So a LOT has happened since last we spoke. I had our baby girl 3 months early, thanks to developing HELLP Syndrome. It’s basically a severe form of pre-eclampsia with the added bonus on renal failure and liver damage/failure. Luckily, the wonderful doctors and nurses at OU Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital took excellent care of me and our sweet Maggie and I was able to avoid any permanent damage from the medical emergency. However, Maggie was not so lucky. As you can imagine, being born 3 months early is not the best thing for a baby and she is currently in the NICU at Children’s. She is doing well but still weighs less than 2 pounds. At birth she was just 1 lb, 6 oz., and now (almost 3 weeks in) is approximately 1 lb, 13 oz. That’s not a LOT of weight, but it is good for her. As well as being forced out of mah belleh early, she was severely growth restricted in uterou thanks to a fibroid tumor that was the size of a baseball when the doctors did the c-section.

I guess I need to write all this down so I never forget all the details. So here goes …

Dad, Deanna, and Matt all came to visit on Christmas day and the day after. I was up and busy as people always are when they have out of town visitors. So the swollen feet and extreme fatigue was chalked up to those circumstances. Christmas was Thursday and on Saturday night I woke up with a HORRIBLE pain in the upper right side of my abdomen. It was behind my ribs and beneath my right boob. It was horrible and I could NOT get comfortable. I couldn’t stand, sit, lay down, walk around, NOTHING! Then the vomit came, and it came in large amounts! It was not a good night and we finally decided to call my midwife for advice. I knew this was not right. We ended up getting her assistant (read ASS) on the call back and she tried to convince me that I had either heart burn (even though I told her that I knew what hb was and this was NOT it) or the baby had kicked me hard under the ribs and bruised something (again, NO, as this wasn’t the dull ache of a bruise). UGH! Anyway, she told me to take 2 Tylenol PM and try to get some sleep. So we did. 

I was a mess the next day but luckily Brad was home so I wasn’t alone with Beans. 

The second occurence was Monday night. Again I had the horrible pain but this time is was MUCH worse and accompanied by never ending vomiting. As soon as I thought I was done I had to run back to the bathroom for another marathon session. This time around we didn’t wait to call my midwife. We got her on the call back this time and she told us to come on in to OB Urgent Care. We had already called mom as I knew that even if this was just like last time, I would at least need some help with Beans the next day. So Mom showed up, I convinced Brad to go on to work as Mom was going to take me to Urgent Care, and off we went. 

Once we got there, they immediately took a urine sample and laid me down in an exam room. Here is where things start to get a little blurry for me as I guess I was in not so good shape. Mom says that when the nurse came in to test the urine she shook her head in a negative way and Mom asked if she should call Brad. The nurse said, “Yes, he needs to get here right now.” So she called and he was on his way. In the mean time the nurses tell me that they are admitting me and shuttle me away on a bed into a VERY LARGE and plush room (I later learned it was an OB Acute care labor/delivery room). I know that as soon as they got me into that room I promptly vomited all over a nurse, poor girl! Then Brad showed up and things just kind of went into a fuzzy state for the next 48 hours. Here are the emails Brad sent out to friends and family:

>>> Bradley Whiddon 12/30/08 4:23 PM >>>

Hello all.

I’m typing this from Cristi’s iPod so please forgive me if my fat thumbs hit the wrong button.

The story is this: The baby is not in any distress and, as far as I know, hasn’t been at all. Cristi is the one in distress. Unfortunately, the only way to get Cristi out of distress is delivery of the baby - which then puts the baby in distress due to it only being 27 weeks gestational age.

They have started the baby on steroids and want very much to give her at least 48 hours of them before they deliver. At 27 weeks the lungs are not fully formed and the steroids will help this fact when they deliver. If Cristi is able to maintain or improve what she is now, the baby will be delivered after 48 hours. If things take a turn for the worse, they will deliver sooner. At this point the physicians do not expect improvement and only hope to maintain for 48 hours. Chances are very high that we will have a new year’s baby and only hope that it has been in the womb long enough to survive. It will be a long road for the next couple of months for sure.

That’s all I know at the moment. Cristi is awake, alert, and able to talk and half-joke with family and friends even though she has tubes coming from everywhere. I will keep you posted tomorrow as I’m sure at this point I will not be in. Maybe by then we will have talked to the neonatalogist and other doctors who can give us a better idea of what lies in store for Maggie. We’ve only been told what lies in store for Cristi at this point.

Thanks for your thoughts and concerns. I will be in touch.

Brad

************************

>>> Bradley Whiddon 12/31/08 2:31 PM >>>

Hi.

We have met with the neonatal physician and he has answered all our questions concerning what to expect with the baby. So far, we have only been told what to expect with Cristi.

