Crazy Week of Recovery

This week has been very eventful, even though I slept through half of it. In the last blog I mentioned that I had begun to have pretty bad back pains. Well, over the weekend they only got worse. By Sunday night I was having extreme back pain that did not ease with medication. I also noticed that my stomach was extremely tender, and it only took a soft brush of my hand to aggravate it. In the beginning I thought the pain in my back was normal due to pregnancy and my stomach sensitivity was round ligament pain, but on Monday morning I called our insurance advice nurse and she told me she thought I was in pre-term labor.

An appointment was set up immediately with my doctor and upon arrival I was admitted in the adjoining hospital. Pre-term labor was ruled out, but the doctors were not sure if I was having a severe kidney infection, kidney stones, or appendicitis. The normal way to diagnose these is through an x-ray, but my pregnancy complicated things. Instead, we had an ultrasound to see if a problem could be found. Nothing conclusive. I was moved into another part of the hospital and put on an IV drip to administer medication, antibiotics, and a fluid drip (all of this amounted in a six pound weight gain overnight!).

The sonographer for the ultrasounds gave us two more pictures of Wiggle bean. This time the baby looked completely different because the bones have begun to harden. I think these are fabulous pictures of Wiggle bean for the Halloween season. Logan will be posting these pictures as soon as they are downloaded. He is also threatening to post pictures he took of me at the hospital.

Throughout the night I had many blood tests and another ultrasound (both times the baby was uncooperative and we still don't know pink or blue). I began to feel better the next day and the doctors were able to rule out appendicitis. I went home on Tuesday night with treatments for both a kidney infection or a kidney stone. Every day this week I have felt progressively better and on Friday the results came back from the lab to show it was indeed an infection.

The best news of the week was that the baby was not affected at all. As my doctor put it "The baby has no idea what mom is going through, he or she is just patiently waiting for the next feeding." Wiggle bean was happily kicking throughout the whole ordeal. This definitely improved my mood! Wiggle bean has become increasingly active over the last week and a half and I am loving every minute of it! Logan felt the baby kick for the first time on Friday! That was a very sweet experience.

I would like to take a minute and thank everyone in our ward and at the dental school that have called, brought over goodies, and inquired about me to Logan. I don't really recall telling anyone what happened, but it seems the grapevine here in Cleveland is very active! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I feel very loved!

Needless to say, we have had a very non active week. Yesterday in-between conference sessions we decided to try and walk to the lake. We made it about three blocks before turning around and driving instead. I feel much better, but my entire stomach and the left side of my back feel like one gigantic bruise.

A few months ago we visited the zoo and noticed the vendors selling funnel cake. We decided that we could do that on our own, and this week we did! We made fabulous funnel cakes on Thursday and we decided to try a recipe for chocolate waffles on Friday morning. This week new recipes were not the healthiest, but they tasted really good!

Logan and I enjoyed watching conference this weekend from the comfort of our home. We didn't go to the church because I can not sit for that long. Ironically the only video version available was the ASL interpreted version. I enjoyed watching the interpreters and was pleasantly surprised to see some of my interpreting friends from BYU.

Life is wonderful in Cleveland!

Hey guys- This is Logan. As promised, here are the pictures of Wiggle Bean making scary faces. Also, as promised, I've included a picture of Beautiful Rachel as she models the local hospital attire. Please take a second to look at our next post as well to hear more about our adventures this week. Rachel has also updated her baby-belly pictures, for those of you who are tracking her "progress."

In this first picture, WB reminds me of Venom (The bad guy on Spider Man 3) with the giant teeth and big eyes. All you can really see here is the face.

In this one, WB is doing the "sad clown" routine. Look at that frown! You can also see both hands curled under the chin- sort of like a hamster.

Here's Rachel eating hospital macaroni and cheese with pudding. Yum. You can't see it, but she has all sorts of tubes and stuff going into her right arm.

This is the funnel cake we made. It actually turned out really, really good!

Here are the chocolate waffles we made. They sort of fell apart when we took them out of the waffle iron, but they tasted good!

That's all for this weeks edition of "The Hazard's Exploits."