Waiting Game... Part 1

Well things have take a slight turn with my "nice and easy" pregnancy.  I am now officially waiting it out in the hospital until the babies decide to make their arrival.  As word gets out that I'm here for the long haul, I have been overwhelmed with people reaching out to me through calls, emails, texts, etc.  It is so great to have so many people caring about me and these little guys!  But it is becoming impossible for me to respond to everyone and keep what I've told to who straight.  I joked with my sister, mom and aunt that I needed a secretary to respond to text messages, and she suggested I just blog about it and send it out to those who are asking.  So.... let's give it a shot on this little space!

In a nutshell, here's how I ended up in the hospital.  I'll break my adventure in bed rest into a few posts, to get everything caught up and not in one super long chunk.  To start off, one week ago today (Saturday), several of my friends threw me a wonderful, amazing, perfect baby shower!  Hopefully I will get some pictures from it soon, so I can post them here too.  I was blessed with so many friends and family in attendance, many from out of town, and they really did shower us and the babies with some sweet and wonderful gifts.  That night, my family helped me unpack and sort everything we received and we started to put together the nursery.  Things were coming together and we were more and more ready for the twins to arrive!  The plan was still to have a scheduled c-section delivery on November 16, so the six week countdown was on.

Monday at work, I was feeling kind of off and especially tired, which isn't really all that unusual.  Toward the very end of the day, I started to see a blurry spot in my peripheral vision, and then had some tingling and numbness in my right hand.  These symptoms had both happened once before in the summer, and my doctor had told me to let her know if I experienced them again.  So when I got home, I called the office and talked to the on-call doctor that evening.  She thought I was likely having a migraine, or about to have one, and didn't seem too worried.  So I shrugged it off and figured I would talk to my regular doctor when I saw her an my upcoming appointment later that week.

Tuesday, I was back at work, and the nurse from my doctor's office called and asked if I could move my appointment up to that day, just so they could check me out.  So I left work a little early and went to see my doctor that afternoon.  After I gave her a rundown of what had happened the afternoon before, she said she would like to admit me to the hospital to monitor my blood pressure for a few hours.  To her, while it could be that I was having a migraine the day before, it could also be that I was developing something called pre-eclampsia, which is a dangerous condition for pregnant women and is especially common with multiples pregnancies.  So if my options were a) I was having a migraine (which I've never had in my life) or b) I was developing a condition that I was already a "ticking time bomb for," it made sense to assume the latter.  She said ideally she'd like me to stay for 24 hours to monitor, which I wasn't opposed to, so the grabbed a wheel chair and rolled me over to the antepartum floor for my stay.

I called Mark and at work and told him what was up, and we figured we'd be in for a night away from home.  To determine if I had developed pre-eclampsia, they would check for two things over the next 24 hours: high blood pressure and high levels of protein in my urine.  So for the next day, my job was the drink water and pee, while getting blood pressure checks every 4 hours.  Glamourous!