The day Brianna was born

I began to feel better and was holding down fluid and food so I went to work on July 15th and July 16th. I still had some swelling but elevated my legs as much as possible and went for a 1/2 hr walk each day while on my break at work. I thought all would be fine now and didn't think twice about anything and was just looking forward to my next OB appt the following week with my doctor. I went to bed as normal on July 16th and woke up around midnight in extreme pain in my chest. I thought I might be having a heartattack the pain was so intense. I tried pepto and it did nothing. I then began to feel like I was going to get sick to my stomach again and I did. I noticed in the mirror in the bathroom that my eyes looked like they were closing and like I had been punched in the face it was so puffy. My ankles were huge that night which I thought was odd as I had been sleeping and my swelling was usually during the day only. I then began to get an extreme pounding headache worse than any headache I had ever had before. I woke Brian up and told him something was seriously wrong and I was calling 911. I called for an ambulance and they took me to the ER (not without convincing them to take me they asked several times if I wanted Brian to take me but I said no I knew something was majorly wrong.) I arrived at the ER and sat there for almost 3 hrs before finally I was able to get them to give me some pain meds for the headache. They were giving me IV fluids and watching my blood pressure and the monitor kept going off as my blood pressure kept rising. The ER doctor asked me to go and give a urine sample and I immediately knew something was wrong my urine was the color of coffee it was the weirdest thing I had ever seen. I went back and layed down and the doctor ran in and said I was being admitted and I had preclampsia. The next thing I knew my feet were shaking and I wasn't moving them. The only thing I remember after that was my arms flarring in the air and calling for Brian who was standing on the other side of the room. When I woke up there were doctors standing over me putting oxygen on me and they were telling me I had just had a seizure. They explained that I had eclampsia and they needed to send me to a bigger hospital and deliver the baby to save me. I was transferred by ambulance to the hospital and they prepared me for an emergency c-section. They were able to give me 1 shot of steriods to try and mature Brianna's lungs but the protocol is 2 shots but there wasn't enough time. They had to do the surgery under general anesthesia due to my high blood pressure. During the surgery I developed HELLP syndrome which is elevated liver enzymes, high protein, and low blood platelets which clot the blood. I'm not exactly sure all the details of the syndrome but I know its serious and not a good thing. Brianna was born at 3:30pm on July 17, 2009 at 1 lb 2 ounces. It was explained to me that she should have been bigger but the preclampsia had gone undiagnosed so the blood pressure had affected the function of the placenta and thus created interuterine growth retardation making her smaller than she should have been. She had to be given CPR after birth and was placed on a ventilator. When I sort of woke up from surgery it was explained to me that I had the worse case of eclampsia and HELLP syndrome they have ever seen where the mother had lived. My blood pressure had gone up to 210 over 180 or something close to that and I was close to having a stroke during the surgery. The next few days I pretty much lived in a magnesium fog and don't really remember too much. I do remember that my legs and body was full of fluid that I couldn't physically walk for a day until the catheter began to drain some of the fluid....I have no idea how much fluid I got rid of I lost track around 16 liters. I was in the hospital for 5 days until my blood pressure stabilized on medicine and the fluid was on its way out. Right now I'm still waiting to feel normal again it takes 6 weeks for all the effects of preclampsia to go away. Each day is a little better.