Well, we have been out of the hospital for a couple of weeks now, and Q's bilirubin levels FINALLY seem to be decreasing on their own (slowly but surely). She wakes up looking a little yellow in the morning sometimes, but with a lot of sunshine and feedings, she is almost always back to normal-baby-color by the nighttime. Soon jaundice will be nothing but a distant memory!
Speaking of memories, now that I have all this free time to catch dozens of daily spit ups and the occasional explosive poop, I've had time to reflect a little bit on Q's birth story and thought I should write about it. My friend Candace visited for the first time the other day (one of the few visitors we've allowed so far), and she was expressing her surprise at how every aspect of the pregnancy, delivery, and newborn stage had gone awry. And it's true, I realized! I would say that everything went badly! But as any new parent can attest, they probably could've stuck a skewer through my right arm and forced me to listen to an endless loop of Justin Bieber hits, and it all would've been worth it.
To not-so-briefly recap the pregnancy, its main feature was unending, multiple-trimester nausea. In the first trimester, I lost close to 15 pounds (luckily, I had pounds to spare) and was ultimately put on a heavy duty anti-nausea medicine that they use for chemo patients. I was assured that it was the anti-nausea mothership, but it was also VERY expensive (on the full dose, close to $1,000 per month before insurance). Luckily, we had insurance, and I only needed the full dose for a month or so. The nausea meds greatly reduced my discomfort, though by no means did they eradicate the nausea completely. I also had a huge amount of swelling in my feet from about 19 weeks onward. I had "pitted edema," which meant that Steven spent many-a-night poking my foot with his finger so that he could see the indent. It also meant that by the end of my pregnancy, the ONLY thing that fit me was flip-flops, and there was snow on the ground. In the week following Q's delivery, my feet actually swelled up even more until my flip flops no longer fit.
Meanwhile, my diabetes kicked into high gear, and my insulin needs spiked incredibly (I was on up to 5x my original dose). The nausea complicated this, because if you take your insulin for the food you eat and then throw it up, you're in trouble. I had a few times where I was sitting in the living room trying to make myself throw up so that I could go ahead and treat a low blood sugar with some juice. Throughout the pregnancy, I had many, many ultrasounds, including an ECHO ultrasound in Calgary to check for heart defects. They didn't find anything that alarmed them, besides the baby's size, which consistently measured about 3 weeks ahead of her gestational age/in the 95th percentile. There were occasionally indications of increased amniotic fluid, which can be a side effect of the diabetes, but that seemed to wax and wane somewhat. All we knew for sure was that she was a big girl. Toward the end of the last trimester, I just felt absolutely ill all the time. I wasn't necessarily throwing up or even feeling "nauseous" persay. I just felt... ILL. That's the only way I can describe it. I was prescribed a medication for heartburn on top of the nausea meds.
Around 34 (?) weeks, I began getting unexplained low blood sugars in the middle of the night and stopped being able to feel them. This is a dangerous condition (for me--the worry being that eventually you might not feel the lows at all and never wake up) that landed me in the hospital for a number of days. My insulin was reduced and I was told to keep my blood sugars higher than normal (which terrified me, after the doctors having drilled into me so constantly for the past 8 months how vital it was to keep blood sugars in a very tight range). I was able to greatly reduce my lows, but between feeling ill, nausea, ridiculously high insulin needs, and an inability to feel low blood sugars, I asked my doctor if she would consider inducing me a week earlier than planned (most type 1 diabetics are induced before 40 weeks due to their placenta degrading faster and an increased risk of stillbirth). So in the middle of my 37th week, we began the induction process...
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