xquisitlife

I’d love to know your thoughts about your own experiences on giving birth, or the miracle of life within your own life! Please leave a comment, or your story here or at Xquisitlife’s new site under blog posts! Have an Xquisit and Fabulous day and I send my love to you on this gorgeous winter day!

Just a reminder about some new things you need to see on Xquisitlife.com ! Don’t forget to sign up for my email postings under the email button on the right side of the page today…many are in the race for the prize, but will you be one of them? The games have begun! Remember to refer as many people as you know and once they sign up, you are that much closer to winning! Plus, don’t forget about your special FREE gift that I am going to send you just for entering your email! Have a fabulous day, and don’t forget to check out my newest line of champion clothing on the site for Men and Women! I have hand selected the coolest fashions by Champion that you can’t find in the stores! With Valentine’s Day approaching, please click the perfume button right above my blog post there to get your sweetie his or her favorite cologne or perfume for loads off the retail price! You won’t be sorry! Please comment about your thoughts on the clothes and perfumes! I love knowing what you think!PS- Don’t forget to click my picture when you are finished reading!

Now on to today’s thoughts about the miracle of life!

As a woman, there is usually nothing more exciting than the expectation of the day you will deliver your new born baby. From the moment you hear those precious words “I’m Pregnant” you realize that the gift of life is now growing in your belly and you eagerly wait, watching your belly grow, cravings come, and moods change! I have to say that with each baby I have been blessed to deliver, it was like being pregnant for the first time all over again. You learn so many things with each new pregnancy! Ultimately you find yourself working to stockpile these new pieces of information within your memory as the day approaches when you will deliver your beautiful creation into this new world!

This is all that I could think of as the nurses whisked me away down a long corridor to the operating room! But I wasn’t being wheeled away to have a C section, I had just delivered my 4th baby and I was bleeding to death! It was the year that all of the nurses were on strike and all of the nurses were from various parts of the country. Few were even from here. Nobody knew where anything was, they were all unfamiliar with everything, and so they had trouble finding the operating room. On the way there, it was like each of my previous deliveries flashed quickly through my mind. Why couldn’t this one be like those? Granted with each delivery they each got easier, but this one was working to take my life and leave my precious children and newborn baby motherless.

Tears streamed down my face as I remembered with my first son how labor had taken 39 1/2 hours for him to finally make his appearance. Pushing for 40 minutes because I didn’t have the urge to push from the epidural seemed ridiculous, but it worked wonders for the pain!

With my second baby, my daughter, my angel, true labor was about 2 hours long and that was the first time I found that incredible urge to push! WOW, that is forever etched within my heart and mind. Something you work so hard to control, but ultimately it battles to control you~ and the race is on! I was about 3 weeks early with her and they broke my water because the contractions weren’t dilating me any further. Then they started pitocin to induce the whopping contractions that came so hard and so fast that when the doctor walked in, he didn’t quite get the scrubs on all the way, and in less than 3 pushes, my gorgeous and perfect daughter arrived and was placed upon my deflated belly.

Then there was my third baby, my second son. He wasn’t scheduled to arrive for yet another 3 weeks but just like my daughter, he had other ideas. Nearly the exact same scenario happened with this baby as with my daughter. They broke my water, induced pitocin, and attempted to give me an epidural. The lady didn’t give it to me right and the medicine made my head feel like it was in a vise and having its own contraction! Needless to say, I would deliver him without pain relief~ Au natural! My baby was coming to quickly, and I had only been in labor for and hour and 20 minutes. My doctor was out of the country, the doc on call was not close enough, and so with a 3rd attempt at getting the doctor to the hospital, they found one shopping at the mall next to the hospital, and he rushed in to deliver my 3rd little bundle of joy!

Now with my 4th baby, I had a tough pregnancy. I nearly lost her when I was 3 months pregnant. There was gushing blood like a fountain, and I prayed all the way to the hospital for God to save my baby. I expected to hear the worst when they did the ultrasound, but she was fine, and I was hemorrhaging, but if they placed me on bed rest, then it may allow the pregnancy to heal in that place from which I was bleeding.

Well, that hemorrhage finally stopped, and was healing up behind the placenta so that the flow of blood was blocked. She grew normally, and I loved being pregnant and dressing in trendy, stylish maternity clothes from A pea in the pod! Throughout my pregnancy, baby wanted to start coming early. I spent lots of time in bed, and about 6 weeks before my delivery date, she decided to give us all a scare. I raced to the hospital for them to stop my labor, and they gave me a shot for my babies lungs so that if she were born that early, she would have had a protective coating on her lungs to help her survive.

All quieted down for about 2 more weeks, and then the contractions started coming all over again. With that many false alarms you begin to get desensitized to the urgency of going to the hospital for fear that they will just send you home again! So I stuck it out through the night with these horrible pains rippling their way from side to side throughout my belly. The next day, going on barely any sleep I was still having steady contractions. Tired, crabby, and a little frustrated that even with medicine the contractions were not decreasing, I finally called the doctor later in the day, right around dinner time.

