Bed Resting... A Day in the Life

Well, it's day number 9 that I've been here in the hospital.  It actually doesn't feel like it's been that many days, but also, it feels like a realllly long time ago that I was at home and at work.  I was so not prepared to go to work and NEVER GO BACK HOME last Monday.  It's very weird.  I miss being at home and I really, really miss my cat, Gus.  Every day Mark asks if he can bring me anything and every day I say "The Goose Cat!"  He hasn't smuggled him here yet, although he did offer to stand outside the window (seven floors down) and hold him up for me to see.  Humph.  Goose would flip. out. at that!  But! Gus did FaceTime me the other day, which was so fantastic that I almost got a little teary eyed!  Mark followed him around with his phone while I got to watch him pretty much ignore me, but it was awesome.

So I thought I'd do a little "Day in the Life" of my time here, so I can update others to how thrilling it is being here, and also so I can chronicle this crazy experience.  Here's how my days typically go:

9:00 pm - Go to sleep.  Since all this laying around seems to really wear me out, I usually go to sleep pretty early.  Mark stays some nights (and sleeps on this horrible little couch that I need to get some pics of, it is so tiny) and goes home some nights.  We figure it makes more sense for him to go home and actually sleep well!

11:30 pm - Nurse storms in, holy cow it is bright in the hallways, takes my blood pressure and temperature.  Then it's back to sleep.

5:00 am - Lab tech comes in and turns on the lights (he's nice and usually gives a "prepare your eyes warning") and then takes my blood.  Ouch.  I now have visible needle marks and bruises on my arm, but hey, it's for the babies, right?  Back to sleep again.

7:00ish - Mark either arrives for a little visit before work, or leaves for work, depending on where he stayed the night before.  We were having him stick around until we saw the nurse or doctor for the day, but they tend to come later and later and never have too much to report, so now he just heads out for work and I update him once I know more.

7:30-8:30 - Either the nurse or one of the doctors will come update me with platelet levels, blood pressure, etc.  So far, these have always been a "looks good for now" update, which means yay, no babies today and I get to order breakfast!  The nurse will also hook my up to monitors on my belly each morning, to hear the babies' heartbeats.  The twins always knock this test out of the park!  All the nurses tell us how perfect they are, how they've never seen better twins, how they are just the "cutest little babies ever " (this from looking at a strip of their heart rhythms!).  So clearly the babies are in no way affected by all this drama.  If it was up to them, they would keep cooking for weeks to come!

9:30 - Eat the totally awesome hospital breakfast food (sarcasm font there).  I also watch the Today Show, Live with Kelly and Michael, and Wendy Williams every morning.  Then I run out of good TV.

11:00 - Nothing else to do, guess I'll take a shower!

12:00-4:00 - daytime TV (yawn), lunch from hospital cafeteria (meh), nap, and generally lay around doing nothing.  Being lazy really wears you out!  I also still get nurses popping in every several hours throughout the day to check vitals, blood pressure, etc.

5:30 - Doctor might stop by to chat about how the day went, latest numbers, etc.

6:30ish - Mark comes up after he gets off work, runs by the house to feed all the animals, changes clothes and packs whatever new stuff I want him to bring (you should have heard me describing each piece of make-up I wanted him to bring out of the big make-up drawer!)  Sometimes he brings dinner, sometimes I just order in and he eats something from home.

7:30ish - Nurse shift change, so new nurse comes by and we hook the babies up to the monitors again.  As usual, they always get glowing reports!  We watch nighttime TV on our limited channels (hmm, The Voice or Dancing with the Stars?)

9:00 - Tired.  Mark either heads home or makes his little couch bed.  Lights out, time to get a solid 2.5 hours of sleep before someone's back in the room again....

