Samuel

I'm gonna get a little more detailed here than some (men) may be comfortable with. So stop now if you don't want to know...

Yesterday (Friday, May 14) at about 5pm I noticed that I was spotting (bleeding) a little bit. I blew it off. But I noticed again an hour later and again the next time I went to the bathroom. Finally, by 9pm I was no longer able to blow it off as a fluke and I started freaking out. First I called my Dr. to see what he would say. He told me that it was probably fine, but that I should come in to the hospital to have it checked out anyway. So I called my sister Ruth, who left an art gallery in Washington DC, abandoning the friend she had taken with her, and came straight over. In the meantime a good friend came over so that Richard and I could go straight to the hospital.

After checking several things and listening to the baby's heart beat (he's still a major wiggler and kept moving away from the heart rate monitor), two hours later they sent me home. While I feel relieved that there is nothing major...

~~~~~~~~~

I wrote the previous post last Saturday morning. I stood up from what I had typed above and passed out.

So then we knew, maybe there was something major and went straight back to the hospital. In the hospital they whisked me in to an ultrasound and discovered that my cervix was less than one centimeter thick, where normal would be 4cm. Upon this discovery they immediately put my head down and my feet up, letting gravity do its work. The hope was that taking the pressure off my cervix would help it thicken back up.

And so I stayed for five days, upside down, in the hospital. After 48 hours, they did another ultrasound and discovered that it was working--my cervix was thickening up and was already back to 3.5cm. So the plan from there was to do a little surgery that would basically tie my cervix closed and keep that baby inside longer.

On the Sunday after I checked in to the hospital, many family and friends were praying and fasting for us, and we felt the benefit of those prayers very much. We decided that this baby who we were praying so hard for needed a name. We had a couple of picks and after Richard and I separately thought it over and prayed about it during church hours, we decided this baby's name would be Samuel, after 1 Samuel 1:20, which says,

"she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the Lord."

Being in the hospital for that long upside-down was certainly difficult but I tried not to linger on the difficulty because it's a price I'm willing to pay to have our baby be in our family here on earth.

So Tuesday evening I had the surgery and there were some risks, but everything went wonderfully. And by Thursday afternoon I was allowed to go home.

I am now on complete bed rest, flat at home on my couch. It looks like I will be on bed rest the rest of this pregnancy which hopefully will be a very long time. We are working on hiring some kind of nanny/helper and are feeling very blessed that in the meantime Richard is working from home and so many friends are helping us out. Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers and calls. We really do feel the blessings pouring in. This situation has turned into the very best of the worst case scenario.

{Thanks to my sister Angela for being my scribe for this post. Typing is very difficult when you're laying flat.}