How did we get here?

To cut a long story short - Pre-Eclampsia.

To make the short story long again - here goes.
Despite debs history she had been having a rather un-eventfull prgnancy, we had been attending our appointments with the specialist Dr Brooks diligently and all seemed to be going well. On the afternoon of the 12th Of October 2009 having visited the specialist just that morning Deb started feeling dizzy and light headed. We rang her friend Angie (a midwife at TBH) for advice and we decided to go down to the ante-natal ward to get her checked out on a better to be safe than sorry basis. It was noted at this check out that Deb had a raised blood pressure and protein in her urine, two of the first signs of pre-eclampsia. It was decided then that she would be admitted for further testing to determine if she had pre-eclempsia or not, this involved collecting a 24 hour urine specimen to enable exact quantitation of how much protein she was losing in her urine and 4 hourly blood pressure checks.
I stayed with Deb that night and we spent a long day on tuesday the 13th waiting, wondering and stressing about what was going on, regular blood pressure checks showed that her blood pressure was remaining at the same mildly elevated level.
The 24hour urine collection was finished that evening and sent to the lab but the results were not to be available until the next morning, so we were condemned to another night of worry and sleepless waiting (I was trying to sleep on the worlds most ancient and squeeky lazy boy). You can only imagine the worst case scenarios running through our heads, our history did not permit us to be optimistic.
The next morning Dr brooks came in and sat down, we were immediatly worried as this was quite out of character for him. He then stated quite matter of factly "it's not good".................... the most painfull of pregnant pauses followed during which time all permutations of "how can this be happening again" and "there must be some mistake" went wizzing around my brain. It turns out that Deb had 2.6grams of protein in her urine over 24hours, the cut-off level for diagnosis of pre-eclampsia is 0.3g. So we were given the news that Deb definatly had early onset and relativly severe pre-eclampsia.

F*%K

What kind of crappy God damn shitty luck is that. Not only is this the second major complication of pregnancy in 2 pregnancies but it is very unusual to get pre-eclampsia in a second pregnancy!

We were then delivered in news in the same matter of fact way that not only was Deb in increasingly grave danger but the only cure for this was immediate delivery of the baby and that a theatre had been booked for 8:45am the next day for a semi-planned caesarian section.

Sophie was to be born at 31 weeks and 2 days gestation.