First we had each other, then we had you, and then we had everything!

Ever since my hospital stay in week 26, my doctor has been keeping an incredibly close watch on my blood pressure. I’ve been going to the doctor twice each week and having an ultrasound done weekly and doing fetal monitoring at each appointment to make sure that Emmy isn’t under any stress (Lord knows Mommy has enough for the both of us!) along with being on bed rest when I’m at home but my blood pressure is still out of control and at my appointment on June 17, the ultrasound revealed compromised cord flow to Emmy which means she isn’t getting the blood and oxygen that she needs. The fetal monitoring showed that she wasn’t as active as she should be either and my urine analysis showed that I had over 18,000 units of protein in my urine compared with just over 1200 three weeks ago. All of that, combined with the fact that I had gained almost 10 pounds in less than a week because of fluid retention, led the doctors to diagnose me with preeclampsia (something we had feared would develop from day one) and since the environment outside of my body was less harsh for Emmy than the one I was currently creating for her, the doctors decided to fly me to Little Rock to UAMS Medical Center. I certainly never expected to experience my first helicopter ride like this!

I delivered Emmy via emergency C-section on June 18, 2009 at 3:20 p.m. She weighed in at a whopping 2 pounds 1 ounce and was 14 and ½ inches long. The C-section was a very strange experience! I couldn’t feel any pain thanks to a spinal block (which I was terrified to death of getting but then felt really stupid when it didn’t hurt!) but it’s kind of scary when the doctors are pulling on your stomach so vigorously that your upper body is rocking back and forth on the table. Of course, I couldn’t see anything thanks to that lovely blue curtain in my way but Tony was giving me a play-by-play from the view he had. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be able to see anything either but he kept cheating and looking over the curtain anyway. It was kind of funny because I had a doctor standing at my head alongside Tony and every time Tony would stand up to see what they were doing to me, the doctor would look over at him with a look on his face that said, “Oh no! Please don’t let that dude faint! I sure wish he would sit back down!”

Emmy was breathing on her own at delivery and scored 8 out of 10 on the tests that they perform on each newborn to evaluate how well they’re doing (better than some full term babies), but the effort that it was taking for her to breathe on her own was making her too tired so they went ahead and put her on a ventilator to help her conserve energy, but by the beginning of the next week, she was breathing on her own again and has been doing just great ever since!

It is so strange how quickly everything happened. I went in for what I thought was a routine doctor’s appointment, thinking I still had 11 more weeks to wait for Emmy to make her appearance in my life and the next day, I have this little baby that I can’t even hold in my arms yet. I’m a Momma now but yet I don’t feel like a Momma because I can’t hold her and change her diaper and feed her. I can’t be a Momma to her yet. I just have to pray to God and ask Him to keep His loving arms wrapped around her until I can hold her in mine. And I know that He will. Lord, thank you so much for our precious baby girl!