Input requested.

Dear lovely mostly ladies of the Internet,

This is the post where I ask what you think, and don’t worry we’ll all still be friends at the end of this, I promise. You see, I never talk politics round these parts and also I come from the wrong part of the world to be especially involved in the merry game of who-has-the-most-hidden-mistresses/lovechildren/porn addiction/stuffed toy collection/nose picking habit etc that seems to be going on in one part of the world right now.

But seriously, you all get kind of up in your politicians lives over there.

Anyway.

I did have a question for you and it isn’t political at all. It’s about what to do with the extra breastmilk my poor freezer is carrying because the old girl can’t take the groceries I need to jam in there to avoid multiple shopping trips a week and thus my life kind of sucks right now in the way that repeatedly going shopping (popping out to the shops, ha!) with three children will do.

Bhaji doesn’t do bottles, I pump because of morbid fear of repeat mastitis and I keep taking the domperidone because I am not crazy enough to mess with what is working. There is only one milk bank in town and it only takes from women who delivered at that hospital and are therefore trustable sorts.

I did not deliver at that hospital and am clearly extremely untrustworthy I guess. Hence the bursting freezer problem.

Is it wrong to give it to Saag and Naan in their sippy cups in lieu of the moo variety?

On the face of it I can’t see a logical reason why not, per se, and there is a nice belated full circle element of closure about my utter failure to manage lactation for THEM at the appropriate juncture.

But.

The thought makes me feel a bit squarmy and wrong and I-can’t-do-THAT, I just can’t quite put my finger on exactly why.

I mean, it’s not like extended nursing, which is a bit of a social taboo even though there’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s just that we’ve all be cultured to not like hearing somebody’s three year old ask her Mama for her booby in the supermarket.

It’s just a sippy cup.

So why does it feel all odd?

Thoughts and opinions and suggestions for other use of human moo all welcome.

G

Jumble.

Today really has been one of those days.

You know, the kind where you could fry an egg on the bonnet of your car, if you were so inclined, there was a local stove shortage and your car was rather cleaner than mine is, but anyway, the principle remains.

Where I live you could have, really.

Needless to say when two polite but bloody early tradesman turn up at sparrow’s fart (also known as dressing gown and caffeine but hold the full bladder until the newborn lets you go pee  o’clock ) in the morning to fix one seriously prolapsed garage ceiling (all for free! whee! the builder rolled faster than a company who just heard the word ‘lawsuit!’ when I sent them a half-baked mobile-phone picture text message of the problem. Seriously. Not even an inspection was arranged to confirm prolapse. It was just fixed. Quickly) and one’s car is thus evicted from the garagey shade and dumped out in the blistering sun all day, leaving the house becomes an impossibility.

I don’t mind a little heat as much as the next person, but I am not a fan of gently roasting myself on the freeway while the newborn screams in the back seat and the twins quietly melt.

So, coming back to the beginning of my post, today has been one of those cabin fevered annoying, cranky days and it really didn’t help that LS got us off to a roaring start by accusing me of saying something that I totally didn’t, I swear, and then we had a blasted loud barney in full ear shot of the Men On Our Roof. Men who were suddenly Very Busy quietly rearranging tiles.

Because about ten minutes later, Saag decided to start running around the house cheerily chirping ‘fu@king hell!’, ‘fu@king hell!’, ‘fu@king hell!’, a phrase I think my potty mouth abuses all to often. Especially when I am contemplating if the best way to a man’s heart is actually through his shirt front with a steak knife as some particularly aggrieved comedienne once observed.

Saag did moderate to a more sedate but also eerily thanks-be-she-doesn’t-get-the-meaning ’bl00dy hell!’ upon some frantic Not Making A Big You-Should-Trot-This-Word-Out-At-Creche-For-Kicks Deal but stop it and FORGET IT, NOW action and, although part of me found it childishly funny to hear a toddler say ‘bl00dy’ so happily, I think it is time for a swear jar.

Because by now and upon retelling the ‘fu@king/bloody hell!’ tale I feel a bit, well, yuk. Ashamed-ey?

Anyway, it’s been a long day, I’m knackered, it’s still hot but at least my garage doesn’t need the structural version of a big pair of knickers to stay up anymore and tomorrow I am not going to say fu@king. Not once.

Wish me luck, I think I need it.

G

The easy life.

