I have insomnia myself, so I have no advice for him…

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cry it out, crying, newborn, overtired, sleep

My mum went home yesterday.

Babby decided to give us an easy day by going to sleep relatively easily and at regular intervals throughout the day.

Perfect Husband and I were like “We totally rock.”

Then night happened.

Now, most of his 6-7 hour screaming jags have taken place in daytime, and nightime has actually been fairly regular with wakings every 1.5-3 hours and reasonably prompt sleep after feeding/diaper changes.

Not last night.

Today, my first day home alone with Babby, was mixed success. Morning was awful, afternoon was fine. I finally managed to get him to fall asleep at about 10:30 this morning and collapsed into exhausted sleep until 1:30. So that was good. Then he fed, had a diaper change, went in the Sleepy Wrap while we walked the dog, fussed a bit and then slept in the wrap for an hour and a half. Then he woke up, was fed, went back in the wrap, fussed a bit and fell asleep.

This evening was more difficult. It took us an hour to get him to sleep after his dinner meal.

Now, here’s the thing I’m having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with – he seems to need to cry to sleep, sometimes.

The other night we were taking turns walking the floor with him as he had been alternately crying and feeding and crying WHILE feeding for hours. Perfect Husband was flipping through a book I had picked up at the library, called The Baby Whisperer. Now, I had already discounted this woman earlier in the evening because she talked a lot about how “no baby needs to eat more often than every two hours” and saying that once baby’s needs are met, he should be put down to “foster independence.” Both sounds like total nonsense to me and goes against what the lactation consultants and child psychologists say (babies carried more actually have MORE independence later on in life, because they trust their caretaker etc). So I had given her up as a resource. But then PH said,

“Are his eyes staring as if propped open by toothpicks, not focusing on anything?”

“Yes,” I said, “the dog just sniffed his face and he stared right past him.”

“Is he arching his back when he cries?”

“Yep.”

“Then the book says he’s overtired.”

“He hasn’t slept for five hours. We know he’s overtired! What does it say to do about it?”

The book said to lay the baby the hell down and let him fuss himself to sleep.

“That’s cry-it-out! You can’t do that to a newborn. I won’t do that,” I said angrily.

“No, no, it isn’t cry-it-out. She says to stay with the baby and let him know you are with him, but he needs to sleep and anything we do will just continue to stimulate him.”

So against my better judgement, Babby was laid down in his moses basket, covered snugly, and then rocked and rocked and rocked. And damn it all, it worked. Within ten minutes he had settled down.

“The book says he’ll wake and fuss three times before settling down for good,” said my husband.

And damn it all, that’s just what the baby did.

He slept for nearly four hours.

Early the next morning, the same thing happened – he wouldn’t go down. So Perfect Husband took him from me, laid him in his basket, and sat on the edge of the bed, shushing soothingly, watching him and occasionally holding down his arms  when he started to flail wildly (because he flails in his sleep and then hits himself in the face, which wakes him up and makes him cry because all he knows is that someone randomly hit him in the face…), while my baby cried and cried. It was breaking my heart, and I kept wanting to take the baby from the basket, but Perfect Husband reminded me that we had tried that and tried that. It was his turn to try.

It felt like forever, but it wasn’t actually all that long. In half an hour, Babby was out for the count, having had his three drift-offs-then-wake-up-and-fuss episodes.

But I was a mess.

Perfect Husband kissed me and told me he was proud of me.

“I don’t like this. It feels like cry-it-out and he’s just a tiny baby. If we let him cry like this it’ll break his trust in us…” I sniffled.

“You fed him. You changed him. You rocked him. He was still crying. He was crying because he was tired, and we can’t force him to sleep. He needs to learn how to do that himself and we can’t help him. Rocking him and walking with him just seems to overstimulate him. We never left him. We were right there with him, and I even held his hands.”

I knew all of this, and over the last couple of days, PH has been proven right time and time again. He cries… and then he will sleep. I did make PH promise to ignore anything this woman Baby Whisperer says about breastfeeding. I picked up a copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding from the library as well, and that has comforted me, because it specifically mentions a growth-spurt in the second and third week, which explains his constant feeding which has been leading to this overtired issue. The constant feeding does seem to be dying down – and my breasts are fuller than they were so I think he was just working to bring in my milk. It’s just a matter of getting him to go to sleep, the poor little insomniac.

