For those of you who have been reading along, you will know that yesterday was my first day back at work after 8 blissful months of maternity leave (okay, not all 8 months were blissful – the first 3 were pretty bloody awful, dealing with 3rd trimester pregnancy, followed by 6 weeks of dealing with sick, colicky baby, but anyway).
To begin at the beginning, my maternity leave began at 8:30pm on Thursday 1 March 2007. 8:30pm because my boss insisted on only started my file handover at 5:30pm on my last day! :rolleyes: I was 34½ weeks pregnant and definitely ready to be at home. The only problem was I wasn’t having my baby here in Bahrain, but home in Australia, so the following day I flew all the way to Brisbane, then drove home with Mum and Dad to the Gold Coast. After a few more weeks, my husband arrived and my OB decided (due to my escalating blood pressure, carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand, bad fluid retention and a baby who wouldn’t drop down) to induce labour. The final result, after 8 hours of syntocinon and some entonox to take the edge off the contractions, was our darling daughter Noor (aka HRH).
We had a lot of problems in the first few weeks of HRH’s life. From the day she was born on 6th April, she wasn’t interested in breastfeeding and wouldn’t wake up for anything. We had to wake her up every couple of hours and syringe feed her whatever milk I had managed to express (I didn’t want to use a bottle in case we could get her to take the breast). Then when Noor was 7 days old, she stopped breathing and turned a frightening shade of blue. After a flip onto her tummy and some gentle rubbing, she started breathing again, but we rushed her to the emergency room, where she repeated her neat trick another 3 times (once for the ER nurse, once for the ER physician and one more time for the paediatrician, just so everyone would know we weren’t making it up!). After a chest x-ray ruled out any problems there, a head ultrasound revealed a sinister shadow in the left temporal lobe of Noor’s brain. The paediatrician immediately gave HRH a Phenobarb load (anti-convulsant/epilepsy drug) and she was transferred up to the PICU in Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane (in the humidicrib, waiting for the ambulance), where a head MRI showed a large haematoma or blood clot (3cm x 2cm x 1.5cm) in her left temporal lobe (the area of the brain responsible for speech and language, as well as right-side motor function). The apnoeas (stopping breathing and turning blue) were due to HRH having seizures, caused by irritation to her brain. After a couple of days, Noor was stable enough to move down to a private room, where we stayed for another 10 days, while the multitude of consultants ran further tests (CT angiogram, retinal scans involving pinning her eyelids open and sticking a special camera on her eyeball, suck/swallow testing, etc, etc.).
Since that awful time, Noor has continued to take Phenobarb twice a day and has gone from strength to strength (although we never did manage to get her breastfeeding). Subsequent head MRIs have shown the haematoma is reducing in size and there is no sign of any problem with her motor function (she is crawling all over the place and wreaking havoc as she goes). HRH’s speech and language development is also proceeding apace, in line with expected developmental milestones. She is now nearly 7 months old, has started on solids, and is the light of our lives. Following are some more gratuitous cute baby photos:
Happy Little Vegemite!
Sleepy Bunny
Happy girl on the phone
But, the last 4 months of my leave have been without pay, so the time has come for me to go back to work and earn a living to help support our new family.
Yesterday was my first day back at work. 
Regular MMPers will know that this was not just an ordinary return to work, rather it was more like walking back into the maw of the beast – my boss is an insecure woman who compensates for her feelings of insecurity by treating everyone else like sh*t. This is complicated by the fact that her boss (the senior partner in our office, and the head of the “chain of command”) is also her boyfriend (read between the lines), so there is no recourse if you feel she has treated you wrongly; any complaints will be dismissed without review, as she couldn’t possibly be wrong. Needless to say, I am hoping to avoid working directly with her now that I am back at work. This should be easier to achieve now that the office has expanded and there are more senior lawyers in the office with whom I can work, but we will just have to wait and see.
My priority for now will be to ensure that my boss and co. do not prevent me from leaving work on time to race home and feed HRH before bedtime. There will be (and has been) some horse-trading involved in settling my work hours, but this is to be expected. I had tried to sort things out with the big boss before I went on leave and several times since then, but nothing has been done. The senior partner and I had a chat yesterday and settled some things, but I am determined to take every second Sunday morning off for playgroup, and otherwise work 9am-5:30pm the rest of the week (we work Sunday to Thursday here). Normal office hours are 9:30am to 6pm, but HRH’s dinner is at 6pm, followed immediately by bath and bed, so I need to adjust for that. The partner in charge has approved 9am-5:30pm, but needs committee approval for my Sunday mornings (committee of 3 international/senior partners). The bigger problem is that, as a “professional” lawyer, my salary is supposed to be sufficient to cover working beyond normal office hours. Before my leave, I would normally work 9:30am to 7:30 or 8pm (sometimes much later, if a deal was closing or TB was just being her usual self). I say my salary should be sufficient to cover the additional hours, but my recent enquiries with a recruitment consultant have revealed that I am only being paid 55-60% of the going market rate; most international firms here pay London gross salaries, with the employee bearing local tax risk (there is no real income tax here, just a recently introduced 1% tax to cover unemployment benefits for nationals). Sigh! I would have been on a slightly better salary if my salary review in December 2006 had gone through and mirrored the increase in my billing rate (an increase of about 20%), but the salary review got swept under the carpet because I was going on maternity leave in a couple of months, so I have not had a salary adjustment since mid-2005. :mad:
Anyway, I have rambled on with my whining for long enough, so I will sign off with this one last cutie pic and keep my fingers crossed that I can meet all the challenges being thrown in my path! Happy Monday All!
Enjoy it while you can!
