I woke up on Monday June 27, 2016 to a nurse at 5am with the words "If everything goes right you should get your cerclage today". This meant 3 things for me 1. I knew that if it worked Henry could potentially make it until 34 weeks inside 2. I was about to have surgery and that was scary 3. I needed to tell my family I was in the hospital.
But first... what is a cervical cerclage? It's a procedure where they actually pull together your cervix and place a strong suture through and around to keep it closed. In my case it was especially difficult and dangerous because my water was already started to come out. I had what is called, hour glassing membranes. So my water bag was both inside of and outside of my cervix to replicate an hourglass.
At 5:30am I began making phone calls to the family, I only had to make 4, and asked them to spread the news. I explained everything that was going on, I told them about the surgery, about the chance for preterm labor, about a chance to lose our sweet baby, and of course my room number.
At 7am a doctor, who I hadn't met yet, came in to examine me, she also brought an ultra sound technician. She did her thing, while the ultra sound lady did hers and neither of them looked happy. They had come together on a decision and it was a heartbreaking one.
I was not a candidate for the cerclage, my water was too low and too fragile. The doctor was not confident in her ability to pull it off, her recommendation was to keep still and try and stay pregnant. Her main concern was that if the water broke mid surgery and tore my cervix, not only would I have to deliver in the operating room but my future fertility would be shot. She told us it was a controversial procedure in the first place and that there are other doctors who would disagree with her decision.
So I continued to lay there, and I had visitors all day. Derek and Hannah, Aunt Non and Chelsea, Grandma and Aunt Debbie, April, Matt (of course), my parents, Justin and Erin.
Then at 8pm and new Doctor came in, it was shift change, he sat down and said "we need to talk". He talked about how he felt a cerclage was the best option for us, his point was that my water was going to break soon, and that a cerclage was the best option to prolong pregnancy. He did talk about the last doctor not being confident and how he felt that the only way we would know is if we tried. We had 2 sides of the story and we knew that it was controversial and that it was dangerous, but I had to know that it wasn't off the table. It took Matt and I less then 2 minutes to decide to try it, we were prepared to do anything we could to save this baby. We felt, that if it didn't work we would be no worse off then we were at that moment.
So we scheduled the surgery for 7am the next morning, I laid very still, it was important that I was still pregnant in the morning. We were happy to say goodnight to Monday.
We didn't meet you on Monday Henry... I kept you in!!
Nikki