Sometimes I can nurse him to sleep, which is always my first choice, but other times he just pulls away from the breast and squirms and cries and that’s when PH steps in with his shhshing noises and his heavy hands pinning down those flailing arms. A friend of mine even sent me a link indicating that some babies are just like this – they need to have a good cry. And the way he just suddenly goes limp after ten or fifteen minutes of fussing shows that it IS exhaustion – not a matter of him crying himself to sleep. But the waiting through that ten minutes is breaking my heart. At least, today, he fussed in his wrap instead of in his basket, and for some reason that was easier on me. I don’t know why it matters, him crying his heart out in his basket or crying his heart out in a carrier, but I can tolerate the carrier easier.

But that doesn’t help at night, when I have to put him down.

There HAS to be a better way.

Sleep, baby, sleep...

Poor kid inherited my insomnia and my webbed toe.

I’m sorry, Babby.

The Labour Story, Part III: In Which A Son Is Born

Tags

birth, bonding, childbirth, epidural, episiotomy, labour, pregnancy, umbilical cord around neck

Sept 8th, 11:45 am

Omar Sharif coached me through a couple of experimental pushes. Reaching his hand indecently high up inside my gooch, he asked if I could feel his hand. I could. He asked me to push against it, holding my breath, which I did, and he praised me. He told me to try again, this time smiling as I did so (because apparently smiling helps pushing? Is this why babies smile when they’re gassy?). I did. Then he left me to it, with the nurses to help urge me on. I couldn’t really tell when my contractions were happening at first, because of the epidural. The monitor on my belly gave the nurses a vague idea, and soon I began to recognize a tightening in my abdomen which seemed to correspond with the monitors. The nurses began to rely on my judgment rather than the monitors, because they said that even with the epidural, I would still be more accurate than technology.

So with each contraction I’d hold my breath and push until my face turned red. I was sure I was bursting blood vessels in my eyeballs. Perfect Husband held my hand and watched with fascination, encouraging me through each push. I guess my efforts began to be visible on the other end, because he began saying “Oh, wow, love, you’re doing amazing, oh WOW…” a lot. He seemed deeply impressed with my achievements. I would push as long as I could, and when I couldn’t hold my breath any more I’d collapse onto the pillows, huffing, and wait for the next contraction. They seemed to be coming every couple of minutes so I just had enough time to try and catch my breath before the next one would hit.

Then there was an expression of shock from the nurses.

“Oh, the catheter is out!”

They had put in a urinary catheter when hooking up my epidural, and apparently I had pushed so hard that I had pushed the catheter right out. Now here’s the thing – apparently they keep those catheters in by inflating a little bulb on the inside, to kind of serve as a plug. I had pushed it out, inflated bulb and all. The nurses had never seen that happen before.

To my relief, there was no pain. I could feel everything that was going on down there, and I could feel the slight tightening of the contractions, but absolutely no pain. I was so relieved that I’m sure it added to my ability to push – the freedom from fear.

After about half an hour (I think… I wasn’t really watching the clock, just gasping for breath and then screwing my eyes shut and pushing like hell) Omar Sharif returned.

“She’s a great pusher,” said the nurse in greeting. Then they told him about the catheter, and he was duly impressed. I worried about damage to my urethra, but he said I’d just have to work extra hard at my kegels.

He took her place at my bottom and took over coaching me through the contractions. He demanded two pushes per contraction – when I finally let out my breath, he’d tell me to take another one and push again. Perfect Husband continued to watch and encourage me, and his amazement and praise were really what got me to milk just that extra drip of effort from each push.

The head began to be visible, and Perfect Husband’s encouragement went up several more notches.

“Would you like a mirror?” Omar Sharif asked me, “some women like to be able to see their progress.”

I don’t think I actually said “hell, no.” I think I politely declined. But since I was feeling no pain, I was able to pretend that everything was sunshine and roses Down There, and the last thing I wanted was anything to give me a frightening reality check. Perfect Husband’s intrigued look as he stared at my progress suggested to me that I would not see sunshine or roses in that mirror.

An hour in, the doctor reached behind him and pulled a wheely metal cart with medical supplies closer to him. Then he got out some scissors, and suture material and laid them out neatly.

“I’m going to give you some lidocaine,” he said, approaching me with a syringe.

“What, no! I said no episiotomy!” I said in alarm.

