Silly Little Girl

Oh...Right. Someone actually has to get this baby OUT.

I'm far too lazy to go through the archives to see whether I ever mentioned anything about Donovan's birth, so if I'm retelling the story, my apologies.

Donovan showed absolutely ZERO indication of exiting my uterus anytime before Independence Day, 2004. He was due July 1st, 2003, incidentally. Nor did my doctors seem to be in any particular hurry to evict him. It wasn't until an appointment, a full 14 days past my due date, where I refused to leave an office without a scheduled induction date, did anything fall into place. I entered the hospital shortly after midnight on July 17th, was given a dose of Cytotec, and left to wait.

Around 3:30am, I finally started having contractions. They were extremely mild, but measurable. Around 7:30am, I told my Aunt Kate that this labor business was really not too bad. At 8:00am, they started the Pitocin. By 8:30, I was screaming my ever-loving lungs out. 10:30am, a futile dose of Stadol. By 11:30, I had sufficiently worn down the patience of my two labor nurses enough that they fudged my dialation to get an anesthesiologist up there and get me an epidural. They told him I was 6 centimeters dialated. In truth, I was barely 4, but I imagine that a 16 year old girl screaming herself hoarse for 3 hours straight might compel someone to stretch some numbers.

Donovan was born at 5:29pm on the 17th after 14 hours of contractions and 23 minutes of pushing. There were no complications until AFTER his delivery, when my uterus was declared "boggy." It was a shift change, so the doctor that attended the birth was in the room, about to be relieved by the doctor coming on. After 45 minutes of blood loss so severe that it looked like transfusions might be necessary, Doctor #2 said, rather nonchalantly I'm told, "Take her to OR and get it out." "IT" being my uterus. He was recommending a full hysterectomy for a 16 year old girl. Doctor #1 was having no part of that, and sat literally elbow deep in my vagina, massaging my uterus for the next 30 minutes until the bleeding finally stopped. Obviously, a hysterectomy was not performed that day.

I was told in the office later that this complication may make me a more likely candidate for a scheduled C-Section later on. Apparently, I took this to heart.

When I started seeing the doctor this time around, I told them my history with childbirth and thought nothing of it. Some delusional mechanism engaged in my brain and I convinced myself that OF COURSE they were going to schedule a C-Section. OF COURSE THEY WERE. So I went my merry way for about 25 weeks, assuming they'd bring it up as we got closer to D-Day. But no one did. And, by the tone of their conversations, they seemed to be under some misguided notion that I was going to LABOR to have this child. What, seriously?

At my 30 week appt, I came right out and asked, and it was confirmed that YES, I AM GOING TO HAVE TO LABOR. So. Wow. Ok. I actually did not see that coming.

So the past several weeks I've been reconciling my brain with that fact, and I am surprisingly calm about the whole thing. I am actually hoping that this all happens on its own and I can labor at home for a few hours before a nice, leisurely drive to the hospital. I am hoping that, if no induction, and no Pitocin is necessary this time around, I might have a bit of an easier time with it than last time. Between the supposed difference in contractions manufactured by Pit and the shortening of labors in each subsequent birth, I might be in for an entirely different experience this time around. And truth be told, the first time wasn't really THAT bad.

I say that, of course, with a degree of the amnesia that comes with having given birth, but also with the comforting knowledge of remembering that no matter how bad it really is, when it's all said and done and over, that amnesia kicks in FAST, and it never seems as bad in retrospect.

I am, however, a little apprehensive about my husband's role in this whole thing. I seem to be shockingly unable to find a way to prepare him for what this might be like, and my greatest fear regarding this birth is that he'll be the kind of guy who rolls his eyes in the delivery room, making it clear that he thinks you are totally exaggerating this whole thing. Any advice for prepping the dad-to-be?

A random series of updates, or, How the Blogosphere will render my child nameless

I'm not even going to offer up an excuse why I can't form transitional sentences and am falling back to the blog-slackers stand-by of listed updates. I don't care. It's 7:30 on Black Friday, I have painkillers, my child is nameless, and that's really all that matters.

