Nora is born Part 2

When we got back to the room, the nurses were asking me how I was feeling. I kept telling them that I was having pain around my belly button, and they said that was normal. But then it didn't go away, and didn't go away, and an hour later, I was still having pain. Quite a bit of pain, to be honest. I figured it was probably just normal c-section stuff but they couldn't figure out why the pain wasn't going away since I had a spinal and medication. Then we realized that anesthesia had left out the morphine when they did the spinal because I have an aversion to morphine. I was supposed to get a pain pump after surgery so I could control the amount going in, but that didn't get communicated at shift change.

Shortly after that realization, I got a pain pump and about 3 hours later, we got the pain subsided. The downside to morphine is that I get really nauseated and groggy. Cue those reactions, and I couldn't really keep my eyes open for most of the day. Finally by evening, the pain was subsided and I was able to get off the PCA and onto oral pain medication, which I do not have adverse reactions to. I still wasn't eating yet though.

At about 4am the next day, I was hungry, I wasn't nauseated anymore, and my lovely nurse (Tara!) let me eat peanut butter toast. BEST.MEAL.EVER. Seriously, I would've paid good money for that toast. It was amazing. Then, I ordered breakfast and ate a full breakfast at 7am. The rest of the stay was pretty uneventful. We had a few visitors on Friday and hung out, watching football and taking walks on Saturday.

Saturday afternoon we asked the nursery to do a carseat test for Nora, since we'd had problems with Tess. We figured it was just a precaution and would give us peace of mind. Then she failed, miserably. We'd always attested Tessa's troubles with her respiratory distress at birth. So we were pretty baffled and discouraged by Nora having the same trouble. She failed the carseat test too. Not how I was expecting that to go. The pediatrician came and looked at her and ruled out a few things immediately, finally got her oxygen saturation back to normal (for now) and wrote us a script for an APNEA monitor. Yup, we're doing that again.

Sunday morning we were discharged with an APNEA monitor, a carseat bed, and what equated to Round 2 of constant worrying about alarms in the night. Nora only needs to wear hers when we are sleeping, so just overnight. Tessa had hers on all the time for a few weeks, so we're a little better. But still, not what we were expecting.

We are home and doing quite well. The adjustment period for Tessa is difficult because she wants all the attention she used to get but also wants to help with Nora, even when we don't need help!