I cried lots today… I cried during Oprah. I cried during Queer Eye For The Straight Guy*. And then I cried when our baby’s birth certificates arrived in the mail.
*I understand that many people probably cry during QEftSG, but possibly they are crying due to the existance of the show. I was crying due to a soppy romantic proposal of marriage.
So. Yes. The last post was about the belly cast, the making of which I thought, in terms of timing, was spot on (at 37 weeks 6 days) if not pushing it a little. I mean, 2 weeks is not a lot of time, and had we not done it that Sunday we would not have gotten around to it till the following weekend.
Did I say pushing it? Tuesday the 11th I called my midwives about an itch I had, and the lovely Paula suggested I come up to the hospital for some bloodwork and a CTG (well, she didn’t mention the CTG but I think they automatically hook you onto that thing anyway). So I got there at 2pm, CTG was fine, sat around in the birth centre for 3 hours waiting for a doctor to be available to advise Paula on what bloods to take. I napped on the bed, trying to tune out the sounds of a local commercial radio station (buggered if I know why I didn’t either turn it off or tune in to Triple J instead). Bloods were taken and then Mark showed up at 5:30; we left at 6 with a prescription for a cream for the itch and a referral to have more blood taken at the end of the week to test for bile salts in case I had obstetric cholestasis.
A couple of days earlier I had read about the itch in my pregnancy bible, and it had a section on cholestasis, but my itch wasn’t as severe as the cholestasis description and I had no other symptoms. Cholestasis is a liver condition in which the liver of a pregnant woman can’t process the bile properly and it builds up under the skin as bile salts, hence the itching. Paula thought it unlikely since I wasn’t going crazy with itching (and she later said "You certainly didn’t present like the usual women made crazy by the itch of cholestasis).
So we drove home, picking up the soothing cream on the way, and Mark went out to get me a box of(wholly unsatisfying) Gravox so I could have curly chips and gravy for dinner. Just as I was eating the last of my chips, the phone rang. Neither of us felt like answering but the person left a message. Mark went to check and it was Paula, asking me to ring back.
And it’s moments like those which change your life.
The return phone call was very short; simply Paula telling me that the initial bloodwork had been tested and that I needed to come back to the hospital. With my bags. Luckily, but for a few items, these had been packed. I say luckily because I could barely see through the tears.
To cut a very long story short (shorter?) all the natural birth plans went out the window and instead, on Tuesday, 11th July 2006, the process of induction began at 11:30pm because cholestasis brings an increased risk of stillbirth and hospital protocol is to induce no later than 38 weeks – my chol. was diagnosed dead on 38 weeks, so there I was lying in the antenatal ward waiting to see if the prostin gel would work.
It didn’t. The drip of syntocinon did, which began at 2:30 the next afternoon (after the breaking of the waters also failed to do anything much). And despite my very hazy recollections of a labour which seemed to last only a few hours (probably in no small part due to the gas that I sucked on for maybe 5 hours) I laboured for a full 13 hours and 1 minute, according to my discharge papers.
Unfortunately the baby was not reacting well to the drip and his heart rate was not rising quickly enough after contractions, and I was ‘failing to progress’ quickly enough, and I was also Damned Tired after quite some effort and posterior labour and having multiple contractions in a row and it bloody well took 40 minutes to get the epidural in, we decided that we would deliver by caesarean section. So, a very jovial, jokey bunch of people in scrubs wheeled me down what seemd like neverending miles of corridor and into theatre, and at 6:01am on July the 13th our baby boy Arlo was dragged into the world.
I won’t go into the dramas of the weeks following but they involved jaundice, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and a humidicrib for phototherapy), a bitch midwife called Kim, major baby blues for me, a few lovely midwives who were my saviours, finally being discharged when his jaundice had dropped sufficiently, and then being readmitted 5 days later when the jaundice returned (and the doctor who treated Arlo in E.R. was the same doctor who had treated him in the NICU – he’d been transferred between wards. This mae the E.R. experience much nicer, having a familiar face who recognised us and remembered Arlo’s treatment the first time around). We had two nights in the paediatric ward and then the all clear to go home.
Anyway.
Now we’re home, happy and healthy, if rather sleep-deprived. I’m trying to get a flickr photo account together so I can post all the photos to there. Meanwhile, there are a scant few from the first week in hospital; we spent so much time there in the first two weeks that being home seems odd sometimes, and it certainly is a shock to realise that come Thursday he will be four weeks old already.
To see some photos, follow this link.