1. My teeth. Can we talk about my teeth some more? Listen, I know we discussed it, but this is getting out of fucking hand. You'll remember the awfulness that was the extraction, yeah? And if your reading comprehension and memory skills are good, you'll remember my wishful desire that I would need no further dental intervention in the next two months, when painkillers are sparse? You do? Good. Stomp on that wish for me. Hope is a bitch.

Turns out, that goddamn tooth never needed to come out. You know what was causing me pain? You know what DID need to come out? My motherfucking wisdom teeth. All fucking four of them. Isn't that pleasant? And no, no I really CAN'T deal with it until the end of my pregnancy, unless they changed the rules and it's totally ok to take massive quantities of Vicodin washed down with Margaritas until then. So out they come, next Thursday. Without general anesthesia. Without any kind of anesthesia, thank you, save for Novacaine.

Now, in talking to EVERY SINGLE PERSON I COULD THINK TO ASK, pretty much everyone else gets put to sleep to have their wisdom teeth out. I...have to imagine there is a reason for this. I have to imagine there is a reason that they do not want you awake during the type of oral surgery where they have to CRACK YOUR JAW to get the teeth out. And I imagine that being awake during such a surgery is going to fucking BLOW.

But...you know. Far be it for me to whine. Moving on.

2. My son is nameless. He truly is Baby X now. Our front-runner name, the name we'd agreed on MONTHS AGO, somehow simultaneously became unacceptable to both my husband and I at the same time. For the record, the name was Perrin. Perrin is our favorite character from his favorite book series. But that's besides the point.

This wouldn't be a huge issue if Nik would even just CONSIDER the only other name I find to be palatable. Which would be Nikolas. But noooo. Apparently they don't name kids after parents or relatives in that family. Some crap about having one's own identity. Blah. Whatever.

So I've been up since 5 this morning scouring baby name websites making neat little bulleted lists of acceptable names. Also not helping the cause - two names I really love happen to be the names of the children of two of my favorite bloggers, and that has rendered them useless in my opinion. I CANNOT STEAL FROM ANOTHER BLOGGER. IT BREAKS SOME UNWRITTEN BLOG RULE, I'M PRETTY SURE.

3. I got fired. While, in this economy, this sounds like it should be a sad thing, I'm really not all that broken up about it. Next week probably would have been my last anyway, and I'm just vaguely irritated that the element of surprise was taken out of the whole thing, cuz I had no intention of telling my boss that I was leaving. He's been very angry about my pregnancy for the last few months, and when I cut my hours to make kindergarten possible for my son, he basically did everything in his power to get me to quit. When that didn't work, he presented me with a nice little speech about how "our tenure had ended....somewhere along the way [my] pregnancy and son became more important than my job...didn't live up to [his] expectations." I did gain some small satisfaction from the way his face crumbled and twisted in fury when I just smiled and waved good bye. I think he expected me to cry or something.

4. I am officially nesting. God help my neighbors, who have to hear me hammering and vacuuming at 4:30 in the morning lately. My closets are officially on notice.

And that is all, dear readers. My thanksgiving was fabulous, and I hope yours was, too. We have a lot to be grateful for this year, even more so considering the climate of the universe, and we're happy campers for now.

Feel bad for me, cuz no one else will.

Blogosphere, can we talk? Can we, seriously? Cuz I'd like to whine to you for a few minutes, and have you feel sorry for me, cuz honestly, I've used up everyone else's sympathy for me.

My week, post Wednesday, SUCKED. Kind of royally, actually. All because of my goddamn teeth.

See, my teeth have probably been the most consistent source of annoyance and aggravation my entire teenage to adult life. Aside from being terribly, embarassingly crooked, there's always something fucking wrong with them. My mom...well. She didn't set much store by little things like "dental care" or "tooth brushing" when I was a kid. I went to the dentist a total of 6 times between being born and turning 18. By the time I was 18 and could get my own insurance and take my damn self to the dentist, there was so much damage that I've spent the last 4 years just trying to catch up on the periodontal disease and the breakages in my molars and the zillions of cavities requiring root canals.

