Memorial Box Monday: Code Blue

Three pregnancies in a little over three years can take a toll on any body. But my body did NOT like growing babies at ALL. I was sick throughout the entire pregnancy with each boy. Start to finish. Multiple hospital stays with each one. Dehydration was my middle name. Pregnancy with Boy #1 was so rough that they ended up removing my gallbladder about 8 weeks before he was born and I used a pump in my leg to pump anti-nausea meds clear through to the end of the pregnancy. Boy #2 wasn't much easier. But Boy #3's pregnancy was the most eventful. Our marriage was facing one of the most difficult times we've ever experienced, two toddlers and a sick wife with Baby #3 on the way. NO FUN!
Memorial Day weekend was upon us and we decided to take some time together and try to recoup some of the losing ground we'd been battling over in our marriage. We stayed up late that Saturday night an talked through some really big things. We both felt better and closer than we had in months.
A few hours later I started having contractions (I was only about 20 weeks pregnant) and terrible pain on my left side. I called the Dr. on call and told him I was having contractions about 3 minutes apart and was only 20 weeks. He told me that I shouldn't be in labor now and was I sure that these were contractions? (Not a warm, fuzzy kind of guy). And if I really thought they were contractions that I should go to the hospital.
So, our neighbor came over to stay with our sleeping babies and My Prince rushed me to the hospital Maternity Floor. Once there the pain increased. I was so miserable. The nurses did some tests and called the Dr. (not my dr. just the guy on call for the holiday weekend) and he said they should give me a bag of fluid (I wasn't dehydrated this time!) and send me home with a pain shot. So the nurse put me in the wheelchair. Gave me the shot once in the chair (weird!) and then pushed me out the door to where my hubby was waiting in the car. Wham-Bam-Hope you're better Ma'am. I remember getting in the car and saying to My Prince, I don't feel any better. In fact I feel worse. I cried all the way home. When we got home, my Mom had arrived to stay the night with the boys. We all went to bed, but about a half hour later, I was up again with terribly increasing pain and decided to go back to the hospital.
We got there and it was a shift change. New nurse came in and talked to me. She said that she was guessing it might be a kidney stone with how dehydrated I'd been. I had no idea what that meant. Just encouraged that maybe they'd fix me. She called the grouchy Dr. and he said he wasn't going to rush over to the hospital on a Sunday morning. He'd get there when he got there and they could just give me morphine in my IV until he showed. He finally rolled in about 10:30 that morning. He announced after very briefly looking me over that I had a kidney stone and there was nothing they'd do about it over the weekend. So I might as well get used to being there and on morphine, cause that's all they were going to do. He then looked at my mom and said, "This is nothing to start a bedside vigil over, this is perfectly normal." Wrong thing to say to that Mama Bear. He left rather quickly after she chatted with him in the hallway. Late that night I began vomiting. By the next morning (shift change!) I was coughing uncontrollably, had a high fever and I was coding. My Prince was asleep on the oh-so-comfy pull out couch through the whole thing. He woke up when the team of people came in to work on me. Talk about a startling scene! They quickly put me on oxygen and then stood back and tried to figure out what was going on. The new dr. came in--he was a breath of fresh air. He sat down and began at the beginning of the story. He rushed an order to do a test on my lungs to rule out a pulmonary embolism. While Shawn and I were on our way down for the test, the dr. called my parents and asked them to come to the hospital. We didn't know he was going to do that--looking back now, I can see how serious the situation was, but at the time I didn't.  The "bed pusher team" raced me down to radiology and then proceeded to tell me I should NOT have this test done if I wanted my baby to be healthy. I started to panic. Then the radiologist said that he would not do the test. Finally the nurse who came with me from maternity called the Dr. (the good one) and told him what was happening. She handed me the phone and he said, "Mrs. Hicks, this situation is very grave. You need to have this test to save your life, we're not even concerned about the baby at this point." After that the radiologist agreed to do the test with some modifications so it wouldn't be as dangerous for the baby. They ushered My Prince out of the room and my nurse asked if she could stay with me and hold my hand. She prayed with me and then continued praying under her breath the whole time the test was going on. I could feel His presence in the room and I was totally at peace.