He looked at me steadily in the eyes, and said, “I think that the umbilical cord might be around the baby’s neck. I don’t want to cut you either, but I am going to give you one more push. If you can’t get the baby out, I’m going to have to make the cut.”

Now, I wish I could say that the whole “umbilical cord around his neck” thing frightened me into giving a monster push through a surge of mother love. However, that part barely registered. It was those scissors that gave me my motivation.

So when I felt the tightness of the baby’s head against my vulva, I found that hidden reserve of strength which I had not yet tapped into, and pushed for that extra couple of face-reddening, eye-bursting seconds.

Sept 8th, 12:57 pm

There was a popping feeling, and a slither, and suddenly the doctor dumped a blue, gape-mouthed baby onto my chest.

I put my arms around him feeling the slimy warmth, and stared into two massive eyes that looked almost green against the smurf-like blue skin. His face was open wide, but there wasn’t much sound coming out. I looked at the toothless void and at those eyes and tried to recognize this person as mine. It felt very surreal. His skin was peeling off of his arms, legs and body in rolls. He looked like he had been badly sunburned, except he was blue instead of red.

“Whoa,” said a nurse, “really post due.”

“Make him cry!” the doctor said, “stimulate him!”

So I rubbed his neck and jiggled him a little, “hey, hey…” I kept saying, “welcome to the world… hi… hi… hey…” and I tried to believe that this was MY baby. I had been expecting generic squish-nosed, Winston-Churchill newborn, but this baby had a very distinctive little face, which made him look like a real individual, and it was no one I had ever met before.

He was whimpering a bit but I guess that wasn’t good enough. He was whisked away from me and taken to the other side of the room and placed on the warming table. My husband went with him, and stood in the huddle of people surrounding the baby. I couldn’t see the baby for the people, but I could hear his cries beginning to strengthen, and PH would occasionally look up from the baby to send me a serious but reassuring nod across the room.

It wasn’t until later that I would understand how serious the situation had been. The monitors had been pointed away from me, which I had thought inconsiderate but now realize was probably purposeful, so as not to worry the labouring mother. So Perfect Husband, the nurses and doctor saw what I didn’t know – that his heart rate had been dropping frighteningly. Apparently there had been worried whispers among the nurses, and that was when the doctor reached for the scissors. My husband told me that until that point, he had been working hard to protect my perineum, keeping pressure on it during my pushes. But I guess the drop in heart rate scared him into reaching for the scissors.

So I avoided the episiotomy, but of course I tore anyway. While the nurses continued to stimulate Babby and weigh him (3.8 kg, 8 lb 6 oz), Dr. Sharif came over and removed my placenta, then explained to me that there was “a little tear” which he was going to sew up now. He proceeded to camp down there with his needle and thread for half a frigging hour, stitching me back together.

Meanwhile, the nurse brought Babby (looking much pinker) back to me and laid him in my arms, skin-to-skin against my belly and draped a towel over both of us to keep him warm. She placed his head near my nipple in case he wanted to latch by himself, and after a while she showed me how to position him for breastfeeding and how to get him to latch. We tried a couple of times, but he didn’t get a good latch and didn’t seem particularly interested in getting one, either. He clearly had no idea what a breast was or why I kept shoving one into his face when he had just has such a rough day. So after that I just held him, and I looked at his face and tried to recognize him while Perfect Husband sat by my side and stared at his son.

He told me that the umbilical cord HAD been around Babby’s neck, but he got overwhelmed describing it and shook his head, not wanting to continue thinking about it. Suddenly nervous, realizing fully for the first time that there actually HAD been a problem, I asked for his Apgar score and was given a reassuring 8. The 52 hour marathon was telling on me, and I was feeling exhausted and a little confused. The adrenalin of giving birth was wearing off, and my memories for this time period are hazy at best. Thankfully, we have some videos. I look tired – near asleep – but Perfect Husband looks exhausted, but radiant. You could tell, looking at him, that he had gotten the hormone dose that seemed to have missed me.

“Does he feel like yours?” I asked him as he bent over the two of us, and he nodded mistily.

“How are you feeling?” he asked gently. I think he could see that I wasn’t in quite the same state.

“He doesn’t feel like mine,” I confessed, touching the tiny stranger.

“That’s okay, he will.” Perfect Husband squeezed my hand.

“Yes. I know.”

And I did know. I was disappointed that I wasn’t feeling that big gush of mother love. I would have liked to experience that. But I trusted that it would come.