I'd gotten the major stuff under control by last winter, but pregnancy hit my teeth and gums HARD. Suddenly, my teeth were breaking all over the goddamn place. Thankfully, they were all molars and back teeth, which are a pain in the ass, but I'm still grateful that it's not visible. I saw the dentist and because I wasn't in any pain, we decided to try to hold off on the extractions until after the baby.

Cut to last Friday morning, around 1:30 am. I wake up in fucking AGONY. My top left molar is throbbing throughout my entire face. Someone forgot to turn on the voicemail at my dentist's office, so I couldn't get their emergency number. I couldn't think of anything else to do besides go to the emergency room.

They figured immediately that I was dealing with an abscess, gave me a script for pennicilin, cleared a couple Vicodin with my OB/GYN to get me through until the infection cleared out, and sent me on my way. The vicodin helped, the antibiotics did their job and by Sunday, I wasn't in pain anymore. I made the first available appointment with an oral surgeon for the 18th.

Until Tuesday morning, 1:30am AGAIN. I wake up, realize quickly WHY I'm awake, and curse the heavens in my bedroom. I had fully believed I was only dealing with an abscess, so why, with a course of antibiotics running through me, was I in so much fucking pain again.

This time I did call the emergency number, and a fat fucking lot of good it did me. No one called back. I called until 8:30 that morning, when finally some broad answered and told me to call the office at nine. By 9:30 I was in their office getting that sucker yanked right out of my skull.

And then the fun REALLY started. The oral surgeon, who did not want to do the extraction in the first place, said I'd be fine with tylenol once the novacaine wore off. I...believed him. He did mention that if I happened to NOT be fine, I needed to go to my OB/GYN, because he did not give narcotics to pregnant women. He again reiterated though, that I'd be fine with tylenol. And like I said, I believed him.

Less than an hour later, without the novacaine even fully wearing off, I was crying on the phone to the nurse in my OB's office. That motherfucker HURT. It hurt worse then than before it got taken out. I felt like I'd gotten punched repeatedly in the face. The OB called in a prescription for Tylenol 3, and slowly, slowly I finally started to feel better.

So now, here I am, cautiously optimistic about possibly, maybe, making it through the remainder of this pregnancy without any more dental intervention, but still pretty fucking pissed off at the world and feeling sorry for myself.

Also, I went to the OB yesterday afternoon for a routine checkup, and was told that, NO, NO it was not possible that 5 ultrasounds were wrong about my due date, and YES, YES I do have to go through 8 more weeks of pregnancy. AT LEAST.

Bastards.

30 weeks, bustin' out of my 220lb husband's t-shirt.

Well.

He did it. And while part of me would like to jump up and down and scream from the rafters and cheer and cry, just a little, the biggest part of me feels how heavy and sobering a moment this is.

History was made. And to me, it feels like America gets to start over. We get to rebuild where we were broken, we get to earn back the respect of the other nations. There is still so much left to do, but we started by successfully taking that first, huge, crucial step.

I hadn't planned to go to bed before 2 or 3 a.m. last night. Nik and I agreed that neither of us could sleep until a concession was made. I had NO idea that I would be in bed by 12:30, peaceful and dreaming of better days for all of us.

For those of you whose guy didn't win, I'm sorry. I know that it must be devastating and scary to some of you. I hope, though, that you can try to push your misgivings to the side a little bit and step forward with us and hope. I hope that at least for the next couple years, the awful divisiveness that plagued us can be forgotten, and we can work together.

I felt McCain's speech was the best I've heard from him. Maybe it's only because I don't perceive him as a threat anymore, but last night I saw a warmth and grace from him that he lacked his entire campaign. A sense of accountability. A flash of humanity and humility.

For those of you did vote for Obama, for those of you who made phone calls and knocked on doors and registered voters and drove them to the polls, I raise my proverbial glass to you. This one is for us, for everyone. And while I may sound like a politician myself saying this, I will reiterate what President-Elect Obama stated last night both at Grant Park and in an email to his supporters - this happened because of you. Because you came together and moved mountains. When people scoffed, you worked harder. When defeat seemed close, you refused to back down. And move mountains you did. You changed history. You overcame a racial barrier. You did it.