Alexander David Miller

Tuesday, March 22nd 2011

6:00 am

Sarah woke me up with a start, saying that she needed to go to the hospital. She was bleeding a lot, which is never a good sign. She was 33 weeks pregnant, and had high blood pressure from the start.
Sarah had seen the doctor the day before. Her blood pressure was 152/106. The doctor decided not to let her go to full term. He would start her on steroids, to help the baby's lungs finish developing, and deliver the first week of April. His due date was the first week of May.
She came home from her appointment with equipment for a urine test. The doctor would test her urine over 24 hours: if there were high levels of protein, that meant pre-eclampsia, and the baby would need to be delivered immediately. Unfortunately, he was still breach, which meant a normal delivery would be dangerous.
When I got home from work, Sarah was complaining of severe a abdominal cramps. She looked it up in her book, and I looked it up online. I read about the possible causes:

1. Pre-term labor
2. False labor
3. Abruption
4. Pre-eclampsia

You could tell the difference between false labor and real labor contractions by walking around for a few minutes. If the cramps go away, it's just false labor. So, after walking around the living room, the cramping subsided, and we were able to go to sleep. Throughout the night, however, the cramps continued. Sarah was up much of the night in pain.
At 6:00 am, she awoke to the feeling of the start of menstruation. She went to the bathroom, and discovered her bleeding. She called out to me several times before I finally woke. I grabbed some clothes and we rushed to the hospital.
We arrived at Lakeview Hospital at around 6:30. After spending several minutes checking in, we were finally escorted to Labor & Delivery by a nurse. She led us to a room right across from the OR, and finished Sarah's registration. At that time, her blood pressure was 159/115. They paged Dr. Ward, who happened to already be on his way in to work.
It took what felt like forever, but Dr. Ward came, took one look at the large egg-sized blood clot that she passed, and got her ready for an emergency c-section. It was an abruption. Because of her high blood pressure, the placenta was tearing away from the wall of the uterus. The anesthesiologist explained to me what was about to happen. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to safely perform a spinal block, so they had to use general anesthesia. I had to wait in the hospital room for news.
After about a half hour, a nurse came in and told me that the surgery went perfectly, but the baby was limp and unresponsive. It took them 2-3 minutes to resuscitate him, after which, he was wheeled off to be prepared for transfer to another hospital. When they removed the placenta, half of it was purple and dead. He was born at 7:41am on Tuesday, March 22nd 2011. He weighed 4 pounds even, but they didn't have time to measure his length.
Several minutes later, the nurses wheeled in Sarah, who was beginning to recover from the anesthesia and in a lot of pain. The Life Flight team brought the baby into Sarah's room before they brought him over to St. Mark's Hospital, in South Salt Lake. He was in a rather large infant incubator, all ready for his first trip. I stayed behind with Sarah for a few minutes more, and then left for St. Mark's.

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