The physician was using the term “intact survival” to provide us percentages and stats of what to expect. An “intact survival” in effect means that the baby walks out of the hospital, when able, with no severe problems. Severe problems could include blindness, deafness, mental and physical disabilities, intestinal organ problems, heart problems, respiratory problems, etc. A 27 weeker, as he kept referring to her, has about a 75% chance of being an intact survival. So the odds are in our favor but there is still a 25% chance of things going the opposite way. Cristi and I are realistic and while we are hoping for the best, we are aware of the worst, and can only take things as they come. To dwell on what may or may not happen would drive us nuts. 

We have been told that a NICU stay lasts about as long as the baby’s expected delivery date. Going by this rule of thumb, we can expect her to be in NICU until the end of March, give or take. Delivery is planned for tomorrow…not scheduled yet but planned. I will keep you all updated tomorrow even though you will all be hung over from partying

That’s about the only news I have at the moment. Cristi is still the same as she was yesterday which is good because it’s giving the baby an opportunity for the steroids to work. My mom is in town. Cristi’s mom is here. The waiting room is filled with family. We’re being well taken care of.

I hope to see all of you soon and will have some pictures of a baby whose birthday will be very easy to remember.

************************

>>> Bradley Whiddon 01/01/09 9:07 PM >>>

Hello again.

Well, it’s 2009 and we have a baby. Maggie Isolda Ray Whiddon was born at 10:33 on New Years Day. She weighed 1 lb 5oz and was 12 inches long and she is as tiny as that weight makes her sound. 

She is doing ok right now. Relatively speaking. She is intubated and being fed through IV but that’s expected with a baby born so prematurely. We’ve been told there is a 24 hour “honeymoon” period after birth during which everything usually goes ok. The next several days and months will hold many challenges for her as her body begins to learn how to live in this new environment. 

Some good things she has going for her, and please excuse me if I repeat something I’ve already told you, is that 1) she’s a girl 2) she was able to get the needed steroids before delivery and 3) she’s already trying to breathe on her own. They had actually taken the intubation out of her earlier today and started her on a CPAP. She was having issues with that, though, and they ultimately had to reintubate her. They plan to extubate her tomorrow as it’s not very good to keep someone on a ventilator for a long period of time. They will try some other kind of PAP machine that I won’t pretend to understand and they are optimistic about it.

Cristi is doing well. She’s been on magnesium for three days and is recovering from the c-section. She’s in good spirits considering. She’ll get to see Maggie tomorrow for the first time other than the pictures from the back of digital cameras in between her morphine and percocet haze. She was able to sit up and eat some jello and an apple this evening - her first food since dinner Monday. The c-section was interesting to say the least. For those of you who’ve been through it, you know what I’m talking about. I saw a lot more than I was hoping to see and Cristi was smiling and laughing a lot more than I ever thought anyone would with their abdomen cut open and three people yanking on stuff. Delivery of Maggie has already made a drastic improvement in Cristi’s condition. Her blood pressure is stabilized and her liver and renal functions are back to normal. She’s still on the magnesium drip as she is an increased risk for seizures the first 24 hours after surgery, even mores o than before.

I am planning on stopping in to the office sometime tomorrow (Friday) and touch base with some or all of you. I’ll bring a couple of pictures for show.

 

************************

>>> Bradley Whiddon 01/05/09 1:22 PM >>>

All is well with us considering. They are keeping Cristi an extra day due to spiking blood pressure and “weird” heartbeats. She is scheduled to get out tomorrow (although she was scheduled to get out today - we’ll see how it goes). Now onto the news you really care about

Maggie is doing fine. For the first three or four days she was stable - not getting better but not getting worse. Today, however, she is finally starting to get a little better. They have decreased her ventilator to 45 breaths a minute from 55. They have decreased her oxygen to 22%, which is just 1% more than you are breathing as you read this. She was under the bilirubin lights over the weekend due to an increasing bilirubin level (jaundice) but that has decreased drastically and she is no longer underneath them. She is out of the dangerous 72 hour zone where she was at an increased risk for brain bleed so she is able to be on her tummy and other positions now which she seems to be liking. Her acidosis levels are getting better. This has been a main concern of the physicians. They say to think about it like a swimming pool. Pools need particular levels of ph and acids and the body is the same way. She was a bit acidic and it wasn’t good. They think they have finally turned a corner in treating it, though, after two transfusions over the weekend.

She is scheduled for a head ultrasound this afternoon to check for brain bleeds. The physicians do not think they will find one as she has given them no indication that she may have one but they need to do it anyway. This is the one single thing that Cristi and I are nervous about. They can’t really fix a brain bleed if they find that there is one. They can fix hearts and lungs and colons and other stuff but not a brain bleed. We’re keeping our fingers crossed and our breaths held. 

