Bedrest Blahs

What an interesting week I've had. It started with a couple of very busy shifts at work, followed by four days off. The first day off I had was Thursday. I had these grandiose plans of doing a bunch of things and ended up staying at home all day because I felt crappy. Friday I was okay and drove around town doing errands. On Saturday, I went to my friend Greg's wedding and tried various Korean food at the reception. I noticed some different symptoms on Saturday, but I chalked it up to being either excited for him getting married or due to being further along in pregnancy. For instance:

I had a burning sensation in my right upper quadrant, right underneath my rib cage. I figured it was from sitting in the pew and turning all the time to see if other people I knew were at the church, or from the way I was sitting. I kept massaging it and it only went away after a couple of hours. Later on I would learn that it was probably my liver saying "OW."

I had some visual changes, like blurred vision and seeing spots. I thought it was from driving toward the sun and not having my sunglasses on.

Later on that night and on Sunday, I noticed more troubling symptoms that made me want to visit my midwife, including feeling swollen around my eyelids and an increase of edema in my hands, attacks of shortness of breath, and sudden onset dry heaving. I contemplated going to the ED (since it was the weekend and my midwife's clinic was closed), but went against that idea since I figured they wouldn't be able to do anything for me except ship me off to SJMC. I called in sick Monday morning and scheduled an early appointment with my midwife, and after checking my vital signs and telling her about my weekend symptoms, she promptly admitted me to the antepartum unit for observation of pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome.

During my first hours of being admitted to the hospital, my nurse asked me if I was trying to get the prize for the highest blood pressures in the unit. (Later she was amazed at how much I could urinate. I told her I was always an over-achiever.) My systolic BPs were running between 170-196 with diastolics and heart rates above 100. After three attempts of getting an IV in, they were able to get an 18G in a vein on top of my wrist bone. If I had been more with it mentally, I probably should have asked the nurse if an 18G was really necessary, and if so, why was she trying to put it in my wrist vein? Either way, it hurt the entire time and even now that it's out, there's a big hole to remind me of what was there. After some IV labetalol (blood pressure medication), my SBP were around 150-160. They added some oral labetalol and by night my SBPs were in the 130s. I had to do a 24-hr urine collection to quantify the amount of protein in my pee (which ended up being somewhere around 750 mg, over the 300 mg cutoff for pre-eclampsia), and one of my nurses put me on "low stimulation restriction", where I had to have all the lights off in my room, curtains drawn, no noise, and only two visitors at a time who could sit in a chair and not talk to me that much. I felt like I was a dungeon and started to panic that I was going to have to be in this situation for the next nine weeks.


By the end of the admission we had seen four providers: Peggy (midwife), Dr. Venuto (high risk OB), Dr. Funk (night shift OB), and Dr. Read (maternal-fetal medicine high risk guy). We also had two ultrasounds to check on Baxter's growth, one done by the Tacoma Community College student, and the other done by Dr. Read in his office. At Dr. Read's office, he pronounced Baxter having IUGR (intrauterine growth restriction) and that his size (3 lbs., 6 oz.) was in the 9th percentile for his gestational age of 31 weeks. The IUGR was probably caused by my underlying chronic hypertension, which was compounded by pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) and pre-eclampsia. He then told us that we would be lucky to keep Baxter in utero for another one to two weeks and suggested I stay on bedrest in the hospital, and told us about physical and mental developmental delays that could happen with a pre-term baby with low birth weight. I was upset when I got back to the room and started blaming myself for what was happening to Baxter. It wasn't a happy morning.

Dr. Venuto and Peggy came in after that and shared their opinion on the matter, and told us about differences in software and politics between their office and Dr. Read's. Dr. Venuto believed that Baxter did not have IUGR, and although he's small, he's not unusually small. The important thing was that he was growing proportionately and had excellent blood flow through the umbilical cord from the placenta. They also said that my other labs were coming back normal and that I would be a good candidate for home bedrest so that I wouldn't have to stay in the hospital. Hooray! They did say that if my symptoms worsened then I would probably be re-admitted for the duration of the pregnancy. I'm crossing my fingers that everything will work out okay.

So, that leads me to where I am now. Lying on the sofa bed, making best friends with the computer and shows on-demand. I am so thankful for the shower of love and support that our friends, co-workers, and family have given us. My friends at work have been keeping me entertained with texts and pictures, our families have been coming by to drop off gifts of food, flowers, and other essentials (like a carseat). Michael has been the greatest by spending his days and nights at my side, listening to me gripe or plot about breaking my bedrest, and even sleeping on a wimpy blow-up mattress on the hospital floor by my bed to keep me company. I don't know how I could do all this without his presence.