In the meantime, I just held the baby and we looked at each other and I tried to get to know him… without falling asleep.

Read Part IV: The Aftermath

The Labour Story, Part II: In Which Mohammed Ali and Omar Sharif Make An Appearance

Tags

birth, childbirth, induction, labour, mucous plug, oxytocin, pregnancy, prostaglandin gel, water breaking

Sept 7th, 5:00 pm

When we got home, PH and my mother put me to bed and I slept -fitfully- for several hours. I had vomited once in the car and once when we arrived home, but did not end up needing the bowl next to my bed. I woke up for a contraction shortly before 5:00 pm, and thought “Oh good, it’s almost 5, we can call the hospital and ask if they have a room ready for me yet.”

I felt a warm wetness between my legs, almost as if I was leaking urine…

Painfully, I rolled myself out of bed and looked at the drips trickling down my legs. I hobbled to the door and opened it. I could hear the shower running, and the TV on downstairs.

“Mum…? Perfect Husband?” I called, like a little girl who has woken up from a nightmare.

“What is it, Love?” My husband called up the stairs.

“I… think my water is breaking.”

There was a couple of thumps on the stairs and Perfect Husband appeared in the doorway within seconds. I had shuffled over to his bedside, and was mopping at my legs with kleenex.

“See? I don’t THINK I’ve wet myself…” I said, showing him the wet kleenex. As I spoke, there was a moist, slithering feeling between my legs, and then something went SPLAT on the ground.

We looked down and saw a reddish-brown gelatinous blob wobbling on our carpet.

“Huh,” said Perfect Husband. “That’s a mucus plug.”

“Yup,” I said.

There was a jingling of a dog collar and a black and white flash of fur whisked towards us.

“NO… LEAVE IT!” we hollered in unison, diving for the dog.

Just in the nick of time.

I cleaned up the gelatinous blob while my husband called Admitting to tell them my water had broken. Now, don’t get me wrong. Of course my husband would have cleaned it up, rather than leaving it to his water-dripping, contracting, pregnant wife. In fact, he was  going to. But there are some things that I feel a husband should NEVER have to do even in the most dire of circumstances, like watch me on the toilet or sit through a knitting group, and cleaning up my bloody, blobby, gooby mucus plug is one of those things.

So I posted on Facebook and the blog while PH and my mother initiated the phone trees, and then we drove to the hospital. AGAIN. I was in more pain than ever, although the pain seemed more concentrated in my abdomen and less in my back than it had been before.

Turns out the hospital still didn’t have a room for me. They put me back in one of the curtained-off beds, attached the monitor, and left me to continue my vomit-drink juice-vomit cycle. The morphine had worn off so contractions were coming close together, sometimes on top of each other, again. The nurse hooked up nitrous oxide for me, which did NOT make me laugh or even really seem to do anything at all. When a doctor finally got around to checking me (2 cm, maybe, nothing else to report), I got another morphine shot which helped space the contractions back out again.

Time passed.

Every 20 minutes PH would make me get up and walk around for 20 minutes before he would let me rest again, in an attempt to get things moving a little. He and my mother brought me juice. I would throw it up and then beg for more, which they would only let me have in small, controlled sips. I would doze a bit when on the bed, between contractions. They continued to hurt.The sounds of women screaming, followed by babies wailing, continued as background noise.

Sept 7th, 11:00 pm

We were beginning to resign ourselves to the fact that our son would not be born today.

It was nearly 11 pm before they finally had a room free for me, and more time after that before a nurse was available to initiate and monitor my oxytocin drip. The room was nice – big, private, with its own bathroom with a shower and stool for labouring in warm water, and a big chair that folded out so my mother and husband could take turns lying down on it.

They hooked up the oxytocin on a low dose, telling me that they would steadily increase it until it had the desired effect. By this time my second morphine shot had worn off, and my contractions were back to being one on top of the other. I believe it was after I had the four and a half minute long contraction, which had at least three peaks, that the tears started to come into my eyes and they offered me the epidural.

I’ve never been good at handling pain, so I always expected to need an epidural in the end. I accepted without hesitation.

Sept 8th, 1:00 am

The epidural guy came in, and introduced himself as Dr. Mohammed Ali. This is not a pseudonym. That was actually the man’s last name. I shook his hand gravely and didn’t mention the name at all, because I’m sure he gets ribbed a lot about it. But after he left there was a lot of joking about how he “knocked me out” and “stung me like a bee, then I floated like a butterfly.”

