First Hospital Visit

This weekend was a learning experience. Let me explain...

Saturday I woke up feeling great and energized which is highly unusual given the uncomfortable third trimester state of whininess I've been cloaked in lately. I jumped on this opportunity to get some things done. I hastily wrote thank-you cards, finished decorating my new "kid-friendly" bathroom, helped Dusty with laundry, and the biggie.... cleaned the bedroom. Cleaning the bedroom was a momentous task because it involved not only cleaning, but going through baskets of stuff from before our move a year ago and organizing things! Dusty helped me rearrange furniture so as to fit Abigail's pack-n-play in. After all this hard work, Dusty and I straightened up the rest of the house since Dusty had company Saturday night. Then I rushed off to a girl's night pajama party (only after hitting our good friend's BMW while backing out of the driveway..eek!)

Phew... what a day. It was hectic but I felt good about accomplishing so much.

Sunday morning however was a different story. Now I did not feel so good, in fact I felt HORRIBLE. I was sore from head to toe, barely able to get out of bed. I was also swollen from head to toe, especially in my hands which felt like arthritic 90 year old hands. I had a headache and my face was puffy too. I made it to church but could hardly stay upright in my chair through my favorite bible class. I told Dusty that I would need to leave after the Lord's Supper, which we did.

The more I looked at my puffy balloon hands the more nervous I started to get. I asked Dusty to take me by a pharmacy so I could check my blood pressure. I felt like doing so would give me peace of mind and help me relax and sleep. However I was shocked to see my BP at 149/97... yikes!

I called my Dr.'s office and the on-call midwife called me back. She told me not to worry that those BP machines at pharmacies are notorious for being high... nevertheless she advised me to go to the hospital for an accurate reading.

I felt better knowing the reading was probably wrong and Dusty and I headed to the hospital for what I thought would be a quick BP reading. I could tell right away that I was wrong when the nurse told me to change into the lovely hospital gown, put me in bed, strapped me up to three different machines, and began questioning me on a million things. She sent Dusty down to the registration office to fill out paperwork... then told me I would have to stay there for two hours and left.

I was all alone and scared and tired and just wanted Dusty to be there... I started to wish that I had never gone to that silly pharmacy.. now I was stuck here.

Finally Dusty came back... he told me to try to rest, but I couldn't. I was so uncomfortable, they only gave me one pillow. Don't they know I need at least 6 right now? When the nurse came back she checked all my readings, she said everything was fine. She told me I did the right thing to come on in because I could have worried myself to pieces overnight which would've made things worse for me and Abigail... but still I felt angry over wasting my afternoon there.

We had to miss afternoon church services and I went home and just collapsed. Moral of the story? Well... I worked much too hard on Saturday which caused me to swell up and probably did elevate my BP. It's so hard to know your limits when you are pregnant. Especially because I feel like a lump on a log most of the time, and want to get things ready at home to bring my baby here.

So this weekend was a good lesson for us. From here on out, it's no big manual labor for me around the house. It was also a good trial run I guess for us to experience what it was like to be at the hospital. Hopefully we will be much more prepared next time. (As in bring more pillows!)

So that's the story... Abigail's first visit to the hospital.