size has a total body blood volume of 180 to 200 mL but they found 350 mL of his blood in my bloodstream! Since you can't lose more than your total body blood volume all at once, the doctor believes that the hemorrhage started at least four weeks ago and that Ryder had been trying to make more red blood cells to make up for it for weeks until his little body just couldn't make up for it anymore. Thankfully he is doing pretty well in the NICU, but I don't get to hold him skin to skin because he has a catheter in his umbilical artery and he is on TPN because they haven't wanted to feed him by mouth yet (when you have severe blood loss anemia like he did, blood is shunted away from the GI tract to the more vital organs, and so the GI tract is damaged and needs to heal). They are going to let him have a tiny bit of my pumped colostrum for the first time tonight at 4 days old. Please keep us in your prayers. He weighed 4 pounds, 10 ounces and was 17 3/4 inches long. I also wanted to mention that I heard my OB tell the nurses and anesthesiologist during surgery that her "decision to operate was 25% the fetal heart rate tracings and biophysical profile results and 75% her (aka me) instincts that something was wrong." So don't ignore your instincts!
xxxx
