The Recovery, The Scariest Day of My Life, The Surgery

After the delivery, I felt completely exhausted. Jeff said that I looked like death and I attributed my tiredness to the lack of sleep and the work of labor and pushing. Then when I tried to stand after the epidural was taken out, I almost fell over because my legs just didn’t have enough energy to support myself. Come to find out the next day my blood level (hemoglobin) was 6.0 (the normal is 13-15.5) and I had lost over half of my blood in the birthing and recovery process! A patient typically will get a blood transfusion with a level of 7.0. I received 3 units of blood and felt like a brand new person. It was amazing how much of a difference that made! People always ask if it is normal to need blood replacement after having a child. I would say it occurs in about 0.1% of patients, so it is pretty rare.

Mostly everyone I have seen since having the baby asked how I was doing. First off, delivering an eight pound baby out of my body certainly did its damage and I don’t think I will ever be the same. Add on a broken tailbone and I felt like I couldn’t sit for weeks, maybe even a couple of months. But he’s worth it!

One week after delivery, I experienced one of the scariest days of my life. It was Jeff’s first day back at work and my first day alone as a new mother. As I was preparing to go for a walk (to the mailbox) outside for the first time after having our baby, I started gushing bright red blood. At first I blew it off, thinking that it was just lochia and normal post-partum bleeding, but then it started running down my legs. I rushed to the bathroom and I was bleeding and afraid. Being in the medical field can be advantageous because you know what it is, but at the same time you also know the treatment and worst-case scenario. So there I am, sitting on the toilet, thinking “I’m not ready for a hysterectomy yet!” (which is what they would do if they couldn’t stop the bleeding) and my newborn baby is crying and hungry but I can’t get to him because I’m bleeding like crazy. I called my mom who was thankfully able to answer the phone and she came from Lincoln to come pick me up and take me to Lincoln. My mom and I argued in the car about whether or not to go to the ER. [As someone who works in the ER, I know that it is a long process to first get registered, wait for a patient room, have the ER provider see you, then wait for the OB to come to the ER to see me.] I called my OB and he got me into ultrasound right when I walked in and got me set up for urgent surgery about an hour later.

The diagnosis? Retained placenta. After you deliver your baby, you enter what is called the third stage of labor which is delivery of the placenta. The placenta is essentially a pillow of tissue that provides nutrients to the baby and weighs about 1-2 pounds. Typically the delivery of a placenta involves gentle traction on the umbilical cord and the placenta comes out easily. The OB then checks the placenta to make sure there aren’t any chunks missing. Well, sometimes it is hard to tell if some of the placenta is missing from the delivered portion and there is a piece of placenta still in the uterus. This leads to severe postpartum cramping (the uterus is trying to push it out) and a lot of bleeding (because the placenta has a lot of blood vessels).

The treatment? Dilation and Curettage/Evacuation (known in the medical field as a D&C). This is a surgery where the patient is put under general anesthesia and the OB accesses the uterus vaginally to scrape out the retained contents. This is the treatment for retained placenta and is unfortunately also the same procedure they perform for abortions.

Everything went smoothly and recovery went well. I had a lot of anxiety (less about the procedure, more about who would be with my week-old baby and how would he eat without me since I didn’t want to introduce a bottle so early), but we got through it. I didn’t have a lot of fun taking medication which induced uterine cramping for the following week, but my bleeding slowed and improved. And if I had to choose, I would choose this any day over having a baby with health problems.

I am grateful to the Lord for allowing me to recover my health and keep my uterus, to my mother for reminding me to pray when I was frantic and crying while sitting there alone, to my mother-in-law who drove and stayed with me the night of my surgery to help me recover, to my father and husband who gave me a Priesthood blessing before the surgery, to my obstetrician who was there when I needed him, to my friends and ward family in Omaha who offered help even if it would inconvenience them to drive so far, and to my husband who dropped everything and drove to the hospital from his work in Omaha to be there for me.