The Morning After

As I was relishing the reduction in pain and the sweet little one in my arms, the midwife was still at work trying to get the placenta delivered. I didn't have the urge to push it out, but I tried anyway. At one point I thought I passed it but it was just a gush of blood. I remember the midwife telling me I had a second degree tear, and that I had lost as much blood as a c-section patient. They massaged my uterus and showed Cory how the cord had come away from the placenta. I don't remember much after that, just flashes of being wheeled into the OR, the anesthesiologist introducing himself as I moved myself off the bed and onto the operating table, and then five hours later when it was getting light I woke up in the recovery room with Ivy and Cory skin-to-skin in the rocking chair next to me.

Nobody told me how much blood I lost, but I had a unit of blood transfused at some point that day. That morning I didn't care because Ivy was nestled in my arm, her head on my shoulder, and nothing else mattered. Until the pediatrician came in and told us she wasn't breathing well and needed to go into the nursery and put on a CPAP. The next few hours were the beginning of the scary period. The pediatrician told us she thought Ivy had a tracheoesophageal fistula which needed immediate surgery and couldn't be done at our hospital. We had two options for transport: to Eugene or Portland. We chose Portland.

Around 3pm on her birthday, Ivy was packed into an insulated box surrounded by machines and wheeled into our room on a huge stretcher to say goodbye. It was hard to see. She left for the hospital in Portland and Cory went home so that he could take a quick shower and pack. I'm glad that my family came to visit me after that because as soon as I was alone I was a wreck. Cory, who had been up since the wee hours the morning that labor started and hadn't slept since, went home and took his shower but then fell into a deep sleep rather than getting to the hospital. My mom actually went to our house to wake him up because I could not get a hold of him and I was starting to worry he had gotten in a car accident or something on the way home. He made plans to finish out the night at home and go to the hospital very early the next morning to sign the consent forms for Ivy's surgery. Mom stayed the night with me for support and I started my pumping regimen, though I wasn't getting any colostrum yet.