pregnancy drama

Yesterday was a pretty stressful day for me. In the morning, The Landlord came with a sheet-rocker person to finally get our bathroom and kitchen fixed. (That's a whole different story.) But when The Landlord comes for a visit, it's always a bit, er, "interesting". Wasn't the best beginnings of days. They left around 2 or 3pm and I finally felt I could leave my bedroom to take a shower.

Brett and I had some errands to run, and last night was also the first night of our childbirthing class so we left the house around 5 or 5:30, right during rush hour (which I always forget about because on a regular day, we usually drive opposite of traffic). It had been snowing all day, but we have our Subaru, and weren't too concerned. However, as we started going down the hill on A street, our tires were like skis and we slid the entire length of the block from 1st Ave to South Temple. There were 5 or 6 cars waiting at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill that Brett was able to dodge, as well as dodging the trees on the left side of the road, but once we slid out onto South Temple, we hit a car that was stopped in traffic going west. All of this really happened in slow motion, and not the kind of slow motion that Brett talks about when he got hit by the bus (you know, where time seems to stop for you and your life flashes before your eyes). It happened in real time slow motion, because we were only going about 5 miles per hour, maybe 10 by the time we hit the guy at the bottom of the hill. No one was hurt; the jolt was less severe than landing in the airplane home from Chicago last week. Our car has no damage to it at all, and the other guy's car has a scrape and small dent on his rear bumper.

(Sidenote: A few months ago, I slipped at the top of my stairs and fell, sliding down on my bottom about halfway. I was startled, but not concerned, and after sitting for a while and making sure I could still feel Ethan moving, I did not go to the doctor. My doctor was not pleased with me at my next visit. She said if I fall like that again, I need to go directly to Labor and Delivery up at the hospital. That was news to me. I'd heard people always are worried about falling when they're pregnant, but I never knew why. It's good the doctor explained it to me.)

So, back to yesterday. I didn't go in to the hospital after the car accident. I don't know why, (it probably has a lot to do with my mother's attitude toward doctors as well as my own experiences with doctors and Brett), but it is counter-intuitive to me to go into the doctor. I wait until I've been sick for 3 or 4 weeks before I go in. I don't trust doctors. So I didn't feel like I needed to go in.

So far during the day yesterday, I hadn't eaten anything. I go through phases of not eating sometimes, which is very stupid of me, especially since I'm pregnant. Yesterday's not eating was in part because the sheetrock guy was in my kitchen the entire day, as well as the fact that we don't really have any food in the house. So now that I had a combination of no food in my system plus adrenaline from the accident, I was shaking pretty bad.

We headed on out to the childbirthing class, which was (for some stupid reason) not at the University Hospital, which is running the class, but clear out at some random clinic on State St and 7500 S. Because of the bad snow and the rush hour traffic, it took us 2 hours to get to the class, making us about an hour late for a 2 hour class. We got some food at the Wendy's on 21st S and State, but it took us probably 30 or 45 min to get to that point, so I was very hungry. I was also so anxious about driving and the car wreck and being late that I couldn't relax the whole way to the clinic. Don't get me wrong: I was doing my yoga breathing, and my meditation practice, and I was doing my best to stay clam. I kept thinking that the class would be canceled because of the snow, or that I had the wrong address, and that we would have gotten in a wreck and driven clear out to wherever for no reason at all.

When we arrived at the clinic, all the doors were locked. Oh, that made me furious! We found another couple attending the class stuck outside as well, and we waited by the main door (knocking and knocking) until someone from another class was leaving and opened the door for us. I liked the class a lot, and the teacher was really great. I'm glad we drove out there, but I had the hardest time relaxing the rest of the night after that stressful drive.

It didn't take us long to get home, and we decided to go grocery shopping before we got home, so that I wouldn't go through another day with no eating again. We got home from the Smiths and Brett shoveled the walks while I broke down the boxes from my 2 new chairs (an office chair and a glider, yay!). After I finished with the boxes, and as I was standing on the sidewalk watching Brett finish the walks, my heart started doing the weird thing that it does from time to time.

(Another sidenote: For about the past 10 years, my heart has had a weird little quirk where I am going along fine and from one heartbeat to the next, my heart rate triples in speed. Normally, I just need to lay down flat (sitting doesn't do it, I have to be totally flat) and within 2 seconds again, from one heartbeat to the next, it stops and my heart starts going normally. I've been to doctors (oh, those knowledgeable, trustworthy people) and no one has ever been able to tell me anything about it. I even wore a heart monitor for a month or two one time during my sophmore year at the U, and they still didn't know what was wrong.)

