My First Post From the Hospital!!

I have completely dropped the ball on blogging since being in the hospital which is funny since the whole point of starting the blog in the first place was to try to keep everyone in the loop and I thought I would have all this free time but “free time” during a hospital stay just isn’t the same as free time at home or anywhere else to be totally honest. It has been physically and emotionally draining in ways that i don’t think would make sense to anyone else unless you’ve been inpatient long term.

First and foremost, the babies are doing fantastically. I actually couldn’t imagine them doing any better! We’ve had a few tiny scares where one of the babies experiences some heart rate dips or accelerations. I had few bouts of contractions that caused some concern but only ever very briefly. And every time the issues have resolved fairly quickly and we’ve had tons of reassurance from the doctors that these little spells are completely normal for babies of this gestational age. We’re all very encouraged that the babies have never shown any patterns of distress and they have always recovered from their spells of accelerations or decelerations very quickly.

The babies must just be growing and growing as evidenced by my belly which seems to grow by the minute and the babies movements getting bigger and stronger and seemingly more coordinated everyday. At our last growth ultrasound, the babies were each weighing right about 3 pounds and that was 3 weeks ago!! We should be having another growth ultrasound tomorrow which will give us an updated weight estimate. At the rate they’re growing, they are going to come out at 34 weeks as very hearty kids, hah! Which is only fitting as their dad weighed over 9 pounds at birth and I myself was nearly 9 pounds too! I can only assume that bigger is better when you know they’re going to come out early. So I’m grateful to already be carrying 8 or so pounds of baby and I’m also a little grateful that I don’t have to carry them to 40 weeks because if they continued growing at this same rate throughout the third trimester, I would likely be giving birth to two babies weighing over 9 pounds!!

The view from my room! 

Tomorrow will mark 4 weeks in the hospital already and believe it or not, it’s gone by really fast. I really haven’t done anything of substance but let me give you a little update on what the day to day looks like! At first, they started me on a schedule where I was on the monitors for 4 hours, followed by 4 hours off the monitor round the clock. But that resulted in a major meltdown on my behalf very quickly! On my 4th or 5th day here, I was on the monitor 6-10pm and when I got off (not until about 10:20 actually), I took a shower and didn’t really get to sleep until 11 and then the nurse woke me up to go on the monitor right at 2am. Compounded with 4 days of weird and disrupted sleeping hours, I launched into a full blown meltdown alone, in the dark, awake and strapped to the monitor at 2am. I finally did fall back asleep and got a little bit more sleep but when the new nurse came in the morning and asked how I was doing, I melted down all over again and after I expressed my concern over my level of exhaustion and how it felt impossible to sustain this type of schedule for 8 weeks, the nurse immediately reached out to the doctors to ask about changing my schedule and within a few hours, we got the confirmation that I would be changing to a 6 hours on, 6 hours off schedule. And while I was nervous about that at first, mainly the being on the monitor for 6 hours part, it has proved to be way more sustainable! I can actually function on 6 hours of sleep!

So for the last 3 weeks or so, I’ve spent every day on the following schedule:

12a-6a Sleep

6a-12p On the monitor

12p-6pm Off the monitor

6p-12a On the monitor

So when I’m on the monitor, I have to lay or sit fairly reclined in my bed and I have 3 monitors strapped to my belly: one for Baby A’s heart rate, one for Baby B’s and one for contractions. If I need to get up to use the restroom or anything, I just unplug the monitors from the machine and do whatever I need to do and then plug them back in before I lay down. It’s difficult because it has often been a struggle to find and keep the babies’ heart rates on the monitor consistently because they move around so much. So I often feel guilty about getting up because it usually requires some adjustment of the monitors to get their heart rates tracing again after I get up which means the nurses have to come in to attend to me. But if a girl has gotta pee, a girl has gotta pee! And it’s also important that I get to stretch my legs a little bit and break up the monotony of sitting in bed for 6 hours straight.

I have mostly been entertaining myself with boat loads of trashy TV… lots of reality shows and baking shows. I brought all sorts of things to entertain myself with and I mostly have not used any of them at all! I have done a tiny bit of coloring and worked on some sudoku puzzles a little bit but it’s easiest just to watch mindless TV to help the hours in bed pass by more quickly. Just last week, I finally started reading! For the same reasons that it has been difficult to concentrate enough to write a blog, it has also been difficult to read a book. But I’ve finally gotten into a book called Educated and I’m loving it. Hopefully I can finish it in the next 4 weeks before the babies come! This past week I also spent a ton of time finally setting up a registry. There are so many options for each thing that babies may need that making even one selection to add to the registry often took me 30-45 minutes if not more before I could research enough of the options to make a decision. We have a few more items to add but many of the big main things are on there and we’re well on our way to getting all set up to be ready to bring the babies home.

Between Facebook and offerings from family and friends, we actually have a number of things at home including a whole bag of premie clothes (which the babies may not even fit into!), a breastfeeding pillow, a bouncy seat, a moses basket, a rock n’ play, a pack n’ play with 2 bassinet attachments and a snap n’ go stroller. There may even be more but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head since I’m not actually there to lay my own eyes on everything! We’re also in the process of having a mural painted on the wall of the nursery by one of our sweet friends and we’ve ordered a rug. So before long the room is going to be looking like an actual nursery where actual babies live!

In the afternoons when I’m off the monitor, I try to stay away from my bed as much as possible and also get a little bit of exercise in! I have been aiming for 4000-5000 steps every day and I even throw in a tiny bit of strength training from time to time. I have been reassured by several doctors that the best way to ensure a smooth recovery from a C Section is to be in decent shape before having one. So they all seem very glad to hear that I’m doing my best to stay active. I’m allowed to leave my unit of the hospital so I usually spend a few hours on the 4th floor of the hospital where there’s an Au Bon Pain, some seating areas, lots of long hallways to walk and a little atrium where I can get some fresh air. Technically, I am granted one 30 minute outing off the unit every day but I very quickly learned that the nurses are not keeping track of the time I’m gone and are actually very happy for me to get out for a change of scenery. So I’ve gone from adhering to that rule fairly strictly (enforced by my own nature to follow all rules) to often spending 2 or 3 hours on the 4th floor before coming back up to my room on the 8th.

So before I lose your interest with a crazy long post or start to worry about little details or launch into a longer story about something else and get sidetracked, I’m going to wrap this first hospital stay post up so at least you know a little bit more about the day to day and what is going on in here! Please let me know if you have any questions about everything that is going on so far or if there are more specific things about the hospital stay, preparing to bring home the babies, the pregnancy, anything, that you would like to know about! I’d be happy to use your questions to inspire my next posts! I already have a few ideas so hopefully this is just the beginning of my posts from the hospital! Also make sure to check out my Instagram (@making.of.a.mama) as I’ve been a little more consistent with adding updates over there.