Hospital Visits

Well, Jacob and I have had an eventful weekend! And I haven't been able to do even a decent job of keeping anyone updated, so this will have to do. It's a long, boring post, so you really don't have to read it unless you want an update of our weekend hospital visits.

Early Saturday morning, around 2, I woke up with this incredibly awful pain in my right side/right lower back. I tried to shift positions and get up and move around, but nothing helped at all. It just kept getting worse, so I tried to wake up Jacob. Usually, waking him up shouldn't have been that hard, but I had finally convinced him to take half a unisom so that he could get to sleep (he had worked 3 night shifts the previous weekend and hadn't been able to get to sleep before 8 or 9 in the morning since), so he was so groggy and so out of it that I was having the hardest time just trying to get him awake enough to understand what I was telling him.

When I finally got Jacob woken up enough to talk to me, we called my doctor's office and spoke to the doctor on-call, who told us to go to the emergency room. I have never had to go into the emergency room before, and I really didn't want to go, but I have never had such bad pain before in my life... not even close... and we didn't know what else to do. So to the emergency room we went, and they sent us straight up to Labor & Delivery. One of the nurses from ER pushed me in a wheelchair up to L&D, and the whole ride up she was asking me questions about the baby, like when were we due, was it a girl or a boy, did we have a name for her yet... and the whole time, I was so annoyed with her. Because I was convinced that something was horribly wrong and we were going to lose her, and how could she be so insensitive and ask me questions about her like everything was fine?

When we got into the room, the nurse tried to find the baby's heartbeat with one of the machines they had, but she couldn't find it, which didn't do anything to help our fears. She was finally able to find it on a different machine, thank goodness, and she said that it sounded good and normal. Thankfully, the pain ended up not being pregnancy-related. They did some bloodwork and urine tests, and they called my doctor a bunch of times to talk to her, and they finally decided that it was a kidney stone. They were debating between Appendicitis and kidney stones, but most signs seemed to point to kidney stones. So 5 or 6 hours after we got there, they sent us home with a couple prescriptions and the instructions to come back in if the kidney stone didn't pass by Sunday morning.

Exhausted, but relieved that the problem wasn't something worse, we went home and slept the rest of the day. The pain reliever seemed to help for the first couple doses, but by Saturday night, the pain was coming back full-force only an hour or two after I took the pills. Jacob was amazing through all of this--coming in and sitting with me while I screamed and writhed with the pain... bringing me water or my pills or helping me sit up or shift position to see if it would help (it never did). It wasn't a fun time for either of us. Somehow we got through the next day and made it to Sunday night. We planned on waiting until Monday morning to go back in, because we were really hoping that the stone would pass and we wouldn't have to spend more time or money on hospital visits. But around midnight, the pain got so much worse (and I still had over 2 hours to wait before I could take more pain meds) that we abandoned our plan and drove straight back to the hospital.

Getting there went a little more smoothly on this second trip, since we already knew exactly which entrance to go into and everything, and we didn't have the same panic and fear that something was horribly wrong with the pregnancy. But the pain wasn't any better than when we made our first trip, and considering I was on pain medication already, that had me a little worried.

We got into our room, and they hooked me up to the machines again (this time they were able to hear her heartbeat on the first machine). One cool thing that came out of this trip was that I finally felt the baby move and knew that it was her moving. The machine that they had hooked me up to made noises whenever she was shifting and moving around, and every time I heard a noise, I felt her move! So although the whole hospital trip thing sucked, I can finally feel her moving around, which has been really cool... a little happiness out of the misery and pain!

The nurse did more bloodwork and made another call to my doctor, and since my white blood cell count was considerably higher than it had been on our previous visit, they decided they wanted to do a CT Scan to be sure that my appendix was ok. They did an ultrasound first to take a look at the kidneys, but they weren't able to find any kidney stones. They did say there was some calcification (or something?), but they couldn't see any kidney stones yet. So they wanted to make sure that it wasn't a problem with my appendix. So I got an IV put in, and then I got to start drinking this incredibly disgusting liquid every ten minutes for two hours... and I had to keep it down, which was the hardest part. I had been throwing up constantly pretty much all weekend, so trying to drink something that tasted as horrible as this and keep it down for 3 hours seemed nearly impossible. Somehow, though, it worked out. I was able to drink it all and I made it through the CT Scan (barely) without losing it. About 30 seconds after they finished, I sat up and threw up into a bucket beside me. Luckily, I had warned the guy beforehand that it may happen, so he had a bucket all ready for me. Also, because I was pregnant, the radiologist tried to scan a little higher on me than they were going to scan so that they could try to get the appendix without subjecting the baby to all the radiation, and they were able to do it. So the only part of the baby that they even got in the scan was a little bit of her feet.

When we got back to our room, my doctor came in to see how we were doing. I was really happy to see her! I like our doctor a lot, and as nice as the nurses are, every few hours I would get a new one, and I would have to explain everything all over again. It was nice having my doctor there, who already knew us and knew everything that had been going on all weekend. Dr. Savage told us that everything with my appendix looked great (thank heavens!), so she thinks it is definitely a kidney stone. She gave me two different prescriptions for nausea and pain medications (a much stronger pain medication) and told us we could go home! So after another 10 hours at the hospital, we got to go home and sleep. So far, the pain medication has been helping somewhat... I'm about 2 hours into my second dose, and I'm still in a lot of pain, but Dr. Savage said that is to be expected when the kidney stone is moving. Hopefully we can make it through the next few days until the stone or stones work their way out! I'm not good at all with pain, but I'm just so grateful that the baby is fine. I just keep telling myself that I can deal with kidney stones or whatever else is wrong as long as the baby is ok.

I know many of you have been thinking of us and sending prayers our way, so thank you! Things should hopefully start looking up soon.