The girls were born on Monday night, January 3rd! "Baby A," Katherine Hope, was born at 9:46, and "Baby B," Emily Elizabeth, was born at 9:47. I awoke at 4:30 that morning with contractions, and they continued on throughout the morning. By noon, they hadn't subsided and were becoming a bit more uncomfortable. I called the doctor on call, and she said to come in and get my levels checked for preeclampsia again (I was in the hospital Friday night too.) I got settled in with monitors for the girls and a monitor for the contractions, and they ran two bags of IV fluid. The contractions were coming every 2-3 minutes apart. They ran a bag of magnesium, and the contractions started coming every 1-2 minutes. They were trying to decide what to do, and I was about at the end of my tolerance for the pain, so they gave me some medicine which completely knocked me out for two hours. Daniel left to go pick up the kids. When I woke up, the pain was all but unbearable. The doctor was called in, and I said, "This is it! This pregnancy isn't going any further. This is my 10, or I'm afraid something might not go well." Dr. Green immediately got things headed toward surgery, and Mom called Daniel who was picking up the kids from Leigh's house. He dropped them by for my sister to put to bed and sped to the hospital, making it from Lexington to Palmetto Richland in 20 minutes. Thankfully, he arrived as I was getting prepped for surgery, and I was so relieved to hear him behind me as the c-section began. Katherine cried pretty quickly when she was born, but it took a little work for Emily to get that first cry out. Once the girls were stable, the nurses brought them over for us to see and give a quick kiss on the head before they were whisked away to the NICU. I felt such relief that they had arrived safely and that I too was safe and on the road to recovery!
