21 + 5
10/10/24
After three days home from the hospital I had been to the doctors three times. I had three different appointments on Friday, and three more appointments on the following Monday. I had been continuously leaking and throughout the week it began to increase. On Thursday the 10th I was beginning to get nervous about the loss of fluid. I only had 5cm and I had no idea how much I was leaking vs. how much was being created and retained. My mom was taking me to all of my appointments and other than going to see my doctors I was mostly sitting in bed or on the couch, so I couldn’t do much else to rest. I had gotten home from the hospital on Monday, and by Thursday afternoon I was heading back to emergency.
Before leaving the house I packed a couple bags, grabbed my pillows and some of my electronics, and prepared to be admitted. This was not what I had wanted, but over the past few days I began to get more nervous about something happening while I was home. We were still two days away from viability but we were getting closer every hour and I wanted our baby to have there best chance if they decided to come in the next few days. My plan was that if my fluid had not gone down at all then I would be ok going home and continuing to monitor at home, but when I got to the hospital and completed our ultrasound and NST I just did not feel comfortable being back home and having to leave every day for different monitoring appointments.
While waiting in triage one of the attendings from our high risk team came in and very subjectively asked me how I was feeling. Anthony and I had decided that being in the hospital for months was not going to be good for me in any way, so we wanted to avoid that if possible. So I explained that I would really rather be home, if this can be safely managed from home I would prefer that, however, I wanted to do what was best for baby. I had explained that I assumed I would end up in the hospital eventually because the stress of worrying at home would outweigh the inconvenience of being in the hospital, I just didn’t think this would happen for a few more weeks. The doctor told me that he and his team had actually called a meeting that morning about me because they were concerned about our plan to monitor from home. He said that everyone is given the choice to do what is best for them and their families obviously, but it is very difficult for the doctors to manage these situations when patients are out of the hospital. He reiterated the risk of prolapse (with less fluid the umbilical cord and come out and this would suffocate the baby, so seconds matter when this happens) and the small chance of survival if that were to happen while not at the hospital. He also reiterated that at the hospital we have access to our full teams and specialists and everyone would come to me which would make the bed rest a much more feasible solution. He listed a few other pros and understood the cons and let me feel out what I was thinking.
I think that subconsciously I knew that I needed to be at the hospital. The stress I was feeling over the past 72 hours was making me sick and I was beginning to think that the pros of being in the hospital were already outweighing the pros of monitoring from home. So I made the tough decision to stay. The goal would be to try to get baby to 25 weeks at minimum, our next goal would be 28 weeks, and our ultimate goal would be to try to keep baby in until 32 weeks. I knew this could be a very long stay, and I cried and hated the idea. Anthony was very supportive of my choice and my final decision was based on the fact that we had been told by every single doctor that I should be in the hospital, and if anything happened to this baby because I thought I was better off at home, I would never forgive myself. So I was officially admitted for what would be the remainder of my pregnancy, however long that was going to be.
