My Preemie Pregnancy Story - part 1

This story has taken me much longer than expected to work up the courage to write down... I guess a part of me is still sad about having missed out on the expected "normal" third trimester and delivery.

Here goes:

My pregnancy started off great! A tiny bit of nausea, but nothing I couldn't live quite confortably with!

The very first ultrasound was great! Perfect size for predicted gestational age. We found out we were going to have a little girl and were super excited! Those were the best days of blissful ignorance of what was to come.

We went on to have another U/S at around 16 weeks. There they found that V had a persistent left vena cava. I've talked about that before here. Freak out, freak out and some more freak out... Little did I know this would actually turn out to be the least of our worries. Funny how that is... Looking back it really puts into perspective how sometimes what I make out to be the scariest thing is really nothing to worry about afterall.

They also found that the umbilical cord was not inserted in the middle of the placenta where it should, but rather it was attached to its outer edge. Another "worried about for nothing" thing.

Oh yeah, and I had a bleed around my 17th week, so I was put on strict bedrest.

All of these events or discoveries turned out to be insignificant in the end. But boy did I worry and fret about it all! 

They decided to keep a closer eye on us and get me biweekly ultrasounds, where miss V's size kept dropping from 20th percentile to 15th to 10th. I was getting worried but the doctors seemed ok with the decreases... Apparently there is quite a large margin of error for ultrasound measurements and for their machine they only got worried when the baby's size was below 5th percentile.

So here I was 28 weeks along, worried beyond belief about all these complications and especially that my baby was not gaining all the weight she should. To try to compensate I ate as much as possible, hoping that it would somehow trickle down to her. Because I was driving myself crazy thinking about what could be going wrong, I called my doctor to schedule an earlier appointment. I'd like to think it was mother's intuition, but looking through my lovely retrospectoscope, I think I was starting to feel physically unwell.

Everything seemed to happen very quickly once I was seen at my OBGYN's office. My blood pressure was 135/85 (I usually am at 90/60) and there was protein in my urine. Ugh! I had "pre" preeclampsia, was put on immediate bed rest and a bunch of tests were ordered. I had to take my blood pressure twice a day and got transfered to the high risk clinic at a tertiary center... 

I was told that I could stay in this "pre" preeclamptic state for weeks, or it could rapidly degenerate. And unfortunately the only cure was to deliver my baby.

This is already far too long of a story for one post, so I'll cut it short here and continue in a second part...