On Tuesday I started noticing little gushes of fluid. Could it be amniotic fluid?! Who knew? All kinds of weird things happen in a pregnant body. I paid close attention though. On Wednesday Kendall stopped at the hospital and picked up some litmus paper. From what we understood, it was supposed to change color if it was amniotic fluid. It didn’t change color. I still paid attention. We debated whether or not to go in and get checked. To be honest, I just wasn’t at all thrilled about going and spending several hours sitting in a waiting room waiting to be seen when I was feeling just fine.
Thursday morning I was full of energy and got my hair cut
and went grocery shopping. I was still
noticing fluid. When I got home I
thought about it that I hadn’t felt Baby move very much that day. I decided to sit down and hold still and pay
attention. She just wasn’t moving much. She moved a bit, but not nearly as much as
she normally did. Kendall and I kept
checking in by phone. Finally after I
ate some lunch, I went in and met Kendall at the hospital. They were expecting me there and took me to
the delivery room. (Weird!) The nurses strapped me up to the monitors to
see what Baby was doing in there.
After a bit, the nurses started asking me if I was feeling
the tightenings or contractions. Well, I
was to a degree, but I had been feeling them for months! What I was feeling on Thursday was nothing
different from what I had been feeling all along. They saw that Baby’s heart rate was dropping
with each tightening. That is normal to
a degree. Apparently, though, it was
dropping too drastically. They called
the doctor on call to come over from the clinic to see what was going on. He came and consulted with us. While he was in the room, the monitor showed
a drastic drop in Baby’s heart rate- down in the 60s. He happened to see that and realized this was
serious. (I was still rather oblivious
to the seriousness of what was happening.)
Kendall said later that he was so thankful that the doctor was in the
room and saw the drop for himself.
Sometimes it is up to the nurses to try to convince the doctors of the
gravity of what is going on. Sometime around then, the doctor mentioned the possibility of sending me to Winnipeg. I couldn’t believe it. When I went in, I thought they would strap me to monitors, tell me Baby was just fine, and most likely send me back home to wait for another week or so. (She started moving normally once I was sitting on the hospital bed.) I thought maybe my amniotic sac had actually broken and they would need to induce me. But I wasn’t thinking Winnipeg. We don’t have a surgery here in Red Lake. If an emergency comes up, you get “medivac’ed” or flown out to a bigger center. The wait for a plane can take hours. Then you have a 45-minute flight to Winnipeg or Thunder Bay.
I didn’t want to go to Winnipeg. Sure enough, the doctor came back after awhile and said, “You got yourself a trip to Winnipeg.” I didn’t want to go to Winnipeg. Around this time, Kendall and I were in the room by ourselves and I started crying just a bit. But of course I was in this small-town hospital with a nurse I knew well and all of Kendall’s co-workers. So I pulled myself together and held in the tears.
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