Take that, multiply it times 9, and you have pretty much experienced my time in the hospital so far.  We've had lots of guests stop by with food and magazines and conversation, which is awesome.  I've also had some days where I feel crappy and tired and just lay around with the curtains closed all day.  But the past few days I've been feeling good and optimistic about making the most of this time, which I know is so important for our little guys.  Every day I lay in this bed is another day they stay inside and out of the NICU, so I'll do anything I can to give them that chance.  Every morning I wake up and look at the date on the little white board in my room and think to myself, October 9...hmm, will this day be their birthday?!

Waaaaaiiiting... Part 3

Catch up with these posts:

Waiting Game... Part 1 and Still Waiting... Part 2

So I'm almost all caught up.  Since deciding to check my platelets every day, the plan has been that if they ever drop below 90, that day will be Baby Day.  This decision came after a day when they were at 90, so if they dropped at all from there, we'd deliver.  The first day after this new plan, they jumped up to 113.  Woo!  No babies!  The next day, they were back at 95.  Still safe, but at this point, it was decided that I would be staying for the long haul, waiting at the hospital until the babies were here.  Yesterday, platelet level was 90.  Oy.  But, as the doctor explained, she did say we'd wait until they went below 90 and they weren't there yet, so we bought ourselves another day.  Whew.  Today they were back up at 95, so we are still safe for now.

In the past few days, we met with a NICU doctor and learned what to expect, depending on how early the babies come.  The bottom line was that we are so lucky to be at the hospital we are at, because they have exceptional NICU care and we do not expect anything but perfect outcomes with the twins.  The length of their stay will just depend on how early they come, so of course every week, every day we can keep them on the inside is a great help to them.  So we are waiting around, praying for high platelets and passing the time with visits from friends and family.  I am so grateful for those who will run by and drop off lunch (hospital food is quickly getting old!), and my sweet mother-in-law even brought her entire manicure/pedicure kit to my room yesterday for some pampering.  My family has come by almost daily, bearing gifts of cookies, candy, magazines and goodies to make this place feel more like home.  We don't know if our stay will be a few more days or a few more weeks before we get to meet the twins, but we are certainly hoping for as long of a stay as possible!  In the meantime, all your prayers and well-wishes are so appreciated and felt!

Still Waiting... Part 2

Catch up on the latest first: Waiting Game... Part 1

So here we are, hanging out in the first of our three rooms that we'll be in during our first night at the hospital.  We moved rooms as others became open, and I'm sad to say the room we finally settled in for good is kind of the most depressing of the three.  It's very.... 80's.  It has a forest green and taupe color scheme, and clunky wooden furniture that seems too large for the small space.  But the nurses here are super nice, so that helps make up for it.

After my first night here, I knew I had until 4:30 that afternoon to keep "collecting" for the protein test, so we figured it'd be a long day before we knew what was up.  That was until at 5:00 a.m., when the nurse told me someone had accidentally thrown out my entire collection thus far, so I was now starting back over for the 24 hour count.  Which meant another night here!  AHH.  I was angry and annoyed.  How did it get thrown out?!  The one thing I was here to do and it somehow got tossed?  But there was nothing to do, other than suck it up and start over.  So another day goes by of hanging out in our 80's glam room, peeing and waiting.  Mark hung out all day, which made it seem *almost* (if you tried really, really hard), like a little vacay.

Finally, we had a full 24 hours of pee, and could find out the results.  Was this pre-eclampsia?!  Basically, no.  My blood pressure was going up and down all day, but never getting high enough to be a real worry.  The protein in my urine was pretty much normal... certainly not high enough to be pre-eclampsia.  So I'm thinking woo hoo!  Let's go home!  But my doctor had other plans.  She thought that even though my levels looked mostly good, they also appeared to be moving up towards actual pre-e.  So she wanted me to stay through the weekend, test again on Sunday, and then decide on Monday what to do.  Again, I got bummed out.  Another 4 days here?!  But what can you do?  I wanted to do what was best for the babies, so we extended our stay and I sent Mark home for some more clothes for me.  Not long after she broke this news, my doctor returned and said they had another concern.  My blood platelets were low, and she was afraid now that if they continued to drop, my blood would be too thin to clot during delivery.  So the plan was now to also check my platelets everyday and if they dropped more, we would have the babies THAT DAY.  Which meant that, as she told us this, baby day could be tomorrow.  This freaked us out.  Tomorrow?!  We'd just have to wait and see what my blood levels looked like the next morning and go from there.  Nerve. Wracking.