The epidural didn’t take long and the needle itself didn’t hurt much, but sitting up and leaning forward so that I was pressing into my painful abdomen was almost unbearable. It didn’t take long, though, and soon I was lying on my back in a warm puddle of bliss. The pain was gone. I could feel my legs and move them, although they were heavy and I didn’t have proper control of them. I felt warm and cozy and very comfortable. The only downside was a kind of itchy feeling, which I would scratch idly, but a slight itch was really nothing to complain about, now that I was out of pain.

I remained that way for almost 12 hours.

Finally able to doze for more than a few minutes at a time, I conked out quickly. But it was still not a prolonged and restful sleep because of course the nurse was there monitoring me. Every hour she would run ice down both my sides, asking me to tell her where the cold feeling stopped so she could make sure my epidural was still doing its job. They also kept waking me and getting me to shift positions, because the monitor kept losing the baby’s heart beat, and they weren’t sure whether the problem was the baby’s actual heart beat, or the monitor/my position.

At one point, the night was shattered by the most ear-piercing shrieks which went on and on. A woman was clearly being vivisected by Jack the Ripper in the next room. Polite conversation between my mother and the nurse ground to an awkward halt. I half sat up in bed. “Did that woman have an epidural?” I asked nervously. Would the birth still hurt that much, even with the pain medication?

When the screams finally died away, a nurse came in to spell-off my oxytocin nurse. She told us that that woman had arrived 10 cm dilated, no time to for her doctor to arrive, definitely no time for an epidural. The nurses ended up catching the baby on their own. That poor woman. If I could have found Dr. Mohammed Ali and hugged him, I think I would have.

Sept 8th, 4:00 am

The problems monitoring the heart rate continued. Sometimes it would drop down low. I couldn’t see the monitor, though my mother and husband could, and I think this was to prevent me worrying. Finally they decided to attach a sensor to his skull so they could monitor him more accurately. They went up my gooch with a little plastic stick and somehow pinned a little monitor onto the baby’s head. They told me I was at 4 cm.

By morning the right side of my epidural had worn off a little, the icy feeling lasting almost to my waist, and I could feel slight aching in that side, which made me nervous. They talked about topping me up if necessary.

Sept 8th, 9:00 am

The Wednesday OB showed up at around 8:30 or 9 in the morning. I had never met this one before, but he seemed nice. He looked like a bearded Omar Sharif in his late thirties or early forties. He pronounced me at 9 cm, and left again. I remained at 9 cm for a very long time. The nurses kept checking me and saying that there was a “rim” still and therefore it wasn’t time to push.

Sept 8th, 11:45 am

Dr. Omar Sharif returned, probably just before starting his lunch break (he was running back and forth between me and the OB clinic, you see). Though the nurses had told me only a little while before that the “rim” was still there, he pronounced me ready to push!

Read Part III: A Son is Born

No Sleep For You! You Come Back, 18 Years!

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cluster feeding, newborn, sleep, two week old

I’m almost done writing up the next part of the labour story, I swear, but it’s bloody hard to find a moment in which to work on it.

This kid doesn’t sleep.

Ever.

He is 16 days old and he doesn’t sleep. He suckles, and he cries, and sometimes he lies quietly alert and being all cure, before crying/suckling some more.

Now, I am not particularly disillusioned. I knew that having a baby would mean sleepless nights and a lot of screaming. But I did think that newborns, while waking up every couple of hours, would eventually go back to sleep for an hour or two at a time.

But when this baby  dozes off, I am constantly afraid that it is for the last time, and that the next wake-up, which will likely happen in the next fifteen minutes or so, will never, ever end. Even my mother is baffled by his constant wakefulness and insatiable hunger. On Facebook, people keep commenting on how alert he looks in his pictures. They’re telling us.

On Tuesday, he was awake from 5 pm until 1 am. On Wednesday he was awake from 2:30 pm until nearly 10:00 pm. On Thursday he was awake from 1:30 pm until 9:30 pm. Today he woke up at 12:30, and right now he has FINALLY gone limp and he is downstairs in his moses basket with my mother and husband hovering over him like he is a bomb ready to go off. He may wake at any moment.

If we’re lucky, he’ll sleep for a couple hours before he’s up and screaming for food again. My nipples, which were beginning to heal, are getting sore again.

I CAN HAZ BOOBAS??!!

