mad mad mummy

Well this week is pre-eclamsia awareness week, so I thought that I would share my pre-eclampsia experience with you. This has also been published on Moment by Moment, which is a fantastic resource for any premmie parent. 

Charley was a surprise package that became apparent weeks after my now husband and I got engaged. Needless to say, once we found out I was pregnant, the wedding was on 6 weeks later and another four weeks after that we had moved from our swish executive apartment in North Sydney to a townhouse in suburban Menai.  

From the minute I found out I was pregnant, I was tired. Sometimes even getting out of bed felt like an effort. I would go and sleep in my car during my lunchbreaks and sometimes would drop into a microsleep at my desk. But I just put it down to so much going on.  

I began retaining fluid early in my pregnancy, but when I was 20 weeks, my ankles blew up to enormous proportions. It was to the point where I couldn’t wear anything other than thongs. But I just thought it was normal – hey I was pregnant. Being 23 and pretty healthy, I was receiving care through the midwives clinic at RNSH, which was close to where I used to live in North Sydney. I had an appointment a couple of days before my feet blew up, and although the midwife noted a slightly elevated blood pressure, no big deal was made of it.  

By the time I attended my next appointment, the amount of fluid I was retaining and my blood pressure worried the midwife and I had to come back the next day so they could monitor my blood pressure over the course of the day. Within an hour of the testing, I had been diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia, admitted to hospital and told that I would be having my baby within a week. I was 28 weeks pregnant. 

That week felt like the longest week of my life. The sicker I got, the more and more I wanted to have the baby, which sickens me when I look back on it now. The way I handled the whole thing was to deny the risks so that they didn’t do my head in too much. 

Pretty much exactly a week later at 11pm I was too sick to go on and was taken upstairs to have a c-section. I was pretty delirious at this point so don’t remember much of it, only that they showed her to me just after she was born and I touched her face before they took her to the NICU. When they wheeled my bed in to see her, the humidy crib was lower than the bed and I couldn’t move, so I couldn’t see her very well.  

Surprisingly enough for the next couple of days I was really upbeat. I was a proud new mum despite the fact that Charley was holding on to life by a thin thread. It was my way of dealing with it. She came off CPAP after a week and was moved into HD after two weeks.   

The most frustrating thing I found about being in the NICU was not being able to look after my baby the way I wanted to. I had nurses telling me when I could bath and touch my baby and when I could breastfeed or not. I was desperate to breastfeed and was devastated when it turned out to be so hard. And since we had moved to the burbs it took us 1.5 hours to get there and back each day, so we were exhausted.  

All up we spent about three months in the NICU, and brought Charley home weighing 1.9 kilos. While she did have some problems with her lungs which saw us in and out of hospital for the first year, but otherwise she is perfect. She is nearly 3 years old now and if anything has exceeded her milestones. Apart from her little size, you would never know she was a premmie. But I will never forget.