I’ve been mulling this one over, because typing smug is generally the way to guarantee but one of two outcomes:

1. An ark-full of deathstares at perfectly innocent monitors, followed by rapid clicking on the ‘Eff off/unsubscribe with extreme predjudice’ button.

2.  Being rather accurately informed by a commenter that I am in fact being a smug pain in the arse and am generally sucking in the Making Friends department and simultaneously excelling in the Alienating People masterclass.

But, here it goes. Please don’t shoot.

One baby is EASY. I think I’ve got this kind of licked. Bhaji slept seven hours last night, again.

Sorry. I am cringing just a little at the words that just came out of my keyboard, if it helps.

But, honestly, compared to just-preemie-enough-to-be-rather-hard-work twins, especially when one has never actually had a baby before and has absolutely no real idea what one is in for until hit in the face with the full force of the misery that is sleep deprivation for months on end and fussy babies that never read those books that friends with only one damn baby keep trotting over with.

You know, the ones that go ‘How to have eight hours sleep and an insanely happy baby in only fifty easy steps  or you’re doing it all wrong (exclamation mark)’.

Because everybody knows that if you have been lucky enough to have a settled singleton then you are the best positioned person on the planet to advise a very tired mother of premature twins with severe reflux on how to do things better, rather than asking if you could do something useful like a load of damn vomit coated washing, instead.

Ahem. I think that was old wounds reopening just a tad there. Will stop picking forthwith. The very same person never returned my maternity tent or some of my favourite Saag and Naan clothes, either, after I lent them to her for HER next settled singleton.

Grumble.

Anyway, really, this is a whole ‘nother world.

I can just grab the baby and walk into a shop any time I like with something I really didn’t have last time- actual freedom of movement. I am not compelled to hoist a giant pram out of the back of my car, assemble it and juggle two precariously settled newborns into it before even getting started. Actually, I don’t have to laboriously strap two remarkably unhelpful with limb function newborns INTO the carseats in the first place. It’s amazing if you’ve never been able to do it before. Trust me.

I’m not stopped for an autograph by my uterus every ten metres like some kind of freak reproductive rock star, either.

I’ve had the odd baby admire, but I’ve yet to be interrogated about the role of my breasts or vag.ina in the emergence or nutrition of Bhaji.

Seriously, am tempted to get a ‘go on, ask me about my tits’ t-shirt I’m so freaked out by the general level of disinterest.

Nobody points at me and my ears don’t burn in the post office queue from blue rinse set deaf-eared slightly too loud conversations that were meant to be private.

I guess (if yesterday is any indication) I WILL still get asked what gender the isn’t-it-obvious-pink-swathed-to-within-an-inch-of-her-life ‘it’ is and nobody will congratulate me on the shape of my abdomen, but you can’t have everything in this world.

I could seriously get used to this and if only somebody could install a ‘stop squabbling like blasted cats over the last fish’ function on the twins, life would be brilliant but if you could excuse me, I have to go be the United Nations again.

G

Not Cool.

I have this friend.

Okay, I have these friends. They’re a couple, recent migrants who used to practise their English on me because I was their neighbour home all day with the young twins and, well, pretty safe to flub your tenses on.

When the common language became fluent enough (rather embarrassingly they learned my language far, far better than I have to date picked up any of their Mandarin, unless you count effusive THANK YOU’S as fluent speech) they asked.

I can’t recall exactly how it went, but clearly twins aren’t common in China. They were curious but without all of the sideways glancing and ‘do they run in your family (DID YOU DO IVF?????)’ bulldust that the locals do.

I told them the truth. All of it.

At this point, after about a year’s worth our informal cultural exchange, she told me about her miscarriage three years ago, newly arrived in a strange country without a word of the local lingo and little counselling or understanding of the process here.

She also told me she’d never been pregnant since.

They wanted help, wanted to know who to see, the words for the right kind of doctor. If there was any hope. The herbs sent from China weren’t working. Their parents were anxious.

I referred them onwards to somebody I trusted.

They got help.

Their first IVF worked.

…and then they had another early miscarriage.

We all spent hours talking it through and I explained the likely bad reproductive luck, the additional tests they could do to make sure, the normalcy of the grieving process. How awful it feels.

That it’s okay to be so sad and so stressed. To be scared of trying again.

They are trying again, now. Another fresh cycle.

…and LS keeps using them as babysitters for the twins while he dashes off to do this and that.

My memory may be faulty, but that is just Not Cool and I don’t know how he of all people doesn’t instantly get it.

