Catching up: The Birth Story part 2 (Warning: this will be long!!)

Well, now that it is rainy again, and there's a little less to do, I'll use the time to finish the story of Eric's birth.  If you'll recall, the last time I wrote about it, I explained how I went into labor, how Eric didn't seem to want to come out into the world, and how I finally had to have an emergency c-section under general anesthesia.  I ended the first part of the story when I finally had Eric in my arms.

Mauri took this picture with his phone after they put Eric in my arms.

I was tired, but very happy to see him.  He seemed to be tired, too, and spent most of the day napping.  I was very thirsty, too, but they wouldn't let me eat or drink that day because I had to recover from the general anesthesia medications.
We had several visits from members of Mauri's family, and my friend Maite. Otherwise the day was pretty uneventful.
Once nighttime rolled around, and I could finally drink, they only offered me one small glass of water, and no other water was available for me.  So, Mauri found a vending machine and bought me water.
The first night, Eric woke up a few times, but not too much, since he was still tired from the birth experience.

Our home for 2 weeks

There was a couch/bed in the room for Mauri, but that first night, he preferred sleeping on the recliner chair that was also in the room.

As would continue daily, I was visited by nurses at midnight and at 7AM for rounds to check our (Eric's and my) temperatures, my blood pressure, and to give me my pain medication.  Despite not getting a lot of sleep, I was feeling much better the next day.  I still couldn't really sit up, and my cut hurt quite a bit when I tried to move.  As the day progressed, though, even that started to feel much better.

The morning routine was always the same.  At 7AM, the nurses made their rounds.  One would come take our temperatures, and one would take my BP and give me my meds.  A few hours later, a nurse would come and take Eric to get his bath and be weighed.  Mauri went along to watch since I wasn't able to walk there myself yet.
A little later someone would drop off a tray of coffee and cookies for breakfast, but, once again, no water.  I had meds that needed to be taken with water, and I was offered cookies and coffee, but no water.  That just didn't seem normal to me for a hospital.  Mauri asked one of the nurses for water, and she said that it wasn't their responsibility to give us any, so he found the vending machine and bought me more.
Around this same time, someone would stop by daily to change the sheets, clean the floor, change towels...
That would be followed by someone coming to pick up the food tray, which would be followed by a visit from a doctor to check on me and my cut.
A little later, they would drop off a food tray with lunch, which was a surprise, followed by someone to come pick up the empty tray, someone to check our temperatures again, BP, meds...  You get the idea.  People were in and out of our room all day long from 7AM to 12AM.
That night, as can be expected, Eric woke up several times in the night, and I kept breastfeeding to try to get him to sleep.  It was getting frustrating, though, because nothing seemed to come out, and I felt like I was starving my poor little baby. At one point we gave him a few drops of water to try to calm him down.
On Thursday I was feeling much better, and at one point I even refused the pain meds when the nurse offered them to me.  A couple of hours later, though, I changed my mind.  I was up and walking, so I went to see Eric get his bath.  I also found out about a breast milk pump that they had there, so I got a nurse to bring me to the lactation room, and I tried to pump some milk.  A very little bit of milk did come out, which helped me feel a little more relieved.

I had gotten to know some of the nurses by that point, and one of the nurses told me that I was scheduled to go home the next day.  I was very surprised, but was very happy about it.
As the day went on, it was getting harder and harder for me to breastfeed, and I noticed that I was getting a really big scab on one side, and the other side was starting to get cracked.  I wanted to keep breastfeeding, but it was starting to hurt too much, and I was worried that it was just going to get worse.  So, I decided to start getting as much milk as I could from the breast pump, and was constantly pumping and trying to feed Eric with the little milk I was getting out.  It was inconvenient, though, because I had to go down the whole hall to use the one breast pump available, which was in the section of premature babies.
At one point that night, in the middle of the night, one of the nurses had seen me going down the hall to pump, and she saw me returning a couple of hours later to pump again, and she told me that I should try to relax a bit.  She went to get a little syringe filled with about 10ml of formula that she said was what they used to feed the premature babies.  She told me not to tell anyone that she had given it to me, but that if I needed more to go to her again.  She also gave me more lanolin to try to heal up the sores from breastfeeding, and basically said goodbye to me because her shift ended that night, and I was scheduled to be released the next day.  Her advice was to take it easy and not to worry because most girls' milk came in about the time they were going to be released from the hospital.

