This past week, my wife was at the Christiana Hospital for a scheduled C-section. Everything appeared to go well, and we were in one of the Periop Recovery rooms waiting for a Postnatal room to become available. While were waiting, the nurse who was checking in on my wife noticed that the bleeding was still pretty significant, even after having changed the pads out several times. After a few rounds of this, she called over another nurse to take a look and get a second opinion. This still continued, so she brought in a doctor to take a look also. I don't really know anything about surgical recovery myself, but the other nurse and the doctor didn't seem particularly concerned (I don't say this to mean that they didn't care about the issue or that they didn't also realize something was wrong - they just saw it and seemed like they wanted to just keep an eye on it a bit longer). The next pad change was in 10 minutes, so the doctor hung around to see how that went. At this point, I needed to follow my son over to the NICU, so I was gone for a short while. When I got back, I found that after watching the whole pad change, the doctor agreed that something was definitely wrong, and had already scheduled another surgery to open my wife back up and figure out what happened. During this second surgery, they discovered that the placenta had actually grown into her uterus. During the initial C-section, they had noticed what they had assumed to be a fibroid, but it looks like this was actually the placenta invading the uterus itself, and that this is what was causing all of this bleeding. Thankfully we were at a great hospital, and they were able to page the on-call IR team and get them back in to do an emergency embolization at some ungodly hour of the morning and block off the arteries supplying blood to this fibroid. This does appear to have worked, and the bleeding stopped. If this had not worked, the next step was a complete hysterectomy.
During our stay at Christiana, we had a number of fantastic nurses, but the one who was with us from when we first came in until this last procedure was Sierra Savoy. She is the one who noticed the excessive bleeding and kept making sure that it was looked at. By the end of all of this, my wife had lost 2.5 liters of blood. Had Sierra not noticed this, or not taken it as seriously as she did, who knows what the result could have been. We are very, very grateful for her. It's now 5 days later and my wife still tears up when she talks about everything that happened, and how lucky we were to have Sierra there.