Little Eliza

Eliza is my beautiful strawberry blonde, almost 4 year old. She was born May 30, 2001. Her birth was a magical, mysterious and traumatic experience.

My third pregnancy went unremarkably. I gained the usual 40ish pounds and feeling fat and uncomfortable. On the morning of the day she was born I was 35 weeks pregnant. I remember sitting in the hallway playing with the kids, not really having contractions, just feeling really "weird". I kind of hummed and hawed with my husband for an hour, then we decided to go into Labour and Delivery - just to check. When my second child was born we went in thinking I wasn't really in labour and I was 7 cm. dilated.

We packed along our other two kids and while they parked the car I went up. By the time my family joined me I was strapped to the fetal heart monitor. Everything looked okay, small contractions, nothing that looked like labour ad the heartrate was fine. My Dr. came in and decided she'd do an internal after the strip just to see. While she was out, the kids went down to the cafeteria to get a snack. During those twenty minutes the heartrate went up to 220-225 beats, didn't change. When the Dr. came back in I casually asked "isn't that a little high?"

Total panic set in. Within 2 minutes I had an IV in, was shaved and cleaned for surgery and a frantic call had gone out to "any OB in the hospital" to come and help us. Through this I remained calm and almost serene in a weird way. I knew that I had listened to my body and that, although it seemed weird to go into L&D for feeling"weird" - I was right. Everything was out of my hands and I had faith it would be okay. I was so calm in fact, that they were able to put a spinal in in less than a minute instead of using a general. 8 minutes after I asked my Dr. about Eliza's heartrate she was ripped from my womb. I had no idea my baby was going to be born that day. After she was out there was a huge amount of blood - turns out I had had a placental abruption that was undetected because her head was engaged blocking any blood from coming out. She would have died in a matter of hours or less if I had not gone in to the hospital. She was good, great considering. She spent a week in the Special Care Nursery requiring oxygen. Then we went home and I have cherished every day since with her.

I have always held her close. Sleeping beside me always so that I can keep my eye on her. She is now the sweetest, dimple cheeked, mischievous little girl around. I love her.