The next day I was excited to get to go home.  My sore was actually starting to hurt a little more, though, so I asked the nurses about it.  They told me that it was normal because I had deep stitches in the areas that hurt, and that they would be pulling a little.  When they took my blood pressure, though, it was a little bit higher than normal, so they said they would wait a little while and retake it.
When they came back, I was nervous about it being high because I was afraid it would keep them from letting me go home.  Not only had it not gone down, but it was actually very high, something that I have never had happen before since I usually have low blood pressure.  Having a hard time believing it, I assumed that it was high because I was nervous about not being able to go home, and was actually quite irritated when I learned that I wasn't going to be able to go home that day.
The only thing that made the day better was the fact that they actually brought me a 1.5 liter bottle of water for the first time, and they also brought me a menu with 3 choices for each of my meals for the next day.  I found it rather ironic that I finally got my menu when I might be going home the next day, and not even have the chance to try the meals that I had chosen.  Of course, at that time, I had no idea that I was going to have plenty of time to try out the various meals, and plenty of days to receive their bottles of water.  From then on, I got a bottle of water every day, and a menu each day, too.  Anyways, for some reason the system wasn't working when I had arrived, but normally everybody is supposed to get a menu to choose the next day's meals from and a bottle of water.  

During the day, I kept up my routine of going down to the pump to pump milk to feed Eric, but decided it would be much more convenient to have my own pump, especially since my cut was hurting more and more all of the time, and there were moments that it was getting difficult for me to get up and walk.  So, Mauri went home to get my breast pump, and to get some more clean clothes, etc.
At one point, I needed to get up to go pee, but I could barely get up anymore.  I needed Mauri to help me up, because moving really pulled on my cut, which hurt more and more all of the time.  Plus, I needed him to hold onto Eric, who had been sleeping on my chest.  Just a few minutes earlier, the nurse had come in and taken our temperatures, and had commented on how Eric and I had exactly the same temperature.
When I was going to go back to bed, though, I started to feel really cold.  I thought that it was from my hair being wet, because I had washed my hair earlier that day, now knowing that I would be stuck here at least one more day, but the second I hit the bed, I started to shiver and shake.  It must have been out of control, because it freaked Mauri out, and he ran to get a nurse.
I couldn't control it, and was freezing.  They put more blankets on me, but it didn't help.  It was supposedly really warm in the room, but I was ice cold.
They took my temperature, which had shot up instantly, and I had a relatively high fever.  So, they came back to put in a new IV needle (the last one had been removed in preparation to send me home), so that they could rapidly administer acetaminophen to bring down my fever.  When they took my blood pressure, it was so high, that they decided to give me medication, which I later found out to be a calcium channel blocker, to be administered under my tongue.  That freaked both Mauri and I out a little.  They checked on my cut, but it still looked relatively good. 

