Warning: This post contains material of a graphic nature
So, this is the part where if you get squeamish about blood, you should move on and avoid reading this post. I am all fine and good now, just lost some blood at the hospital and they had to keep me longer than the normal pregnant woman.
For all you others who care to hear the gory details of birth, I had what you call Postpartum Hemorrhage. You see, you are supposed to feel cramping and a little bit of pain when you finish giving birth because your uterus should immediately start going back to it's normal/non-pregnant state.
Mine did not.
Hence the lack of pain. I mean, my epidural had long worn off at this point and I hadn't had any other pain killers and I felt great. They helped me get in my bed and told me to rest while they would do all the weighing, washing, and basic care for a newborn on Alyenna. She would be returned to me when she was ready to eat. Both Marcus and I drifted off to sleep. I woke up about an hour and a half later to a nurse walking into the room. She wanted me to get up, go the bathroom, and check how my tummy/uterus was doing. I started to push myself up to get out of the bed and it was really wet. Scratch that, it was really bloody. I looked at the nurse and said I was sitting in a lot of liquid and blood and asked if that was normal. She said "not really, but let's get you up and clean you up in the bathroom." I still felt completely fine. *Now, forgive me for the graphic-ness of this next part...there really is no other way to describe it.
I got up and more and more liquid was pouring out of my body. Kinda like when your water breaks, except bloody, not clear. It was extremely uncomfortable, and I kept asking if it was normal. She wasn't really giving me a real answer. Once I was in the bathroom she had me take off my pad and I had 8 blood clots on it the size of half of a dollar. Not a half dollar coin. Half of a dollar bill. They were huge. You are supposed to alert the nurse if you have any(normally one or two) that are bigger than a half dollar coin. So not only did I have 8, but they were 4 times the size they normally are.
It was far from normal. The nurse had me sit down and she tried to clean me up a bit. Finally she decided to move me back to the bed to go and call the doctor and discuss what needed to be done.
We got to the bathroom door and she noticed some more blood on the back of my leg and she wanted to get it off, so I just braced myself on the doorframe for extra support just in case(I had lost a lot of blood). She was wiping my calf and all of the sudden I felt dizzy. I immediately said I felt dizzy and woke up lying on the cold floor with 6 people staring down at me, non of which I recognized except Marcus who was holding my feet up. I was so confused that I didn't even remember giving birth, going to the hospital, any of it! Once I felt okay enough to sit up, they helped me back into bed and I started to remember where I was and what had happened.
The nurse said I told her I felt dizzy and immediately dropped to the floor. She caught me, but I fell with so much dead weight that she wasn't able to keep me up and had to ease me quickly to the floor while yelling out for help. Marcus popped up when he heard her yell and rushed to help me onto the floor, then raised my legs to get the blood back into my head. The other people around me were the rest of the staff on the postpartum floor. They were all concerned and had heard my nurse call out for help.
They all kept telling me that I gave them quite a scare. Apparently I had lost about 2 quarts of blood, if not more. My midwife was very concerned and came in special on her day off to check on me and get more blood clots out. I believe I had 2 or 3 more. She said they had never seen so many blood clots of that size come out of one person. They gave me a special shot to get my uterus contracting and then put me on pills for the next 24hrs that would continue the contracting.
All that medicine gave me some intense cramping. I finally needed some pain meds.
So, my hemoglobin/iron level dropped to 8.6...not good. Normal people are at 12-16. Pregnant women are normally 10-12. They put me on an iron supplement and checked my blood constantly. I felt like the nurses were in my room every hour. It was exhausting.
The next day, I had dropped to 7.4. It was not looking good for me. They were talking blood transfusions and extra stays at the hospital. I was so ready to go home already, I was dreading having to stay, but transfusions come with all sorts of risks and I was willing to stick it out if there was a possibility I could avoid those risks.
I stayed until Monday. Four and a half days in the hospital, and my iron level had finally stabilized at 7.4. Still ridiculously low, but they decided to let me go home anyways. I had to take iron three times a day though and sign a document that I was going to do so or there would be serious consequences. haha.
It was so good to leave. Having a baby is hard. Taking care of a newborn is really tiring, but being at home, even when you have no energy and feel crappy is so much better than that hospital. It was a relief to be at home and in my own bed again!
If/when I ever give birth again I will always have to have the shot that they gave me to start the contracting in my uterus. Apparently, I am what the doctors call a "bleeder." Once I have that I should recover more "normally."
And that's the birth story! Tada!
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