This Time Last Year, part 2

* By the way, I appreciate the responses to the last post. I didn’t mean to be particularly cliffhangerly, so I hope the rest of the story is not a letdown; I just ran out of time when Simon woke up from his nap, which undoubtedly will happen again.
** I keep thinking it’s taking me too long to write this, but in the true spirit of “this time last year,” you’re not really missing anything, since mostly all I was doing was hanging out in room 433, watching What Not to Wear and How Clean Is Your House?

That first weekend was full of surprises of the not-so-great variety: Friday they told us that I’d have to stay overnight (well, I had kind of figured that when I was still hooked up to the baby monitor and they were still taking my blood pressure every five minutes at 10:30 pm); Saturday, they told us not to make plans for the rest of the weekend (hard to swallow, but we figured even hospitals were a little wonky on the weekends; Monday would be a normal doctoring day and we could get some answers and head home); and then on Sunday, they told us that we should plan on staying until the baby was born.

I was diagnosed with PIH (pregnancy-induced hypertension). My blood pressure was just not coming down, and although tests showed that my kidneys and liver were still functioning within normal ranges, they kept me (and kept keeping me) because the condition could worsen quickly and unexpectedly. In fact, everyone (except Jason and me, that is) expected me to have to deliver Simon within a couple of days, a week at the most (I overheard my midwife tell someone that). It still was not sinking in that he would have to be delivered early, so when they said “until the baby is born,” I was thinking at least six weeks (thirty-seven weeks is considered full term) and since they also said that the longer I could stay pregnant the better, it did cross my mind that I could be in the hospital for nine weeks.

The worst moment of that first weekend was when they (I keep saying “they”; I don’t really remember who specifically—maybe a nurse, maybe a doctor, maybe Carol, my midwife) told us that we would need steroids to help develop Simon’s lungs. I didn’t care about the pain of the shot, which a nurse warned me would be significant (yeah, it hurt; actually, if I remember right it was two shots given a day apart). As I have said, an early delivery was just not in my schema, and it really freaked me out—and by that I mean made me go completely cold inside—to think that they were even remotely considering having to deliver him before he was ready.

And this is where the story becomes not much of a story at all: for nineteen days I pretty much slept, watched cable TV, read magazines (I didn’t have much of an attention span for books, even with all that time on my hands), and gladly chatted with whatever friends could come by. (Rebecca tells me that my visitors were pretty limited because they were concerned that too much stimulation would raise my blood pressure—either I don’t remember that or Jason kept it from me at the time. I don’t doubt it, though: after just one wheelchair ride the first or second night there, I was banned from going anywhere but up to the bathroom and back, and even when I had ultrasounds, they brought the machines to me.) Jason slept most nights on what must have been a very uncomfortable couch (he said when it was all over that “sleeping in your own bed after 3 weeks on a hospital couch is like getting a massage from God”); if I had it to do over, I probably would have told him to go home to sleep more often, but I was so very grateful for his presence.

They hooked me up to a baby monitor on every shift,and by the time he was born, I figured I had listened to Simon’s heartbeat for something like fifty-two hours. We had I think four ultrasounds—two with a tech I would very much like to forget. I learned more than was good for me about what Simon “should” be doing in there (heart rate increasing at least twice during the hour, etc.), which made me sometimes worry needlessly.

I don’t know how deep the rose tint on my glasses has become, but I actually do look back on my time in the hospital with fondness. I have amazing friends who were taking care of the “nesting” I never got to do—cleaning our whole house, painting the nursery, even going shopping for basics like diapers and crib sheets; all my needs were taken care of, including meals brought to me on a predictable schedule (after about a week, they stopped bringing me the regular menu and told me to order whatever I was craving, and the kitchen complied), a dessert tray in the afternoon, pudding for Jason whenever he wanted it. As Jason said, life got stripped down to just the basics, and while I wouldn’t want to live that way for very long, I never did get too stir crazy or even bored really, and it wasn’t until the last two or three days that I felt bad (actually, that did make it a little weird to be in the hospital; for the most part I felt fine. What I didn’t feel was pregnant). Though it wasn’t what I would have chosen, I was grateful for the rest, for the time to prepare mentally, if not physically, for the gracious care I received especially from the nursing staff, for the opportunity to see concretely how much our friends and family love us.

***Okay, I’m thinking I’ll probably do two or three more installments. I still want to write down so that I don’t forget entirely what it was like the day Simon was born and our experience in the NICU afterward.