Oh spilt, that's such great news! I'm so pleased for you!
Congratulations everyone else - I've not been checking on here very much recently, so forgive the lack of individual responses.
Today was Thea's funeral. It went as well as I guess these things can go - it was nice to see everyone and some people came back to the house afterwards and that helped too. I get a lot of comfort from having my family and friends around, although DH was exhausted and just wanted to go to bed. I waver between normal life and total desolation. It's still 2 weeks or thereabouts until we get any sort of answers/results.
I never did tell you guys what happened. I started contractions on Thursday 10 March and went to the hospital that evening when they were 3 or 4 minutes apart. They checked Thea's heartbeat through a contraction, took my blood pressure and a urine sample and everything was normal, and I was only 1 cm dilated, so they sent me home and said to try to get some rest because it would probably be a while. The contractions carried on all that night but started to slow down at 6 am, and had more or less stopped by lunchtime on Friday. I could feel Thea kicking intermittently, so I wasn't worried. The only thing unusual was that it really hurt to pee, but I assumed that was just a labour thing. I slept most of Friday night, but contractions started again on Saturday morning (12 March), and we went to hospital at 4.30 pm, by which time they had been coming every 3 minutes for over an hour. The midwife in Triage said I was only 2 cm, my blood pressure was normal and so was Thea's heartbeat, although she didn't listen through a contraction and she didn't take a urine sample either. She wanted to send us home but I begged to stay, so she gave me some dihydracodeine and put us in a room to wait and said she'd examine me again in 4 hours. We waited, and the contractions got more painful, and I cracked at half past 7, 3 hours after admission, and got DH to fetch the midwife to see if I had made any progress. I had to beg her to examine me because she wanted to wait another hour, but she did in the end and I was 3 cm and allowed to go up to the labour ward. She didn't check Thea's heartbeat, though. I had felt Thea kicking hard about 45 minutes earlier, so again, wasn't worried because I thought labour was just masking her movements.
It was when I got up to the labour ward that they tried to find her heartbeat and couldn't. I know now how rare that is, but I didn't then. The community MW said she had only known one other baby die in labour in 25 years practice - every other stillbirth she had attended had been induced labour after they had discovered that the baby had died. It took ages for me to realise that this was seriously wrong - at first, even when the labour ward MW couldn't find the heartbeat, I just thought she was doing it wrong, because there was nothing wrong with my baby. It wasn't until the doctor did a scan and I could see nothing was moving that I started to believe it. Part of the reason was that labour was still going on - I was having contractions every 2 or 3 minutes and it didn't feel real that I was in so much pain and it was all for nothing. I wanted them to do a Caesarean and get her out and see if they could do anything, but they said it was already too late and because they didn't know what had killed her, it was too dangerous for me.
DH called Mum and she came in, and I was given gas and air and a morphine drip, neither of which seemed to do anything to help the pain, so I had an epidural. By this time, I had started to show weird things too - my blood pressure was completely haywire, one minute high and the next low, my pulse was really high, there was protein in my urine and when they gave me a catheter with the epidural, they discovered that my kidneys weren't functioning properly - there was almost no urine coming out. They gave me IV fluids, but still there was nothing coming out. Nobody seemed to know what was wrong with me, though - some of the symptoms looked like pre-eclampsia, but I wasn't having headaches or epigastric pain or visual disturbances. My white blood cell count was slightly raised, so they gave me IV antibiotics in case it was an infection. They broke my waters and DH said it was almost all really thick gloopy meconium, not much water at all (I couldn't see it). They put me on a syntocin drip to get the contractions going more strongly, and by about 9.15 on the Sunday morning I was ready to push. I was falling asleep between contractions, but I kept snapping awake because I would lose the rhythm of my yoga breathing and I thought I was forgetting to breathe at all. In retrospect, I was pretty stoned.
Thea was delivered at 9.42 am, after a really short pushing phase. Weirdly, I loved pushing even though it hurt - I could feel my pubic bone separating, eww! It felt like finally there was something I could do, and I did it, with the help of a really great midwife. When the night MW passed me over to her, she said to me, if you want to avoid stitches, she's your girl, and she was right.
Thea was so beautiful, and so perfect. I had her in my arms straight away and I just held her and gazed at her. DH and Mum were in tears on either side of me, but I wasn't - I was too busy holding her and I was so happy to have her. I did think she moved just at first, but she was just settling into my arms, and she felt really hot, but of course she was at my body temperature.
She was covered in thick meconium, which is not normal - meconium is reasonably common, but not like this. This was like pea soup. The midwife said it was nothing to do with the cord - it wasn't near her neck and there were no kinks or knots in it. Almost all of my symptoms vanished within 24 hours of giving birth - the only thing that's still going is that the urate levels in my blood are still higher than normal, although lower than they were in the hospital. The MW is going to test my blood again in a week to see if it has gone back to normal. It might be a sign of pregnancy induced hypertension, but I will have to wait until the review session in 2 weeks' time to find out if they know for sure. They still might not know.
Sorry for the massive post - had to get it out in one go!