An After Birth Story: Leah

And yes, it is probably going to be as graphic and unpleasant as the title suggests.  Watch out!

So my beautiful baby was born and she was perfect.  This was a huge relief to me.  The last weeks and even months of my pregnancies are spent with the nagging thoughts and fears about all the things that could be wrong with my baby. Maybe because of my overall education has made me more qualified to be a parent of a child with special needs. Or maybe college anatomy just really drove home how miraculous it truly is that any baby is born without any number of problems or special needs.  We would deal with any needs that the baby might have had but I could never not hope that those challenges wouldn't be my child's challenges. And when she came out perfect I couldn't help feel like we had tempted fate and again beaten the odds.

Things continued to happen in the usual way.  They took the baby to clean her, weigh and measure, diaper, cloth and wrap her.  The afterbirth was delivered with relative ease and quickness, especially in comparison to the last time.  The doctor ordered more pitocin to help my uterus do the after delivery things and left. The helpers cleaned up their areas and returned the room to it's pre-birth state.

My nurse was very attentive and helpful.  Luckily for me she was very attentive.  After some time, I have no idea how much, she noticed that I was still bleeding a lot and there were a lot of clots.    More time passed and the bleeding continued apace. The nurse became more concerned and called the doctor back. She ordered a second bag of pitocin and a shot in the thigh of something else that would slow the bleeding. I have to admit that I was more perturbed by the idea of a shot in the thigh than I was concerned at this point.  It is well documented that I don't like needles.  Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised that the medication in the epidural was still effective enough that I didn't even feel it!  More time passed and the blood continued to come.  The doctor had been waiting and watching to see if either or these things would be effective. After gauging how much blood I had lost and the continued blood flow she filled me in on her thought process.

Hindsight allows more insight to the events and situation that I wasn't really taking in at that point.  One such insight was how calm and assured the doctor, and even the nurse, were.  I did not become alarmed or even overly worried about my situation till later, despite her catalog of procedural efforts we would take to try and improve my situation.  After seeing how much blood I had lost she explained that it was worrisome that the medicine had not been sufficient to slow things down and perhaps there was tissue from the placenta still in the uterus. She ordered a blood draw to ascertain how much I had lost and to type me in case I needed a transfusion. She told me she would try and clean out the uterus herself and if that didn't produce a change than I would have to have a D&C. I still wasn't too worried.  I remember thinking that it would be fine.  Things wouldn't progress to the D&C point.  Thankfully, oh thankfully, the medicine from the epidural had not worn off when she manually tried to scrape out the uterus.  Several times. And thankfully she was a woman with nice, small woman hands. We waited some more to see if her efforts would change anything.  They did not.

While we waited the lab tech showed up to do the blood draw.  After completing that she put a new band on my wrist and declared me ready for a transfusion should the need arise.  Despite all that had gone before this was the first red flag in my brain that perhaps my situation was more serious than I had thought. The doctor also ordered another shot of something else to the thigh.  It didn't make any difference either.  Eventually we reached the point where the doctor said something to the effect that all their efforts had failed to produce results and she thought we should do a D&C, all the while looking me in the eye in such a way as to make it clear she was really dictating the next course of action not asking my permission.  That look was flag number two in my brain.

In short order I was wheeled down the hall to the OR,  moved onto the table where they do C-sections and strung up like a side of beef.  Having lost all dignity, as usual, during labor and delivery, I was surprised by how much worse this felt loss-of-dignity-wise. The epidural was still in place and used to administer more pain medication so I knew that it probably wouldn't hurt but I was very relieved when they gave me some feel-good-relax-and-sleep stuff through the mask.  While technically conscious, I was really pretty much unaware of the loss of whatever dignity might have been left as they scraped out my insides.

Afterwards, I came back to myself with a bout of nausea.  I was wheeled back to my room still hooked to monitors, feeling sick and not entirely with it. I felt pitiful. The doctor talked to me about the effects of the blood loss I had experienced but it didn't mean a whole lot to me until after I came home from the hospital.

Normally, in this hospital, after the delivery of my baby I would have been moved to a postpartum room.  They elected to have me stay in the L&D room that night so that I would have one on one nursing care till morning. That next morning I was moved to a recovery room and Thea and I stayed there until we were released from the hospital, having experienced way more than I had planned.