One thing I will say about him – the worst of the feeding/screaming fits have mostly been during the afternoon/evening. He does often sleep for as much as two or even three hours together over the night and in the morning, although last night it took my mother and I from 2 am until 4 am to get him to go back to sleep for those couple of hours.

In the meantime, he’s learning lots. He has discovered his rattle, and he reaches for my shirt or my glasses when he is enraged. He’s working on rolling over. He has also decided to try and help me put him to the breast by clutching at the sides of my boob and exerting as much muscle strength as he can summon to bring the booba to his mouth. Unfortunately, he hasn’t worked out the difference between Push and Pull, so he actually sits there pushing the breast away while gaping frantically like a goldfish out of water, and eventually screwing up his eyes and wailing in frustration, at which point I snatch away his fists and plunk my breast into his mouth.

So basically he’s strong and fit. I, on the other hand, am a hollowed-out shell of a woman who has watched far more HGTV than any normal human should watch in a year.

Always-Awake Babby plots my demise

Can anyone explain to me why I feel guilty snatching half an hour to myself for a bath or to check Facebook, leaving the baby under the care of my mother or Perfect Husband? I mean, it’s not like he’s mine and only mine. He’s every bit as much my husband’s baby, and PH doesn’t feel the need to ask me if I can watch the baby for an hour while he reads cracked.com. But PH is happy to care for his son (if apologetic that he can’t help me with the constant-hunger issue), and my mother is delighted to have a chance to be useful before she leaves on Monday.

So how come I feel like I’m being selfish and asking them to do my job for me when I try to give myself a just few moments out of the rocking chair?

The Labour Story, Part the First: In Which Absolutely Nothing Happens.

Tags

childbirth, induction, labour, overdue, oxytocin, pregnancy, prostaglandin gel

Monday, Sept 6th, 8:00 AM

Induction day. Officially I was overdue by 7 days, according to the date of my last period. According to that early ultrasound we had at 12 weeks, the baby was overdue by 11 days. Either way, my OB clinic induces at one week, since they say that reduces the occurrence of stillborns. We went in to the hospital and they put me in a bed with a monitor strapped onto my belly,told me to push a button whenever the baby moved, and left us for a while.

PH got a big kick out of being able to tell ME when the baby was moving simply by watching the heart rate spike.

“He’s kicking again”, he’d say and I’d say “Yes, yes he is”.

Then they felt up my gooch and told me that I was not at all dilated (still) and Babby was floating at -3 station (still). The hospital induction OB, who looked like Jane Lynch, warned me that there was a good chance his head might not be able to pass into my pelvis, which felt narrow to her. I’ve always thought of myself as being wide-hipped, but I guess I’m not so wide where it counts. She wanted me to prepare myself for a probable C-section.

“But still, we want to give it the old college try,” she said, “obstetrics is full of surprises, and we won’t give you a C-section until we KNOW you won’t be able to achieve a vaginal birth.”

Then she shoved the gel up my gooch and left us for an hour to think about it. It kind of burned a bit, but I didn’t feel any of the cramping or contractions they had warned me about. Then they sent me home, and told me to come back at 2:45 pm for another dose unless I suddenly went into active labour in which case I should obviously come in sooner.

I had some mild menstrual-like cramping but that was it.

Monday, Sept 6th, 2:45pm

We returned to the hospital for my next dose. They were rushing around busy so they put me in a bed with a monitor and we waited and waited for them to get around to me. The women next to me was moaning and crying behind her curtain, which I didn’t find very encouraging whatsoever. PH read out loud to me from the Princess Bride for a while and then started wandering around the ward.

“I’ve found the Christmas decorations”, he announced at one point. “At this rate, we may need them.”

FINALLY Dr. Jane Lynch showed up and poked me in private areas, which was much less comfortable now, with the cramping and all that. I mean, it was not exactly a comforting massage at the best of times. Now it was like “Oh dear gawd, what did I ever do to you?”. She told me that I wasn’t dilated at all, but Babby had moved down to -2 or so. We found this encouraging. She shoved more gel up my gooch and left me for an hour. Babby’s heart rate remained fine and I didn’t burst into active labour, so they let us go. They gave us the option of either coming back that night for a third dose, and then getting pitocin in the morning if nothing had happened, or waiting til the next day for the third dose, and getting pitocin that afternoon or evening.

