July 3, 2023
Resilience and Hope: Erika Fox's Journey Through Infertility and Parenthood
Imagine standing on the precipice of one of life's greatest adventures, only to find the path far more treacherous than you'd ever anticipated. That's the reality for our guest, Erika Fox, a dedicated OR nurse in a fertility center and one-time labor and delivery nurse. Erika’s journey through the maze of fertility treatments is a testament to the resilience and strength many couples display in their quest to start a family. From handling the whirlwind of tests, procedures, and surgeries to the emotional roller coaster ride that accompanied them, Erika's narrative is an eye-opener to the struggles many endure in silence.
Erika's tale doesn't end there. It takes us through the labyrinth of her IVF cycle and the ensuing pregnancy that led her across the country. Despite the retrieval of three healthy embryos, her body's response meant they had to be frozen. What followed was a pregnancy with unforeseen medical concerns, yet Erica remained motivated, even turning her experience into a contribution to medical research. Her labor, delivery, and postpartum experience embody the essence of determination and hope, navigating through the pain of a one-sided epidural, living far from family, and finding her village.
Finally, we shift gears and delve into the uncharted waters of emotional parenthood. We illuminate the often-overlooked perspective of fatherhood and the emotions that accompany the transition of the non-birthing parent. Listen as we unfold the importance of building a support system for new mothers, managing the anxiety linked with motherhood, and juggling the world with a baby onboard. Erika's story is a tribute to all parents who grapple with infertility and the highs and lows parenthood entails. Prepare for an episode that will tug at your heartstrings, challenge your understanding of fertility, and leave you with a newfound appreciation for the journey to parenthood.
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Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is intended as a safe space for women to share their birth experiences. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Each woman’s medical course of action is individual and may not appropriately transfer to another similar situation. Please speak to your medical provider before making any medical decisions. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that evidence based practice evolves as our knowledge of science improves. To the best of my ability I will attempt to present the most current ACOG and AWHONN recommendations at the time the podcast is recorded, but that may not necessarily reflect the best practices at the time the podcast is heard. Additionally, guests sharing their stories have the right to autonomy in their medical decisions, and may share their choice to go against current practice recommendations. I intend to hold space for people to share their decisions. I will attempt to share the current recommendations so that my audience is informed, but it is up to each individual to choose what is best for them.
Chapters
00:00 - Erica Fox's Fertility and Birth Journeys
10:05 - IVF Cycle and Pregnancy Journey
25:08 - Labor, Delivery, and Postpartum Experience
37:54 - Navigating Parenthood and Support Systems
46:01 - Challenges of Fatherhood and Podcasting
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hello, today I have with me Erica Fox.
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Erica is a mom and a former labor and delivery nurse.
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She is now working as an OR nurse in a fertility center And today she is going to share her fertility and birth journeys with us.
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Erica, welcome and thank you for joining me.
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Hi Kelly, thank you for having me.
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I'm so excited to hear this story.
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I haven't seen you in person for a while.
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I know, yeah, I miss all my East Coast friends and you all from the hospital And it's like, yes, I can visit with Kelly for a while.
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They're going to love hearing this.
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This is going to be a popular episode.
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I've enjoyed listening to everyone's stories, but it kind of has this little pang of oh my gosh, I miss everybody.
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Well, we, miss you too.
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Every time I hear somebody say push it real good, I think of Erica.
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Did.
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I'm happy with that Yeah.
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All right.
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Well, I'm going to let you go into your story.
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I am very excited to hear it.
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Thank you.
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Well, i can't tell my birth story without also telling the long, long story from trying to conceive.
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We did struggle with infertility for many years, something that we weren't expecting, of course, we were married for two years and that was kind of in our plan.
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Okay, we're going to start trying after two years, and I was 30 at the time.
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No one in our family experienced infertility, so there wasn't a huge reason to for us to worry.
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We thought it was a pretty straightforward path.
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So this went on for like six months and you start you're wondering and you think it's going to happen right away.
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And it wasn't.
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And I was dealing with a disappointment every month of getting that period.
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So it was like six months in and I did talk to my gynecologist about it and she looked into it, just like with an ultrasound.
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She said, well, i don't visually see anything.
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That's going on.
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That's wrong.
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We moved from Massachusetts to Virginia in 2017.
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And when we were living in Massachusetts, i was working night shift.
