Thread by @PeterOrlowicz

Hi all,

Hard to know where to start, because it’s been a wild seven days. Spoiler alert, though, this is where it ends:

Needless to say, we didn't expect to meet Tiny Human for another 6-7 weeks. @mreno79 had tracked her blood pressure through most of pregnancy, but last Monday our @NorthwesternMed docs looked at her blood pressure logs and called her to come into the hospital.

No, she shouldn’t wait until I got home from work. 😳By the time I got to the hospital, Martha was in a room for observation. We thought we’d be there a day or two while Martha got on the right meds for high BP, and then we’d be headed home. Uh, nope.

Tuesday turned into Wednesday, and Martha’s BP kept spiking into pretty scary numbers, so they kept upping her meds, which would work for a while, until it didn’t. As a precaution, they gave her some steroid shots to help Tiny Human’s lungs, just in case he had to come early.

I stayed over some nights and went home for others; the hospital where we had planned to deliver is about 20-25 minutes from home, which isn’t far until you’re in a hurry or you’re really tired, when it feels a lot farther. I called sick into work one day at a time.

But the long-term plan was always “get the BP under control, so we can keep you pregnant.” Early delivery was a vague possibility in the background, but we were encouraged that probably wasn’t going to be necessary.

But discharge depended on having good, controlled BP readings over a couple days, and we were never quite there. Friday started out well, though; things looked good and I went home after lunch to do some laundry and just take a breather. I planned on going back after dinner.

Halfway through the afternoon, Martha called me to say she'd had some breakthrough bad readings, it was preeclampsia, and docs wanted to induce labor. Then she texted: Tiny Human was positioned sideways and she'd have a C-section later that night because she’d eaten lunch.

Then the labor and delivery nurse called me while I was driving back to the hospital to ask how far away I was, because a nurse was going to be waiting for me with scrubs to change into and Martha was already on her way in for anesthesia.

I made it in time, but not by much. Tiny Human was born Friday afternoon at 4:27pm, at 3 lbs 2 oz and 32 weeks 2 days of gestation. The great news was he was breathing on his own in the operating room; we heard him cry right away, before they took him down to the neonatal ICU.

Delivery is ultimately the cure for preeclampsia, but for us it wasn’t an immediate cure. Martha had some good readings after delivering, so they stepped her BP meds down, but then they spiked back up again, which meant more monitoring and more intervention.

Normally, the hospital moves new moms from Labor & Delivery to the Mother/Baby unit within a couple hours of delivery, but Martha still needed to be monitored and medicated so we didn’t get to move that quickly.

Tiny Human was in the NICU, Martha was still in Labor and Delivery all of Saturday, and I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be or what I should be doing. Due to all the monitoring, Martha wasn’t able to see Tiny Human at all between birth on Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.

That was really frustrating for everyone concerned. Getting on a breast milk pumping schedule was also really hard b/c all the tests and meds interrupted more than a few planned attempts to pump.

Sunday was better, though. We got moved up to Mother/Baby, both Martha and I got to hold Tiny Human, and he’s doing great. The neonatologist said he’s surpassing expectations, and we’re starting our NICU journey from a really strong place. Hospital staff here have been amazing.

Which brings us back to that first picture. I’m relieved we're all okay, relieved that both Martha’s and my employer have been so supportive, flexible and understanding as we went through so many iterations of “here’s what we think will happen tomorrow”, only to be proven wrong.

I’m so grateful and fortunate to have so many friends I’ve reached out to for emotional support and advice, including some folks who have been through similar experiences. You know who you are, but thank you SO MUCH, and I'm going to keep calling/texting/messaging.

I don’t know what this week will bring, exactly. Right now, Martha's on track for discharge on Tuesday, but Tiny Human will be in the NICU for a while yet and we're hardly leaving the hospital in the rear view mirror.

But, if you see me on Twitter a lot more between 1-4AM, now you know why. 😂

Finally, it’s obvious Tiny Human is a FedGov kid at heart, since he decided to appear unexpectedly on Friday afternoon after 4PM. And I hope we can get a refund on that “Understanding Your Newborn” class we scheduled for mid-September. /end