September 10, 2009

I woke up that morning just certain that today was the day.  I was scheduled to have my terbutaline pump (the medicine I'd been on for 4 months to stop contractions) removed from my thigh and to have my cerclage removed.  Considering these two things literally saved me from delivering Luke and Olivia at 19 weeks, I knew that once both were removed, the time would quickly come for our world to change.  Yes, we knew that going from one child to three would shake up our world.  We knew that going from one child to three under the age of 2 1/2 would shake up our world.  What we didn't know, however, was how going from one child to three under the age of 2 1/2, with one special needs and severe medical issues, would completely rock our world.  And rock our world it did, but in a more positive way than we could have ever imagined one year ago.

But back to September 10th of last year...

My saving grace over the past 4 1/2 months had been a very sweet friend of a friend who came every other week to give me circulation massages to avoid clots.  Since I hadn't seen the sun for so long, I had her come this day to give me a spray tan (another side job of hers) at home so that I wouldn't be so ghostly white in all of our post-partum pictures.  I was so pale that I think we were a little too aggressive with the spray tan and did one too many layers.  It was my first spray tan ever, so I did not time it up very well and didn't have time to let it fully dry before we had to go to the hospital for our appointment.  As soon as they started hooking me up to all of the belly monitors, I knew the spray tan was a bad idea.  Brown stuff was literally coming off all around me and all over the bed!

Notice the savage tan!

Then the best part...removing the cerclage was incredibly painful (almost more painful than my 22 hours of labor with Jackson), and the pain on my face and force with which I was squeezing Pete's hand made him pass out, flat against the cold, hard hospital room floor!  (He will probably kill me for sharing that here.)  It scared me so badly, especially when 10 nurses rushed into the room, that I started to cry and immediately thought, I'm going to have brown streaks all over my face!  As I held back my tears and the doctor finished the cerclage removal, Pete recovered and we all joked that he was just tired of me getting all the medical attention for 4 1/2 months and wanted some attention himself.  We were finally able to leave the hospital, but I knew we would be back later.

I was so happy to be out of bed and able to walk around, especially without my "buddy" (the pump) attached to my leg.  We went home to get Jackson and then went to pick up our new family vehicle...yes, the mini-van!  Afterwards, we took Jackson to get ice cream to spend some final quality time with him, just the three of us.  Little did he know how much his world was about to be rocked!  Afterwards, we went home, played, and put Jackson to bed.  By around 9pm, I started contracting every 5 minutes and we were back at the hospital by 10 p.m.  I really did not want the babies' birthday to be on September 11th, so when they decided at 11:39 p.m. to start prepping me for my c-section, I jokingly asked if they could get it done within the next 21 minutes so their birthday would instead be September 10th.  No such luck!

Since it was so late, we weren't able to let too many people know that I was about to deliver.  My sister was staying at home with Jackson and, of course, we called our parents.  We were a little sad that we weren't going to have that big crowd in the waiting room, ready to hear the news that Luke and Olivia had arrived.  In hindsight, it was actually better this way because we learned of Luke's diagnosis just after I had been wheeled into recovery.  It was almost 1 a.m. by this point, and the hospital seemed eerily quiet and empty.  I was already in tears as the nurses were explaining that Olivia was having trouble breathing and would need to go to the NICU right away, and then the doctor came in with the news that, at the time, seemed to shatter our world...