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Everything just felt off And I was like, well, maybe if I get off with night shift, i'll really focus on working a day shift job.
00:02:09.930 --> 00:02:13.544
So at least my circadian rhythm is normal, because maybe that's a factor.
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We didn't have any answers at that point, so I waited a while in Virginia for a day shift job to come about.
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You know how that can be, so let's see.
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In late 2017, we kind of got on board with some more testing And it seems like with infertility it's often focused on the woman partner.
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There's a heavy focus there on what's going on.
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So I had a test called a HSG, where they look at your fallopian tubes to make sure they're both open, and they found that one side was blocked.
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So then if you ovulate on one side one month and the other side one month, you're gonna maybe have to wait every other month to try to get pregnant right, better chance, because that's the side that A is gonna be on.
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So we had this information, didn't quite know what to do with it, just kept moving forward, nothing's happening.
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And then in 2018, they started looking into my husband's medical background and reproductive stuff.
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So I won't talk about his piece as much because I don't wanna talk about his medical history and all that and I don't think that's fair to him.
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But in infertility you have two pieces to a puzzle that have to come together And we both just had a little something where we could not get those pieces together and conceive.
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So the next step in that process was doing IUIs, which is intrauterine insemination.
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It's not super invasive I mean it's more invasive than conceiving in a traditional way But so you take some medication and they insert a catheter with the partner's sperm through your cervix and then you hope to get pregnant.
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We did three rounds of those.
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They were not consecutive months, but we didn't have a pregnancy from that.
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And then in 2019, my husband had a surgery and we thought that would help.
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So we continued trying and obviously nothing was happening.
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And then in late 2019, i had a procedure to look inside my uterus and check for polyps so that if we move forward with IVF, would we have a nice clear uterine lining.
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And they did find polyps And that was at the end of 2019.
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So I had a surgery scheduled to remove them in early 2020.
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And that was in February.
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So it's such a roller coaster.
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It's like you're constantly finding out a new thing that you have to overcome and deal with, and where's the light at the end of the tunnel.
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So had the surgery and was really excited about that because once that pathway was cleared we could start IVF.
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They told me I would just have to wait a month or so after surgery to be able to start.
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And IVF is, if you don't know, it involves a lot of stimulation for a lot of injection medications and taking medications by mouth and monitoring your cycle and hyper stimulating your ovaries so that instead of ovulating one egg, like you would every month, they try to get as many as they can.
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So then they combine your partner's sperm and the egg in a culture in the lab.
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So did the IVF work.
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So COVID Yay, so I had the surgery February 2020.
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In March 2020 called the clinic and said hey, am I still on the books here?
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And they're like, no, we're shutting everything down.
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No surprise there, we don't know when we're opening back up.
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So I kind of just had to call back all summer and they got us in in August And the first round of IVF.
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This whole process takes about like six weeks because you have to go by your menstrual cycle and you may be on birth control to suppress your cycle and have a more controlled start to everything for when they need you to ovulate.
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And then you start taking the injection medications and you stimulate your ovaries for 10 to 12 days.
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So it was doing all that driving to the clinic, getting monitored every day, every other day, where they do transvaginal ultrasounds and look at your follicles Super fun.
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I've had so many transvaginal ultrasounds that it's not even shocking anymore.
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You just get really used to the not so lovely parts of it.
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So with that cycle I got to the egg retrieval day, where your ovaries are Nice and juicy, you have those follicles all filled with fluid and your eggs should be in there And you go under light anesthesia.
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So you just get a short nap.
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They go in with another trans-saginal ultrasound with a needle attached to it and drain each follicle through a catheter and put those in tubes And that's where your eggs will be.
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So I think I got like 12th that first time.
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I think eight were mature and so you can only fertilize the mature eggs And ultimately we had three embryos and they were not growing very fast.
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So you have a little wait time.
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You know we had to wait the five days and at that point we were doing a fresh transfer and we got to transfer a day where they would put the embryo back into my uterus and found out that the embryo didn't grow very well It was kind of stuck on day four.
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So they transferred it anyway.
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And you do hear success stories from maybe slower growing embryos, but this was not a success story.
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So you put a lot of hope into it.
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You have the two week wait and then they called after my blood test and told me I was not pregnant.
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So it's very crushing to go through all of that and then not have a successful pregnancy.
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So we ended up having to do two more cycles with egg retrieval.