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!  

t-minus 2 months

Well, time is flying.  Like whoa.  And I keep trying to come write a post on this ol' blog, but I get maybe a sentence written before I am distracted, off to do something else, or just plain too tired to go on.

Month seven of pregnancy is wearing on me.  I am uncomfortable.  Baby girl is up in my ribs, like all. the. time.  And the two of them move around like aliens inside me, constantly pushing and shoving on my insides.  Sometimes this is really cool and amazing.  Other times I am so over it and just want to lay down without the internal drumming beginning.  My feet are starting to swell up, and some days it is so bad that I feel like Shrek with my ogre feet.  Other days it's just my toes that get swollen, which isn't too bad but still feels very weird!  I am still plagued by heartburn.  It is mostly manageable but some nights I can hardly sleep without sitting straight up (which is, you know, impossible).  And my never-ending cough is pushing the two month mark now.  That's two months of coughing.  Oy.  Plus, due to baby girl or the constant coughing or who knows what, I have a constant pain in my right ribs/side, which is especially painful when I lay down.  So again, sleeping is tough.  I borrowed a Snoogle pillow from a friend.  Despite being a little ridiculous and large, it does help with actually getting comfortable at night.  We took a quick, 24-hour trip to Oklahoma City this weekend to see my family, and you better believe the Snoogle came along!

It's not all bad news over there, though.  We've been seriously talking baby names and we are officially decided on Baby Girl's name, and down to a handful of options for Baby Boy.  So that is fun.  We aren't keeping the names a secret, but we are holding out until we are set on both names.  Hopefully in the next week or so we can share those with friends and family.  And our nursery is coming along too, thanks to Mark's hard work and my delegating of ideas :)

I've got bedding to wash and walls to decorate, but the big items are assembled and in place.  Not pictured from this angle: a dresser and a chest of drawers.  It's crammed tight in the room, but babies don't need that much extra space, right??  Let's hope not.

It's hard to believe our littles will be here in less than two months!  I saw my doctor on Thursday and she told me to expect to see "exponential growth" over the coming weeks.  Which kind of freaks me out.  I am already growing out of most of my pregnancy clothes, so what will I do after exponential more growth!  Eek.  But the good news is that everything is still going great with the pregnancy.  Besides some really minor aches and pains, I am doing well and lucky to not have anything worse than some discomfort and ill-fitting shoes and clothing. It could be so much worse.  I feel like we still have SO MUCH to do to get ready, but at the same time, I'm ready to just dive in and figure out this crazy Parenthood thing when they get here!

Bump.

I started back at work today and dare I say I'm excited for the school year?!  Getting the classroom organized, sorting out all the brand new supplies, decorating the walls and door... it really got my pumped for when the kids show up next week!  I was even a little bit sad to think that I won't be here for the entire school year - leaving for a big chunk in the middle of the year when the babies are born was kind of bumming me out, even though I know I'll feel differently when they actually arrive!

Part of being back at work means that I am actually, oh you know, showering, blow drying my hair, putting on make-up, and coming up with a decent outfit to wear (which is tough when none of your clothes fit!)  I pretty much wore the same pair of yoga pants or gym shorts with tshirts all summer and for real NEVER blow dried my hair or went further than some blush in the make up department.  In fact, one day I was up at school working on some stuff and I saw one of my students from last year.  She looked at me all confused like with her head cocked to the side and said, "Are you wearing make-up??"  I told her no and she said, "You look really different!"  I told her she had never seen the {Summer Me}!

