Should NOT have had those last 10 chicken wings.
So the girl who cleans my house is pregnant. YES, I pay someone weekly to clean my house. To me, it’s worth it not to have to worry about the gremlin-sized clumps of cat hair peppering the floor and covering every household surface. We hired her when I was about 4 months pregnant and had a hard time standing up for longer than a few minutes and I also consider it an investment in my marriage — I ain’t cleanin and we get pissy with each other when it’s messy, so it goes a long way toward ensuring domestic bliss. She does the dishes and EVERYTHING! But now that she’s pregnant, I can’t watch her clean without feeling guilty as crap, so I usually go grocery shopping while she’s here. But I digress…
So she’s pregnant and young and she and her husband already have a “spirited” almost 3-year-old boy and they were NOT planning this one. She was upset last week when she told me, worried she’d have another boy when she doesn’t feel she has a handle on the one she has. No insurance, etc. So when she told me today she was having a girl, I was SO excited for her. I have a serious issue with throwing things out, especially if they’re in perfectly fine or better condition, so I love, love, love it when I can give something to someone who can really use it and really appreciate it. And I so seriously overbought for the Bean when I was pregnant, so our house looks like Babies R Us. As it stands now, we are NOT planning on having another one. I know she’s only 7 months old, but with such a crap pregnancy and labor/delivery, it’s not even something I can consider right now — I mean, she’s still getting up twice a night! My point is, and I do have one, that for a very brief nanosecond, I thought to myself “should I keep these clothes just in case we have another girl?” BOOM! There it was! Out of nowhere — and then I just told myself I was being my frugal (cheapskate) self and handed over the goods. Oh, wait — HERE is my point: for posterity and in order to correctly reflect on the crapfest that was my pregnancy/labor/delivery/postpartum depression, I have decided to create a timeline of the events that led up to the birth of the cutest baby girl in all the world.
- May 19 – 22, 2005: Attempts to get pregnant (awwwww, yeeah!), get off anti-depressant (more on that later)
- Weeks 1 to 3 – sore boobs. REALLY SORE boobs.
- Weeks 1 to 40 – stuffy nose. REALLY stuffy nose. Can’t breathe. Lotsa snot. Go through large box of Puffs Plus with Lotion per week. Called Rhinitis of Pregnancy. It BLOWS. heh heh.
- Weeks 7 – 11 - uncontrolled vomiting. Diagnosed as hyperemesis gravidarum, a specific type of morning sickness affecting 1 out of 1000 pregnant women (because I’m special).
- Weeks 9 – 29 – headache. That’s it. One headache that lasted 20 weeks. I took the max dose of Tylenol every single day (8 extra strength)
- Weeks 13 – 40 – joint and muscle pain that got exceedingly worse by the week. Could barely walk by week 33 and at other random times throughout pregnancy. Was told this is due to Relaxin hormone. aka “F Your Shit Up” hormone.
- Weeks 19 – 40 – undiagnosed high blood pressure/extremely elevated heartrate issues (not diagnosed until week 36, more on that later). Had to be rescued twice from hair salon by extremely worried and patient husband because of near-fainting. Mama got to look good.
- Weeks 13 – 40 – random external tearing “down there” and subsequent bleeding and scares. For no damn reason!
- Weeks 15 – 40 – intense heartburn. Who cares if you can eat whatever you want when you don’t stinkin want anything?
- Week 39 – finally convince crapola Navy Hospital to induce me to spare me the debilitating heart and blood pressure issues. We go in at 6 pm on a Tuesday, smack some Cervadil on my cervix and labor begins. Pain so awful by 4 am that they give me Fentanol that makes me so woozy and spacy that I feel drunk. Epidural at 9 am that stops working even though I’m told I just have a low tolerance for pain. Still only dilated 3 cm. Midwife sticks an internal monitor on the baby’s head and another to measure my contractions. “OH, wow, you ARE in some pain, huh?” Still only 5 cm at 4 pm and epidural STILL not working. Contractions every couple of minutes. Starting at 5 pm, midwife lobbies surgeon for c-section (of which I am terrified. TERRIFIED) and contractions every 60 – 90 seconds. No epidural. After my temp spikes to 101 and so does the baby’s (and her heartrate is up to 220) and STILL NO MF EPIDURAL, they start agreeing to a c-section. Which doesn’t happen until 12:35 am in the MF morning! After a brief panic attack while my privates are being groomed for surgery, and STILL with contractions lasting 60 seconds one right after the other, I’m rolled into the OR, where the anesthetician dude gives me 4 TIMES the normal amount of drugs and then tells the surgeon to stick the incision site with extra lidocaine “just in case.” I’m still having contractions, still trying to do the breathing and vaguely aware of my husband somewhere behind my strapped-down arms. Even though I cringe and gag at the thought of being sliced open while awake, I know this is best for the baby and am trying to remain calm and not vomit on myself when I feel the “pressure” on my stomach. All of a sudden my pelvic region is pierced — WRENCHED — with stabbing, burning pain. I scream “I can feel it! I can feel it!” to which the surgeon answers “where?” and I yell “on my pubic bone! oh, my God!” and then confusion and then the next thing I know, I hear my husband say “I’m going to check on the baby.” Apparently, I’d already been given the max dose of drugs and the dude gave me an amnesiac (after asking my husband) that would knock me out for “at least an hour.” 20 minutes later is when I woke up and heard my husband say he was checking on the baby. Not only did I miss being there for the birth of my tiny little baby and hear her first cries, I woke up while they were STILL STITCHING ME UP. The hell that was the days that followed in the hospital and then the depression will have to come at a later time — my baby’s getting ready to be home with my baby!