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The second time it was late January of 2021 when we had this cycle And it was the same thing.
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This time We had a few more embryos but nothing that was getting to that blastocyst stage that they want to see.
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And we got to transfer a day and they said only two embryos made it.
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They're not really good quality.
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We wouldn't freeze them.
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We had to make this decision on the day.
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We can transfer one embryo or two embryos, so they would just discard the other embryo.
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So I said you know, i don't, if I had to choose I wouldn't choose a multiple pregnancy because of the high risk.
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But we did choose to transfer the two embryos.
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Two week wait again, and that was another failed transfer.
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It did not result in pregnancy.
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So we did it a third time and that was in May.
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All along I was making a lot of changes.
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You kind of you want to grasp onto any piece of control that you can.
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So you're.
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You're making changes.
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I threw out all of our plastics.
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It was like a crazy person in our Tupperware drawer Like this might have chemicals in it, this might have chemicals in it.
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My, you know anything I put in my hair dry shampoo.
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throw that out.
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I threw out so many products.
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You know everything unscented.
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I wasn't wearing perfume, and this is all based on a book.
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It's it starts with the egg.
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That for for your egg health.
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We did a last round and we made a few changes before this third IVF cycle.
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And this cycle I had more follicles because they stimulated me a little bit more aggressively, just based on what happened in the past cycles, And we ended up with three embryos that were pretty healthy.
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They reached that blastocyst stage and then they grade the embryos and they were like a a, which is good, so that was really hopeful.
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The problem was with this last cycle my body kind of did something different and we could not do a fresh transfer, meaning we didn't just go in five days after the egg retrieval and transfer those embryos.
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They had to freeze them, otherwise it could have made me pretty sick with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome.
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My ovaries were really big, really swollen and my estrogen was really high.
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So it's a recipe for not having a lot of success with a fresh transfer.
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So that turned out to be really good because I could recover from the cycle.
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I could.
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I could just get back to feeling a little bit more normal before introducing those embryos for the for the transfer.
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So we did a frozen embryo transfer, but first we moved across the country.
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So we took two weeks to drive from Virginia to California, all the while I'm taking the medications for the frozen embryo transfer.
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So wait, how did you get the embryos to where you're going?
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I didn't.
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I flew back.
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So we moved us and our dogs across the country, closed on our house in early July And then a couple weeks later I flew back and I stayed with my in-laws and it takes like 10 days so that they can go in, monitor you and then do the frozen embryo transfer And had that they transferred one embryo and it went well.
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So success Yes, yay, viv has her arms up.
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She's stretching them up in victory.
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So I flew back to California and then did everything here, had kind of a hard time getting established with care out here because you don't have an OB until they won't see you until like 10 or 12 weeks at least at this new OB.
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So I had to find somewhere, someone that would do an ultrasound to get that first six week ultrasound and confirm everything, which is super exciting.
00:12:10.898 --> 00:12:14.744
So my pregnancy, first trimester it was.
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It was good, but I had a lot of nausea and pseudoversions really bad.
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I'm such an avid coffee drinker I like just a black kelo coffee in the mornings.
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The smell of it just sent me to the grain zone.
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There would be like one piece of paper in the trash can and I would be like David, do you smell that?
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That smells awful, we need to take the trash out And he's like there's nothing in the trash can.
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So just everything.
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I'm smelled everything, but otherwise it was really good.
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That first trimester.
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I did have to go to the ER at 18 weeks, which was really not fun.
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At one of my appointments I had a lot of like clear fluid come out and I told my nurse practitioner that and she said oh my goodness, the next time that happens you need to call us.
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So sure enough, it was like a week later And I was sitting on a chair at work starting an IV and I felt fluid go all the way through my scrub pants.
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And so I, you know, went to the bathroom, saw it was like clear fluid, no blood, no blood.
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And I called my OB and they said you need to go to this emergency room to make sure your water didn't break.
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And I'm like I'm pretty sure I just maybe peed myself a little.
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So I was worried, but my co-worker is kindly, put me on the OR table and brought out the ultrasound and they said well, before you get shipped off to the ER, let's just make you feel a little bit better.
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And so, sure enough, she was in there doing gymnastics.
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You could see fluid pockets around her And so that was reassuring.
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So I did go home and take a shower and then went to the ER and my water had not broken.
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So I went to the ER because I maybe peed myself.