So anywho, since I made myself look presentable today, I figured why not take some pictures to document the bump!  I have not been taking photos of myself at all since getting pregnant, not really out of choice, but more out of lack of reason to get the camera out, since the summer has been so laid back.  Other than some photos on our vacations, I have no photographic evidence of the baby bump.  Until now!

6 months and some change.... or 25 weeks, for those of you familiar with this whole confusing pregnancy-week-talk.  I get confused by it all the time and have to do the math to remember if I'm five months or six months along....  Big sister pups making an appearance!

Travels

Today is my last Monday of summer break.  Oh my.  I have mixed emotions about going back to work.  I am excited to see all my work friends on the regular again, and super pumped to see my kiddos from last year, who I really have missed!  I have even been dreaming about seeing them again, which is kind of odd. I am also anxious to meet this year's new class of kids, but I kind of feel like I won't like them as much as I liked last year's class.  I know I'm going to see all the second graders and be like, "No!  Come back to first grade!  I neeeeeeed youuuuu!"

Now don't get me wrong.  I am also super bummed that summer is over.  Like everything fun and carefree, it flew by.  We have been out of town SO MUCH over the past three weeks.  It was fun to travel and get away from the Texas heat, but I am also kind of bummed that I spent so many of my last lazy days packing, unpacking, packing again, driving, flying, and just generally not at home.  It's always fun to get away, but being back at home is pretty awesome too.  My plan for this last week of break: NOTHING.  Just me, sleeping in, floating at the pool and generally not doing anything.

Here's a quick rewind of where we have been over the past several weeks.  Just looking back through it all wears me out!

At the end of July, we jetted up to Pittsburg for Mark's college roommate's wedding.  It was fun and the weather was awesome, and got to see several of Mark's OSU friends, which is always a good time.  It was the babies' first official wedding and they seemed to enjoy the festivities.  I know I enjoyed the half glass of champagne I allowed myself for the toasts.

After Pittsburg, we came home and repacked our bags for a getaway to Colorado Springs.  We met my sister and brother-in-law up in CO and spent five days in the mountains, where it rained every afternoon and the highs were in the 80's.  It was heavenly.

Here we are at the top of Pike's Peak, 14,000+ feet up in the air.  We drove up the mountain in our little rental car, which was fun and also incredibly freaky.  I felt like we were going to fall of the edge of the road several times!

We took some pit stops on the way up the mountain and walked around.  I was super out of breath and had to take breaks as we climbed up some rocks on one of the stops, but the views up top were worth the panting and chilly temps.

Bros up top.  They dressed opposite that day, can you tell?

Here's my sister and I one evening after we walked around the lake at the Broadmoor, where we stayed.  Holy cow, I cannot recommend this place enough.  It was beautiful and the staff were so friendly and nice.  Behind us is the building we stayed in.

Here's the view we woke up to each morning at the Broadmoor.  I miss those mountains and that crystal blue lake.  Sigh.

We also ate awesome the entire time we were in Colorado Springs, and even hit up one breakfast diner twice while we were there, we loved it so much.  One day we hit up the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, which is a zoo on the mountain.  I don't know why my pictures didn't upload on my computer, but we got the FEED and PET giraffes!!!  It was the neatest thing ever, and I would totally recommend this zoo to everyone who travels to CO Springs.  We'll have to come back in a few (several) years with the kiddos.

Three days after getting back home from Colorado, we hit the road again, this time road-tripping it to Small Town, Kansas for a Mark's cousin's wedding.  The 17 hours in the car, there and back, were brutal on six-month pregnant me, but let it be known there were plenty of bathroom breaks and stops to get out and stretch.  The wedding was charming and sweet, the perfect little farm town shindig.  I haven't uploaded any pictures of the weekend yet, since we just got back last night, but picture sitting on hay bales while the bride and groom said their vows under a huge oak tree, and plenty of country music and cowboy boots at the reception.  I think it's safe to say that was our last big weekend out of town before the babies arrive, which is okay by me!