My Pregnancy

When November, aka flu season, came around and I started feeling sick and slightly off I decided to finally take a pregnancy test. On Sunday, November 10th, 2019, I finally saw both those lines appear and all my hopes and dreams were finally coming true! I was so excited to tell Dakota! Our little family was finally growing and I couldn’t be happier! We were gonna have a baby on July 19th, 2020!

Over the next few weeks, we started our journey of understanding what was in the process of happening. We made doctor’s appointments, talked of names, hopes of a boy or girl, everything that we could think of we discussed. I don’t think we had been happier to share this time. The idea of having a little one on the way was more exciting than we had originally planned.

It didn't take long before the fears slowly started to creep their way into my mind. We didn’t live somewhere with a hospital super close. Half of our drive to and from work didn’t have service. What would we do if anything were to ever go wrong? How would we choose where to go to have the baby? There were just so many things that could happen and I knew I had only started to think of a few.

For the first few weeks, I would wake up a little nauseous and would end up throwing up if I ate too early or too quickly, and of course, it was almost always when I was on my way to work. At 8 weeks, we made a trip to Salt Lake for our first baby appointment. If everything looked good we were going to share our exciting news with our families.

I don’t think I will ever forget the first time we heard our baby's heartbeat and got to see the little jelly bean I was growing. If the world could have just paused that moment and stayed in it a little longer, I wouldn’t have complained at all. It was the most magical moment of my life.

When we made it back home, pregnant life started to get a little more difficult for me. Whoever decided that calling it just “morning sickness” would suffice, obviously had never been pregnant before. I was trying to figure out how slowly I had to eat in the mornings, but now I also had the struggle of finding out all the random things I’d eat or smell that would end up sending me running. I started to notice that I couldn’t even drink water half the time without at least gagging a bit. At 12 weeks, ended up needing an IV to fill me back up on fluids. On top of the new back pain that was becoming a daily struggle, I was waking up feeling exhausted no matter how much I slept. Needless to say, I was beyond ready to get out of the first trimester.

At 16 weeks, we decided that we couldn’t wait any longer. We just had to find out what we were having! We opted for an extra ultrasound and we were able to see our baby girl! It was love at first sight. She had the cutest little button nose and I swear she couldn’t have looked more perfect! It made all the little flutters I was feeling so much more amazing. The love I instantly felt was so real, and pure. It made everything just that much more real. That much more exciting. I was so ready for July to come! I couldn’t wait to meet the beautiful baby I had growing inside of me. But for now, we were ready to tell the whole world of the little addition we were going to add in a few months.

As each week went on, I loved seeing my belly starting to grow more and more. I loved being able to start to feel each little kick, every movement our little girl was making. It was so fun being able to share that with our friends and family. Just being happy and living in the moment, enjoying this amazing miracle of life I was blessed enough to be part of. I had finally figured out what I could and couldn't eat, for the most part, had my daily schedule down as to when and how fast I could eat, knowing how much water I had to be drinking, had a good bladder schedule, and was just kinda loving being pregnant now that everyone knew. But of course, just when you think things are great the way they are, something comes and knocks you down…

Monday, February 10th, my friend, Natalie, was murdered by her boyfriend in Salt Lake. The news of her death hit me hard. I remember so many weird details about that morning before I had heard the awful news. When I got ready that morning, I put on a pair of leggings that Natalie had given me and headed off to my nail appointment. I wasn’t sure what I was wanting to do, so I picked out a purple, her favorite color. When I got home, I turned on the TV to a show that we had talked about and was playing a game that she introduced me to when our friend called me to give me the news. I still remember all of it so vividly. Natalie’s memorial was so beautiful and I am grateful that I was able to attend.

A month later, on March 11th, I was 21 weeks along. I woke up that morning with a strange feeling. Something just didn’t feel right. Being the paranoid person that I am and living where we live, I had bought myself a doppler so I could give myself some peace of mind hearing my little one’s heartbeat at home. So I turned the little machine on and searched for my baby's heartbeat. After a brief moment of searching, I found it and felt like I could breathe again, even though something still felt a bit off. I tried to shrug it off and headed to work. We had a meeting that morning and I tried to just relax and not overthink too much as I started to feel worse. I sat quietly sipping some water over the hour-long meeting. After the meeting, I made my way to my register and started working on the load while waiting for customers to be ready to check out. As 9:30 hit, I felt one of the sharpest stabbing pains in my right side. It made me instantly drop to the ground.

