blurry.
The next 5 days were a total blur. I lied, the first 5 months were a total blur, but I know you other moms can relate to the latter.
What they don't tell you when you're getting an epidural is that they have to put a catheter in. I was NOT happy about this at all. If you're my friend, and you've had a baby; I hate you for leaving out this detail in your birth story. not cool.
What no one also told me...was that they have to massage your incredibly sore uterus (the one they just cut open) to get it to start contracting back to normal human size. Thanks again fellow mommies for leaving that out as well.
Little disclaimer, if your grossed out easily, I'd go ahead and stop reading now.
A N Y W A Y, catheter out, uterus molested, and my sweet husband and the nurse heave me off the bed to help me try and pee on my own. As soon as I got up on my feet, the floor pooled with blood. Not just a little blood. Like "Oh honey lets get you on the toilet" blood.
I quickly turned white and felt myself losing consciousness. They called some other nurses in to get me to come to, and try and figure out what was going on. They were able to stop the bleeding, and carefully got me back into the hospital bed.
Scariest night ever. I could feel warm liquid run down my legs every so often and they would flip me over and change out my bed pad because it was filled with blood. Although it was more than the normal amount of blood loss after a delivery, they just kept me in bed. A nurse continued to come in every few hours to "massage" my uterus. I can remember the pain so vividly. It was a nightmare. How did anyone leave out this detail with child birth?
Fast forward to the next morning. I have a really hot spot on my stomach. Like it felt hot on the inside, but you could also feel the heat from the outside too. They could see a red circle forming and drew a new tattoo on my stomach surrounding the "mysterious hot spot."
The hot spot kept getting bigger...and warmer...and they still couldnt figure out why I lost so much blood the night before. They finally decided to do a CT scan of my abdomen.
For those of you that did not go to medical school, from what I understand, the black that you see in the picture below-that's blood. Pooled blood...A nice new hematoma to go with my nice new newborn baby.
A hematoma that was larger than the size of my newborn baby's head.
They ran blood tests and my hemaglobin level was at a 6. Basically, I was a lot closer to the pearly gates than I should have been. With levels that low, one can go into cardiac arrest. Or in my case, feel really shitty.
I had just had a baby though. I just thought that was how you feel after you have really long labor, and have a 9 lb baby cut out of you. Apparently you aren't supposed to feel THAT BAD.
SO, next step was to get the hard-core trauma nurses up to my room and pump 3 bags of blood into my arm for my idea of a fun time: a blood transfusion.
This process literally took about 8 hours. Eight hours of being tied to a syringe full of cold blood. I can still feel how freezing it was as it was traveling through my body. So unreal.
I felt like a super human once my body recognized that it wasn't on the brink of death anymore.
We spent the next few days watching my blood levels, monitoring Lou's infection, and staring at our new baby girl.
I have to plug my super human husband here too. We were tucked into that hospital room for 6 days and he never complained once. He took care of both of his girls with such grace, that it pains me to think about how incredibly grateful we are to have him as the patriarch of our little family.
We were sent home on Easter Sunday with instructions to come back for a CT scan in 6 weeks to check on the status of my new friend "hematoma". Apparently my other organs were supposed to be really upset that they lost so much blood that they would just absorb the hematoma inside of my abdomen. My organs are assholes though and they rejected it.
Like a bunch of mean girls.
