The Saga

Hi all,
I've rejoined the land of the living (or blogging) and I figured for those of you who didn't hear the whole story that I would get it out of the way before I tell you all the cute things Nicholas is doing now.

On August 22nd I went in bright and early for the c-section. Everything went well and Nicholas was born a whopping 8lbs 4oz. (By the way at week 6 he weighed 11 lbs 4oz. , he's a big boy). I was feeling fine and since we had a lot of relatives at the house I pushed to be released on August 24th. We were cleared to go home around 5pm. That evening around 8pm I started to develop a fever. By midnight the fever was 104. For the next few days I battled the fever with tylenol. The doc's thought it was urinary tract infection and started me on an antibiotic. The next tuesday we went in for Nicholas's one week appt. We go to a family doctor. He took about 5 minutes to look at Nicholas and then said, let's talk about you. He gave me some thoughts on home remedies and then sent me on to my OB. The OB ordered some blood work done. The OB and my family doctor at this point started working together on me. They didn't like my liver levels and ordered an ultrasound for the next day. They couldn't find anything the next day so they ordered more blood work. Liver levels getting worse so they ordered a CAT scan for the next day (Thursday). AFter the CAT scan they got a liver specialist involved and ordered more blood work and asked me to stay at the hospital till they got the results. AFter about 2 hours waiting in the hospital the my primary admitted me to the hospital because now not only were my liver levels getting worse but my creatine (kidney) levels were getting bad too. They hooked me up to saline and decided to do a DNC to see if there was anything left in the uterus that would be causing this problem. Because the liver was so bad at this point they did not feel safe doing a liver biopsy. I was at the Westerly hospital for 24 hours before the liver specialist decided that I needed to be at a more specialized hospital and transferred me to the Lahey Clinic outside of Boston. He said they would be able to do the liver biopsy there. SO off I went in major pain by this point in an ambulance for an hour and half. Of course, the ambulance driver was a complete idiot and got lost. They tried giving me morphine for the pain but it made me so nausous that it didn't work at all. Matt and my parents got to Lahey before the ambulance did. Then when we finally got there they couldn't find the ambulance entrance and fought with the security guards to bring me in through the main entrance (this is all at 10PM at night).

Once we were at Lahey I had a whole team of doctors working on me. Liver specialists, kidney specialists, pulmonary specialists (by this poing I was having a hard time breathing), infectious diseases, as well as OB/GYN, plus all the residents and medical students who all wanted to push on my stomach and ask me if this hurt. DUH!!! After about 2 days at Lahey and a ton of tests including 2 CAT scans, 2 MRI's an ultrasound, an X-ray and a liver biopsy, they got the culture results back from Westerly hospital from the DNC that it was a staph infection which had caused my body to go into toxic shock (which is why all the other organs were being affected). The ID people were very excited about this and took all kinds of pictures of this rash I had because I was such a classic case and I guess pretty rare. They started me on a bunch of antibiotics. Over the next week or so the ID specialist would fiddle with my antibiotics until I started responding the way he wanted me to. Finally all my levels started dropping back down but I was still having pain in my belly. The pain had started to migrate a little lower than it had been before. So off for another round of ultrasounds, CAT scans, X-ray's and a marathon 2 hour MRI trip. Finally they figured out that my internal c-section incission had opened up and I had a 3 inch gap in my uterus. They figured this out on a Friday of course and Lahey doesn't have an OB/GYN specialty on staff (they were coming from a different hospital). So we waited until sunday afternoon thinking they were going to do more surgery until the OB came by and said, no this is actually fairly common and will heal itself. So on Sept 11 I was sent home with a PIC line (IV line) and three different antibiotics (one oral, two IV). For the next week and a half I administered these antibiotics to myself twice a day. Let me tell you they made me feel like crap. I couldn't stand or walk for more than 10 minutes at a time. I was having trouble sleeping and I felt on edge and jittery. Finally on Wednesday, Sept 20 the doctor called and said that the latest blood work showed everything was back to normal and I could stop all antibiotics.

Baby is crying so I will finish the story hopefully tomorrow.