A really bad day

Let me preface this post by saying that I am extremely happy and grateful that we have a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and she is much loved by her parents. :) She is totally worth it.

I started feeling a little strange after we came home from the hospital, but I wasn't sure if any of the things that were bothering me were causes for concern or just normal postpartum issues. (It's sad that I have four children and I still wasn't sure.) I was suspicious of my blood pressure, since it had been elevated the last couple of weeks of my pregnancy, but I was reassured at my last OB visit (and at the hospital) that everything was fine. On Monday night (the 16th), I finally broke down and took a blood pressure reading. The first set of numbers I got was 160/105. My pulse was in the 40's. Oh. My. God. I tried so hard not to freak out, but all I got was a bunch of shaky, weepy tears.

It was late in the evening and my OB wasn't in the office, so I ended up on the phone with the on-call nurse at the hospital where I delivered. She felt pretty strongly that I should come in and be monitored. In fact, she was so worried that she called back two more times over the next couple of hours to check on me and see if I was coming in.

During the series of phone calls and hysterical break-downs (on my part), Nathan and I were trying to get the kids fed, changed, and put to bed for the night. I was sitting on the couch, simultaneously reading bedtime stories and fielding phone calls from the nurse, when Nathan comes storming through the house at top speed. Apparently, he had discovered that our entire backyard was full of water (and it hadn't rained in months). Yep. The main water line to our house had ruptured, and we had a massive flood going on. My poor husband marches back outside, armed with a plastic cup and rubber boots, to turn off the water and start digging. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out what to do about whether or not I should go to the hospital.

We decided to go. I was afraid to go to sleep! My pulse was so low, I seriously thought my heart was going to stop beating, and it scared me more than I've ever been in my life. My parents came over to get the kids, and we headed into Austin. They put us in Labor & Delivery, since I had just given birth less than a week before, and I was so grateful. We obviously had to take Anna with us, and I didn't want to sit in a disgusting emergency room and expose her to God-only-knows-what for several hours when she wasn't even a week old.

To make an extremely long story incredibly short: we were there for almost 24 hours before they allowed us to go home, and we met with my OB, two internists, a perinatologist, and a cardiologist before we could leave. I had at least 40 BP readings, a urinalysis, two series of blood tests, a CT scan of my head, an EKG, and an echocardiogram done. My blood pressure remained elevated the entire time I was there, so the decision was finally made to give me some medication to try to bring it down. It worked, and I immediately felt better (and my pulse came back up to normal).

Final determination? Well, the cardiologist really feels that this is pregnancy-induced hypertension, which is still hanging on due to all the extra fluid and blood volume in my body post-delivery. All the tests came back completely clear and normal, and I don't have a history of high blood pressure, so it doesn't seem that this is something I'll have for the rest of my life. I am taking a small daily dose of BP medication, which is keeping me in the normal ranges, and I am feeling much, much better.

You know how they say things happen in threes? Well, we already had two. The third wasn't far behind. Tuesday afternoon, while I'm sitting helpless in a hospital bed, we got a phone call from Nathan's parents about Nicholas. He was acting strangely, having small, incoherent fits, and he'd had a gushing nosebleed. I freaked out completely when I heard that, because the day before, he'd told us that he hit his head. I was thinking the worst, of course. My in-laws were going to bring him up to see the doctor a few hours later, and I couldn't even go and see him. I was seriously upset. That did wonders for my blood pressure, let me tell you.

A few hours later, we found out that Nicky was okay. There were just so many things that happened all at once, it seemed like something horrible was going on. It was just a series of strange coincidences. Anyway, he is completely fine, so no worries here.

Also, Nathan fixed the water line, and we had water the very next day.

My follow-up visit with the cardiologist this week went really well. He wants to see me back in two months, at which point they will do another echocardiogram, and we'll talk about how to wean from the medication. I can't wait! I'm hoping that it will be an easy transition, and I'll never have to worry with this again. The only small concern that I have is that this will be something that crops up later, if we have more children. The doctors did tell me that, as a result of this, I may be more prone to having BP issues during pregnancy. I now know what to watch for, so maybe it won't be such a dramatic issue. I also know that there's nothing wrong with my heart or my brain, so it's something that can be fixed with a little medication.

We've had some stressful times around here since Miss Anna was born, but I think it's all better now. She is worth it, as I said before, and I wouldn't trade her for anything!