Abigail Bryanne...our Miracle Baby!

Sunday, September 9th I woke up with a sore neck...figured I slept on it wrong and didn't think anything of it. Pain got worse, but me, being stubborn and not liking to complain just ignored it. Monday morning, September 10th the neck pain grew stronger. My neck was so sore...it was pounding on both sides and causing a headache...took a warm shower and just continued to deal with the pain figuring it would go away. I tried a heating pad...that did nothing...tried Tylenol (since that is all you can take while pregnant)...meds did not even touch it. SO...once Bryan got home from work I decided it was probably a good idea to check my blood pressure because I got extremely hot and the head and neck pains were just throbbing. We checked my blood pressure three or four times...all super high. (154/100). Not good! So, I called the doctor's office and they said to get to the hospital...and there the fun begins...

We dropped Bethanie off at Grandpa Glen's house not knowing what to expect...honestly I thought we would get to the hospital and they would put me on bed rest or something...no idea what was really going to happen.

We got to the hospital, got settled in and they started doing tests. Blood tests, urine tests, monitored my blood pressure (off the charts readings)...they gave me some strong meds that should have done something to help with the neck and head pains...but even their meds did NOTHING for me. This is when we knew something was really wrong. They sent in a high risk pregnancy specialist, Dr. Lynn. She talked to us and told us all of the concerns that she was having with my symptoms. Even though blood tests were coming back normal, my blood pressure was off the charts high, very scary. They put me on Magnesium to try to get my blood pressure down. This is when she diagnosed it all as Severe Pre-eclampsia. When we heard the words pre-eclampsia, we just figured they would put me on bed rest or do something to push forward with the pregnancy...nope. Being just a little over 32 weeks pregnant, we figured they would do all that they could to help my blood pressure go down and send me home. This was not the case. Blood pressure is a serious and dangerous thing. The specialist said that the best thing to do would be to deliver the baby asap so that nothing happened to me. Blood pressure issues could cause seizures or a stroke.

So, once we were told that we needed to get the baby out of course we were shocked! 32 weeks really scared us. The doctor assured us that this was the thing to do and then about an hour later we were scheduled for a c-section. Talk about a life changing event! We were scheduled to go into surgery at 9:15 pm...not much time for us to even think about things or to even realize that this was all not just a dream.

They got me into the room all prepped for the c-section and Abigail Bryanne joined our family at 9:48 pm Monday, September 10th. She weighed 3 pounds 1 ounce and was 15 1/2 inches long. She's TINY but doing great! She is a champ! She has been off and on of tiny amounts of oxygen, mostly breathing on her own and doing amazing. She has been starting to be fed through a feeding tube using some of the milk I was able to produce so far and our goals are to just get her strong so that she can go home with us sooner rather than later. She was born at 32 weeks and normally they like to keep pre-mature babies until at least 36 weeks, but we are hoping she will gain some weight and become strong much sooner than that. I cannot imagine having to leave the hospital without my beautiful teeny, tiny princess. We are in love and so happy to have such a sweet baby in our family. All of the nurses have already fallen in love with her too...she's a sweet and amazing child! :)

Pictures to come in another post :)