Many of y'all already know about my not so fun adventure last week, but here is a possibly better explanation of what happened and updates since then.
We have seemed to have endless problems with our apartment that we live in from 3 inch long cockroaches raiding my kitchen to our electricity being randomly turned off by our neighbors. Even finding out that we were paying our neighbor's electric bills. But none of these aweful experiences can top this past week.
First I'll give a brief background. Shortly after moving into our apartment we realized there was a problem with our garbage disposal. One day when the disposal was running, I put my fingers under the running water to get a small shock (kinda like a static shock). I became upset and the manager sent an electrician out to see what the problem was. He found that the disposal had not been grounded interiorly (some of you techno buffs may understand more what that means). So, he fixed that, but told us that if we had any more problems then it was possible that it hadn't been grounded exteriorly as well. But he did not check.
Well, we went a couple of months without any problems. However, this last Thursday evening I was washing the dishes again. The disposal and water were running and I put both my hands onto the sink and recieved a fairly large shock when penetrated my whole body for a little over a second. Luckily I did remain conscious and was able to scream and turn off the disposal. After laying on the bed for a couple minutes while David searched the internet to see what could happen to pregnant women who recieve shocks like that, we became excessively anxious and worried. David found that the survival rates of the babies in these situations is only about 29%. Lydia had been quiet since the shock. We called the hospital and they told me to go straight to the Labor and Delivery department.
After a long, long, long wait in the waiting room and in the observation room I was hooked up to several monitors which showed I was having minor contractions about every 2 minutes. The baby's heartbeat was normal, luckily. However, my ob happened to be the on-call doctor that night and requested that I stay to be observed for 24 hours to make sure I wasn't going into a pre term labor. So, I got to experience life in the hospital. It was far from glamorous! I ached everywhere and had a difficult time getting comfortable with so many monitors and iv's stuck in me. In the 24 hour period I got a total of about 4 hours of sleep. David got about 2. He still went to classes Friday morning.
Friday was, however, a little bit more comfortable just knowing that Lydia was alive. And our manager has been more workable than we ever expected having had several terrible experiences with her previously. I was discharged from the hospital at about 4 pm on Friday after the contractions had stopped and my cervix was still closed.
Call us crazy, but we still made an exhausting drive to San Antonio to be with my dad for his Halloween birthday. But I think that it was the rest and escape that I needed before coming back to deal with the mess of our apartment.
The electricians still have yet to figure out what caused my shock. They claim that one of my hands had to have been on something else in order to "complete the circuit". Maybe I'm just a accident prone pregnant woman. Our manager has agreed to let us out of our lease at the end of November and is sending us a form in the mail which will give us the legal evidence of this. And we have been searching the island for more suitable apartments. We've decided we prefer a larger complex this time with onsite management and have a long list of questions that we keep asking them after our terrible experiences here. We think we have it narrowed down pretty well to a place where we can feel both safe and happy. And Lydia is just as active as ever.
Things seem to be working out now, but please continue to keep us in your prayers because there still is a chance I could go into a pre-term labor.