We wanted to get the show on the road. We were afraid that if we held off the third dose to the next day, the baby might not even be born on Tuesday at all, and my husband would have taken a day off work for nothing. By going in late on Monday, we thought we would actually be able to produce a baby by the end of Tuesday.

We were so naive.

Monday, Sept 6th, 10:30 pm

They were still incredibly busy. We waited and waited and waited, and now I was feeling QUITE crampy and out of sorts. Finally Dr. Jane Lynch showed up and told me that absolutely nothing had changed. Oh, no, I might be almost dilated one cm. Kind of.

Another dose of gel, an hour of waiting which resulted in much stronger and more painful cramping, and the promising encouragement of “come in when you wake up and we’ll give you oxytocin”.

Good to know they had faith in their third dose of gel doing the trick.

Tuesday, Sept 7th, 5:30 am. 5:32 am. 5:35 am…

I did not sleep at all. The cramping had been kicked into contractions by the gel, but they were apparently not real contractions that actually did anything, since they had sent me home with them at 1 in the morning. I suppose it was basically the first stage of labour with  very frequent contractions. The pains started in my lower abdomen and shot up my back, with an added stabbing pain between my legs which made me really sympathize with that poor pig in Lord of the Flies. They came every two to four minutes, so I would doze of for a minute only to be woken up by another pain. I watched the clock the whole night. 2:48 am. 2:51 am. 2:54 am. 2:56 am. 2:59 am…

I took a warm bath, but I needed PH to pull me out of the tub when it got cold. I breathed deeply. I remained quiet so as to not wake PH up, since there was no point in all of us losing sleep. I rolled onto my knees and arched my back. I got up and checked Facebook. 4:21 am. 4:23 am. 4:26 am…

PH woke up to find me desperately trying to get comfortable during another contraction at around 5 in the morning. We debated about whether or not to go in. On the one hand, contractions 3 minutes apart seem to scream “active labour” but since they had sent me home like that, clearly such measures didn’t count when you had pig prostaglandins on your cervix. Eventually he called Labour and Delivery and asked them, and they seemed unconcerned. They said I could come in if I wanted my progress checked or some pain meds, but that I was not likely to be in active labour. We held out until 6:30 or so and then PH and my mother helped me, walking as gingerly as an old lady and moaning, to the car. On the way, I opened the passenger door and vomited onto the road at a stop light.

I was eased back into the damn uncomfortable hospital bed and a monitor was strapped to me again. We waited for quite a while for a doctor, occasionally assured by sympathetic nurses that we weren’t forgotten about, but they were extremely busy. Apparently the entire population of Vancouver chose to be induced/have their c-sections on the 7th, because it’s a lucky number don’t you know.

The contractions kept coming. Most of them I could breathe through but every now and then I’d get several continuous waves with no break in between, and I’d begin to whimper with tears springing in my eyes. I am not known for my stoicism. The pain seemed aggravated too by the unabashed moaning and crying from the woman next to me. She was clearly in a lot of pain and very unhappy about it, but she kept turning down pain medication. I was really motivated to breathe deeply and not whine during contractions because I didn’t want to sound like her.

Tuesday, Sept 7th, sometime late morning

Finally my own OB (who works Tuesdays) came in and told me that I was 1 cm dilated and Babby had not moved any lower. She told me that I needed oxytocin but that they were far too busy to be able to give me a room and a nurse at the moment. She offered me a shot of morphine with gravol, which I accepted.

The shot was extremely mild, obviously, and it didn’t really do much for the pain, but it had the blessed benefit of spacing out the contractions to every 5-7 minutes, and giving me the ability to doze between each contraction. PH and my mother sat there for hours, holding my hand, talking softly to each other while I dozed, and timing my contractions. They brought me juice, which I would then vomit up. Someone brought me breakfast, but just looking at it made me throw up, so that was a wash.

After I don’t know how long (my sense of time was totally shot at this point) the doctor returned and told me that she was sorry but there were STILL no rooms available and likely wouldn’t be until at least 5 pm. Did we want to just go home and wait?

Yes, yes we did.

Read Part II: In Which Mohammed Ali and Omar Sharif Make An Appearance

Ten Days In.

Babby is ten days old today. His birth feels like a lifetime ago. And also like yesterday. He’s a good baby, generally, and overall I like him quite a lot. But cluster feeding is from the devil, I’m here to tell you now. I like nursing him, but sleep would be nice.