The next morning, though, one of the nurses took a look at the cut, and said it looked red and a bit unusual to him.  So, they called for a gynecologist to come take a look at it.  They brought me to a different room, and took out the outermost stitches, and cut open little sections to have a look, and try to drain some liquid from my wound.  After getting quite a bit of liquid out, the doctor put in some thin gauze, filling the wound from one side to the other, to help drain some of the liquid.  He put a new bandage on, and sent me back to my room.  I was disappointed that I wasn't going to get home that day, but was happy that they were likely finding what was wrong with me, and I actually started to feel much better as the day progressed.  Even my blood pressure, which was still high, seemed to be getting a little bit lower.
The next day, I was a lot more optimistic, and was happy to see a different gynecologist who was going to clean out my wound, and was going to put in a new drain.  I was feeling much better, and my wound hurt much less.  She was happy to see that it had made
Unfortunately, though, instead of starting to feel better and better, I started to feel worse and worse.  Mauri decided to go home to get some more things, and to stop and bring me some non-hospital food, but while he was gone, I started to feel sicker and sicker.  I also started to feel very cold again.
I tried to hang on and wait for him to get back to the room.  By the time he got there, I told him that I thought the same thing was happening to me again.  I was getting the shivers, and didn't feel like eating any of the food he'd brought for me.  The nurses on call came in, took my temperature and blood pressure, and once again gave me meds to bring both my fever and blood pressure down.  By that point, I was taking blood pressure medication 3 times a day, but despite the meds, the readings were always high.  Nobody seemed to understand why it was high, nor did things look any closer to getting better. Some nurses were suspecting that I was affecting my blood pressure myself, by getting worked up every time they were taking my blood pressure.  One day, when I asked one of the nurses about my BP reading, she lied, and told me it was low, but that she wanted to recheck it to make sure.  Mauri had seen the original high numbers, and also saw that my BP had gone down a lot after she had assured me that it was close to normal.  While it was still high, the second reading was much lower, making it seem more likely that I was unwittingly affecting my blood pressure in some way.  I've never had "white coat syndrome" before, though, and while it was true that I really wanted to go home, and that my high BP was preventing that, I didn't really feel especially nervous when they were coming to take my blood pressure.  I looked up ways to prevent white coat syndrome, to see if they would help me, but the only thing that seemed to consistently lower my blood pressure was breastfeeding.  For some reason, whenever they took the reading while I was breastfeeding, the numbers were closer to normal.  As the days were going by, the scabs had been healing, and I had started to directly breastfeed again.  At least that was much better. 

The nurses couldn't help speculating about what my problem was, and most of them assured me that it couldn't be related to my infection.  According to them, an infection can affect your body temperature, but not your blood pressure.  They told me that it was likely due to the pregnancy, and that it may or may not go back down again.  Most of them seemed sure that my blood pressure would be high for the rest of my life.
That surprised me, and angered me a little.  By that point, though, blood analyses had ruled out eclampsia, and not having had high blood pressure while pregnant, it seemed unlikely to be due to the pregnancy. 
Anyways, the next day I got visits from a plethora of doctors, including a gynecologist, an internal medicine doctor, and a surgeon.  The surgeon had been called in by the gynecologist who had cleaned out and packed the wound the day before, to get an idea as to what the problem was, and why it wasn't improving anymore.  When the surgeon took a look, though, the first thing she did was criticize the way the gynecologist had packed the wound with gauze.  She said that rather than acting as a wick to help it drain, that it was plugging the wound so that it wouldn't drain at all.  While I was surprised how blunt she was with the other doctor about how she had messed up, right in front of me, I wasn't surprised that that had been the problem as it seemed to me that she had packed an enormous amount of gauze into the wound.  They decided to change to a different type of wicking material that breathed more and had silver particles in it to help against infection.  Most importantly, though, they barely packed any into the wound, and let it drain better.
While that was probably the turning point after which everything started to get better, it was only the beginning of trying to determine why my blood pressure had spiked so high.  The internal medicine doctor decided that I should have several tests done, and, over the next few days, I got wheeled around the hospital for all of the different tests.  I always felt a little out of place because I was being wheeled around in my hospital bed, and was waiting with a lot of really old people who had walked in and were sitting in the waiting area.  One day I was taken in for an ultrasound of my heart, but everything looked OK.  Then, there was a night that I couldn't eat or drink anything, especially difficult while breastfeeding all night, so that I could drink two large bottles of barium sulfate the next morning, and have a cat scan done.  I was a bit concerned about drinking that while breastfeeding, and, although I was very happy to finally be able to drink something, I have to admit that it wasn't the most pleasant thing in the world to drink.  Of course, it was all for nothing, and the scan was also "normal."

