July 20th
The morning of the 20th, I was taken back for my final ex lap and abdominal washout. They were able to close completely.
At 9pm that evening, they decided they wanted to try to take the ventilator out. I was brought out of sedation and immediately terrified. I tried to pull the tube. I started to hyperventilate. They said they needed me to calmly breathe over the vent for 40 minutes before they would pull it. Imagine waking up in the CTICU with a tube down your throat and remembering nothing except for being at the end of your pregnancy. It wasn’t looking like I was going to stay calm enough for them to take it out. Then my best friend decided that this needed to happen tonight. I needed to get off this vent. She came to my bedside put her hand on my forehead, while holding my other hand and spoke softly to me. Every time she tried to take her hand off my head, I hyperventilated. She stood there, after barely sleeping for 3 nights and willed me off that ventilator. I was taken off the vent that night and switched over to nasal oxygen. It took me a while to catch my breath and I needed lots of oxygen plus some steroid treatments to help open my airways. Now that the vent was out, I didn’t need to be kept as sedated, but that meant I was more aware of what was going on around me and as a result, absolutely terrified.
July 21st
I held my son for the first time while conscious. I unfortunately don’t remember this, but we have a video. I asked if he looked like a fish and whether or not he was a mutant, like X-Men. I had a weird obsession with water and asked my mom if she remembered when we were in the water together and how weird that was. I then began to question what had happened to me. My family decided to tell me it was a c-section, until they could come with a better plan of how to tell me what actually happened. One of my favorite stories from this time is when I would look around and ask Steve if everything was okay. He would, of course, say yes and I would look around and ask “are you sure, seems pretty fucked up.”
July 22nd
This was the day I finally found out what happened to me. My family couldn’t decide who would tell me and what they would include. No one felt qualified to explain what happened, but they also didn’t feel like they had a choice. As they were discussing it, my OBGYN and anesthesiologist from Paoli showed up to visit me. My OBGYN offered to explain what happened to me. This is actually my first memory. I remember she was at my bedside holding my hand to the right of my head and my anesthesiologist was on my left side, down near my hip, holding my hand. I remember her telling me that I had an AFE. I remember mostly holding it together and nodding thinking it finally made sense given where I was and all of my tubes and lines. Then, she told me I needed a hysterectomy, and I started to cry. She was so patient with explaining everything I wanted to know. After they left, I rested for a while and then started to ask my family a million questions. Later that day I was finally able to drink fluids. Unfortunately, I went a little crazy with the drinking because of my dry mouth and threw up massive amounts that night. I proceeded to tell everyone that it was the most traumatic thing I’d been through. To which they rolled their eyes and reminded me of my son’s birth, 5 days prior.