My mother has been here helping out and I have no idea how I will survive without her. She and Dad are supposed to leave Monday, but she’s going to see if she can switch her ticket to stay for another week. This after I started weeping over my baby this morning out of exhaustion.

The first three nights of his life largely involved screeching to the point where we feared the Dread Demon Colic. The next few nights were actually just fine. He would wake up, nurse, and sleep for another two or even three hours. However, the last two or three nights have been getting increasingly worse. His nursing sessions have stretched from an hour to an hour and a half to even two hours long. Even then he fusses and cries and I have trouble settling him. Once I do, he’s up in only an hour or two at most, and it starts all over again. Poor PH is back to work and so must actually sleep at night as much as possible, so it’s no longer a tag-team effort.

This morning I woke my mother at 8:30 completely exhausted after a two hour feeding session, which was preceded by an hour of sleep after an hour and a half feeding session. She spent nearly an hour humming and singing him to sleep while I hovered around fretfully, and then shooed me upstairs for a nap. I slept for a couple of hours, then nursed him again, and the time between two and three thirty was spent in us taking turns singing to him and rocking him while he fought sleep valiantly. His eyes would close for a little while, then pop open just as we were starting to relax. Another hour and a half nursing, and now he’s finally out for the count. I went back to sleep once he was out, and got another hour before PH came in, wrapped his arms around me, and roused me for dinner. I’d forgotten to eat lunch, and my mother is still beating herself up for forgetting to force feed me.

On most days I’ve been feeling good. But a couple of those bad nights and BOOM – I feel like I can’t possible handle it.

What on Earth will I do when his Nana isn’t here to take over for me and let me get some sleep?

My little sea turtle. Unfortunately, I can't adopt the sea turtle style of parenting and let him crawl out to sea on his own.

Post-Birth TMI

Tags

bleeding, childbirth, pregnancy

Okay, I know you are all waiting for the labour story, but instead I’m going to inflict you with some serious TMI, because I really need input from people who have Been There.

Is it normal to be bleeding from your urethra as well as from your vulva?? Is it possible for blood from the vulva to somehow travel upwards and forwards to just make it LOOK like your painful urethra is bleeding?

I’m Back! And so is Babby!

Tags

birth, new baby, newborn, postdue

Hi everyone! I’ve missed you. This isn’t the labour story yet, because I feel that deserves a level of time and attention that I don’t have yet (visitor stream is dying down slowly, but the next one is expected in 10-15 minutes).

Just wanted to let you know that as PH has said, we have a healthy Babby with ten fingers, and ten toes, although two are freakishly webbed, a trait he inherited from me (that blew my mind – HE HAS MY CRAZY TOES). He looks like a cross between Muppet Babby Perfect Husband and a baby sea turtle. We aren’t sure if he’s an angel or devil spawn, because he kept us up two nights in a row with colicky toothless screaming but has been cooperatively eating and dozing for the last 36 hours. We’re not sure what awaits us tonight.

While you’re waiting for the gory details, some pictures! These pics are when he was only a few hours old and heavily over-baked in my oven (it was my first attempt at babby-cooking, okay?), so please excuse post-birth baby cone head, splotchiness, peeling skin etc. Also, PH is still deliberating on whether to let me use his son’s real name. I would happily tell you, since it’s a really generic name, but of course this is a two-parent decision. So a moniker may be in order.

New Babby

The new family

Perfect Husband approves of Babby

Quick (yet important) update with special guest blogger

Tags

babby, birth, delivery, special guest blogger

PH here (and may I say, while I have my two seconds in the driver’s seat, that Carol is completely insane when choosing monikers. But I digress). Carol was hoping to post this update herself, but apparently when the hospital told us that they had wifi, they lied through their teeth. So you get me instead.

The update you’ve all been waiting for – New Babby has finally entered the world as of yesterday afternoon, 20 hours after the water broke and 51 hours from the beginning of the first gel treatment. Health okay, even though there were some hairy moments during the labour and delivery. All body parts there and accounted for.

I will save most of the details for Carol to share with you, since she has the gift of blagging, a talent I sorely lack. We will be in the hospital until at least tomorrow and possibly Saturday, so expect no further updates until then.

Thanks to all for the well-wishes, and regular blogging will resume within the next 48-72 hours, knock wood.

THUNDERCATS ARE GO!!!

While you’re waiting, enjoy this video sideshow of pics of Perfect Husband and myself as babies/children. You can speculate on the possible appearance of our offspring.