After a couple of hours of talking to different familiar faces and letting the nurses watch my contractions, it was decided that they needed to start me on a medication to make the contractions stop (hopefully). Alex settled in for a night on the couch next to me, and I tried to get comfortable in the hospital bed without moving the monitors too much.
The nurses had kind of "taught" me to read the monitors so that I was educated on what all was going on. Constantly in the background, the baby's steady heart beat was thumping along at around 150. When I would start to feel a contraction, I could look up at the monitor and see the climbing hill and peak of when the contraction maxed out followed by the slow decent back down to the baseline all while listening to the baby's heart rate. It was incredibly reassuring and scary at the same time because there were points where the baby's heart rate would drop down into the 120s. Not that 120 is scary, but any kind of rapid heart rate change made my pulse go up just because the slowing of the steady sound of 150 had become so familiar.
Once the decision had been made to move me to a room and keep me overnight, I called my parents to check in with them. They had decided to drive up from West Texas and be with us while I was in this premature labor, something that really made me uncomfortable because I felt that they were only coming because they were worried that we would deliver that night. Also, since my grandmother had been going downhill with her Alzheimer's disease, that week had been particularly rough on my parents with figuring out how to best care for her without wearing themselves down completely. It was my Dad who tried to comfort me a little on the issue.
"We just feel like we need to be there; we're not panicked or in a hurry, we just want to be there..." he said in his calm-but-tired voice.
"Yeah but what are you guys going to do when you get here? You're just going to sit up here and stare at me and there's really no use in that," I told him.
"Well that's okay, we just want to be there in case you need us."
"Dad, there isn't anything anyone can do right now. Alex can't do anything, y'all can't do anything, even I can't do anything. This is all up to God and if tonight is when we're suppose to deliver her then that's what's going to happen. This is just between me and God right now, and having everyone else's anxiety around me isn't going to help me calm down to try to help these contractions stop."
His end of the line was quiet for a minute.
"Okay. You're right. We are already on our way, but if you decide you don't need us this weekend we'll head on to Austin since we were headed there anyways. We just want to be close incase our granddaughter comes tonight."
"That's fair. I just don't want y'all to come up here and be worried around me," I reaffirmed.
I really wasn't trying to be a jerk, but it just felt overwhelming to have everyone rush in from out of town. First off, I didn't want my parents making the 5 hour drive in the middle of the night. My parents aren't old by any stretch of the imagination (number wise or acting wise), but in the back of my head that fear that I had been battling all week took a different turn. "What if your parents are killed on the highway? They would be on their way up here to be with you and if nothing even happens then they died for nothing. Your daughter wouldn't know her grandparents because you scared them into coming."
I had to start my verse-battles again. I started repeating the verses I had written on the back of those notecards that had lived in my purse for a week.
Eventually, our room quieted down. We turned off the TV and Alex fell asleep on the couch. Every few hours, the nurses would come in and ask me to roll over or shift my hips a little bit because the baby's heart rate didn't like the position I was in. After one of these episodes, I couldn't go back to sleep so I just laid there and stared at the ceiling.
Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub Baby girl's heart rate at 150.
Thub thub thub thub thub Baby girl's heart rate at 120.
Contractions come, contractions go.
Repeat.
Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub.
A girl could go crazy focusing on those heart beats.
Thub thub thub thub thub
Leave it to us to make another stubborn child that is making her own schedule.
Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub
Contraction starting
Thub thub thub thub thub
I wonder if this is what happened to Kaitlyn.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, the devil loves doubt and worry because it makes us question our Maker, but still the thought shocked me. When I had felt the wave of movement in the office I had been reminded of that same feeling I had towards the end of my pregnancy with Kaitlyn. I had always thought it was her shoulder or her arm making a movement across my stomach to get more comfortable, but now I know that it was really contractions and I just didn't realize it.
If this baby girl was having a hard time tolerating my contractions, why wouldn't Kaitlyn? This baby was head down and had been for a while, but if a baby is breech does it make it harder for them to tolerate labor? Her head was right under my rib cage and who knows where her cord was.
Did I have contractions before I felt her stop moving?
After a year of grief, it's hard to remember.
I laid there and stared at the ceiling and cried. I cried for my daughter that was gone. I cried for my daughter that was still here. The fear had taken a stronghold on me and it was hard for me to shake it in the dark room of the hospital.
And then something popped into my head- a conversation I had with Kate when I was seeing her again before Kaitlyn's birthday.
We had talked about fear and doubt, and she reminded me that every one of Kaitlyn's days were written long before I got pregnant with her. Every second of her life, every kick, turn, head butt, everything; was written in God's book before she was even a thought in our heads.
And the same went for this baby.
There was nothing I could do that would change the course of this baby's life because God had already written her story.
"Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written,
every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them."
Psalm 139:16
I breathed a little easier after that. The anxiety was still there, but it was now background music instead of concert-loud in the front of my mind.
All I needed to do was cling to Jesus and the promise that there was nothing going on in my body that He didn't already know about.
Peace.
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