So, they kept taking blood analyses, and started to make me collect all of my urine output.  They didn't seem to know what else to do.  (Where is Dr. House when you need him?)  I was starting to feel better, though, and was starting to get annoyed with all of the tests that proved it.  As the days went by, I was starting to be able to get up and walk again too.  Still, my blood pressure was higher than it should be, but it had gone down a little bit.
Finally, though, after constant draining of the wound, it was starting to feel much better.  Around 11 days after Eric was born, not only was I feeling better, but my blood pressure was starting to go back to normal.  Of course, I was still on BP medication, but before, even with the medication, my BP was always high.  The doctors finally decided that the rise in blood pressure was likely due to the infection and pain, and nothing else, and started to plan for me to be able to go home soon.
Feeling much better, and hearing that the nice weather that I had been missing while in the hospital, was likely going to change in the next few days, I asked for permission to be able to go outside.  They told me that I wasn't technically allowed outside, but that it wasn't a bad idea for me to try to start moving a little more on my own.  So, they told me to change my clothes, and try to cover my iv needles, and to go for a short walk to the cafeteria the next day, if I wanted to.  Of course I wanted too!!  Poor Eric had been stuck in the stupid hospital with me, and I wanted him to be able to go outside for a walk with me.  Mauri had brought him outside to get some sun one day already, when the nurses pointed out that Eric wasn't the patient, I was, and that it would be good for him to get out.  I felt like I was missing out on everything, though.  I was asleep when he was born, in bed during his first bath, in bed when he took his first walk outside...
I wanted to be around for his firsts, and not miss out on all of them. At least I was finally going to get the chance to go outside with him.

So, the next day I got ready for our walk.  Just in case, we didn't say anything to the nurses, and we headed towards the terrace of the cafeteria.  I ordered some fresh squeezed orange juice and was enjoying the sun on my face outside.  Only halfway through drinking the glass, though, I started to feel dizzy.  After days of mostly being in bed, walking around and getting in the sun was just a little bit too much for me.  Now I understood why the doctor had said that it was a good idea for me to get out little by little.  So, we headed back to the room, and decided that we would go back outside later.
That's exactly what we did.  We went for a walk outside around the parking lots, in the cafeteria terrace, etc., and I was feeling much better.  I was also excited that I would likely be going home, finally, the next day.
The next morning, we started to get our things together.  After such a long stay, it seemed really strange to be finally leaving.  I could hardly believe it.  At least we wouldn't be paying 4 Euros a day to see the TV anymore.  No more stale muffins and gross coffee.  On the other hand, by that point I had gotten to know most of the nurses well.  I decided that I would miss the nurse who snuck me formula, and "Mika" (she reminded both Mauri and I of the singer), and several others who were always kind to me.  I didn't figure I would miss the nurse who didn't want to change the positioning of her very uncomfortable IV needle, though, and the one who refused to show Mauri how to change a diaper the first day.  Overall, the stay wasn't so bad.  I had my own, decent room, had been treated relatively well, and can't really complain, except about a few minor things.  I would still prefer not to repeat the experience.

Eric in his stroller and huge clothes, ready to leave the hospital.

When we were finally ready to leave, we changed Eric into the clothes that I had brought for him to ride home in.  Luckily he was already 2 weeks old, because the only clothes I had for him were still huge!!  I had bought everything on the large size, to let him grow into them, but realized that I had gone overboard.  So our first mission, once finally home, was to go buy Eric some newborn sized clothes!!

Eric in his car seat for the first time, on his way home from the hospital.

Seeing as how this story was very long as is, I actually skipped a lot of details.  We did get lots of visits while in the hospital, though, and our stay was made much better by people like Maite who came to the hospital to stay with Eric and I while Mauri was able to go get dinner many nights.  She also brought us bags of snacks to munch on, despite me saying that I wasn't hungry for anything.  In the end, once the infection started to go away, and I started to get my appetite back, they came in very handy.  We were also visited by my aunt Carmen and uncle Roberto, Mauri's family, and some neighbors of Mauri's parents.

Eric in one of his newborn outfits that we went out and bought right away.  Mauri picked this one out.

I'm sure I'm also leaving out a lot of other little stories about what happened, our interactions with the people in the hospital, and figuring out how everything there worked, including the little soapy sponges for bathing ourselves.  I also left out the part about the photographer who visited the rooms.  That's a whole other less important story that I may or may not get to some day.  I wanted to record the majority of it, though, to help me remember the experience.  Having to deal with the infection, it wasn't the most fun experience of my life, but it was a very important one because it was when I first got the opportunity to be a mother.  In the end, as most of you know, my blood pressure went back to normal within days of being home, and I took myself off all of the medications.  After a few weeks of going into the med center several times a week so that the nurses could clean out my wound and drain it, it was mostly healed up, and I was able to focus on taking care of my new little boy...