Life After Death

I don’t remember much about the day my daughter was born other than what I’ve already written.

Here’s what I’ve been told: I needed two bags of blood after hemorrhaging; I knew who I was but not where, so I had a CAT scan at three in the morning to check for signs of a stroke; and at some point during all of this, possibly because of the magnesium sulphate IV drip, my heart rate dropped to seven beats per minute.

Seven beats per minute.

One of my nurses was five months pregnant, and big enough for me to notice nothing except for the baby belly. The belly set me off when I wasn’t best friends with reality.

I had a nightmare that kept my blood pressure high for days. In my nightmare, the pregnant nurse handed me a pair of scissors and told me to cut my baby. She said that every baby who was born by c-section was only allowed to survive because another baby had been scarred or killed.

If I didn’t cut my baby another baby would die. It was the circle of life. A baby before mine had died to pave the way for us. It was our turn.

It was terrifying because I honestly believed that the nurse wanted me to cut my baby’s stomach open with scissors. The nurse who was in charge of my life in the ICU.

Tim stayed with me to keep me calm and rational. He sat in an uncomfortable armchair beside my bed until I fell asleep at night, and then he slept in the Quiet Room a few feet away. He was also there for our daughter, who was stuck in NICU while I was getting better.

He rubbed my head and told me jokes. He listened to my paranoid ramblings, took my fear seriously and helped me see what was real and what was not. He picked me up out of bed, put me in a wheelchair and brought me over to our baby whenever the nurses said my blood pressure was stable enough.

His love was the only thing that dispersed my fear long enough to lower my blood pressure. His effect on me was more powerful than the labetalol they were feeding me through IV.

How did I get to be so lucky?

When I was finally moved to the maternity ward after days in the ICU, my roommate was also moved from ICU. She had preeclampsia much earlier in her pregnancy than I did, and her baby was born way before term.

She was fine, but her baby would have to stay in NICU for weeks. Her story made me want to curl up beside her in her hospital bed and brush her bangs out of her eyes. She actually lived an hour north of the hospital, and she could only stay in her room for five days. After that, she had to find a hotel, or pay per day to use the hospital’s family house.

Her little preemie was fighting for his life, trying to use his underdeveloped lungs in the incubator next to our plump little baby. Our baby was perfect; she was whole.

My roommate had to listen to our baby cry and coo when we were able to bring her into our room. She had to listen to the lactation consultant give me breastfeeding tips. She was an uninvited guest to our joyous celebration while her little baby struggled down the hall. It must have been heartbreaking.

As for me, the luckiest girl in the world, I was the live, proud new mom to a perfect baby girl. And I woke up in the hospital basically the same girl I was before I was sick. I can’t tell you if it was the drugs, the detox effect of ICU, or some kind of near-death phenomenon that righted me.

I could have basically been right after the heart meds, but didn’t give myself enough time to fully adjust before getting pregnant. Or something else was happening.

Whatever it is, here I am, the luckiest girl in the world. My husband loves me unconditionally. My baby and I are alive. I am myself again.

Life after that experience has been amazing so far.

You're Special: ICU

This is the third part in a series. You can read the first part here, and the second here.

They wheeled me right to the ICU from the recovery room after our baby was born.

My experience in ICU is actually the beginning of a very traumatic time. I’ll get to that soon, but first I want to write about seeing a specialist while you’re in a hospital bed.

When you’re conscious and alert, it’s reasonable to shoot for goals like reading cues and writing lists. When you’re wheeled into a room on a stretcher, it’s not.

There isn’t much you can do to control the situation when you don’t know where you are. My situation, being in the ICU, was extreme. Sometimes people don’t ‘know where they are’ even when they literally know where they are.

If you’re so tired/confused/fucked up that you can’t contribute in any meaningful way to your exchanges with your specialists, I have one piece of advice:

Trust them.

For the most part, doctors are competent, caring people. They know the ramifications of their mistakes. They stuck it out in torturous med school because they want help people. They would rather shove their egos into a donkey’s ass, strap that donkey on a rocket and launch it into space on a crash course with the sun, than kill you.

They work long hours trying to figure out what is wrong. They give up time with their families to keep us alive.

Most people are good people; this includes specialists. Unless something in your gut says NO!, trust is a good thing. And good or bad, trust may be your only play when you aren’t conscious.

Just because I had a really bad experience with one of the seven specialists I saw doesn’t mean it’s something everyone should be on the lookout for. It won’t necessarily happen to you.

I learned a lot about the relationship between relaxation and getting healthy in the ICU. Trust starts with letting go, relaxing your fears and erasing those negative mind-tapes. Sometimes it’s easier when you don’t have any other choice.

Of course, I always had an advocate by my side. I was the luckiest girl in the world.

Labour

When I was in labour, they monitored me and the baby very carefully. My blood pressure was high enough to induce seizures and strokes. A stroke might have killed me.

Nobody explained exactly how my baby could have died, and I refuse to look it up, but it was a very real concern.

I was admitted and induced about 3 pm on a Tuesday. I was moved to a delivery room that evening, not because I was ready to push, but because they wanted to watch the baby closely using an internal foetal monitor.

