All about Catcher

Catcher Lee Hoskins was born Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 11:20 in the evening (not 11:48 as originally reported by my sister on facebook:) He was born via c-Section because there was so much that had been going wrong with my body that the dr and i had a long discussion weighing the pro's and con's of an early delivery. I was 34 weeks pregnant and my blood pressure was really getting out of control, i'd been having SEVERE headaches (a sign that the blood pressure could cause a stroke) and to top it off the fluid around the baby had fallen to dangerously low levels. Last week my fluid level was a 12 (they view pockets of fluid on an ultrasound and measure their size to give a total overall amount)a 12 was much lower than it had been, but not bad. Well at my appointment on friday the level had dropped to a 7, and if the level drops to 5, it will most likely kill the baby. Waiting any longer to deliver the baby would have more than likely killed him as they didn't know how fast the fluid was dropping. To clarify, i was not losing fluid, not like my "water broke" or anything, this was all caused by the high blood pressure. high blood pressure puts pressure on the kidneys to work harder and can cause real damage to the kidneys, well the baby's kidneys help replenish the fluid and if my blood pressure remained high consistently it had an adverse effect on his kidneys as well which caused the fluid to not replenish as it was used in normal function by the baby. Anyway, all the medical crap aside it came down to the fact that delivering friday meant an early LIVE baby, delivering even a week later would most likely mean a dead baby. in those terms it made an easy choice, deliver that night.

Then of course we couldn't just stop there and make everything wonderful, no i had to go and have more complications after delivery....just to make it more exciting i suppose lol. I was recovering from my c-section which had occured very late at night and around 3am a nurse who was checking on me noticed that the incision from the c-section didn't look right, i won't give you the gory details but it didn't look right so she called the dr. The dr at first thought it was no big deal over the phone but i heard the nurse nearly yell at him to get here right away. So he came, he looked, i went back in for another surgery. Apparently i was bleeding inside and it was making a massive hematoma (colleciton of blood) under the incision. This was bad for several reasons not the least of which was all the blood i was losing inside my own body, as well as the pressure it was putting on the incision. Anyway, i had to have another spinal block and another surgery to open me up stop the bleeding and close me up again. Then even more time to recover. Apparently this pregnancy just had to be a big production, couldn't make anything easy, not even the recovery :)

But it is Sunday now and i've been up and walking around and feeling great since yesterday afternoon. Catcher is in the NICU at Kaiser in Modesto for now but may be transferred to Santa Clara to be watched more closely. His main problem is breathing, as to be expected at his young gestation his lungs are not quite mature yet, but we've been down this road before and i'm sure he'll be out in a few weeks. thanks to everyone who's already wished congratulations, we'll post pictures as soon as possible.