introducing Clara Grace, pt 2

You can read part 1 of Clara Grace’s birth story here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After all was deemed well with me after the c-section, they wheeled my bed out of the recovery room and I was then taken down to the room we’d be staying in for the duration of our hospital stay. Clara was in the nursery getting checked out and our families – well, partially – had gathered in the waiting room, anxious to meet Clara Grace but none so anxious as the big brother, who was dying to meet his sister!

This was the moment I’d been looking forward to the most, I think. I was anxious to see how Benjamin would react to his sister, anxious to see his face when he saw her, anxious to know what he thought of her. And, after spending the night without him and the morning in surgery, I just really wanted to see my big boy.

These precious moments I hope will stay with me forever. The way he looked at her, as in love with her as we were, how he told us that she was “so cuuute!”.

What a blessing to have both of my babies!! It’s moments like these that melt away all those hard times we faced during this pregnancy and during Benjamin’s delivery. It’s moments like these that make you say, yeah, that was tough… but in the end it is all worth it. It seems like I go through a lot to bring my babies into the world – not saying I have it worse than anyone else! – but when it comes down to it… these moments make everything more than worth it.

But nothing can top this moment… my family… my heart!

We were also really blessed to have friends who stopped by to share in our joy. Because this was something we didn’t experience when Benjamin was born, it meant a lot to us that people cared enough to come and celebrate Clara’s birth.

And not only in the hospital, but we have had people come by and visit with us this week and also bring us meals. We have been incredibly blessed by our church family here! I am so thankful!

As far as recovery has been going, I’ve been really pleased with it! I know that a lot of people have bad experiences when it comes to c-sections, but honestly I prefer this recovery over the recovery I endured after Benjamin… of course, this time I didn’t have to have a blood transfusion {I narrowly escaped that one… more on that later}, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. I can’t really feel my incision, and I’m getting around pretty normally most of the time. I’ve been staying on top of my pain medication and have been keeping everything clean. Really I can’t complain much about my recovery! So thankful!

As for the blood transfusion thing… unfortunately it was something that was talked about at one point in the hospital because my hemoglobin was low. I’m on iron pills instead, though. My doctor asked me if anyone had ever looked into testing me for Von Willebrand disease, and honestly when I looked it up I can see how I could perhaps have it. However, that’s something we’ll have to look into in the future, not now.

For now, we’re just enjoying our sweet new baby, in spite of the lack of sleep and re-figuring out the ins and outs of a newborn. I love to see my family together and so frequently find myself just watching as if watching some amazing dream… I am so blessed! Beyond measure!

introducing Clara Grace, pt 1

Born March 22nd at 7:30AM
7 lbs, 8 oz; 20 1/4 inches

I know that you all have been waiting to see this {unless you’ve been following on Facebook or Instagram}, and I apologize for only just now getting the time or energy to sit down and introduce you all to her! However, I’ve been a little preoccupied with my sweet girl, as I’m sure you can imagine, and also recovering from my c-section.

I won’t keep you any longer, though, because I know there are those who like to read birth stories and all that. Thankfully, this birth story is extremely uneventful compared to the one I had difficulty thinking back on with Benjamin! Praise God – He has blessed me!

Thursday, March 21st

We had our orders to show up at the hospital on Thursday morning at 10AM for pre-op. I didn’t know exactly what that would entail or how long it would take, but we were up and ready to go {I hardly slept… go figure!} and waited around a while before finally going in to the room to be asked a million questions, get blood taken {Benjamin was proud of me for being so brave}, getting a rundown of what I needed to do before showing up at the hospital in the morning, and then meeting with the anesthesiologist.

It really didn’t take long at all. I was super excited because by the time we left out, and had lunch at Mugshots as a sort of last hurrah as a family of three. Benjamin had a hamburger with peanut butter on it… and loved it! ha!

Afterward, we drove over to Target where we met up with my parents and shopped a little before heading to our hotel for the night. It wasn’t a super impressive hotel, but hey, it was just for the night, for us. Benjamin stayed in the room with Nana and Papaw for Thursday and Friday nights and had a great time, apparently, because he kept asking to go back, ha! Anyway, there I had my last major meltdown before the big day, as it finally hit me that hey, I’m about to have major abdominal surgery and um, no I don’t want that! But, I much less wanted something like what happened with Benjamin to happen. We went out to dinner with my parents at Cracker Barrel and then spent some time at the book store before heading back to the hotel. I cried again after we did our last Bible story time as a family of three, knowing that from there on out, things were about to be very different. Thankfully my emotions and medication easily knocked me out, but not before I spewed out some entertaining lines to Carl in my sleepy state, such as my request, should something happen during surgery, that he promise the kids would never watch Spongebob.

