Aftermath

• It wasn't until after the birth that I found out that the jerking? while I was on the table? that was the doctor and nurse yanking trying to get our son out of me. See, apparently 2.5 hours of hard pushing was enough to wedge him in there really really well. They tried to push him back up. Didn't work. They tried to get some turn on him. Didn't work. As tension mounted in the OR, apparently my sweetie was afraid that they were going to have to break my pelvis to get him the heck out. They ended up with the nurse and doctor each with one knee up on the operating table for more leverage, heaving. I was so drugged I only vaguely noticed.

• Being in the hospital was pretty awesome. It was a safe, contained space for the three of us to concentrate on this new little creature and his requirements. I was not at all sorry to be there for the C-section mandated four days.

• Having said that, I was in pretty rough shape physically. I don't know if it was because of the long labor or what, but I was flattened. By the time I was discharged I was still only hobbling slowly. I had the poor example of my best friend, who is, unlike me, a) in good shape b) tough as nails. She was bopping around days after her C-section, and I expected to be doing the same. Noooooo. I also blew up until my ankles looked like a Cabbage Patch doll's. I didn't retain too much water during pregnancy, so I was surprised and displeased by my giant ankles.
  

All of this is preamble to the next big chapter of Aftermath.

I got home on a Thursday. Friday was okay. I woke up Saturday morning feeling awful in every way, short of breath, and with the strong feeling that I was going to die. That was actually my most bothersome symptom: I was terrified. I felt like there was a siren wailing in my head. Get help, you are not okay.

I tested my blood pressure and it was the highest I'd ever seen it, 180/103. My pulse, normally in the 90s, was in the 50s. Off to the hospital we went.

After a few hours of testing, they sent me home. By the time I was there, my blood pressure had gone down to 140s/90s. My bloodwork (testing my liver enzymes) was okay. I wanted to beg them to keep me. I just felt so wrong. I went home. I cried a lot. I couldn't sleep because lying down made me short of breath and, more, I was afraid that I'd die if I slept. It was totally irrational but just so strong.

I got through Sunday somehow, but by Monday I was back in the hospital. By then my stats were more alarming; my blood pressure was staying elevated, my liver function was declining, and there was some fluid (although not a lot) visible in my lungs on a chest x-ray. This time, they kept me. The doctor who told me that I was going to have to stay spoke gently, regretfully. I could have kissed her.

The blood pressure and liver function was a gimme; they see it all the time. What wasn't so obvious was why my heartbeat was so slow. It was in the 50s, then started dipping into the 40s and even the 30s a few times. Alarms kept going off on my monitors. They kept asking me if the rate was normal, did I work out a lot? And I'm all HAHAH do I look like I work out a lot? I had minor tachycardia all through my pregnancy, with my heartbeat well over 100 resting.

They set me up in a room in labor & delivery. They really had no idea where to put me; I was too sick for the postpartum unit, too baby-fresh (and with too many other things going on) for the regular cardiac unit. So labor & delivery it was. I sent my wife and our 9-day old baby home. That was hard enough for me; I can't really imagine what it was like for my darling to be home alone, suddenly a single parent to a brand new baby, worrying about me in the hospital.

They gave me an EEG and an EKG and I don't know which was which; one was a pretty quick monitoring onto a strip of paper, the other an extensive ultrasound of my heart. The person who did the ultrasound was a tech, not a doctor, so couldn't give me any answers. I kept hearing odd shlub-shlubs and wondering is it meant to sound like that? really?

It was a long, long night. They gave me a high dose of diuretic, which was meant to help my lungs and probably my blood pressure. Over the next 12 hours I peed out 6 liters of fluid. So I peed. I watched TV. A M*A*S*H marathon got me through 2-5 a.m. I cried. I thought about dying. I thought about how badly I didn't want to die just now. Every time I dozed off the monitors would start binging that my heart rate was too low. I pumped a few times with a breast pump: not enough, not nearly often enough, but I didn't know that at the time (see My Long Lactational Nightmare, coming soon). I snorted oxygen. At about 4 am a nurse came into check on me and found me crying; she asked me why and I told 'er. I'm scared that I'm going to die, I said.

Nonsense, she said, cheerily measuring my prodigious urine output. If they thought you were going to die they wouldn't have you on this unit.

That bit of logic made me feel infinitely better. It made sense. They didn't want patients falling over dead in Labor & Delivery. If they thought I was going to die they would've sent me somewhere else. It was just those damn binging monitors that made me think of too many medical dramas.

The long night finally ended. My liver function had gotten no worse during the night. A cardiologist swanned in for a consult and told me, in short, that my heart looked fine and he had no idea why my heartrate was so low. I wasn't comforted that he didn't know, but I was comforted that he didn't particularly seem to care. Pregnancy is weird, he said. It'll probably go away.

He was right. They discharged me that evening; I could've stayed, but I didn't want to. After losing all that water, I looked and felt a million times better. I could breathe, I could move, my ankles looked like my ankles, and my overwhelming sense of doom was receding. By the time I left the hospital my pulse was in the 60s.

My milk supply was also almost gone, but that's a story for another day.