Following on from Part 1…
At 12 weeks pregnant the NT scan showed extremely low odds for our baby having Down Syndrome which was great news. The figures were presented to us with “Well done, congratulations, this is a really great result.” My husband and I are like-minded, and we left the consulting rooms mildly angry at being told “Well done” for something we had no control over. If we’d had high odds for Down Syndrome, would we have been reprimanded and made to feel guilty? Thankfully we’ll never know. At a later scan we learned that bub was a girl.
The 26-week gestational diabetes test was a sickly-sweet non-event. I continued seeing the obstetrician every 6 weeks. These visits usually consisted of getting weighed, sitting in the waiting room for an hour or so, seeing the doctor for 10 minutes, then paying another ~$300 towards his bill. During the appointment the doctor would answer any questions I had and do a quick scan with an outdated ultrasound machine. I always loved seeing bub’s little heart beating, and the occasional glimpse of a nose, hand or foot. The doctor always mentioned that she was a very active and healthy baby. I felt that I was putting on weight faster than I should, but I was within normal weight gain ranges.
At 33 weeks pregnant my job suddenly got very stressful, and not in the usual way of tight deadlines etc. There were some necessary budget cuts to be made, and two of my four team members had to be let go. I had two contractors on the team so they would be the ones to go. One contractor had just gotten married and was in the middle of purchasing a new home. The other had just been hired the previous month and had a two week old baby. Both of them were doing excellent work. They both understood and handled the situation in their stride, and aside from feeling stressed I didn’t notice any other effects immediately.
A few days later I realised that my nightly swollen ankles were still swollen in the morning, instead of returning to normal overnight. My pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting listed this symptom under “Call your doctor if…” but it didn’t really say why, and I had no other worrying symptoms. It was after work (i.e. outside of doctor’s hours) so I called the maternity ward, and a midwife asked me to come in and get my blood pressure checked.
The hospital was only 10 minutes away so we left our half-prepared meal in the kitchen and my husband took me to the hospital. Apparently my blood pressure was quite high because I was admitted to hospital on the spot and restricted to bed rest. I was referred to a specialist for hypertension, and told not to return to work. I think this sent my blood pressure up higher, thinking that although I’d starting preparing for a handover I hadn’t actually done one yet. I sent my husband home to get my laptop, and some pyjamas and toiletries.
When he returned he said that half our street was blocked off to the public, with police cars and flashing lights everywhere. There’d been a drive-by shooting on our street. (We found out the next day that no-one was harmed.) There’s one every 2-3 days in Sydney but this was way too close to home… Not great for my blood pressure.
I logged in to work for 2 hours, wrote up hand-over notes, notified my manager and team, and tied up some loose ends. With that out of the way I was able to focus on my health and pregnancy, and I started to wonder if I’d be in hospital for the next 6 weeks. It was strange to be in the maternity ward as the only patient without a babe-in-arms, and it was very difficult to sleep at night with all the crying going on. I was sent for another ultrasound (upstairs), and this time I saw the blood flows in bub’s body appearing as blue and red on the screen. Obviously I couldn’t fathom what it all meant, but I was relieved with the report that everything was normal.
After 3 days – and some complaints about lack of sleep – I was discharged from the hospital provided I kept off my feet as much as possible. As I was leaving a midwife decided to check my blood pressure one last time, and checked my blood sugar as well for good measure. My blood glucose level was 10.8, and the acceptable maximum value was only 7.8 apparently. So I was ordered back into bed to await further testing. Another specialist came past and said that I could still be discharged that day, provided I visit the diabetes clinic next door for some education on how to manage my gestational diabetes with a strict diet. It was a relief to come home.