Yeah…

Friday, March 22nd

The next morning at about 3:30 or so, we were up and getting ready for our early morning departure. I was tired but propelled by adrenaline and yeah, fear, as I took my 2nd surgical shower and packed up our bags one last time. We arrived at the hospital around 5-ish or so. It was so weird going and being put in the room in which we’d recover from the surgery.

No makeup allowed… thanks a lot.

They prepped me for the surgery, giving me my IV and my foley cath {so not fun}, before wheeling me out of the room to the O.R. Now that was a weird ride. I met the anesthesiologists that would be taking care of me, answered a few more questions, and soon Carl was given his fancy medical garb and I was taken into the O.R. without him. Instant shivering, thanks to my nerves and the fact that it was like an icebox in there. I was set up on the table and it didn’t take long for them to begin numbing me.

Actually, to be honest the only two things I can say were really uncomfortable had to be the cath insertion and the spinal insertion. It was so cold in there and I was shivering so badly that I couldn’t hold still and kept jumping whenever they hit a nerve. The nurse was encouraging and the anesthesiologist was good at what he did so no matter how many times they said, “Kristen, you have to keep still,” I was sufficiently numbed up and they quickly laid me down and hooked up my IV to different meds.

My doctor came in, her assisting doctor came in, and I puked.

Then Carl came in and my anesthesiologist said, “They’ve already made the first incision.” Really?! I mean I’m so glad I didn’t feel a thing but it was so weird to know that my belly was open already. Carl stood up and looked over the curtain… he pretty much watched the entire c-section. I complained that my chest was heavy and that my face was starting to tingle, but I was reassured that it was just the medicine moving down and it was all normal. I continually updated my anesthesiologist about how I was feeling, and every time I said I was uncomfortable, he’d do what he could to make me more comfortable.

The tugging was so weird when they were pulling her out, and at first we didn’t hear much from her as my doctor announced, “She’s still a girl!” They finally got her to cry {she’s not much of a crier still} and I couldn’t help but to burst into tears and silently thank God for my healthy girl and for seeing me through and giving me courage as I listened to her gurgling cries. Carl went to take pictures and I threw up again, which was just as not awesome as the first time. The pain medication in my IV made me terribly sleepy but I’ll never forget seeing my daughter for the first time!

I couldn’t stop crying after Carl carried our daughter to the nursery and they finished stapling me up. I just kept thinking how different this experience was and how thankful I was that she was healthy and here and that I was okay! Soon I was wheeled back to the recovery room. Clara joined us in the recovery room and we had sweet moments. The lactation consultant came in but Clara was tired and didn’t want to have any of that, so we did some skin to skin instead and I indulged in the moments that I was cheated out of with Benjamin’s birth.

… and I’ll continue this later because it’s getting late! But there’s the initial birth… next time I’ll tell you about Benjamin meeting his sister and how recovery has been going thus far!

little bitty girl,

tomorrow is your birthday.

i want you to know how much your daddy and i have anticipated this day. you will never know how much we love you and how many times we prayed for you. i feel like this time with you growing inside of my belly has gone by so fast and yet so slow at the same time. it’s been a difficult journey, but i know that no matter what, all of that will just melt away when i hear your first cries and see your sweet little face.

your big brother is so excited to meet you. he loves to talk about you to anyone who will listen and i can’t wait to see his face when he first sees yours. i wonder if you’ll look like him or if you’ll look completely different. i wonder what your personality will be like – will you be as energetic as you have been the past nine months? will you have a larger-than-life personality that will keep us on our toes? i have a feeling that your big brother is going to be your inspiration… i can just imagine you trying to do all the things that he does, and i can’t wait.

tomorrow is your birthday and although i'm scared of the major changes this will bring to our life as a little family, i am excited more than i can express.

bitty girl, we are so in love with you already. we can’t wait to meet you and hold you and show you just how much we love you.

happy birthday, bitty girl.

wordless wednesday: charleston, sc; 2009

eye update.

So today we woke up bright and early, again, to drive to the city, again, to have my eye looked at … again. This time, I was looked at by a retinal specialist who had a lot more experience and better equipment to be able to figure out what is going on with my left eye. The appointment really didn’t last too long, but at the same time it wasn’t very informative either because there is just no telling why my eye is the way it is right now.

Basically the only thing we really found out was that the leak is not  behind my retina, but in front of it. Which seemed like good news to us, although we really don’t know what that means either, ha! Anyway, I know you want to see awesome pictures of my eye so I won’t hold out any longer…

This is a look at the inside of my right eye, the one that is perfectly fine and clear. Nice and clean.

