Just Brave Enough

My hospital stay ended up being eight days - two before having the baby and the six after. I didn't necessarily want to go home and leave my baby, but I did miss my bed. I wasn't really able to eat much because, even though I was on a regular diet, I had to keep my blood pressure under control. If my levels went too high, I wasn't able to see the baby because it put too much stress on my body.  Though I didn't have any symptoms throughout my pregnancy, I was diagnosed with very severe preeclampsia. The medical definition is high blood pressure, often with high protein levels and fluid retention. If it’s not treated, the organs will begin to fail and both the mother and baby are put in danger. Because my case got so severe, so quickly, Flynn had to be delivered as soon as possible. There are situations where the blood pressure can be kept down with medication and the baby can be brought to term, but mine was not one of them. I learned that when you deliver a bab...

As a the mom of a preemie, there are a lot of things that you "lose." The first of which is getting to tell your birth story because not only do you most likely not want to relive it over and over, people generally don't ask either. I'm not sure what is worse, the feeling of guilt because you don't want to talk about your own baby's birth or the fact that no one wants to hear it. Well, I'm ready to tell mine: For some reason, the second I found out that I was pregnant, I feared that I was going to have to take the twenty-eight week glucose test and that I was going to develop gestational diabetes. Why? I honestly don't know. In my head, however, this was the worst thing that could happen and it was going to happen to me. For about twenty-two weeks, I lived with this fear and expressed it to many people who probably  thought that I was insane. My glucose test was scheduled months in advance for the day after Valentine's Day. Yes, the girl whose ...