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| Brooklyn on right, Bailey on left. |
It all started around Wednesday/Thursday when I noticed my contractions were becoming stronger and more frequent. Drinking water/laying down wasn't helping. By the time Friday rolled around, I was timing them and they were coming about every ten minutes. I wasn't sure if I should bothering calling my doctor. Technically they say wait until they come every five minutes but that's for full time labor. If you are under 36 weeks, if you have more than four contractions an hour they say to call. But I really didn't want to go to the hospital again for no reason, and obviously the doctor already knows I've been having contractions. Anyway, when I talked to the on call doctor, she said go to the hospital. So around 10 pm Friday, that's where we headed.
Another visit to the high risk OB side of Fairview Hospital. They monitor me for a while, contractions are coming every eight to ten minutes. I'm dilated to 3.5 cm, a little more than I had been. They decided to keep me overnight and have the doctor check me in the morning, but more than likely I would be going home they said. Contractions continued throughout the night and morning, getting a little more intense. By the morning, they were coming every six to eight minutes. They kept asking me to rate the pain. I am so bad at this. Did it hurt? Yes. But not like the worst pain in the world. And I always feel like it could get so much worse. So I usually go with "maybe a five." We hung out at the hospital all day waiting for the on call doctor to check me. We are getting pretty bored, thinking about what we should get for dinner (which we decided would be KFC). Contractions continue to get worse. I give some of them "maybe a six or 5.5." At 3 pm the doctor finally comes in to check me. And I'm six cm dilated. This is when she drops the bombshell that the babies are coming today. Darren and I are both so stunned - was not expecting that! The doctor strongly suggested having a c-section since B (or Brooklyn as we like to call her now) was breached and they were still fairly premature at six weeks early. She had to do a quick surgery at a nearby hospital, but she would be back in an hour or so to do my c-section and we'd need to get a spinal By the time she got back, another woman needed an emergency c-section so we were waiting for that. I was starting to feel not great - very dizzy, hot and like I might throw up. Contractions getting much stronger, though not unbearable. I still have not had any pain meds at this point. Doctor finally gets back and I'm already 8 cm. At this point they moved very quickly.
They wheeled me into the operating room which was just chaos. There are so many people present for a c-section anyway, but with twins each baby has their own team so it was super crowded. When they do the spinal, the husband has to leave the room so it was pretty scary without Darren in there. Spinal hurt just a little as they pushed the meds in. Then I moved and laid down on the table and everything started feeling numb. They put up the sheet so I couldn't see anything and Darren came back into the room. The nurse next to me was sort of giving a play by play. When they cut into me, there was no pain obviously but it was a weird feeling. You could feel pressure sort of. And of course I knew in my head they were slicing open my body and pulling out babies. Within just a couple minutes they pulled out baby A (Bailey), followed very shortly by baby B (Brooklyn). I could hear them crying but couldn't see anything. Darren was able to get up and see them taking the babies out and cleaning them up, getting them ready for the incubators. Someone brought one baby over to me to see really fast and then quickly took her away. I got only quick glimpses of our girls as they wheeled them past us in their incubators. It was pretty emotional. You always read in all your baby books about the skin to skin contact you'll have immediately after delivery with your baby for bonding time. Obviously this was not the case here b/c of the premature issue. It took them maybe 25 minutes or so to finish sewing me up.
They then took me into a recovery room. I had been given some pain killers during the spinal so I was a little out of it. Nothing too eventful happened; I just kept asking to see my kids. At 10:30, they asked if I had regained enough feeling in my legs to get into a wheel chair. They were going to take me to the NICU to see my daughters. My legs barely had any feeling in them but I said of course I could feel them enough to get into the wheel chair, ha. I practically fell on the floor but the nurse and Darren got me into the chair. Seeing them for the first time (other than the quick glimpses I had in the operating room) was amazing. They were so small and in incubators with a variety of machines hooked up to the them. They were also wearing CPAP masks to help with breathing so I couldn't really see their little faces. It was emotional and hard to see your tiny daughters in such a state, but also amazing because you are seeing your babies that have been living inside of you for the past 34 weeks.
I wasn't allowed to hold them at this point which was gut wrenching but they said they were thinking a couple weeks or so until they could go home so I tried to focus on that. They wheeled me back upstairs and thus began our NICU stay.
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