Your basic news update

What's happening now is:

• Luciana began to experience spikes in her blood pressure
• She began to spill protein into her urine
• She only has one functioning kidney anyway, and it's doing all the work of filtering toxins and waste products from her blood for her and three children
• She is pumping nutrition & oxygen through three placentas to supply three two-pound 28 week embryos 24 hours a day
• Ten days ago the doctor gave her a letter and sent her home with the instructions: no more work
• She found being home and feeling useless almost intolerably intolerable
• So she was more often up and out of bed, working on reports ("I only have three more, I only have two more..."), connecting to her online posse, cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry, pushing furniture around, shredding mountains of waste paper.
• When I was out at work, she would lie down and sleep. When I came home she would bemoan the lost hours and start working at things again. Then we would argue with each other about this.
• On Monday she had high blood pressure and I made her call the medical team. They had her come in and detected some signs suggesting early stages of eclampsia. They kept her in the hospital much of the day, sent her home "on bed rest" and ordered her to collect urine for 24 hours and come back in on Friday.
• All week she struggled to learn how to lie around and rest. It was a struggle, a struggle with a struggle, a struggle against struggling. Mantras like "I am a flower bed" didn't help much.
• On Friday she went in and they analyzed the data. On Friday night they called to say, Tomorrow come back and we're admitting you for a couple of days.
• Yesterday they admitted her. The on-duty doctor told her, Settle in, you're going to be here for a month.
• When I visited last night, she looked okay! Cheerful, bored, unhappy to be in the hospital. Mentally it's a torture. But she notices that when she lies in bed her blood pressure goes down, and when she sits up, her blood pressure spikes.
  
• The regime looks like: rest, lie down, watch TV. Blood pressure monitoring several times a day. Monitor the babies' heart beats three times a day. Every other day an ultrasound to measure the babies' growth.
• If the babies keep growing, good. If her blood pressure stays controlled, good. Because at this point, 28 weeks, their lungs are not up to the task of absorbing O2, their brains are not up to the task of breathing regularly, their GI tracts are not up to the task of absorbing nutrition. In two weeks, they will be.
• The immediate goal is to get through the next two weeks and see how things are going.