Mia's Big Entrance (Part 2)

The first three days in the M/FICU were pretty uneventful but extremely stressful. I was on strict bed rest and couldn't even get up to take a shower or go to the bathroom. Instead they brought this little portable toilet next to my bed and I had to ring the nurses when it needed cleaning. Yeah...not my idea of a good time.


I had daily doctor check ups and was told that I was very lucky that the baby was already head down or I would have had to have a C-section immediately. She still had enough fluid to stay in longer, but I was monitored daily for contractions, her growth, fluid levels, etc. My image of bed rest and the reality were much different. I got to do very little resting really with all of the tests going on. 


We also had meetings with the head doctor of the NICU as well as the head nurse. The doctor was extremely pessimistic giving us all kinds of worse case scenarios and explaining how the baby would most likely be looking at a lengthy NICU stay....until her due date...so six weeks. As a doctor, maybe he had to say these things...but it did extremely little to ease our anxiety. He also told us that indeed 34 weeks is an arbitrary number and maybe Mia's lungs wouldn't be as developed as we would like. After that, we met with the head nurse of the NICU. This lady was like an angel...She explained that babies at this stage had few problems and could even go home around 36 weeks. She also brought in a big photo album with success stories of babies who were born at much earlier stages than ours. A complete 180 from the doctor. Nevertheless, we were both extremely stressed and not at all sure how things would play out when the time came. 


We also got to meet with doctors talking about risk of C-section, blood transfusions, infections, etc. The anesthesiologist also came in and talked about what indeed would happen if an emergency C-section was necessary, and she talked about pain medications available during labor. 


Overall, we were extremely busy for the first 3 or 4 days trying to get everything figured out. Ten and I were hoping at this point that I may be able to even last longer than the 34 week mark since I wasn't having any signs of going into labor. We were becoming a bit more optimistic about our chances and hoping a mind over matter approach would work for us. On April 16, I would be 34 weeks and we were going to meet with our doctor to decide what course of action we would take regarding the medicine that I was on to stop labor. However, on the afternoon of April 15, our decision was slowly but surely being made for us.


Note to anyone looking for an English speaking hospital to have a baby at in Japan: All of the information was presented to us in both English and in Japanese. The staff did their absolute best to communicate everything in both languages up to this point. However, there were several times when the conversation switched to pure Japanese since Ten is a Japanese speaker and the nurses assumed that my Japanese was good enough to at least follow the main points of the conversation. However, I am confident that Aiiku Hospital will do their absolute best to communicate everything in English if you have no understanding of Japanese and are not with a Japanese speaker....however, there are some major drawbacks to this hospital....which I will talk about in later posts.