Hospital Vacation

So I’m finally getting around to posting about last week. Glenn and I went in for my normal OB appointment Tuesday morning. Everything was going well and Glenn and I even joked, while the doctor left the office to get the ultrasound laptop, that we might be out in less than an hour! Yes! “Isn’t it great that everything is going smoothly again?!” chirped Glenn. He gets credit for the giant slip up in over-confidence. :)

Cue doctor and ultrasound. “Everyone is looking good…huh that doesn't look right.” It looked as though my cervix was funneling. She sent us over to do another ultrasound on a better machine and confirmed my cervix failure. There was only 1 cm still closed and the rest was open. This is only supposed to happen right before dilating and labor so it was definitely bad news and far too early for this to happen. (It was scary then but a little funny now: in the ultrasound we saw baby A sticking her little arm down into my open cervix like she was discovering the way out.) The Sonographer tried to console us by saying it could be worse and that they could still stop it. Off we went scared and upset to the hospital and so began our 4 day luxury vacation at the hospital.  

As it normally seems to go with these things, you never really have a full picture of the plan of attack. You get little snip-its and the little snip-its keep changing. Our first impression was that we would only be there a a few hours to get the cerclage. Then we found out it would probably be late in the afternoon/evening since I ate breakfast that morning. Which is when we learned that this procedure was a little more serious than we had previously assumed. It required an epidural and involved some risks to baby A but the risks of not getting the procedure were far worse.

Next was the problem with me being on a blood thinner. They didn't want to go into the OR until it was out of my system for 24 hours. We would stay overnight, have the cerclage first thing in the morning and be out by lunchtime. It was a relief to be moved upstairs to our room though. The bed was soooo much better than the terrible thing I was laying on in Triage. Glenn camped out on the tiny pull out chair bed thing and we tried to come to grips that we were in the hospital.

The procedure was pretty scary I’ll have to admit. It took the anesthesiologists forever to get the epidural in. After numerous try's they finally got it in and apparently it took more than one person. Not sure what makes my back so much more difficult. After that, I think I may have been a little on the freaked out side of things. They kept asking me things and I had to try hard not to turn into a blubbering fool. It didn’t help that my hind side was up in the air for about 12 people to stare at. (The anesthesiologist assured me no one was staring..haha) After getting prepped and draped, prodded and poked they realized I was feeling far more than I should and I would never make it though the actual cerclage. Another epidural, rinse and repeat. That time I couldn’t feel or move anything from the hips down.

Afterwards things seemed to be going fine though the main doctor wanted me to stay the night for observation just in case. We were bummed but glad we did. The next couple of days involved pretty steady bleeding and some contractions that kept us in the hospital until Friday. The amazing thing about all of it was that at every check and ultrasound of the babies they were doing fine – heart rates were good and moving around like normal. It just seemed to be their mama that was having all the trouble. :) Apparently carrying triplets is hard work.

We are officially not planning any more vacations (Even if I wasn’t on bedrest!!). At the OB visit, mentioned above, we were planning to confirm with doc that it would be ok for us to fly down to Ft. Lauderdale. We had tickets we needed to use from our canceled cruise. We were going to stay in a nice hotel on the beach and relax. But alas no, we spent our vacation time in the hospital. :)