Panic and fear immediately consumed me. Streams began pouring down my face as I tried to get to the back of our store without causing too much of a scene. I asked some coworkers to help and instantly an ambulance was called. I made it to the breakroom to sit down. The pain was still coming in waves. I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. One of my leads helped me focus on my breathing. “In and out, in and out” I remember her coaching me. I was so afraid of the unknown. Fear kept creeping into my thoughts as I tried to breathe through the waves of pain. We were hours from a hospital. Dakota is about 40 minutes away, and asleep since he was working nights. I knew that 21 weeks wasn't long enough for a baby to survive outside the womb. All I wanted was Dakota right there with me.

After being moved from the town's rescue truck to the ambulance, it was decided that I was going to be taken to Reno via helicopter. They drove me the little ways from the store to the baseball fields where the helicopter was going to land. Around 11:30, someone was finally able to get ahold of Dakota and he started his drive to Reno. It was about 12:30 pm by the time the care flight team finally landed. The pain was a bit more bearable by this point. I had an IV put in but wasn’t given a ton of fluid. The care flight team brought a doppler and a mini ultrasound machine. They were able to find my baby hanging out on the left side while most of the contraction pain was on the right. But she was still in there, moving around with a good strong heartbeat.

Once they loaded me onto the helicopter, they started my IV. The care flight team was amazing. They made sure my baby's heartbeat was still beating a few different times while we were in the air. They gave me some different medications to help stop the contractions. Once we made it to the hospital it was about 3:00 pm. The contractions were just barely starting to let up. It wasn’t until almost 4:00 pm that Dakota and I were finally reconnected. The nurses took a ton of tests and tried to help figure out what was causing the contractions. By about 7:00 pm, we finally were given some information. The baby was still doing just fine and I wasn’t dilated at all. I had been dealing with Preterm Labor Contractions, which are different from Braxton Hicks. They weren’t 100% sure what caused the contractions, but thought stress and being dehydrated might have played a part of it all. But no one was sure and it had been hours since I was allowed to drink anything since everything had started. With the little bit of reassurance that the contractions were at least stopped, we were able to head back home.

I was pretty much on edge and had a constant worry in the back of my mind from that day forward. I even pleaded with my growing baby, that I just needed her to stay in my body until she was 30 weeks along. After everything that had happened, I seemed to be overly aware of every change happening in my body. I bought a gallon-sized water bottle and made sure to drink the whole bottle before the end of every day. I began to get just as sick as I was in my first trimester. I also started to notice while I was at work that I had a strange pain in my back. It was right in between my ribs and hips on my right side. It wasn’t too bad, but it would get worse if I was standing for too long or moved wrong. The pain seemed to get worse every day and medication didn’t seem to do much of anything.

At my 26 week appointment, I talked to my doctor about this strange pain. Instantly, she was worried about appendicitis and sent me to have some additional tests done. After a day of waiting for some kind of answer, I was diagnosed with hydronephrosis of the right kidney. My growing uterus was kinking my ureter causing urine to back up into my kidney, which was then making my kidney to swell and never fully drain. The pain was pretty similar to a kidney stone but was down by my hip more than in my ribs. The best part of this diagnosis, other than it not being appendicitis, was that I now had the joy of just getting to deal with the pain until I gave birth. So I started to prepare for the fun journey ahead. Before we had the pleasure of leaving to come back home, I had to go back to the ER to be looked at again because of some contractions that had started back up again. Once again, they weren’t sure what had caused them to start but they weren’t strong enough for them to worry and felt that they would go away on their own, which they eventually did.

With the new idea of being in pain all the time, it wasn’t very easy to feel positive about being pregnant. I was kind of done with the idea if I was being honest. As our baby grew, she found her favorite spot with her feet tucked right on the right side of my ribs, up by my sternum. She was not making life super easy for me. I was still sick in the mornings. My daily morning routine consisted of me having to sit on the toilet with a bowl to throw up into since I could no longer control my bladder. I would then go about my day in pain for most of it and always terrified of something bad happening. Then 2020 rolled her dice and COVID started to hit hard. Wearing a mask daily was starting to become a new thing. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found. Everyone was getting annoyed at the limits we were having to start putting on items. Schools, restaurants, and bars were all closing down. Life just didn’t seem like it would ever let up.

