Saturday, November 20th, my sweet Reece, my middle baby... will turn 3 years old. I am having a hard time grasping this truth. I remember when I found out I was pregnant with him...I remember the first time I felt him move...I remember finding out he was a boy...and I remember holding him in the hospital for the first time. I also remember the scary medical issues I had AFTER having him. I was diagnosed with "Post partum pre-eclampsia" two days after we came home from the hospital. I remember having a headache that seemed to last for 2 or 3 days and it felt like the top of my head was about to explode. I called the on-call doctor and she told me to go to the ER and tell them I just needed to go straight up to labor and delivery for blood work. I was not excited about this but it sounded easy enough so I decided it would be better to be safe than sorry. I went to the ER and took my 5 day old baby with me...checked in with the desk and told them what the doctor told me over the phone....and got flat out rejected. I was told everyone has to wait their turn and to go sit in the waiting room until I was called. I sat there for over an hour and decided it was just a headache and not worth my 5 day old baby getting RSV so we went home. I called my Dr. when I got home and explained what had happened. I told her it was just a headache and my blood pressure was a little high so I was going to go lie down on my left side and take a nap. I said if I still had a headache and high bp when I woke up I would try to come into the ER again. She was not the least bit happy with my decision but at that point I didn't care.
I took my nap, woke up with a headache and pretty high bp, so I decided to pump some milk and then go to the hospital. While I was pumping something happened. Something very strange came over me. I felt like someone was pouring hot water over my head and I could feel it slowly covering my body, then I got tunnel vision and couldn't see anything in my peripheral vision. My body was tingling and there were no words to describe how I was feeling. I told Mike I felt weird. He said, "OK....weird how?" I absolutely could not think of a different adjective to describe how I was feeling so I said, "Weird like.....you should....call 911" He did just that and as he was talking to the dispatcher I started to feel a little better. As I started to tell Mike never mind I could hear sirens outside. The firemen were at our house and already knocking on the door. It had only been 4 minutes! I couldn't believe it. They were awesome.
The fireman checked my blood pressure and asked me tons of questions until the paramedic got there in the ambulance. Once he was there he took over and not once did he lose eye contact with me. If I looked down or away for any reason he would ask me to look at him. My blood pressure was 188/122 and he told me I was very close to the stroke/seizure threshold. He told me he couldn't make me go to the hospital but he could strongly encourage me to go. By this point I was scared so I went. It was my first time in an ambulance and I hope it was my last. When I got to the hospital I was rushed into the ER, sat for maybe 5 minutes and then rushed to L&D where they immediately put me on Magnesium through my I.V. It was some nasty stuff and made me feel like poo. I ended up staying in the hospital for a week until my blood pressure finally came down enough for them to feel comfortable in releasing me.
However, while I was a patient in there, I was given the wrong medicine in my I.V. The nurse came in and started hooking up something to my I.V. When I asked her what it was she told me it was just an antibiotic... so I asked if I had an infection or something? She said, "Not sure hun, they just told me to come hook it up for you". Mike read the sticker on it and it had my name on it, it was penicillin (which thankfully I wasn't allergic to) and it said, "Administer every 4 hours while in labor" !!! My baby was a week old and I never was in labor since I had a planned C-section. I was thankful to go home and thankful that the outcome was good. Little did I know my brush with death (well...at least a stroke at 28 yrs old) would give me a handsome, sweet little boy who can bring me such joy and such frustration all within a matter of seconds. haha I love my sweet Reecie Piecie and can't wait to watch him blow out his 3 star shaped candles on his Tom & Jerry birthday cake.
If you would like to see some of the most special pictures of Reece's life that I chose from his birth until now click the link below for a slide show. There were so many I just couldn't put them all on here.
Stay tuned for more from the Tom & Jerry party this weekend!
~Judy
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