Ready or not...

So much for my affirmations and positive thinking. The girls did not get the memo.

At 35 weeks and 5 days, my water broke at about 8:20 AM as I was getting ready to take a shower with my two-year-old. I silently cursed and shook my head...and then told my husband. When we returned to the bathroom to clean up, my two-year-old stepped in the water and froze and hollered out. Andrew called the midwife who told us that we would indeed have to go to the hospital, which was a bit of a disappointment for both of us. We called the hospital, who of course told us to come in. We moved a little slowly. He took extra time to take a shower (I wish I had), and I got a bowl of cereal not knowing when I'd be able to eat again. We muddled into the hospital probably an hour later. In our room the nurses set up the fetal monitoring, and had us fill out all the various forms. It was immediately evident there was a nice nurse and a not-so-nice nurse. Why are they always on one end of the spectrum of the other? Fortunately Nice Nurse was our main nurse. Our doula, Erica, arrived and helped with relaxation - she massaged my poor swollen feet with oils, scented the air with lavender, etc. When the nurse finally got around to checking my progress, I was dilated to a five and 90% effaced. My body likes to move fast (first labor was 4 1/2 hours, start to finish). The on-call doctor was not there, so she was paged and we needed to wait for her before we could find out what position the babies were in (we had an ultrasound the week before but hadn't seen the results). As it turns out, the on-call doctor was the pessimistic doctor, Dr. B, that we had previously changed from, oh well. She arrived, did the ultrasound, and informed us that both babies were breach, which means a c-section, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Everybody immediately whirled into motion. Thankfully our doula asked if we could have a couple of minutes alone. My mom arrived about then and I started crying telling her about the c-section. She was comforting, as is her job, and I eventually calmed down. The whirlwind picked up where it left off and we proceeded forward getting me prepped for c-section and epidural. Dr. B went into the negative aspects of recovering from c-section, no doing this or that, you'll have a hard time for this long, blah blah blah.

As c-sections go, things went smoothly. I would never choose to have an epidural - I don't like not having control of my legs and having everything feel numb. When Andrew came into the room I started crying again. During the delivery, the dr. commented that one baby had the cord wrapped around her body, and the other baby had the cord wrapped around her neck. It's entirely possible that they didn't have room to get into the correct position with their cords wrapped around them.

Joy weighed 6 lbs 3 oz, and Grace weighed 5 lbs 8 oz. There were no major complications, but because their blood sugar level dropped, they were admitted to the Special Care Nursery. Andrew went with the babies while I was stiched up. The babies were put on glucose IVs to regulate their blood sugar. Fortunately, they were able to regulate their body temperatures on their own and did not need to be in the isolettes (when you think of an incubator where you stick your hands through holes to touch the babies - this is an isolette). When I was rolled to the recovery room, they rolled me through the nursery so I could get a better look at the babies. Yeah, that was nice, but so distant from being able to actually hold them. In the recovery room, Andrew would pop in a little, but I was in and out of resting. Nice Nurse went to lunch and Mean Nurse filled in, at which time Andrew went to bring my mom in. Mean Nurse immediately shooed her out - we can't have everyone in her. Just annoying.

Eventually I was taken to my room, but with my whole recovery and not being able to walk and dragging around an IV and catheter, I didn't see that babies again until about 3:00 AM. Fortunately everything was able to come off later that morning around 7 AM. I tried to be faithful about pumping every two hours to get my milk to come in. The minute amount that I would get after 20 minutes of pumping was discouraging, but there was a very nice Lactation Consultant that assured us that every little bit was good for the babies.

Well, I would much rather recover at home, and it was difficult being all the way down the hall from the babies - so we tried to push to see if it would be possible to go home the next day (Tuesday). My doctor seemed to think it was doable. I briefly talked with the babies doctor, and I must not have really communicated (or understood) very well, because the next day when we started asking what it would take to be able to go home with the babies, there was shock and disbelief. On Monday, I made regular visits to the nursery to hold the babies and try nursing them. At one point the social worker came over and talked with me, making sure I had car seats, viewed a video about babies to sleep on their backs, etc. At another point the nurse manager came and introduced herself. I mentioned that we were hoping to get the babies home as soon as possible - she implied that babies that are preemies like ours often stay at least a week in the special care nursery, that they needed to learn to regulate their temperature after being in the isolettes, etc. I was immediately annoyed because she was trying to advise on my babies when she didn't really know my babies, that they had never been in the isolettes, and in fact were doing really well for being early. So, sensing that this was going to be a battle, and that Andrew is a much better communicator (not to mention he didn't have an abundance of maternal hormones raging through him) I called him in on Tuesday to talk to the babies' doctor with me. We were told when he would be there, and went into the nursery, and then waited nearly an hour for him to get done doing rounds before he came and talked to us. He came and was immediately negative, putting forth all the risks of taking our babies home, etc. We went back and forth with him and then he went to look more closely at our babies charts. Another 45 minutes later, he came back with the social worker, the nurse manager, and one of the nurses assigned to one of the twins for a pow-wow. We were eventually able to come up with an aggressive (by their standards) plan that we could both agree on in order to get the twins discharged the next day. And it worked. I like being able to trust in the body to do what it was designed to do. They lowered the amount of sugar water the twins were receiving every three hours and took their glucose levels every three hours to make sure that their levels weren't dropping too dramatically and the babies could regulate their blood sugar on their own. Success, we took the babies home the next day. Side note: also to get discharged (because they were preemies) they needed to monitor the twins while in a car seat for one hour. Thus, we had to bring in the car seats (base and carrier). I think it took Andrew and my mom 30 minutes to get them uninstalled (not to mention another 30+ to get them reinstalled). So much for getting them installed securely ahead of time and saving time.