Although to be perfectly honest it feels a lot more like I was in a car wreck and that, in unrelated news, we somehow got a puppy.
I came home from work Thursday night (Friday marked 35 weeks pregnant) really not feeling well and felt worse as the night went on - weird diffuse-yet-sharp abdominal pain, kind of felt like a stomachache but not in my stomach? Couldn’t sleep, felt restless, tried all sorts of position changes but nothing made me feel any better. The thing is, you find out when you’re pregnant that you hurt all kinds of weird ways that are often one-offs and what your doctor does is shrug and says “eh, it’s one of those things”. Finally I started to kind of wonder if maybe it was preterm labor and labor just really didn’t feel like I thought it would, because the sharpness of the pain seemed to come and go pretty regularly. I tried timing it and got 5ish minutes, so at 2 AM I finally gave in and called my practice’s answering service and was told, eh, probably just one of those things, I could come in to L&D if I wanted to get checked out or if I thought I could hang on until morning I could go in to the office.
Mind you, I’d just been in on Tuesday because I was concerned that my feet and ankles never un-swelled, even at night or when I had them up all day, and that it was moving into my hands and a bit in my face, and that I’d been starting to get headaches (which to be fair I get allergy headaches all the time). I didn’t mention the pain under my ribs because I figured that was the baby taking up more room. Totally normal pregnant lady stuff, but it’s on that list of things you’re supposed to call about, but they told me it was nothing because my blood pressure wasn’t up. (My blood pressure is always really low. Of course, gradually climbing blood pressure is yet again one of those totally normal pregnancy things. Every single thing in the world is a totally normal pregnancy thing which can also mean you are about to die.)
So anyway, one shittiest-car-ride-of-my-life later it turns out I have HELLP syndrome, which can totally kill you (and also make you miss work on a Friday when your boss was really depending on you.) All those natural childbirth classes, plus our very carefully chosen doula and our very well thought out birth plan and the cute little gown I’d gotten because I didn’t want to have to labor in those shitty backless hospital things and - oh, never mind, we’re having a somewhat-emergency c-section at 35 weeks. My platelet count was down in the 70’s and only expected to get lower, so for added fun I couldn’t even do the c-section with the epidural - hello general anesthesia!
So the scary thing is, we have no idea how big or mature the baby is, we don’t know if he’s going to the NICU or what, and we know we won’t know until they get him out and look at him. (If I’d have really understood that general anesthesia meant I was going to wake up before the painkillers started that would have also been “the scary thing” but they failed to really make that distinction clear.) (Also for reasons nobody could explain very well at all that means your husband can’t be there in the OR - he can if you’re awake but not if you’re not? So they station the poor man in the hallway like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz at the intersection of where the baby is either going left to the NICU or right to the special care nursery.)
So the good news - Tater turned out to be a very big 35 week baby - 6 lbs 10 oz, breathing fine, hilariously exhibitable as a Wolf Boy if he needs extra money (still kinda covered in hair). He had to spend some time in special care nursery but never the NICU, because of some concerns about his blood sugar, but he went home with me. He isn’t so good at this latching thing, though. So that’s uncool.
But damn, y’all. Damn. Smart people always say c-sections are no joke, and I’ve always kind of wanted to smack those dumb bitches on BabyCenter who are all “should I get a c-section? I think it’s better for my vagina and also I don’t want to miss the Victoria’s Secret Semi-Annual sale!” But now I actually want to drive to their houses and burn them down.
I am absolutely, totally humbled by the fact that there are women out there doing this by themselves. I don’t know what the hell I’d do if I didn’t have my husband here. I can barely get in and out of bed. If the baby cries, he better be patient about it because it’s gonna take me a minute. It was a million times worse in the hospital - he went home to feed our animals and get some stuff, not even on the first day or anything, and the baby needed changed and started crying and I realized I just couldn’t get out of bed and get him out of the bassinet in less than five minutes or so, so I hit the call button and got told “Well you’re going to have to learn to do it yourself sometime.” (And then she criticized my wipe usage.) I started crying when they took the catheter out because I realized that meant I was going to have to get out of bed to pee. My poor dear husband was totally traumatized in the recovery room - his job was supposed to be to stay with the baby but when I woke up I started calling for him. It was so bad. The first guy who did that abdominal massage thing to me I screamed and fought him like an animal. I couldn’t help it. Special hell mention for whoever asked me “are you crying because of the pain?” I’m sure he meant “or is there something else?” but damn, dude, no, I’m sobbing because we’re gonna miss the early bird special at Sizzler. That was such a shitty thing, seriously.
So on the whole I realize we’re incredibly lucky. We got to a) live, b) go home with our baby instead of leaving him in the NICU like a lot of people do, c) hopefully have at least some of this paid for by our insurance? But the whole thing is pretty hard and I’m dreading the day that my husband has to go back to work. It does get a bit easier all the time, but it’s still really hard to just accomplish basic self care, let alone baby care.
