A hiccup in the plans

The plan was in place, E & S were figuring out flights and I was sitting in the hospital waiting for the nurses to start the blood transfusion.

There was a little bit of confusion when Sandy called E & S at first, they somehow thought that the twins were already here! They called my mom and were sobbing with excitement over the birth of their babies. She straightened things out and told them that I still had to "start the work" to get them here, first. It is sometimes hard to find the right words to say that will translate to what they understand in French. But, finally we got the message across. They would work on getting flights figured out, and I would work on getting blood in my system so I could get the babies out.

The whole blood transfusion process is a pretty lengthy one. Two nurses have to be present and double check each others work and scan everything in the system, scan my hospital bracelet, etc. Blood isn't something you want to just mess around with! They got two bags of A+ blood and went through all their procedures, and finally it was time to start.

Thankfully I already had my IV in, so they just hooked it up to that. Caryn (my nurse friend from California) told me that I needed to tell them IMMEDIATELY if I felt any kind of chest pressure, since this would just add to the already ridiculous amounts of liquid that my heart was having to pump through my body.

Once they started the first bag of blood, they had to stay with me for 15 minutes to make sure that I didn't have any negative reactions, etc. I was feeling fine for the first 13 minutes, and felt confidence that this was going to work. This was going to happen and I was going to get induced shortly afterward. Things were finally going to go my way.

At about 14 minutes in, though, I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. It was making it rather hard to breathe, and of course the nurse didn't like it when I told her that. She immediately stopped the IV, got another nurse and called the OB on call. Could this really be happening right now? I needed this to work. And the OB said very clearly that if I didn't get this blood transfusion, they wouldn't induce me.

With everyone running around frantically around me, trying to figure out what the problem was, and what the next step would be, I just laid there feeling miserable. Here I was so close to being able to not be pregnant, to start healing and get back to normal, and here comes this bump in the road potentially preventing me from getting induced until weeks from now. When was this going to end?