Baby Jade is Here!

Jade was born almost 6 weeks early, 5 weeks and 5 days to be exact. David was with Jade every moment of her rather traumatic entrance into this world.
This picture amazes me because it shows how many people are involved in the process. With Jade coming so early she was at risk for so many things. They had to put her on oxygen immediately and time was of the essence.
This pictures makes just makes me realize how blessed I am that Jade is ok. So many things could have gone wrong and they didn't. Although Jade is struggling to breath at times she is doing really good and off of needing the oxygen 24/7.

Here is Jade now as of a week since she was born. They are monitoring a lot of things on her, hence all of the cords. She is also mostly fed through the tube in her nose, although she is doing so well now that I have started to be able to feed her a few times a day. She will be able to go home when she has the energy and ability to take to all 8 feedings without the tube and when she can maintain her temperature by herself and not stop breathing at all. Her doctor calls her his miracle baby and said she is doing unusally well for her age and she should probably be able to go home in about 2 weeks if she keeps progressing as she has been. He said she is acting more like a 37 week old baby instead of a 34 week old baby. She's already an overachiever!
Now for the story for those of you that haven't heard it yet. Last Saturday was my baby shower. Later that evening I started to not feel so good. I thought i just had normal weird pregnancy stuff. About 3:30 in the morning I woke up and was in a lot of pain and was up for a couple of hours from the pain. I thought I just had a bad flu. The next day was Sunday and I continued to feel really sick. Monday was even worse. I got 3 blessings from David in 2 days and he blessed me to know if there was anything wrong. About Monday afternoon I started to be a little concerned that this was more than just a flu because it didn't exhibit a lot of the normal flu symptoms and it was a lot worse then any flu I had ever had. I still just figured it was probably the flu, however I looked up my symptoms in my pregnancy book and they somewhat matched that of preeclampsia so at about 8:00 pm I decided I better go into my doctor's office and just make sure this wasn't pregnancy related. So we went down to my doctor's office and was told that I needed to go to the hospital because they didn't have the equipment to make sure the baby was ok.

Well, to make a long story short we went to the hospital, they took my blood pressure and a sample of my blood and within 20 minutes of getting there I was told that I had HELLPS syndrome which is a very serious form of preeclampsia and that I had to have a C-section immediately to get the baby out for the baby's sake and for mine. They said I was having contractions 2-7 minutes apart with most of them 2-4 minutes apart but that my body wasn't at all ready to have a baby vaginally. I was shocked because I had been having contractionsd since 3:30 am on Sunday but didn't know it because the HELLPS was making me really sick and it was hard to distinguish them. Anyway, within another 30 minutes I had had a C-section and Jade was born.

I was really scared at first because I felt so unready to have a baby and I was scared for the baby's health. I also felt guilty that maybe this was my fault because I had been running around so much and pushing it a lot. But my doctor told me that this had nothing to do with working hard and that everything would be ok.

Dr's still don't know what causes HELLPS syndrome although there are many theories. It's a strange thing because it can happen suddenly with no previous signs or problems. In my case I had had an ideal pregnancy the entire time and had felt great and was working out and everything and then suddenly within a few days I had HELLPS.

David and I are just so grateful to Heavenly Father because things have turned out so well and we haven't had any of the complications that women can have with HELLPS. Baby Jade is beautiful and she has already brought so much joy into our lives!