And this is a picture of my left eye. The big dark spot is the blood that is sitting in front of my retina, obstructing my vision. Quite a difference, right?

It isn’t painful, it’s just really annoying. We call it my dirty eye because it is basically like trying to look through really, really dirty glass, with a smudge of blood across it. It’s just terribly annoying. Even more so because we don’t know what has caused it. In fact, the doctor was like, “This is just puzzling! There is no reason that I can tell that  this should have happened!” and I just told him, “I have bad luck.”

Which is basically it. I mean, he was seriously baffled and had to leave the room to think for a while and came in a couple more times to talk to us and ask questions. But we all still left the room scratching our heads.

He wants to see me back after the baby is born. In fact, he wants to see me back next week. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not – it all depends on what my OB thinks and how my recovery is going. He wants to do a test where they will inject my arm with dye and then take pictures of my eye again.

Anyway, he did tell us that there is a possibility that it will reabsorb and there won’t be a problem, or that in the future we will have to have eye surgery to drain it. Hopefully that won’t be the case. Right now all we can really do is watch it, though.

So for now, it’s just a huge annoyance. There are a few things that are hard to do when you’ve only got use of one eye… like putting on makeup, cooking dinner, pouring tea {I poured tea ALL OVER the counter last night}, maneuvering {I hit Zoe in the face with the tea jug because she was on the wrong side of me}… and it’s easy to sneak up on me now.

But the good thing is I still have my right eye, so I’ll be able to take pictures of the baby when she comes. Never fear!

buckling.

I am so stressed out.

For a while I thought I was doing pretty well with my stress. My antidepressants have helped me keep a rational head on most of the time. I haven’t had nearly as many meltdowns as I thought I perhaps would. I haven’t been freaking out about my c-section and have actually been looking forward to it – not because I don’t think it’s a big deal but because I know it will be so much better for me physically and mentally than trying a normal birth again. I’ve been trying to have a good attitude about my eye problem that just popped up out of nowhere. I’ve done my very best to take all our car issues that we’ve had in the past few months in stride, as well as Benjamin’s new asthma diagnosis. I have been trying really hard to just trust in God to take care of us no matter what. I’ve leaned on Him and on our wonderful friends here and on my amazing husband and my loving family back in Georgia so much that I know if I tried to stop, I’d probably fall flat on my face. And I guess that isn’t a bad thing.

But I’ve gotten to the point where I just feel like there is too much going on right now. How much more of this can I handle? How much more will I be expected to handle? How am I supposed to be able to get through all of this, and care for a newborn, and recover from a c-section? What happens if my eye issue is a lot worse than we thought it was, or what if something goes wrong with the c-section, or what if something is wrong with baby C…

What if, what if, what if???

I know that a lot of my fears are unfounded. I know that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I struggle with high anxiety. I know I worry myself too much about little things or things that really have no reason to be worried over in the first place. I know that I have an amazing support system and God is heading it up.

I’m trying to adjust my sails in these storms. I’ve certainly not perfected this, but I’m trying. I know that it won’t be easy. I know that I haven’t shed the last of my tears. I know that I’m going to be sick with nerves tomorrow when we drive an hour to my retinal evaluation. I know I won’t be able to sleep Thursday night before my c-section. I know.

But I also know that God will always be there with me and for me, and that at least gives me a measure of confidence that likely wouldn’t be there if I didn’t know it or believe it.

I’m stressed out and I feel myself buckling under the weight from time to time, but I believe it.

too much excitement.

Is anyone missing a good dose of drama or excitement from their life? Because I’m pretty sure I got your extra helping and I’d like to return it. No, seriously. I know there are some of you who don’t follow me on Facebook, or who only get snippets of news off of Instagram, so I’ll fill you in on the latest…

So yesterday was pretty fun. We went to a birthday party for Benjamin’s friend, and had a great time. I was pretty tired by the time we got home, but I went ahead and hopped in the shower, which has became one of my nightly habits since it helps me relax at the end of the day. Anyway, it was a good day. I was happy to be able to relax at the end of the day, though.

{38 weeks! Happy, happy, happy!}

Well, toward the end of my shower, I started seeing floaters. Like, a lot of floaters. There have been some occasions where I have seen a couple floaters here and there, but this time, the floaters were everywhere and lasted a couple minutes. After they cleared up for the most part, I started feeling like I was about to black out. Thankfully, Carl was nearby and had me sit down and after a little bit, I decided I needed to lay down for a little while because my vision had become blurry.

