The Hospital, The Blood-Pressure, & The Baby

Hello Ladies and Gents,

Richard here. I’ve got some un-happy news to share about our pregnancy. We were admitted to the hospital this morning.

If you’ve been following our pregnancy or know us well at all, then you know that Karen and I were really looking forward to a totally natural pregnancy, labor, and delivery. For the first 30 weeks or so, that’s exactly what we got.

However, a few weeks back our Mid-Wife started to notice that Karen’s blood-pressure was rising steadily each week. That’s not good. So she had us change Karen’s diet. This didn’t have any affect, so we tried diet and activity changes and still had no luck.

So last week our Mid-Wife, Val, told us that we had officially passed from having a normal pregnancy into a High-Risk pregnancy and that we need to be seeing a doctor. So that’s what we’ve done.

Yesterday, we went to see out Nurse Practitioner and she ran Karen’s vitals and had us go to the hosital to get some blood work and urine tests done. That means we spent four hours having Kay’s blood-pressure monitored, the baby’s heart-rate monitored, and Karen’s blood tested. Too much fun.

Anyway, the doctors found that being on bed rest reduced her blood-pressure and that her urine tests showed elevated Protien levels and signs of a mild bladder infection. So they sent us home to do a 24 hour urine collection, spend the evening on bed-rest, and pick up some anti-biotics for the infection.

That all went well, with one exception… The doctors prescribed Karen an Anti-Biotic that would have been poisonous to our baby and the only way we caught that was because Karen read all of the documentation before taking it. How inspiring is that for having confidence in our medical staff. We’re already wishing we could have a natural pregnancy again. I guess we’ll survive though, we’ll just question everything they do. So we called to pharmacy and had the prescription changed to something safe for both baby and mommy and went about collecting urine and staying on bed-rest (btw- Karen sucks at bed-rest, she’s much too active of a woman).

Then, this morning we wen’t back to the hospital to turn in our jug of pee and get some more tests done. Well, a few hours pass and the doctor comes in. Karen is in the mild stages of Preeclampsia, which is basically and advanced form of gestational hyper-tension or high-blood pressure. Sadly this can be extremely dangerous for mom. It can cause kidney and liver failure or even strokes. However, it’s not really harmful for the baby, so that’s good. So, the doctor has decided that Karen needs to be in the hospital for 24 hour monitoring and bed-rest.

They will be trying some blood-pressure oral meds and watching her until tomorrow. If all goes well, we get to go home with blood-pressure meds and bed-rest. If it doesn’t go well, then Karen will be in the hospital under constant supervision for the next 6 weeks, until the baby is born. That would suck… please pray, we don’t need that.

There is some good-news in all of this. First, Karen and the baby are currently completely fine. There are no problems other than the high-blood pressure. We are only in the hospital to make sure that nothing worse happens. So, please don’t worry.  Second, as an added benefit of all the testing we got some really cool ulta-sound pictures of our baby. I figured we’s share those with you.

Here they are:

Keep us in your prayers. Thanks!