Lump Year

Riding shotgun in a car going down a hill.
Roller coasters.
E-mail from a ‘concerned’ parent.
Asking Jill for a guy’s night out.

Up until last night those were the things that put a lump in my throat. Then, life went into bizarro world for the Parsons clan when we were whisked promptly from our doctor’s appointment straight to the hospital. Wait. What? Hospital? What’s going on?

Jillian always has high blood pressure when we go to the doctor. The Ponstein gene, I assumed. But usually by the end of the appointment they would recheck it and it was fine. Yesterday, was a different story. We told the doctor about her swelling recently and some minor headaches, nothing major. A few minutes later he comes back and says he wants Jill to go to the hospital, that she’s done working and now on maternity leave, and that if her blood pressure stays high, there’s a chance they will go in immediately to deliver the baby.

Lump. Big one. In throat.

Apparently, he wanted to take some precautions because Jill was showing signs of something called preeclampsia. Many pages on WebMD later it basically says the symptoms she’s showing, plus failure of your liver to break down proteins could mean signs that the baby isn’t getting enough blood or oxygen into the umbilical cord. Um, not exactly something I want to read.

But after talking to a myriad of people in our inner circle Jill and I have found out that this isn’t as serious as we originally thought. We’re in hour 16 of a 24 hour observation of her blood pressure and to see if she’s processing the protein through her liver properly. The best case scenario, if Jill’s readings go down, is that they send us home and we have twice weekly doctor visits and they wait a few more weeks and decide if we need to deliver the baby. Worst case scenario, her numbers stay elevated, and they deliver the baby early. But at this point, since we’re 34 weeks along, the baby is fully developed and everything should go fine.

Minor lump in throat.

That just means we become parents a little sooner than expected. Oh crap, we don’t have a car seat yet. Bigger lump.

More updates to come, but for now, know that Jillian is doing wonderful through all the baby monitors, blood pressure checks, and other various medical shenanigans. I really admire her strength through all of this. She’s a Type-A who decided she wanted to be three weeks early. It only figures our daughter would want to beat that record.