I should note quickly that my PTSD has affected the way I see my own health, because a lot of the time when something is wrong with me, I’ll brush it off or ignore it because I don’t want to be a burden or inconvenience for someone else {mainly Carl}. I’m sure this is why I never woke him up for night feedings with Benjamin and why I refuse to go to the doctor unless I really need it. So while Carl was extremely concerned about me and asking what I thought we should do, I was brushing all of this off and saying my blood pressure was just a little off because of the warm shower.

I laid down for a couple of hours and nothing seemed to change, except that I could distinctly see a dark blob in my vision.

Changes in your vision in pregnancy is not something you ever want to take lightly. It’s never something that you should just brush off as nothing. This, paired with my suddenly fat ankles {complete with slight pitting} made us both fear that this could be pre-eclampsia. And pre-e, if you didn’t know, is not something you need to mess around with. Carl called in to Labor & Delivery and the doctor on call, not my doctor, said that she couldn’t really say unless I came in to be checked out.

So we packed up the car, complete with sleepy Benjamin, and drove an hour to the hospital. It didn’t take very long to be wheeled to L&D… and didn’t take very long for the RN to say that she didn’t think this had anything to do with pregnancy, but that she wanted me to go downstairs to the Emergency Room to get my eye looked at, since it was unilateral and not bilateral – only in my left eye was I having these problems.

I was irritated and tired and it was well past 1AM at this point but we went down and spent forever in the waiting room before finally getting taken back to the creepiest examination room in the world. Seriously it was really, really creepy. We stayed back there for a really, really long time and I had one very serious anxiety attack and had some cool washcloths to put on my neck and head. I just knew that something wasn’t right, and I was just freaking out. It was pretty scary. And nobody seemed to be coming to see me. Thankfully a nurse came in and brought Benjamin a pack of crackers and some apple juice, so he was content with that and watching TV.

Eventually the doctor came in – who was also 38 weeks pregnant although she looked like she was 4 months along at most – and asked a few questions… and then left us alone again. After a while, someone came and took me to an eye exam room and that’s when the show finally got on the road.

The doctor examined my eyes, dilating them some and numbing them before poking some weird little pressure gauge all over them, and then putting some neon dye in my eyes to see if there happened to be any scratches or anything. Nope. No scratches. She couldn’t make any conclusions so she went and called up one of the eye doctors, who was in church apparently, and who said that he would see us at 9AM at his office. That was pretty awesome, because obviously doctors’ offices aren’t open on Sundays and he was doing this for me!

I might mention, too, that this entire time we have been at the hospital, which was from like 1AM to 8:30AM, Benjamin had not slept at all. He’d been up and active and just as normal as could be, while Carl dozed off a few times and I attempted to doze to keep from freaking out. Benjamin is such a good boy… he was so awesome even if we had to get onto him a couple times. He was a real trooper! Proud of my boy for pulling his first all-nighter like a champ! ha!

{watching TV in the eye exam room while daddy took another cat nap and mommy waited for the doctor to come back in}

We left out and drove directly to the eye doctor’s, and as soon as he got there {um hello porche!} he took me back and started to examine my eyes. It look a little while for my eyes to dilate enough for him to see to the back of them, and I’m pretty sure he dilated them about 3x more than normal, but with the first glance, he told me it had nothing to do with retinitis pigmentosa. RP is an eye disease that runs in my family, which my mom has. I was afraid this was going to have something to do with my eye problems, so I was very relieved when he ruled that out. Also relieved when he said that my retina had not detached.

Finally he was able to determine that I had a fluid leak behind my retina, which wasn’t normally a big deal at all and would reabsorb and heal itself over a few months… however, the fluid behind my eye had a little bit of blood in it, which makes sense because the dark blob in my eye that I can see instead of … well, seeing, is red-tinted. It’s sooo weird to be able to see a leak of blood in the back of your eye, let me tell you! Anyway, that isn’t normal.

So I’m going to have to see a retina specialist to make sure that this isn’t something that’s going to require drainage and that nothing back there is damaged. Not excited for that, nor the bills we will have to pay because of all this, but some things I guess you just can’t control.

Long story short, I’m fine and the baby is fine, but my left eye is pretty much useless right now unless I want to look at a blob of eyeblood. Yuck. We are thankful that this problem isn’t something serious, except for being seriously inconvenient. Now baby C is not allowed to come any earlier than expected because I just can’t deal with any more surprise emergencies! ha!

Thanks everyone for keeping us in your prayers! This sure has been exciting but I really wish all the excitement would die down for a little bit, you know?