I realize that this is old news to most of you, but I was looking through my blog posts and realized that I never really explained what happened to me after Ryan was born and how I ended up back in the hospital. So for the sake of posterity:
Just to recap the main events – Mom came about a week before Ryan was born, we moved across the border to stay in a friend's house to avoid the increasingly difficult border problems. Ryan was born on May 21st. We stayed about 6 days in the hospital and then came home. About 5/6 days after coming home I started to get rather sick and after four days of fever, I went to the ER at our hospital that is across the border on June 8th. That started a 10-day stay in the hospital. Mom and Ryan were with me there while Tom and Layla stayed in Buraimi. There is no way we would have made it during this time without my mom! While we had quite a community of friends here before, there is such high turnover of foreigners here that we really didn't have friends to help during this time. We felt pretty isolated.
It took the doctors about 3 days to sort out what the problem was, initially they thought a uterine infection, then they thought it was just typical fluid building up after a surgery and then after two ultrasounds they figured out that it was an abscess under the C section incision. The head surgeon said he has never seen this sort of thing before even though he had been a surgical specialist for the ObGyn dept of a previous hospital. The abscess had made its way down through all the layers of the C section and even broke through the abdominal wall. It did NOT break through the peritoneal (?) sack around the intestines. This is a huge blessing because it would have been a MUCH more difficult surgery and I would have been much sicker. It does mean I have a weaker abdominal wall with some minor things to watch out for like a hernia and some concern about a third pregnancy.
The hospital is very comfortable as we’ve mentioned before. They don’t provide food as the locals prefer to have family cook for them, but consequently, there are small kitchens attached to each room and we had a mejulis/empty sitting room for mom to sleep in just like when both kids were born. It seemed a lot of room at first, but after 10 days we were grateful for the space! So we watched a lot of the World Cup intro stuff, a lot of BBC and actually got a LOT of sleep (= We’d feed Ryan and then put him to sleep and then we’d go to sleep as well.
They did the surgery on June 10th in the evening and I had general anesthesia. I had two surgeons and my ObGyn present. I was grateful they decided to do it that way instead of just putting in a drain. The abscess turned out to be much larger than they anticipated and the full surgery allowed them to really clean things out. I started to feel better immediately and was SO grateful for that. I was getting really tired of feeling sick! My only complaint after that was the IVs I had to have for the three antibiotics! They were giving me SO much stuff because they weren’t sure what to treat me for at first. After a couple of days I stopped breastfeeding Ryan in case if there was something being passed on to him. Once the surgeon heard that, he actually switched all my antibiotics to one they knew was safe for babies. I really appreciated that. When the nurse started to poke around again to restart the IV for the 6th time I just broke down crying because it hurt SO bad. I just begged for oral antibiotics and asked her to tell the dr I just couldn’t handle the IV for tonight. He approved the switch to oral antibiotics and I was SO grateful!
So the wound is still open – they want it to close on its own slowly as it drains. Poor Tom is having to clean it and put gauze on the inside! (they want to keep it clean and open to check for the drainage.) I am told that if it hasn’t closed in two weeks, I should go back to the dr. Doesn’t that sound crazy!? A few days ago we had our one-month check up appointments and I saw the surgeon again and he said everything looked great. What makes absolutely no sense to me is that this incision is right where the C-section incision was and I have no pain with this one. I can sit up, turn over in bed etc etc with no pain other than not have stomach muscles due to the pregnancy/C-section. How is it that two incisions in the same place can produce such different results??
At the one month appointment for me, I asked my obGyn why they did the C-section. Typical to the culture here, the reason for what was happening was not really explained to us. The midwife had said one thing, the dr on call at that time said another thing and Vic (my midwife friend) was thinking a third thing. Essentially, the risk of a uterine rupture is what caused them to rush to the C-section. I was very grateful to have such a good doctor on hand for the C section.
Watching my body heal has been a great reminder of how the Lord created our bodies in such an amazing way. As of the beginning of August, I am fully healed and about ready to start thinking about exercising! Yippee!
No comments:
Post a Comment