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That's a fun story to tell, and you're not alone in that.
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Many people go to the ER.
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And one of my best friends.
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she was like you know, i had a lot of discharge too, so it's like it's just a thing that happens.
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That's probably it.
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I feel like, though.
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so with the girl pregnancy, i feel like that's more of the case.
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I always thought my water broke when I was pregnant with my daughter, so maybe it's estrogen.
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Yeah, that's a good point, i don't know All right.
00:14:33.066 --> 00:14:39.123
So then 20 weeks we have the anatomy scan And that's where things got a little bit interesting.
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I'm feeling better.
00:14:40.418 --> 00:14:43.793
At that point Everything was looking good with this.
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They diagnosed a filamentous cord insertion.
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You know that everyone in the hospital if you see a filamentous cord insertion you gather around and you look at the filamentous cord insertion, where that cord is supposed to be attached nice and securely from the fetus to the placenta, right in the center and in a nice juicy protected site.
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The filamentous cord insertion is a little bit more precariously placed And it's like the.
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The vessel is attached inside of the membranes So they don't seem as well protected.
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It can cause baby not to grow as well And you worry about those vessels possibly breaking.
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It was a lot to digest.
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So at the anatomy scan they also found that I had a short cervix.
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There was no funneling but the cervical length was just short.
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So they brought me in for, i think, four consecutive weeks to monitor my cervical length, make sure it wasn't getting shorter, and ultimately my cervical length didn't change too much, but it was just kind of a thing that was in the back of my mind.
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I did get carpal tunnel, kelly, i remember you having carpal tunnel, that with Owen.
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Oh yeah, i couldn't well with both, but I couldn't start IVs for like six months And even it was after I came back I still had numbness on my fingers.
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It was awful.
00:16:03.806 --> 00:16:06.351
Yeah, i remembered deferring a lot of IVs.
00:16:06.351 --> 00:16:07.914
My hands just aren't working.
00:16:07.914 --> 00:16:09.961
I feel like you're just going in blind.
00:16:09.961 --> 00:16:10.604
Yeah.
00:16:10.604 --> 00:16:13.001
You know I work with pregnant women.
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I knew pregnant women, i knew how uncomfortable they were.
00:16:16.659 --> 00:16:21.663
but you don't know how uncomfortable it is until you're there and you're just so uncomfortable.
00:16:21.835 --> 00:16:22.836
Yeah, especially.
00:16:22.836 --> 00:16:30.261
I mean neither one of us are huge people with huge illnesses, So like, where does that baby fit Exactly.
00:16:31.075 --> 00:16:38.230
And I think just walking up the hill or getting out of bed my husband would say are you okay, just breathing heavy?
00:16:38.230 --> 00:16:42.562
I'm okay, no distress, just breathing real heavy right now.
00:16:42.562 --> 00:16:50.926
And then let's see, around 37 weeks I got itchy palms at night.
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There were a couple nights in a row where I was just up scratching, scratching my palms And I knew I had to call my OB and let them know that this might be cholestasis.
00:17:01.966 --> 00:17:06.084
So they brought me in for labs.
00:17:06.084 --> 00:17:12.844
They checked liver function and bile acids And those results didn't come back for a week.
00:17:12.844 --> 00:17:15.055
So I was at a regular OB appointment.
00:17:15.055 --> 00:17:16.922
It was on a Monday in April.
00:17:16.922 --> 00:17:27.924
I was 38 weeks and five days And my provider looked over the results And I would look at them because I got them back a little bit sooner.
00:17:27.924 --> 00:17:28.997
So I peaked at them.
00:17:28.997 --> 00:17:38.423
Liver function was fine and bile acids were just like barely barely elevated, so I wasn't super concerned.
00:17:38.423 --> 00:17:42.286
But he said you know we're going to bring you in for an induction tonight.
00:17:42.536 --> 00:17:46.540
I said well, but my bile acids, they're so low And he said well, that was a week ago.
00:17:47.016 --> 00:17:48.160
Oh, that makes perfect sense.
00:17:48.160 --> 00:18:03.767
Okay, so I had an induction of labor for cholestasis And he did check my cervix at that appointment And I think it was two to three that morning, so not too shabby, and I felt like I was contracting every two to three minutes on my way to the appointment.