When I was 27 weeks along, I was dead tired from working and decided to take a bath before bed. It felt so nice to relax for a bit. Then I tried to get out of the tub. I was stuck. I had somehow managed to throw my back out. Thankfully, Dakota was home and was able to help me out. That next morning, I was on my way to work when I started violently throwing up after taking a small sip of water, on the highway going about 70 mph and didn’t have enough of a warning to do anything but grab a bucket and try to safely pull off the side of the road. Of course, on this lovely morning, I got to experience one of the many joys of being pregnant. While I was throwing up, I peed my pants. Immediately the tears just started streaming down my face. My emotions were so high and I knew hormones were playing a part for sure. At that point, I realized something needed to change before I broke even more or something bad happened with me or my baby. After calling and talking to my doctor, she placed me on leave from work until our little girl was born with the hope that being able to stay rested would help the rest of the pregnancy go by smoothly.

With COVID being a full-blown pandemic at this point, Dakota was no longer allowed to go into any of my appointments with me. Which of course we didn’t get to find out until we were walking into the office. So just like that, the father of my child wasn’t even able to be part of this experience with me. I started to fear that I was going to end up having to do it all alone.

At 30 weeks I had my glucose test. Which of course, I failed the 1-hour test, so I got to enjoy the 3-hour test. Lucky me! Thankfully, I barely passed the 3-hour test. I mean barely passed! I still had to watch my diet but didn’t have gestational diabetes. Two weeks later, I had my last ultrasound. They were estimating that my little girl was weighing about 5 pounds 3 ounces already. She was too balled up to get a length of her, but the tech was able to tell me that she had a pretty big head. Which of course was totally what I wanted to hear as a first time mom. I was so glad that she was growing well. I couldn’t believe that in the next 10 weeks, we were going to get to meet our little baby!

The next few weeks were full of preparation. Washing clothes, bedding, towels. Cleaning the house. Packing both a hospital bag and a Utah bag. Trying to make sure everything was going to be alright at home over the next few weeks while I was in Salt Lake waiting for our little girl to decide it was time. There were just a few events we had to get through before we were totally ready to meet her. We had baby showers and our friend's wedding in Moab. All of which we were super excited for. Everything seemed to be going alright while we were starting to get me settled in Utah. I was making sure to still drink water and get plenty of rest. Even though I felt huge, I was enjoying getting to feel her strong kicks. I just didn’t love feeling them in my ribs.

While we were headed down to Moab for our good friend's wedding, I started having some contractions. Knowing that I was going to be 36 weeks along the next day, I was only slightly terrified that we were gonna have a baby born at Dead Horse Point. We were able to make it through the ceremony before I decided that it was too risky to stay there any longer. My contractions were about 30-90 seconds apart and I kept feeling like I needed to push. So I mean as much fun as it would be having our baby at the same place and on the same day as our friend's wedding, it just wasn’t really on my bucket list. What can I say? They at least got some great pictures haha! So after the ceremony, we punched in the directions to the hospital and really got to experience Moab. Our trucks GPS thought it was a great idea to take us on all of the off-roading type trails. So there I was with my legs on the dash trying not to push while we hit every bump on the way back to the highway. Once we got to the ER, they checked me in. Once it was decided that I wasn't dilated at all, they chose to use medication to stop the contractions.

When I went to my doctor’s appointment at 36 weeks, Dakota was finally able to go with me again! My doctor was very happy to hear that I wasn’t planning on going any farther than an hour away from the hospital. Especially since I was already 1 centimeter dilated and our baby was head down and had started dropping. She talked to me about how I had been feeling and asked about how long my legs had been as swollen as they were. I had honestly just assumed it was normal swelling and hadn’t been worried about it myself. But When she said my blood pressure was high and my feet and legs were more swollen than they should be, she started to worry a bit. After more tests were done, she called me the next day to let me know that I had preeclampsia and would be getting induced Sunday when I would be 37 weeks. We finally had a set date for when we were gonna possibly meet our little girl!

The next 2 days I had to go back in to get a steroid shot that would help make sure that the baby's lungs were fully developed so she hopefully wouldn’t have to spend time in the NICU. By the time Saturday rolled around, I was so ready. We spent the day walking around stores trying to make sure we had all of the last minute items we needed. As we walked around every store, looking at all of the baby items, I became more and more excited. In just a day or two, my dreams of being a mother were going to come true. My whole heart was overjoyed. Sunday just couldn’t come fast enough!