They said once again to get into the hospital, and so I spent a little time with my other children to explain that I was going to the hospital and I would maybe be having their baby brother or sister today. I drove to the hospital alone so my husband could watch the kids in case I would just come home again. We did get a babysitter to wait on standby in case I really was in labor and going to have baby that day.

They timed my contractions once I got to the hospital and I was only dilated to 3. So I began to walk the halls in hopes that it would speed up the contractions and the process. No such luck. I was a month early at this point and the doctor had to decide if he was ok with breaking my water to deliver my baby. I was exhausted from trips to the hospital, medicine to stop labor and waiting for my precious angel to arrive. So he made an executive decision to break my water and let me have baby today!

I called my husband and told him he needed to get to the hospital and that we would be having our baby. Then the doctor came in to break my water~ and the waiting game would begin. I sat there thinking that I may never know what it is like to have your water break on its own and with that my husband walked into the room. Then once my water was broken, my contractions totally stopped! That’s when they quickly decided that they would start pitocin to make the contractions start up again. Not my favorite choice, but now that my water was broken, they had to help me get active labor going again.

It was a little after 9 pm when they broke my water and then they started the pitocin at about 9:20. There is no happy medium with that stuff- for me at least. I had one minor contraction that was slightly uncomfortable, then the second contraction was a whopper! Totally took my breath away and I couldn’t even talk or get sound out except to whimper as the tears flowed down my cheeks and dripped onto the pillow. It was now about 9:35 or so and there was a few minutes in-between that contraction and the next, but already I had dilated to 8 with only 2 contractions on the pitocin. There was no time to give me any pain medicine or an epidural so it looked like I was going to have another baby Au Natural! Unbelievable!

Then the 3rd contraction came and I nearly came unglued and with it came that awful urge to push and I couldn’t stop it. I tried my breathing exercises and everything, but I couldn’t breathe through this one! Then I felt my baby crowning already, and the end of the bed hadn’t even been taken off yet. It hurt so badly that I physically took my hand and tried to push the baby back inside of me!

The nurses couldn’t find my doctor because they didn’t page him right and later found out he was in the lounge waiting for me to dilate. Well, with all the commotion and baby coming out right then, they grabbed another doctor from the hallway to give me an episiotomy quickly, and as he did that I didn’t even have to push again because my baby came flying out with such force that she landed on the end of the bed and nobody caught her! If that end of the bed hadn’t been on, she would have landed on the floor and been hurt. Luckily, she was fine!

They put her onto my chest and I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl so I was crying and sobbing and in between breaths, I was finally able to get out the words to ask what I had. They told me I had a girl and she was perfect. She had a perfectly round head because she wasn’t crowned for more than a few seconds, and she was beautiful!

That is when my doctor surfaced, to finish off the delivery. About 5 minutes went by and he was ready to leave the room and let the nurses do their job when the nurse ran into the hallway to call the doctor back to tell him that the bleeding wasn’t stopping. I later learned that you can bleed to death in only a few minutes after delivering a baby if there are complications. So they needed to work fast.

They swept my little angel right off of my chest and whisked me out the door to head for emergency surgery. I began to pray and repent for my sins because I knew that if I was about to die, that I needed to be sure I was ready to face my maker with a clean heart. At that moment, I knew more than in any other moment of my life, that I was ready to go if that was God’s plan for me. And just like that, all of this that I have shared with you, came flooding through my mind and heart. I said one last prayer for my family and asked that God would let them know me, remember me, and know Him if it was my time to go.

As we got into surgery, the doctor was there and before they even got the cart totally stopped, they were giving me the medicine to go to sleep. As I drifted off to sleep I heard the doctor reprimanding the staff of nurses because they didn’t know where anything was and this was a life or death situation. And with that, everything went dark.

It was 11:00 or so that night when I groggily began to open my eyes from surgery. Everything was hazy and the pain excruciating! They told me that they didn’t know where the bleeding was coming from and that they weren’t sure if I would make it through the night. I had a blood transfusion, and played the waiting game to see if I would live to see my newest gift~ my baby. They thought I may need surgery again to do an emergency hysterectomy if they couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. They moved me onto a super cozy bed in recovery, and kept me there for the remainder of the night. I had more medicine that put me to sleep and when I awoke at about 6 the next morning, I was being moved to a room on the maternity ward. I was alive! I was that much closer to holding my baby again.

The bleeding continually decreased and the medicines that they gave me worked to keep my comfy. Then the moment arrived that I would hold and see my precious baby girl again. As they handed her to me all swaddled in a blanket, I wept tears of joy. She was so tiny. When she was born she was 5 pounds 6 ounces, but when we left the hospital a few days later, she was only 4 pounds and 14 ounces! I knew that I was given a second chance to journey this life through with my newest angel, and that she would have the chance to know me, and love me! That was the greatest gift I have ever received, and today Ava is nearly 8 and strong, smart, and as gorgeous as ever!

Have a fabulous day and don’t forget to leave your thoughts!

Love to you all!