The Hardest Year of My Life Part 5

If you would like to start at the beginning of my story click here.

(My Second Near Death Experience)

Grace was born on May 26, 2006 at 9:39 in the evening.  She weighed a whopping 8 pounds 11 ounces and was 20 ½ inches long.  She wet right away after she was born.  This was a huge relief, because it showed that her kidneys were functioning.

The only complication I remember at the hospital was getting the shakes after she was born.  This had happened to me before, but not this severe.  I couldn’t control the trembling, and it wasn’t going away.  At first the nurses kept telling me it was normal, but when it didn’t quit they were growing uneasy too.  Finally they thought my body might be going into shock, so they inserted a drug in my IV that put me instantly to sleep.  However, they had to check me out of the birthing ward, so they kept trying to wake me up to answer a myriad of questions–crazy!

Before I left the hospital the doctors told me that they thought Grace had reflux in her kidneys.  In explanation, when this happens, when one voids instead of the bladder emptying out completely, some of the urine is sent back up into the kidneys.  The danger is that should she ever get an infection, it would be going right into her kidneys, and she could easily lose a kidney.  I was given an appointment to see a children’s urologist a couple of weeks after she was born to set up tests and a procedure to see if this was, in fact, her problem.

I got home from the hospital on Sunday, and my parents, who had come earlier to help me with the girls were there.  We enjoyed a relaxing Memorial Day. The men grilled homemade hamburgers, and of course we had to have watermelon.  We had fun taking pictures in our matching shirts with U.S. flags on them.  We developed the pictures right away, and as I was looking at them, I kept commenting about how swollen I still looked.  With my previous two pregnancies I gained a lot of water, but had lost most of it by the time I got home from the hospital.  This time, however, when I got home from the hospital I had only lost 10 pounds, which meant I was still gaining water.

Thursday my tongue started feeling tingly as if it was going numb, and I was experiencing horrible headaches that wouldn’t go away even with the prescription pain killer I was taking.  In the night when I got up to feed Grace, the left side of my face felt tingly.  I was also experiencing night sweats for the first time in my life.  Friday morning the left side of my face was going numb.  I called the doctor, and she had me go right in.

Click here to continue to Part 6.