Willow Hope Jenson

Hi everyone,

The last few days have been a wild ride, but everyone came out of it OK. After I posted on Wednesday, things started taking a turn for the worse. Wednesday night, "my numbers" started going bad and by blood pressure was spiking. I had real bad heartburn all night too. Thursday morning, one of the doctors, Dr. Cook, came into my room at about 6 and said I was getting too sick and they had to go in in the next couple hours and take the baby out by c-section. That's pretty much the last thing I remember; I guess he came in a little later and said never mind, rather than wait a couple hours they were doing it in 15 minutes. I do remember getting wheeled into the operating room and about 20 people doing things to me. They had to do general anesthesia rather than an epidural; something about my platelets being too low. I guess they did a platelet transfusion during the surgery as well. When I came out of surgery, I was in the ICU from Thursday morning until Friday afternoon. I don't remember a whole lot of the time in the ICU either but it was great to come back to the OB floor again yesterday and regain some sense of normalcy. My blood pressure and everything is stabilizing now and moving back towards the normal range. Last night I finally got to go see the baby; everyone else had already seen her. She was born at 8 AM Thursday, February 19. She weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces and was 12 and 1/4 inches long. This morning we finally decided on a name: Willow Hope. Hope is Janna's (Josh's sister's) middle name and was also his great-grandma's middle name. Willow I've just always loved. I guess it grew on Josh too.

She's actually doing really well, all things considered. She doesn't seem to have anything major wrong with her other than having a lot of growing to do. She does need some help breathing but is already on the "lesser" machine, I guess, called the C-pap. I don't know the ins and outs of all these machines yet, but I'm sure We'll get to know them very well. They're supposed to be discharging me on Monday or Tuesday; Willow will be here for awhile. We'll have to figure out a schedule of one of us being here all the time, or at least most of the time. We're actually allowed to go in and see her in the NICU pretty much as much as we want, and we're allowed to touch her. Eventually we'll be allowed to hold her too. Here are some photos of her.

Thanks again to everyone for all the comments, calls, emails, cards, flowers,etc!