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| Our Year of the Tiger baby all ready for his second ever car trip. |
Well, it's now been a really, really long time since I last wrote here! I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is having a good start to their new year. For the past few weeks, K and I have been completely absorbed in learning to be parents to our newest family member.
As some of you may have seen on my Instagram stories, our little bean ("LB") arrived roughly a month ago - at 37 weeks and 5 days - after I was officially diagnosed with gestational hypertension the week before. That particular diagnosis can lead to a recommendation to induce at 37 weeks, which was what my OB-GYN also recommended, so off to the hospital we went just after Thanksgiving. It ended up being a bit of an adventure, something I think it's safe to say no one really wants from their labor and delivery.
My induction took around 30 hours before it was time to push, then ended with an urgent c-section not long after due to fetal distress. Thankfully, LB turned out perfectly healthy, and he's been that way since.
I was recovering well and fairly quickly from surgery, but the night before my original discharge date (after the standard three nights in the postpartum unit, including the night I delivered) my blood pressure started climbing up again. It escalated into postpartum preeclampsia, and before my blood pressure ever crossed into the 170s systolic and before I ever experienced any of the additional "red flag" symptoms of preeclampsia outside of the high blood pressure, I was sent back to labor and delivery for a 24-hour magnesium drip.
Afterwards, my blood pressure proved somewhat resistant to being stabilized, and my doctors would not discharge me until that was accomplished. Including the time it took to administer and recover from the magnesium drip, I ended up staying a total of seven extra nights in the hospital. LB was able to stay in the hospital with me throughout, though his doctors had declared him fully ready for discharge even before the day we were originally meant to go home. Once the doctors adjusted me up to the correct doses of blood pressure medication that I could continue taking at home to keep my blood pressure stable at reasonably healthy numbers (mostly under 140 systolic and 90 diastolic), LB and I were finally able to go home.