So when my heart started doing it's thing yesterday, I told Brett what was happening and went inside to lay down. (I learned pretty early on in our marriage that I need to tell him that it's happening, because one time I was at the top of the stairs and it started, so I laid down on the floor right as he was coming up the stairs and all he could see was my feet hanging over the edge. He got pretty freaked out by that.) I laid down on my back and it didn't go away, so I tried on my side, and then on my other side, and then I tried child's pose, and then I tried several other yoga positions, and I tried sitting, etc etc. It didn't stop. After about 10 minutes of my heart beating super fast, I was starting to feel pretty crappy and so I went upstairs to lay on the bed. Climbing the stairs was a bad idea, by the way. I was starting to get worried, because I didn't want anything to affect Ethan, and so we found the number to Labor and Delivery and called to see what they thought we should do. The lady was very rude and suggested that if I was worried I should just come in.

So, I went to the hospital for the very first time in my life at about 10:30pm last night. I had Brett drop me at the ER. First because I didn't know where Labor and Delivery was, and second because I wasn't walking too well. It had now been about 15 or 20 minutes since my heart rate had jumped up and I was feeling very dizzy and my legs were tingling in a strange way. I walked up to the desk while Brett was parking and told them I was 28 weeks pregnant and my heart was doing something funny. The lady looked at me (skeptically) and put a heart monitor on my finger. The heart monitor started to alarm and her eyebrows went up. She yelled back to some other lady that my heart rate was 253 beats per minute and can she let me back right now? I didn't even have to fill out any paperwork first! hee hee. They took me back to a room saying stuff like "where'd she come from?" "she just walked in!" and I was finally able to sit down again. About 15 people came rushing into the room and stuck me all over with EKG stuff and blood pressure stuff. They all kept saying, "yep, your heart's just humming along" "still just pumping along", as they were trying to figure out what type of medicine they can give me while I'm pregnant. A pharmacist was there too and they found a drug that would be okay for the baby. Brett said he was watching the heart monitor the whole time and I was staying right around 200 beats per minute. When I would go above 210 bpm, then the alarms would go off again. The nurse went to put an IV in my arm and the doctor said "little poke". The nurse said, "he's lying; it's going to be a big poke." Brett said my heart rate went up when he said that, he poked me and a few seconds later my heart rate went down to 80 bpm. All the alarms went off and everyone stood around looking at each other for a second. They didn't give me any medicine even, just the scariness of the needle was enough to jump start me, I guess.

(They did tell us to come back to the hospital if it happens again and not to just stab my arm with a big needle at home. Yeah right. The only reason I went to the hospital in the first place was because of the baby. If it was just me, I wouldn't have gone in. Brett says he would have made me go in, though.)

Total, I think my heart was beating super fast for about 30 or 40 min. It felt pretty crappy, but once it went away I felt fine. They kept me there about 2 hours to monitor me and make sure it didn't happen again. But all during the 2 hours, my heart rate and blood pressure was just perfect. They said that Labor and Delivery wanted to monitor me and the baby for a little while before they would discharge me, so we headed up to that department after they let us leave the ER. This picture was taken in the ER, just before we left for Labor and Delivery (via wheelchair, which felt very unstable and like it was going to fold in on me any second.)
I got an early tour of the place where I'm going to deliver Ethan in 12 weeks. It seems pretty nice. All I can say is that I hope they don't have all the same monitors on me when I'm going through labor, because it was incredibly annoying. I don't know how I'm going to be able to relax and breathe and whatnot when I can't even move without bumping some needle in my arm or moving the heart monitor. -humph-

When we got to Labor and Delivery, they stuck another IV in me, put another blood pressure wrap on my arm, put 2 slimy monitors on my tummy to listen to the baby, stuck another heart monitor on my finger, and drew my blood (taping the cotton ball down with the strongest, most itchy tape in the universe). Whenever I would move in the bed, the baby monitor stopped working, so I felt like I had to stay in one place the whole time. We were at Labor and Delivery for another 5 hours, while they made sure nothing had happened to Ethan or to anything inside me because of the accident. By the time we got to leave, I was extremely irritable and ready to rip all the stupid monitors off myself. Although I don't think I could have pulled out the IV. That's too scary.

Everything is fine now, though, and we got to see 2 more ultrasounds of Ethan. It was funny to me that the ER people didn't care about the car accident because of the heart thing, and the Labor and Delivery people didn't care about the heart thing because of the accident.

My new year's resolution is to do more yoga and stay more calm. It probably would have helped. Maybe I should add 'eat' to the list as well. Needless to say, I ate breakfast today.