It’s insensitive. He doesn’t get it.

G

 

In the ‘things they don’t tell you’ pile.

1. The instant your maternity leave clicks over to unpaid leave, thou shalt get a tax bill for five thousand terrifying dollars.

2. Followed closely by both car insurance bills, the home insurance bill, one car service bill, one car repair bill (other car), a year’s worth of electricity (they haven’t issued a bill in a full year because of a stupid meter upgrade drive that is meant to make us all more energy efficient goody two shoes but mostly has thus far cost a bazillion in new meter installations and caused half the population to have a coronary at just how much a full year’s electricity COSTS when the belated demand does arrive because, um,  holy heck), the gas bill  covering the last bit of winter and the expense of a gas-heated-and-hot-watered house where the occupants clearly like to be both warm and frequently bathed, assorted minor costs and a partridge in a gold-plated blasted pear tree.

3. Seriously. What just happened?

4. Fuck.

5. Do they think I’m made of it?

6. At least I got the electricity bill downgraded to a mere nine months mostly on accounts of careful researching of The Rules and they actually aren’t allowed to pursue a bill they haven’t bothered to issue after nine months and I am not volunteering out of the kindness of my proverbial to pay it anyway.

7. Accordingly, I wish I’d gone nuts with the air-conditioner rather harder last summer. That bit was free, as it turns out.

8. Bhaji will sh!t a gelatinous-yellow poo lake on my lap while I am on the phone pleading with electricity company to at least leave the TV when they raid the house for a thousand dollars worth of value.

9. Please don’t tell me that there’s another envelope with a sinister window in the front lurking in my letter box today. I don’t think I can take the stress.

G

I Think I Get It (The Breastfeeding Post).

I think I finally have enough confidence in how the whole breastfeeding saga shall end to actually write something about it. Probably.

At least as of today I do, and I am beginning to think that is part of the big secret. You see, at some point if you get enough ‘today’s’ then it just happened and you’re doing it because, hey, you did it. Regardless of how much like a boobie fraud I feel just because I haven’t been simply able to whip out a tata from Bhaji’s birth and soothe her utterly and totally without difficulty or pain whatsoever, whenever, wherever, I’m still doing it.

It’s all down to two small revelations. I am the insight queen, albeit the perpetually tardy insight queen.

1. Bhaji is five weeks old today. Ergo, I have actually been nursing for five weeks. I have done it and can do it and hopefully, barring disasters of nipple pain, I can continue to do it for as long as I want to. Yes, I am spending a fortune on domperidone and legions of time on pumping and really I guess the whole thing is about as natural as astroturf and probably no cheaper than formula but if that’s what it takes as of now it’s a price I am prepared to pay.

2. Breastfeeding might be as natural as syphilis and gonorrhoea, but that doesn’t mean it is any more pleasant or enjoyable in the early days, even if the general mechanism of acquisition is broadly similar. Put simple, it probably sucks for most people to begin with.

Also, the boobie thing is awfully snuggly addictive sh!t, isn’t it? I have to admit I would miss the bit where Bhaji is all snuggled up at five bleeping am, lying in bed next to me and talking to her food ‘mm, mm, mmm, mmmHHHH’ as she goes to town. I blame the oxytocin. Five am is not usually the highlight of my day.

As for the nipple-cheesegrater phenomenon, happily there IS less of the clenched buttocks and feet tapping complete with arse rising off of the chair at latch and more of the muttered ‘farking ow, ow, OW’ end of things. That helps. Nobody likes to feel like the wobbly bits are being sucked clean out via a small cheesegrater-lined mouth all day.

The supply, she is not what she should be but things seem to slowly be improving in that department, too. I mean I’ve, without really noticing it, gone from hand expressing drops into a tiny cup to using a real big girl pump and not having to even top up a frustrated Bhaji with expressed milk in a full week now. She hasn’t had formula in nearly a full month. I have more than a litre of my own brand of moo in the freezer.

Hot damn.

But then again, just when I get cocky, there’s days like today where this post has literally taken all day because Miss Nightshift is fussing and carrying on like a starving creature, alternately spitting out both bosoms with squawks of deep disappointment and giving me general stink-eye. Needless to say am not pumping much moo. Am trying to remain zen.

Who knows?

It could all end tomorrow, but that’s always the case and there’s no point worrying about what I likely cannot change. If it goes pear enough, I gave myself permission to give up five weeks ago. I have to be okay with whatever happens because, for now, I am breastfeeding my child and I never thought I’d be able to say that.

