A Pregnancy Journey!

This post was inspired by Peggy over at A Mothers Secret, who has bee requesting posts on pregnancy lows.

To say I was shocked when I discovered I was pregnant would be an understatement, I have endometriosis and PCOS, so the chances of a pregnancy were affected by this anyway, and as I have posted before I was not one of those women who had every really wanted a baby, I liked my life the way it was.

But after feeling kind of off for a couple of weeks I jut somehow knew I was pregnant and decided to take the test, I can remember that little blue line appearing on the stick and I just burst into tears, my hubby was laughing and I just told him, "its not funny, I don't want to be pregnant", to which his reply of "it's a bit late for that" did not really go down to well.

I was only about 6 weeks gone when I found out and it took me a few weeks to get used to it, but for me although I was shocked to be pregnant there was never any question about whether we would have the baby.

In actual fact most of my pregnancy progressed pretty straight forwardly, there were the usual tiredness and aching associated with pregnancy, the emotions all over the place but things did not really start to go wrong until I was 30 weeks pregnant. It was at this stage that we had some very bad news in our family, the man I had called grandad for nearly all of my life was diagnosed with lung cancer and was given only a couple of months to live, I was devastated by this and started to feel very stressed as we were living in the midlands at the time, which was around 400 miles from my family, I was trying to travel back and forward a few times to spend some time with Grandad Phil, but the travelling and stress where really starting to take a bit of a toll on my health .

Unfortunately when I was 35 weeks I got the dreaded telephone call to say that grandad had passed away and I was just beside myself with grief, I knew this was not good for the baby but I could just do nothing to stop the gut wrenching hurt I felt.

We travelled to Scotland for the funeral which was on the Wednesday of my 36Th week and planned to stay for a few days with family. I felt quite unwell during and after the service but put it down to the sadness of the occasion, but when on the Friday this unwellness had still not gotten any better my hubby decided to call our old doctor at the local practice and ask if he would take a look at me. Our old doctor was lovely and when we went in he did all the usual checks and was a little concerned about my elevated blood pressure, so told us to go down to the maternity unit at the local hospital and get checked over by them.

Thankfully we didn't have very long to wait to be seen once we arrived at the maternity hospital, we were put in a little cubicle, attached to a monitor and had to give a urine sample. About 20 minutes later the nurse came back and told us a doctor would be with us shortly, that was all the information we were given, I was starting to get worried by this time, I had been convinced it was a lot of fuss about nothing but now I was starting to really think something was wrong.

A very young doctor came to see us about 25 minutes later and explained to me that I was showing all the signs of pre-eclampsia and they were going to keep me in over the weekend for monitoring, to say I was not thrilled was an understatement, but OK it was a couple of days I could live with that, ha little did I know.

Hubby dutifully went off and got enough stuff to last me the weekend, very considerately of him he also brought me a new ipod and a psp to occupy my time as I was in a ward all by myself, lucky for me he did.

On the Sunday I was pretty sure I was going to be going home, I mean I had been taking the tablets and resting, like they wanted me to do, unfortunately for me when the doctor did his rounds, he informed me that nope I was not going anywhere, they were going to keep me in for monitoring and bed rest with a view to inducing me at 38 weeks if things did not get any better or if they did not have to perform the induction before. I was distraught, hubby had to go back to the midlands for work and all our plans for the birth went out the window.

I did know that all of this was in mine and my baby's' best interest, but my emotions were all over the place.

I was in the hospital for two weeks and labour was induced on the Sunday afternoon of the world cup final, I started contracting at 3.oo in the afternoon and hubby stayed with me till they chucked him out at 11pm, told him to go home and be back at 7am was they would break my waters manually if it had not happened by then. I spend a really uncomfortable night on the ward and was taken to the labour unit the next morning at 7am, I was allowed no tea, no breakfast just in case they needed to do a c-section...my ever considerate hubby arrived with a picnic lovingly prepared for him by my mum!!!

Things went OK to begin with, although the midwife was horrible, thankfully she went of shift after around 5 hours. They then came to manually break my waters which I must say was one of the most awful experiences of my life, the doctor a woman was horrible and in fact was arguing with another doctor(male) in front of us as the male doctor wanted to perform a c-section, as according to him it would stop both myself and the baby getting more stressed, the only thing that was stressing me at this point were the doctors arguing and worrying about smurf. The female doctor, was adamant that she would break my waters manually and we would have a vaginal delivery, she did break my waters and it was extremely uncomfortable, they then informed us that they needed to monitor smurf internally and to do this it involved them putting a tiny scratch on his head to monitor his blood gases, guess what this made me even more stressed, in my labour induced state I was very upset that they were cutting my baby before he had even been born(an over reaction I know).

I was advised to try gas and air, this made me throw up, then pethidine, this made me feel very very out of it, and I didn't like it at all, after 36 hours smurf was getting very stressed, I was getting very tired, and they then decided that the best thing to do was to give me an epidural and try to get smurf out with forceps within 30 minutes or to perform the c-section, this all seemed to happen very quickly and smurf was born about 40 minutes later using forceps. I was very badly torn and smurf was quite bruised, but he was safe and well and that was the most important thing. I had to have a blood transfusion as I hemorrhaged quite badly after smurf was born and we were kept in hospital for 3 days to monitor us both.

I can honestly say I was glad to get out of there.

We have since suffered a miscarriage and a very late ectopic pregnancy and have not been lucky enough to have another baby, but even though I thought the labour and delivery were awful, I would go through it all again tomorrow if I could have another smurf at the end of it.

I have never actually written down what happened before so I apologise if this post is a bit rambling, and if you are still reading thanks you.

Above is a picture of Smurf shortly after he was born, mainly because all of the ones from just after he was born are not on my laptop.