***********************************

Basically all I remember from those 2 days is a lot of people visiting, a lot of needle pokes and blood draws, a lot of catheter measuring (renal failure measure), and a whole lot of drugs. 

The next clear thing in my mind is her delivery. They finally decided that they wouldn’t have to fully sedate me and instead just perform a spinal block. The wheeled me into the OR after I told Brad I loved him and even though I was scared senseless of the spinal, it turned out to be a LOT less painful than the IV hookup. Once they got it “blocked” they asked me to lay down quickly but I guess I wasn’t going fast enough as they started pushing and pulling me to get me flat on my back quickly. It was kind of funny. Then came the usual, “Can you feel this? How about this?” and finally they let Brad come in.  I think we both assumed the drape to prevent me from seeing my innards would be taller as he, unfortunately for him, had a clear view of the entire proceedings. He kept looking but immediately wishing he had not looked. It was kind of funny. He told me later that I smiled through the entire thing, I guess it was a little bit of shock combined with elation that our daughter was about to be born with the full benefit of 48 hours of steriods. In retrospect, I think it was simply a matter of self preservation. Either I smiled and tried to live the joy or I melted down and made every thing difficult for everyone else.

After she was born, the doctors rushed her to the NICU staff (8 people waiting in the corner) and she was whisked off to the NICU floor. They did not pause for the family waiting to catch a glimpse as they wanted to get her settled ASAP. Meanwhile, they performed a tubal ligation on me (at my request) and began the herculian task of sewing all my innards back together. In the middle of all this, one of the nurses received a call on her phone and then asked me if I wanted to be on TV. I said sure and was thinking silently that this must be the drugs because why would someone want to put me on TV. Turns out it was KSBI TV and they wanted to do a “miracle preemie New Year baby” story and we fit that bill. 

Once I got back to the room it wasn’t too long before a reporter and cameraman appeared and interviewed Brad at my bedside. They also did a short interview with me, but did not use it as I’m sure I was FAR too drugged to appear on TV. haha The video is quite good and I’ll post it up here soon. 

After that, I was on Seizure Watch 2009 for the next 24 hours as the risk for my to have a seizure was greatest after delivery. I sailed through that waiting period and then proceeded to have blood pressure issues for the next week and a half. I ended up being in the hospital for 10 days instead of the usual 4 for normal c-sections. 

Once home, I have had all the expected issues with a c-section; pain, fatigue, grumpiness. Wait, what? That’s not a normal issue, oh well don’t tell Brad! haha

In my next update I’ll detail Maggie’s first 3 weeks in the NICU.

I’ve been trying for 24 hours now to figure out how to express my feelings about the election results and have found myself speechless. If you know me personally, you know this is a rare occasion. Anyway, I’ve been reading others remarks and found that Dooce really summed up my feelings.

Finally, I wanted to talk to you about what happened last night, how your father and I and millions of other people across the country helped elect the first African American president. Leta, you are so lucky to have been born in an era where this is possible, in a time where generations have come together to stop the sick cycle of bigotry that has been passed down from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, where we have finally stood up and said, enough, we are more civilized than all of that. I have never been more proud to be an American than I am today, and when you are old enough to understand the significance of this election, when years from now you ask me where I was when I found out that Barack Obama had won, I’ll tell you that while there were millions of people dancing in the streets and gathered at parties, thousands more across the world chanting in impromptu parades, I was sitting on the couch next to your father, our fingers intertwined, the two of us alone with the dogs asleep at our feet. The television was an eruption of noise and chaos, but we sat there quietly absorbing the moment, worried that if we blinked we’d wake up out of a dream.

There have been moments today when I haven’t believed it, have worried that I imagined everything. Having grown up in the South I didn’t ever think this could happen, not when I and so many of my peers had so much indoctrination to overcome, years of being intentionally and sometimes unintentionally taught by seemingly well-meaning superiors that the color of your skin makes you different. And yet, while this election is a firm rejection of that kind of thinking, it’s also about how this man brought so many people together and inspired us by his example to focus not on bickering or hurt feelings or the vast divide of our differences, but on rolling up our sleeves and looking for a way to bridge that chasm. And Leta, I finally feel like we may have the momentum to change and fix so much of what has gone wrong — from economics to the environment, to health care and humanitarian disasters — that instead of leaving your generation with a burden almost impossible to climb, there is hope that we may in fact leave you with a world that is better than the one you were born into. I know I am not alone when I say that my vote in this election was as much for his vision as it was for you and your future.

