Hello! Back to the land of living... A perfectly healthy, beautiful girl was born (with forceps) on Friday morning!
38+3, 2685g...
Sorry for the essay, hope someone finds something useful in it... Not sure if should post this here but as it's mainly re the pump, I guess it's ok here?
Induction got started with gels on Wednesday eve, then waters got broken on thu eve. Few hours later onto hormone drip which was fine until they doubled the dose to 2.4 or something - absolutely horrid change in contraction pain followed instantly and anaesthetist wasn't available for epidural... Was told would take 20min for him to get there but ended waiting for a few hours according to my husband - for me it's a bit of a blur that time. The gas and air didn't touch the sides at all... Once finally got the epidural tho, ohh man, amazing stuff. Huh.
Anyway... Stayed on pump all the way through! Was really meticulous with readings, taking them and marking down right from the start - my husband was rock solid with this, especially towards the end when things got bit chaotic! Really could not have done it without him. I mainly made the insulin decisions (there weren't many from thou eve onwards) and he made sure I stayed hydrated and got energy to keep going with water/coconut water/orange juice.
Being able to show the readings was the only thing to convince the obstetricians (saw quite a few throughout the days and had to have the sliding scale vs pump conversation with all of them) to let me stay on the pump.
Kept it between 4 and 6 to begin with (with one high blib earlier on) and on thu night we kinda lowered it more towards 4's as felt it as more secure to correct upwards then down. Small sips of orange juice were the thing I kept on having. Just did a few boluses to bring it down from the upper fives and as for the basal rate - I used the ones I'd set few days earlier when had the last drop in requirements - still higher than pre pregnancy but not loads (I'm pretty sensitive to insulin, so didn't have a massive jump anyway).
Once they decided we needed to use instruments and hence the risk of Caesarian increased, we got moved to the theatre and another sliding scale conversation followed - by this point I was 3.6 and the anaesthetist was very sceptical but agreed to keep on the pump unless things went pear shaped. And in the end just said we should suspend the pump as I was.low enough for the baby, it hopefully would not take long and would anyway crash down once placenta was out (which turned out easier said than done). So from about 9am onwards pump was off till delivery at 9.20am and still suspended till about 11am - and during this I had about 3 glucojuices and a few pieces of toast. Requirements really dropped!
Baby's blood glucose readings: around 11.30am was 2.8, next one at 2.30pm was 2.6 (borderline problem number but they didn't raise a flag yet) and last one once around 6pm was 4.0! Which was very good
. Cannot remember if she was fed before or after any of these, tho pretty sure she definitely had colostrum before the first reading, but not sure how the feedings were set regards the later numbers.
Tadaaa! Ask if got any queries!
Xx
