Nights in the Nursery: A look back 6 months...

So you may have noticed I haven't written here is 6 months. Looking back I really wish I had continued writing, to put my feelings on paper (or computer).

My pregnancy was an emotional roller coaster from start to finish. Let me enlighten you with the highlights.

*I was very sick the first 16 weeks of my pregnancy. I threw up all the time and my life revolved around when and where I would be able to throw up. I hated it. I lost about 13lbs in the first 16 weeks all because of being sick.

*I had chronic Hypertension (aka High blood pressure) before I was pregnant and was on medications to lower it. I had to switch medications for the pregnancy because the ones before where not prego safe. This meant I had to check my blood pressure daily and that was frustrating with it going up and down.

*I was just starting to feel like a normal pregnant women and gained some weight and was even able to go off of my Blood pressure meds thanks to the weight loss from throwing up and the naturally healthier diet you eat while prego. Then more drama- I was diagnosed Gestational Diabetic. Not just your 'follow this diet and check your sugars every once in awhile diabetic'. This was the 'check your sugars 4+ times daily and self administer insulin 5 times daily'. UGH! This had to be the hardest part of the pregnancy. I was put on the diet and it was so hard. Not because there wasn't much to eat, but if I ate what they told me my blood sugars were still so high I couldn't eat that. I ended up almost starving myself in order to keep my blood sugars down, but that meant I started dumping ketones in my urine (normally a good thing if your loosing weight on a diet but when your pregnant this is bad, the ketones start building up in the baby's brain. NOT COOL). I struggled so much and they kept increasing my insulin. Eventually they were stable until the end of the pregnancy when in the last two weeks my blood sugar would BOTTOM OUT instead of being too high and this led to further issues. UGH!

*Due to the Chronic Hypertension and the Gestational Diabetes I had to have growth scans to check on the size of the baby. ( for reference CH moms tend to have small babies, GD moms have large babies. They didn't know where my kid would be). One Ultrasound showed my baby measuring small in the abdomen. That made me all worried that something ELSE was wrong. UGH! Again UGH!

*Then my doctor left. I cried and cried and cried. Keep in mind I work side by side with all the doctors since I'm their labor and delivery nurse, so I really knew which one I wanted. She Michele was awesome and she totally knew what I wanted out of this pregnancy and was such a HUGE support through everything. Then she transferred jobs at the beginning of July and the doctor I had to switch too wanted nothing to do with me really. He was just mad I didn't start with him from the beginning. I missed Michele through those last couple of apts. But we kept in touch via email and she even called me directly at home to ease my fears regarding blood sugar issues.

*I worked up till the Friday before my due date. I was due Sunday. Sunday July 29th I went into labor naturally- right on my due date. Contractions started to be noticable around 2pm. We left to the hospital with regular contractions at 530pm, got to the hospital at 6pm, and baby was born at 735pm. Very fast. I was suppose to have an Insulin drip for my diabetes and antibiotics because I was GBS+ (another complication of the pregnancy I forgot to mention) but we got none of that since I was going so fast.

*After the birth of my DAUGHTER Tayla Carmen (!!we didn't know the sex so it was so fun!!) I proceeded to have a postpartum hemorrhage. Meaning I was bleeding and bleeding bad. They had to give me 4 different medications to get the bleeding to stop. On top of that, normally with a bleed your Blood pressure goes down, but mine was going up and up. I was starting to make the doctor nervous for a seizure so I got blood pressure meds too and was tested for PreEclampsia. I ended up testing positive for that the next day so I was stuck monitoring my Blood pressure again very frequently.

*I left the hospital an emotional wreck. I think the whole pregnancy was finally crashing down on me emotionally and I could not stop crying those first few days. I ended up with severe PseudoEngorgement and could not breast feed. This only added to my emotional wreckage. I was a basket case and it took me almost 2 weeks to get over it. I think if I had continued this blog I would have had an outlet to let my emotions go during the pregnancy, instead I just bottled them up, determined to do everything perfect for my baby.

But now- I'm at home with my 5 week old daughter. And this could not be any better. I ended up loosing a total of 30lbs from the start of my pregnancy to my 4 week postpartum wt check. Most of my preprego clothes don't fit and I must say, thats a nice problem to have :).

Tayla is for the large majority a very good baby. She doesn't cry often and its easy to figure out what she wants. We really need to work on this whole sleeping at night thing. Once I go back to my 12 hr shifts its going to be rough. If things don't change before then I"m going to get about 3-4 hours of sleep before working 12 hrs. NOT COOL I say. I'm hoping to be able to keep up with this blog a bit more. Share cute Tayla stories.

So to a new beginning- Here is my beautiful daughter...