G

PS. It’s a shame that Naan just looked at my belly and said ‘why is your tummy all wrinkly?’.

Mostly because when I told her all about where she, Saag and Bhaji all lived to begin with and the surgical version of their birth, complete with scar flash, what I got back was ‘You need some stippy (sticky) tape. Your belly is all wrinkly and you have a line on it’.

Thanks, kid.

Zinger

Bhaji is fine. Gaining adequately and seems to have settled herself nicely on the 25th centile for thigh rolls as of extrauterine existance. She started on something rather fatter but I think that had more to do with my antenatal fast food habits than anything else.

Nevermind. I’m learning that lesson right now, too. A second on your lips, about a day in your large bowel and a million little lumps under your bottom later and you have where I seem to be and I am not even going to start talking about my abdomen because it turns out that skin that managed a fundal height of fifty centimetres the first time round is actually less and not more able to cope with a repeat more normal-sized pregnancy.

I hear shar-pei is in this season.

Miss Nightshift is also ninty something centile for length, and unless she’s grown four centimetres in a month, they got it wrong in the hospital and ergo on the pretty card I’ve stuck in her photo album. Am moderately narked because I can’t get a redo of a proper bleeping birthweight and length, but now understand why newborn stuff mostly was too damn short and why her hands and feet look kind of big. It’s because they are and her hair also seems to be kind of ginger.

Go figure. Unless something changes, I’ve got one of all the major options and a non matching set. DNA is a funny thing.

LS and I had the kind of all day bitter drawn out fight about the kind of can’t-settle-them issues that has left me with a sick headache and a complete inability to type anything much about it right now.

It’s a good thing I can quote numbers about the beanpole baby and reminisce about how she compares to Miss Naan and Saag and how is is recognisably like both of them in some ways and traits but indisputibly herself.

It’s funny to look at a little person and think that they only exist because you wanted them to so very badly.

Spellchecker dead. Posting regardless. Sorry.

G

 

Weigh in.

In brief.

1. Bhaji slept for eight hours last night and no she was not given any pharmacological help and nor was she in a coma or anything else dire. Don’t tell anybody she sleeps, will you? It might break the spell.

2. My tits weren’t circulated a memo of warning. Neither was I. I could have fit one of those pointy Madonna-esque contraptions snugly when I woke up at five thirty am with twinging tatas. Pissed since I could have pumped a Precious Stash and Bhaji would have been none the wiser for the sneaky nighttime theft of Her Boobs.

3. I seem to have five kilograms (um, 12 pounds ish) to go and thusly my scales hate me because I swear that’s what I had a week ago. Perhaps I should buy some skinny scales that are less honest.

4. Bhaji’s repeat weight in is tomorrow and unlike myself I would like some fat thoughts, please. I need them.

5. Will be good girl and take obligatory deflat-a-thon picture today and at some point show you the last several weeks lack of progress. Sob. At this point with Saag and Naan I was, um, actually slightly worse off than now.

6. That feels a tad better right up and until I recall that I gained 34 kilograms (um, 70ish pounds) with the twins. Thus, my shrinkage rate sucks comparatively.

7. I could console myself with the gentle reminder that pre eclampsia meant I urinated my way to fat jeans last time as twenty kilos of oedema exited the building in the first week post partum alone and this time I have the fat part of my fat ass alone to kiss goodbye and everybody know it is harder to permanently misplace fat than water.

8. But I’m still fat now.

9. Sigh.

G

Heart

We’ve had a watershed moment Chez MII and it doesn’t feel at all good.

I thought the twins had adjusted very well to the big sister role, I mean they dote on poor Bhaji to the point that Bhaji needs to be placed in twin cuddle safe zones for a much needed kiss and slobber break from time to time.

I figured they were enjoying being home more, albeit with a tired Mama stuck with a newborn attached to her wincing chest half of the day.

I might be right and it might be pure co-incidence but not half an hour ago Naan just bit Saag.

Unprovoked.

She left a perfect set of dented toothmarks all the way around poor Saag’s wrist.

Saag now runs screaming when Naan gets too close.

I know it’s nothing big and this sort of thing is in the Toddler Manual right along with Tantrum Chucking and Dummy Spitting and Embarrassing Your Folks in Public by Loudly Asking Why Somebody Is Very Fat but we’ve never had a hint of anything like this before. Not one. Saag and Naan have been inseparable.