Brad & I voted for Obama, proudly, and we never spoke of the fear that this might not work out. I walked around all day worried that the conservative vote would come out in full force. As we sat down in the living room to watch the results and debate the issues I slowly began to feel that sense of hope that so many have spoken of. I know that I hoped that I would be able to feel that wave of hope, but just had this horrible feeling of dread that America wouldn’t live up to it’s full potential. As the hours passed and I watched the election anchors speak of history being made tonight, hopefully, and revered leaders of the civil rights movement speak of the awesome feeling of hope they were feeling I began to feel it rise up in my heart.

At 10:00 pm our time, that wall of restraint came down and they announced that Obama would indeed be our next President. I realized as I watched the crowds scream and cry, I too was crying. Crying for hope, crying for the change to come, crying for the potential that America has and may reach under the leadership of Obama, crying because, finally, after 8 long years of darkness and hatred, we may once again be able to see the light.

Thank you America, for living up to the potential I always knew you had!

Yesterday Beans & I were in the living room watching Arthur as he sat quietly (THANK GOD) having a snack of chips and juice. He has had a tendency in the past to not chew these triangular chips all the way and therefore getting one or more lodged in his throat during snack time. DON’T FREAK OUT, he does not choke, he simply has that really painful experience we’ve all had where you have something sharp lodged in your throat.

We’ve coached him extensively on chewing his food completely and never leave him alone when he is eating, but as you can imagine, that doesn’t always work. When he does get a chip stuck we revert to the hard smacks on his back that my mother always did to me. I’ve not yet employed the upward arm jerk that she always used when we were choking as I can’t see what having my arms in the air has to do with my esophageal passage.

So yesterday, he gets a chip stuck in his throat and begins the tiny panic whine of fear. I rush to him and tell him to take a drink and try to relax. He does that and seems okay, so I return to my chair. Then he begins to whine again and when I look over he is trying to pat himself on the back! I just about died! It was simultaneously cute and sad. It was also the first instance of him relying upon himself and not me when in a difficult situation, so of course, it was a little heartbreaking.

Beans is really beginning to become a little boy and not my little baby anymore. While it is amazing to watch him learn and grow, there are moments when I just want him to come snuggle up in my lap and hang out with mommy for a while. At the same time, I love to hear him attempt new words and phrases. He is reaching that phase of childhood where his cute mispronunciations and attempts at full sentences have me smiling all day long.

Mommy loves you Beans!

Unbelievable and Crazy Cool!

What a wonderful idea! I only hope that it spreads to parts of the world where kids need something to brighten their day.

This is the cake of my dreams!

Today we went down to Jen’s so Charlie & Jack could play. We started out in the back yard and the boys played independently for a while. However, Jack REALLY wanted Charlie to come jump on the trampoline with him and when that did not happen he dissolved into tears exclaiming, “But I want him to play with me … he’s my best friend!” ACK! It was too cute for words.
After a bit we moved inside and the boy played together in Jack’s room. We could hear them on the monitor as we sat in the back living room. There were a couple of times that we heard a noise that we went to investigate, but generally things were progressing just fine.
Until we heard a noise that sounded like glass clinking against glass. When we bolted up to investigate we found both boys in the front living room, liquor cabinet open, Jack sitting on the couch with a wine goblet in hand and Charlie standing having way between the cabinet and couch with a goblet and bottle of Cold Duck in his hand! Unfortunately, our first thought was not PHOTO!, rather GLASS IN THE HAND OF 2 YEAR OLD BOYS! So, needless to say I did not get a photo. This had to be the absolute highlight of my day, nay week as it was just too damn funny for words!

AAACCCCKKKKK!!!!!
How on EARTH could anyone think she is qualified to help run the country? She can barely understand the fucking question she’s being asked.

Some really big things have happened around here over the last month.  Things, well a singular thing actually.  I found out about 3 weeks ago that I’m pregnant. I realize to most people this doesn’t seem like such a big surprise, but for us it definitely is.

See, we had completely given up on ever having a biological child. Brad & I tried for 6+ years and never had any luck. The doctors ran the usual gamit of tests and could give us no reason for our infertility, “just one of those things” they would say. So, because we wanted children and were lucky enough to be approached by someone relatively close to us we decided to adopt. And it was the BEST decision we have EVER made. Charlie is the bright and shining star in our lives. Every day is a new adventure with him. And yes he is dead center in the terrible twos, but we realize that while it is trying each and every day he is simply trying to figure out his boundaries and understand the rules. 

Back to the new baby. A few weeks ago I missed my period and while that has NEVER happened in the 23 years I’ve had them, for some reason I didn’t pay much attention to it. On Sunday, being about a week late I realized that my boobs were now very tender and it finally clicked.  

more to come