Hospital Stay

Well, I suppose it's time to start using this thing again (as in, this blog), now that we have lots of people wanting updates on our situation. I just looked back and was semi-surprised to see that I've included a few pictures and some drivel, but little of consequence for the last few months.

Here's the nutshell update:

We are pregnant - and with TWINS, no less. (now let's just get these next couple questions out o f the way: no they're not identical (fraternal), and no that doesn't run in my family. If you'll recall, Jared had cancer and chemotherapy a couple years ago, and that left our situation... shall we say... somewhat compromosed. We were so fortunate to have an oncologist who was cognisant of and sensitive to cancer-life-related issues for younger people, and who made time for us to get some of Jared's "boyz" on ice before he started chemo. So... despite our efforts at having one baby at a time, fertility treatments are unpredictable, and here we are).

The babies are both BOYS, and Jared is about as stoked as can be. He's resisting all kinds of urges to buy little basketballs, I'm sure.

So we're excited, and life is changing fast. The pregnancy hasn't been without complications - I was on bedrest for several weeks at the beginning, and have some other complications that make me pretty uncomfortable pretty much most of the time. I have several "indications" that put me at risk for pre-term labor, but things have been looking great lately. I hit the 28-week pregnancy mark a couple of days ago. I was excited to reach that benchmark (a big one for twins).

Of course, as fate would have it, the instant I was excited about reaching week 28, I started having some pre-term labor symptoms. The next night I was sent to the hospital and have been here since (3 days). I'm one of those contraction-ey pregnant women - I get 'em all the time - and this is pretty normal for a twin pregnancy in the 3rd trimester, so it's nothing to be alarmed about usually. But when the contractions wouldn't slow down with rest or water, and especially when they were only 3 minutes apart, it was looking a little scary. At the hospital we determined that I was starting to dilate with all the contractions, so they put me on medication to stop them and IV fluids to keep me hydrated. We also figured out, as the night wore on, that I had the stomach flu.

I hate the stomach flu. HATE. THE. STOMACH. FLU. I'm one of those people that just doesn't deal with nausea very well, and I can't throw up, so I'm just miserable the whole time. BUT, believe it or not this is good news, in a way. It's probable that the stomach flu is what was actually causing the contractions and pre-term labor symptoms, and once I got over that, they were able to take me off the medications and things have been ok since.

So today I get to go home! I have to take it easy and watch closely what happens over the next couple of days, but I don't think I will even need to go on any kind of long-term strict bedrest at this point, which is great news. I will probably need to have pretty limited activity for the next couple of months, so we'll try to find a way to work that out, but that's not nearly as bad as I was thinking it would be.

The pictures, by the way, were taken here in my room during my stay. Seville came to visit me yesterday. Apparently she dressed herself, and arrived completely decked out in poofy pink princess attire with matching shoes and tiara with fuzzy pink embellishments. While she was here, Grandma helped me untangle and braid my hair. She wanted matching braids, so I tried to put little ones in her hair. I couldn't get over how cute they were, so we took pics.

Also, the view from OHSU windows is pretty fun. There are lots of cool cloud things that go on up here, and I've been watching them from my bed (I guess you can see Mt. Hood from other places in my room. Just not the bed).