The crash cart took up so much space in that little room.

Late at night, after what seemed like forever, I gave into the pain and asked the nurses to call the anaesthesiologist. That was a nightmare. My blood was so thick and my veins so swollen, it had taken two nurses and several tries to get an IV line in my wrist that afternoon.

The anaesthesiologist could hardly see my spine because of the water retention. I could tell he was nervous. I actually felt bad he got such a difficult patient.

That nightmare was worth it. I got some relief and a bit of sleep between contractions.

I had really wanted to give birth naturally; avoid a cesarean section at the very least. The OBGYN let me press on until the next day, because the baby was still doing fine. But I just wasn’t dilating, so I had to go under the knife.

As the surgeon cut into the first layer of skin, I said “ouch!”, and he immediately stopped. I didn’t just feel tugging, like they said I would; I felt the sharp pierce as the scalpel broke through my skin.

My body doesn’t play by the rules.

So they fed more drugs through my epidural line, waited for me to feel less, and they started again. This time I didn’t feel the first cut, but I did laugh out loud when the surgeon cut into the next layer. It tickled.

Amid the chaos, our beautiful baby girl was born. I knew she was okay when she cried. I was conscious just long enough to see her squishy newborn face sticking out of the receiving blanket when a nurse brought her into my field of vision.

My life was changed.

Perfection

I’m going to jump right from sorrow to babies.

After a year of heart medication my ejection fraction went from 27 to normal, and I was less tired and less breathless.

Dr. Heart took me off the pills to see if my heart would pump well without assistance. I had to wait for six months before getting another MUGA scan to measure my heart function. Near the end of it I was getting insanely impatient.

The glaring green hands on my biological clock were killing me, but I had to wait for the green light.

Nurse Heart makes fun of me now for being so impatient. I thought Dr. Heart was slow-playing me, so I called to bump my test up a month. My plea worked.

All the anxiety in the world didn’t change the results of my test. (There goes the straightforward mind-body connection theory.) My heart passed and we threw the condoms in the garbage. I wish I had cut them up into little pieces and then burned them in a cathartic bonfire, or at least mailed them to a country with limited access to birth control; it would have made a great story.

We were lucky: we got right to it and got pregnant within three months of trying. I felt amazing. The shift from cautious to all-out-cardio quickly killed my breakable -complex.

And then I was back to fragile with a teeny tiny embryo in my belly. I was happy and comfortable; I couldn’t ask for anything more. My life was perfect. I didn’t feel completely healthy when I stopped taking the heart medication, but as soon as that embryo burrowed into my uterus lining, I started feeling better and better.

But it was a long journey. I was still classified as sick, because I was diagnosed with Fibro, and I still sometimes think this is the story of somebody with life-long health issues.

It got worse – scary worse – before I woke up in the hospital as a new person. I’ll tell you all about the bad stuff soon.

My Heart is Yours

Some couples are always together.

I’ve heard tales of couples who lived an entire life together without spending one night apart. Stories like that always make me wonder about business trips. Does one partner follow the other on every business trip? Do the kids go too?

Maybe it’s an exaggeration. If not, it sounds a bit co-dependent; at the very least, it would be a logistic nightmare. Those stories never inspired a sense of awe or desire in me. Keep in mind, though, that I completed two years of college while living about one hour away from my boyfriend – the guy who is now my husband – so I know we can be apart and not fall apart, and I consider this an accomplishment.

Those facts aside, I’m pretty sure the night of the sleep study was the first night we had spent apart since I graduated from school.

That night, I marched up to the front door of the hospital with my pillow tucked under one arm and a knapsack packed with pills and pyjamas over my shoulder. I walked down the hall toward the sleep labs, unaware that this would be the first of many visits to those rooms.

I looked around the lab while I changed into my pyjamas. There was a hospital bed with a warm blanket and soft pillow. There were curtains on the window, a lamp and clock on the nightstand. The walls were painted a soft pink instead of the standard hospital green. No television. Oh, there was also a big video camera mounted in the corner of the room near the ceiling.

A nurse hooked me up to a machine that would monitor me throughout the night. There must have been twenty-five wires attached to me before she was done – leads to monitor my breathing, pulse, brain waves and sleep stages.

In the bathroom across the hall, I took my pain pills and my sleeping pills. A small monster stared at me as I brushed my teeth. White wires veined my long, dark hair. The wires stuck up from my scalp and then looped down toward my shoulders.

Little did I know, becoming that monster for one night was my first step back to wellness.

I slipped back across the hall in my socks and sat on the bed, testing the firmness of the mattress. With the lights off, the glow from the small lamp gave the room a homey feel. It was only 9pm, so I took a book out of my knapsack and gingerly laid my head on my pillow. The wires made it uncomfortable, but not unbearable.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on the novel. The results of the sleep study would be disclosed after about two weeks, around the same time that I was scheduled to see a neurologist, Dr. Brain, and possibly get a diagnosis of MS.

As anxiety crept into my veins, threatening to keep me awake all night, I closed my eyes and thought of my husband. We were apart that night, but my heart is always with him. The worries quieted and I soon fell asleep.