Sunday, August 23, 2009

A trip to the ER


Warning: if you are not interested in the gory details, just enjoy the picture of the baby above and skip the rest of this post! 

After a lovely day spent with Tom's family, after sharing our news with his grandma, aunts and uncles, I came home exhausted and went right to bed. Around 11:30 pm I woke up having to throw up (the first time all day). Then 4 more times by 3:00 am. Tom called the doctor exchange and talked to one of the other doctors in the same practice as mine, who said to go to the ER.

The hospital is ~15 mins from the house, so I grabbed the bathroom trash can in case I needed it again before we made it to the hospital. We made it to the hospital without incident, and luckily right at the ER admission window they had a pile of small puke basins, as the next puke came before I even got checked into the ER (if you're counting, this is puke #6 in the last 4 hours). Most interesting was the color change of the vomit as my stomach got emptier...orange, yellow...

After answering a million questions for the admitting nurse while I'm puking my internal organs (or at least it felt like it) into a basin, they started IV fluids. They kept asking if my stomach hurt and I said yes (after all I've heaved 7-8 times each time I've puked and I think we were up to 7 times in 5 hours now) so they insisted on doing an ultrasound to check the baby (which I really didn't mind b/c it meant we got to see the baby again).

So after about 4 hrs in the ER and 3 bags of fluids (plus a couple different meds to make me stop throwing up), they were ready to let us go home...until I got up to use the bathroom and threw up again (#8 - by this point the puke was green...).

Needless to say, I didn't get to go home, instead I was admitted to the hospital until I could keep liquid/food down. I had a nice private room on the maternity floor and spent the rest of the day getting more fluids (a total of 5.5 bags) and trying to sleep in the extremely uncomfortable hospital bed. Finally by around 3 pm, since I hadn't thrown up anymore, I got to have some water, then crackers and at dinner time they brought a default dinner tray by which consisted of beef stew, carrots and a dinner roll. I ate enough to satisfy the nurses and doctors and finally got discharged from the hospital around 9 pm, for a total of 18 hrs in the ER and hospital.

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