My unexpected hospital stay

 

This past Friday was quite exciting for me – and I use that term loosely.  I hinted in my 24 week bumpdate that I was having issues with a possibly UTI.  All last weekend I felt like I had to pee constantly, even when I knew I didn’t.  It wasn’t painful really, it was just annoying.  However, I was having right flank pain all the way down my right side, but I had thought that I pulled a muscle lifting a 40lb bag of dog food last Friday.  Monday I went to the OB and they tested my urine and said it was fine and she checked me and baby boy was so low she couldn’t even get a good feel of my cervix without pushing him up out of the way.  So I figured that’s why I had to pee constantly because he was on my bladder.  After she pushed him up my constant feeling of having to pee went away, but my pain in my side didn’t.  She thought that was muscle related also.

Fast forward to Thursday evening – I had a listing appointment that I went to and felt fine, but when I got home, I immediately fell asleep on the couch and even though I was sitting on a heating pad trying to get my back to not hurt and covered up with a blanket and sitting right next to Mark, I was cold.  I started getting chills and I took my temp.  My mouth one said like 99.5 and my ear one said 101.8.  I didn’t really feel like I had a temp, I just had the chills.  I took 2 Tylenol PM’s and slept really well.

Friday morning I got up to pee around 7am and had the chills pretty badly again, so I took my temp.  Again, mouth one was around 99.3 and ear one was 102 and 103.8.  ??  I knew something wasn’t quite right but I was fairly certain I didn’t have a 103+ degree temp.  When I got up I got really flushed and felt my face get red and hot so I called my OB who said to get to the ER asap.  I wasn’t all that worried so I took my time packing a bag of things to keep me entertained since I figured going to the ER would take a least a few hours and gave my BIL a few instructions for Ben, since thankfully he was here to watch Ben for me.  I thought I’d be back in a few hours.  I hadn’t eaten breakfast so I stopped at Starbucks on my way to grab a hot chocolate and a croissant. 

I called Mark to let him know I was headed to the ER at my doctors orders and he said he’d meet me at the hospital in a little bit.  When I hung up with him my professional worrying got the best of me.  I started getting the thoughts about what if this is something serious?  I didn’t give Ben a big enough hug goodbye.  I didn’t tell my kids I loved them enough.  What if baby boy had to be delivered because it was something serious?  I’m a pro at worrying and it was no different on Friday.

I walk into the ER around 10am carrying my purse, bag of stuff to do and my hot cocoa.  I felt kind of ridiculous to be honest.  They checked me in and then took my temp (no temp) and blood pressure (normal), but my heart rate was up around 125bpm.  (My normal is between 80-100bpm.  Pregnant normal is under 110bpm.)  They checked my urine and it came back showing I did have some sort of UTI or kidney infection and I was also dehydrated.  (Not surprising since I’d only had a few sips of hot cocoa at this point.)  At this point, Mark was there with me and they said they needed to put in an IV, take some blood and give me a dose of strong antibiotics and fluids to help with dehydration.  Mark left around 1:30pm to get a pork shoulder at Costco (we were having 40 people over for dinner the next day) and pick Abbie up from school and shortly after he left, the nurse came in and said that my WBC’s (white blood cells) were high.  They were around 15.5 and the normal range was 5-10.  She told me my OB wanted to keep me overnight.  I was SHOCKED.  I seriously didn’t think it was anything that serious.  I thought they’d give me antibiotics to take home and I’d be on my way in a few hours – it wasn’t even on my radar to spend the night.  We had a babysitter lined up for 5pm that night and I had a massage scheduled for the next morning.  I tried to get them to let me go home, but my OB was pretty adamant that I had to stay.  Basically they explained to me that it I either had the beginning of a kidney infection or a blood infection, which can progress pretty quickly and reach the lungs or the baby and has been known to kill pregnant women and/or the baby.  Yikes.

So I called Mark to bring me a bag of stuff and settled in for the night.  It was kind of a weird experience.  I didn’t like being there by myself with my family at all home, but it was sort of relaxing to be able to sit in bed all day and watch TV and have them bring me whatever food I ordered.  My back started to hurt quite a bit and they gave me Percocet, which is a great drug!  That took care of the pain quickly.  My family came to visit me and it was nice to have them around for a bit.  Ben wanted to get up on the bed with me and play with his cars.  Abbie was a bit more hesitant and she had TONS of questions about my IV and the medicine and the baby, and if the baby was coming out and when I was coming home.  When it was time for them to leave, Abbie completely broke down, which absolutely broke my heart.  She cried a lot and I cried too.  Mark laughed at us and Alex (my BIL) chased after Ben who was heading down the hall already.  We were a mess.  Mark said it took Abbie a good 20 mins to finally calm down after they left.  She didn’t want to leave me in the hospital at all.  After that whole ordeal I was a bit more emotional.

I really wanted to take a shower and that turned into an ordeal because they didn’t put a heplock on the IV, so I had to be connected to the bag the whole time.  They taped a bag around my arm to try to keep it dry and protected and I tried to keep it out of the water as best I could.  Luckily my friend Alana showed up after I got out of the shower and she was able to help me get the bags from the IV through my clothes so the wires wouldn’t be going through my shirt.  Kind of a pain, but oh well.  And Alana brought me a flower and a bag of popcorn which was so sweet.  I cried when I saw the popcorn.  HAHA!  The flower was very nice too but she knows how I like popcorn and that meant a lot to me.

I got kinda bored that night, but I slept pretty well.  My IV started beeping at one point so I let the nurses know and got up to pee and asked for more Percocet and then slept until my OB woke me up around 8:30am.  They came and drew more blood around 9:45am to check my WBC’s.  Around noon they got the results and they were down around 11.8 so they were okay with giving me one more IV dose of antibiotics and sending me home.  I ordered lunch while we waited for the antibiotics to go in the IV and Mark came to help me carry all my junk to the car and we were out of the hospital by 1pm the next day.  Two days later my flank pain was completely gone.  Guess it wasn’t a pulled muscle after all…

I learned my lesson for sure with this whole ordeal.  Luckily it wasn’t all that serious, but it very easily could have been if I hadn’t gone to the ER then.  I never did have a fever, which is relatively common with kidney/blood infections, but I knew something wasn’t right.  I just didn’t have a clue that it would warrant an overnight stay in the hospital.

Oddly enough, it made me really excited to have my baby at that hospital.  Everyone was very nice and I was comfortable and well taken care of and the food was pretty good.  I wish his birth was a lot closer than 4 months away.  It also made me really want to get my BSN (nursing degree), but that’s a whole other blog post for another day.  Bottom line is I’m fine and baby is fine and next time I won’t be so cavalier about things like that!