The next few weeks were uneventful. I was relaxing with my feet up watching lots of TV, reading books and doing crossword puzzles. It was frustrating to be home all day while unable to help out much with the housework, but my husband had it all under control. I followed the diabetes diet and pricked my fingertips 6 times a day for blood glucose tests at home. I bought a blood pressure monitor for home as well, and I checked my BP twice daily. Twice weekly I drove to the hospital for monitoring. This involved sitting in a room with around 10 other pregnant women, waiting for my turn on the baby heartbeat and activity monitor, eating hospital sandwiches with toppings that pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat, and waiting to see the doctor and nurse who were rostered on that day.
The medical staff measured my blood pressure and blood sugar, and reviewed the results I’d taken at home along with the readout from the baby monitor. The good news was that I wasn’t going to need insulin, but my blood pressure remained high. One nurse commented that bub’s activity rate was on the lower side of normal, but still within normal range. The results were all forwarded to my obstetrician after each visit. It did occur to me that my once very active baby was becoming less active, but I figured that space was getting tight in there by that stage. She was a big bub!
At 35 weeks my obstetrician said that he’d be inducing labour at 38 weeks. My high blood pressure could be a problem for a full-term delivery, and the risks to bub from being born early would be minimal because she weighed more than average. I had carpal tunnel sydnrome in both wrists, back pain, cramps, etc. and I liked the thought of an early delivery. We made final preparations at home, and arranged to donate the umbilical cord blood to the Sydney Cord Blood Bank.
At 38 weeks I was induced, and for 16 hours of labour bub was monitored constantly on the heartbeat and activity monitor. At that point bub still wasn’t engaged (i.e. ready to come out on her own) and I was taken down to theatre for a caesarean section delivery. Thankfully no-one used the word ’emergency’ at any time, but they did move quickly and efficiently.
My operation went smoothly and I felt that I was in great hands with my own obstetrician. I had a chance to quickly hold bub before she left with my husband, while the doctors continued operating. What I didn’t know as I was laying impatiently in Recovery, is that the midwives had quietly debated whether there was even enough time for me to cuddle bub before they rushed her up to the Special Care Nursery…
Back in the maternity ward the paediatrician on duty started explaining to us that there’d been a foetal-maternal haemorrhage in utero, and that our daughter had low oxygen levels in her blood and needed a blood transfusion. Bear in mind that I was high on morphine at this point and I was asking the same questions multiple times… Through my confusion I was able to understand that there was a problem with our baby girl, that she needed some more blood, and that a blood transfusion would solve the problem and she’d be healthy. She also had low blood sugar, which they would fix with some glucose. She was a 4kg baby, and she made the premature babies in Special Care look positively tiny.
It took less than 100ml of donated blood to save our daughter’s life. Over the next 3 days she fully recovered. Apparently it can take babies up to a week to recover from a transfusion, so perhaps her size helped her to recover faster. We sat by her bed watching the oxygen percentage on her monitor and willed the number to climb from 85%-88% to up above 97%. We learned that somehow the barrier in the placenta wasn’t working properly, and she’d been losing blood into my body. A blood test confirmed that my blood contained foetal blood cells, which should never happen. The cord blood bank representative checked in on us, because her team had also noticed the low level of oxygen in our baby’s blood.
As for me, my diabetes disappeared almost immediately after giving birth and my blood pressure was back to normal within the week.
During my next pregnancy the diabetes returned and this time I needed insulin. At the Diabetes Clinic the topic of my daughter’s birth came up, and the nurse recognised my daughter’s case immediately. She used to be in charge of the Special Care Nursery. She remembered where she was that night when her staff called to explain the situation. Our local hospital normally wouldn’t perform blood transfusions, they’d transfer the babies to the Sydney Children’s Hospital which is less than 30 minutes away. But our daughter’s case was so urgent that there wasn’t enough time for an emergency transfer. I was finding this out 2 years after the event, and the news still gave me chills. I didn’t realise how close we’d come to losing our baby.
My daughter is 4 years old now. She’s in perfect health, tall for her age, caring and clever. She’s also a wonderful big sister to her little brother.
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