Part I - Hilton is here!

I'm a little late posting this, but the past month has been a little crazy.  I went to my 38 week appointments with both the high risk OB and my regular OB doctor on Monday, March 17th.  It was unusual for me to be there on a Monday because my appointments were always on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays (later understood that this was God's perfect timing).  First, I see the high risk OB and Hilton's ultrasound looks great.  The doctor then asks me if I have any questions or am worried about anything like they ask every week.  I usually say no, but on Sunday I had woken up and started getting ready for church and noticed that I was itching very badly.  I had noticed this a few weeks before, but it was only on my lower legs.  Now it felt like my entire body was itching, not like I needed to scratch at it, but just really uncomfortable.  I took a Benadryl and basically slept for most of the day.  When I was telling the doctor about this he was very concerned because it was possibly a sign of cholestasis.

Cholestasis is a condition in which the normal flow of bile in the liver is affected by the high amounts of pregnancy hormones causing your skin to itch because the bile can spill into the bloodstream.  A blood test could have been done to know for sure if I had this, but the problem is that we didn't have time to wait on the results.  I was told that if I had cholestasis that the baby needed to be born before 38 weeks or the chance of stillborn would increase.  38 weeks was on Wednesday so we only had 2 days.  Now I knew why God planned for me to have my appointment be on Monday.

Of course I was starting to get worried.  We had already been through so much and were finally at the end so I obviously didn't want to lose Hilton now!  Luckily, Savannah Kate was at the doctor with me, so she was keeping me a little distracted.  After the ultrasound I went down the hall to my regular OB doctor and waited while the two doctors talked about what to do.  My doctor came in and said that they thought it was best to go ahead and induce labor that day.  She didn't think it was worth risking the chance of stillborn, especially given our situation, and I completely agreed.  She wanted me to go downstairs and be induced right away, but we realized that I had taken my last blood thinner shot at 8:30 that morning (meaning I wouldn't be able to have an epidural until 8:30pm) so I was scheduled to come back and check in at 6pm that night.

At the doctor's office that morning

It was 11:30am when I found out, so I called Hunter (boy was he surprised) and the grandparents right away.  They all had to drop everything as we were not planning to be induced until the following week.  I knew this was the very last time it was ever going to be just Savannah Kate and I, so even though I had a thousand things I needed to do, I took her out to lunch and then we went to the mall.  I let her take her time eating every single piece of mac and cheese while at Panera and then let her pick out a new toy at the Disney store.  It was so strange because while I was completely overjoyed that Hilton was almost here, I was sad at the thought of it no longer being just the two of us girls.  And I was nervous about how SK would react to no longer receiving all the attention at our house.

While SK napped that afternoon, I cleaned up the house and got our bags packed for the hospital.  Thinking I had another week, I hadn't done any packing yet.  We took Savannah Kate to the neighbor's house for her to wait until my parents could get there.  While on the way to the hospital I started having contractions.  I guess Hilton was planning to come that day anyway :)

Last belly pictures