00:18:03.767 --> 00:18:20.076
I was kind of timing them and they weren't super painful, but there was a regular counter in there And when we, my husband just happened to be off that day, which was really good, so we could clean the house, get the dogs walk, to get everything ready and have an evening induction.
00:18:20.076 --> 00:18:25.006
And he said well, do you want to go home and take a nap and rest?
00:18:25.006 --> 00:18:32.344
And I said, heck, no, let's go walk the dogs, let's clean the house, let's keep this thing rolling, because I feel some contractions.
00:18:32.344 --> 00:18:36.506
I could help myself out here by just keeping the ball rolling.
00:18:36.506 --> 00:18:39.654
So we went in at eight o'clock that evening.
00:18:39.654 --> 00:18:41.101
Yeah, it was an eight o'clock induction.
00:18:41.101 --> 00:18:45.645
You have to actually call and make sure they can still take you.
00:18:46.154 --> 00:18:47.625
Even though you were a medical induction.
00:18:47.645 --> 00:18:59.983
Yeah, Yeah, you can do that, i can't, which is kind of nice for the hospital, for the hospital And I thought the plan was to insert a servidil and I thought it might be kind of a long process.
00:18:59.983 --> 00:19:01.240
We had our banks packed.
00:19:01.240 --> 00:19:03.340
I told my husband, like, bring your computer.
00:19:03.340 --> 00:19:08.484
We might be pretty bored really until things get moving.
00:19:08.484 --> 00:19:10.381
So we arrived at 8.
00:19:10.381 --> 00:19:16.067
I had my IV in everything done and ptosis started at 9.
00:19:16.067 --> 00:19:20.839
So I thought I thought we were going the servidil route, thought I had some time here.
00:19:20.839 --> 00:19:22.200
But he did check me again.
00:19:22.200 --> 00:19:25.404
He said you're 390 and minus 2.
00:19:25.755 --> 00:19:26.759
We're going ptosin.
00:19:26.759 --> 00:19:31.066
Ok, i wasn't mentally there, you know, but I was.
00:19:31.066 --> 00:19:36.463
I was showing every two to three minutes on the monitor, so I had some good uterine activity to work with.
00:19:36.463 --> 00:19:39.064
And this is where my timeline gets.
00:19:39.064 --> 00:19:47.045
I thought I would remember everything, like clearly, vividly, time everything, but it just kind of goes all over the place for me.
00:19:47.836 --> 00:19:48.961
So she started pit.
00:19:48.961 --> 00:19:58.203
I was also GBS positive And I had a penicillin allergy listed in my chart, which I don't think is real, but I never got tested.
00:19:58.203 --> 00:19:59.539
I wish I would have, though.
00:19:59.539 --> 00:20:01.361
So they gave me thencomycin.
00:20:01.361 --> 00:20:07.584
They started that shortly after the ptosin, and I just remember feeling like my scalp was on fire.
00:20:07.584 --> 00:20:10.842
I was itching, scrunching.
00:20:10.842 --> 00:20:26.144
Yeah, they give you a high dose for the first loading dose of vancomycin And then you get it again, and then another eight hours, so I just felt miserable, and then, once they shut it off, it was better, and then I was just trying to focus on.
00:20:26.144 --> 00:20:30.661
I wasn't in a ton of pain, but I was feeling stuff, trying to move around the room.
00:20:30.661 --> 00:20:38.544
I got up to the bathroom like 8 million times just because that felt better, and it was around 1 AM.
00:20:38.544 --> 00:20:40.221
I was getting uncomfortable.
00:20:40.375 --> 00:20:54.106
So, about four hours on the ptosin, and the doctor came in to check me And I wasn't able to sleep or really be still, and I told my OB I would really like to get an epidural.
00:20:54.106 --> 00:20:55.279
Probably break my water.
00:20:55.279 --> 00:20:57.501
Next, i want to get an epidural before you do that.
00:20:57.501 --> 00:21:00.825
So he checks me and my water breaks.
00:21:00.825 --> 00:21:07.801
So it was a pretty intense exam, and then my water broke at that point And then it just all hit the fan.
00:21:07.801 --> 00:21:11.825
I mean clear fluid, thankfully, but just so much pain.
00:21:11.825 --> 00:21:19.724
It was like just in a wave over me And I know that's how mama sounded.
00:21:19.724 --> 00:21:27.164
So I did ask for the epidural, like, bring that epidural in right away, please, i need it.
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