They’ve always been the very best of little hand-in-hand friends and my heart, it is so heavy right now.

G

Borderline.

1. Bhaji got her spelling wrong last night and decided she was ‘bhanshee’ nightshift. Ergo am tired and rather deeply pissed. I prefer my newborns to keep their six to seven hour overnight spells, please. That was rather more pleasant.

2. Bhaji’s weight gain is officially a bit iffy, as in nobody is admitting to being worried but yet I seem to have an appointment to re-weigh in a week. I dislike health visitors with polite fibs. I prefer honest mild concern to my face, me. Also, do hungry babies generally sleep six hours a night or am I missing something that doesn’t quite fit here?

3. I have a general policy of dislike for polite but pointless supply advice spot tips from health visitors. What the feck else do they think I’ve been doing for the last three weeks exactly? Grandmother, meet your egg suck lesson and be sure to smile politely while you do- they write things down about one and one’s perceived mothering skillz.

4. Am busting my proverbials to nurse Bhaji, abandoning all but the most dire mashed tits relief pumps but oh my goodness my probervials hurt. Annoyingly, not cracked or thrushed, but mashed from the inside to infinity and if I can’t rest ‘em on the pump, that’s just how it is.

5. When I do pump, that hurts too, now.

6. Did I mention Bhaji has a tongue tie? Am starting to rather suspect that is the cause of all the pain despite very pretty latch from the outside (textbook, every time, folks, right up and until you look at my face silently mouthing ‘fuuuuuuuuucccckkkkk!’ for the first few minutes). Would explain the mashed bits. Also means mashing is not likely to miraculously improve. Insert spontaneous sobbing.

7. Am pumping less and less when I do try. Have no idea if it is all because Bhaji is sucking the insides clean out and the cupboard is bare or supply tanking in face of Bloody Ow or simply more efficient nursing and supply = demand.

8. She is getting faster at the whole shebang. Again, see point 7.

9. Am not having some cruel bugger snip Bhaji’s tongue-tie without anaesthesia as people here think is totally cool to do because newborns don’t feel pain like real people and also don’t think it’s fair to subject Bhaji to anaesthesia over feeding ideology because if it made no difference what kind of a bastard would I feel like exactly?

10. I gave myself permission to give up but it’s just not that easy, is it?

11. Buggerit, millenium hand and shrimp.

G

Protected: The Nightshift Baby

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

..and then I vomited.

You’ve been warned.

I WAS planning to continue to attempt to recall the heady week of en.done, sleep deprivation and the hazards of one regrowing bikini line under a sticky-backed dressing on a nice fresh scar that was, um, more than a week ago now but to be honest all I can mentally do at this point is write big angsty mental letters to you all about breastfeeding.

Which is exactly why I think I shan’t talk about that at all, because emotional whines about how something is gradually going to shit as the wheels fall progressively off is kind of the car-crash sightseeing end of blogging. Suffice it to say that, um, tongue tie, borderline supply at best, mastitis, cracked proverbials (sorry, google, you may not send people with b00by related kinks here, I get enough of the pregnant sex fetishists as it is and no, I can’t be bothered making that term less obvious, trust me the barn door shut about a year after that particular horse grew wings and sent half of the pervy internet here to immediately lose their arousal in befuzzled confusion and much good may it do them to read about cracked proverbials instead) and the disastrous effect of a mere twenty four hours of exclusive pumping hasn’t been good news.

Also, I now have a lopsided chest because rightly will let down for any old thing with suction (sorry again, google, I can’t think of a better way to phrase things, I’m tired) while lefty has higher standards and that is how lefty came to decide upon an early retirement which I have been steadfastly unable to reverse. Lazy thing.

But I’m starting to talk about breastfeeding and I really don’t want to just yet. It will have to wait until I can do Composed and not Oh My GAD But I Feel Like Half Balanced Teary Shit.

So, anyway, after the whole ‘slice and dice and here’s your neonate all covered in goo’ and ‘would you like to pretend nobody you know quite well is up to their elbows in your abdomen then carefully swabbing out your lady parts and shoving a pad the size of the telephone directory down there by attempting to nurse your child while still all strapped down on the theatre table?’ (answer yes and also who the hell took THOSE photos in theatre because now I don’t have anything less than PG 15 rating to show of the whole birthy thing on accounts of mucho sideboobie) I spent twelve miserable hours on the ward discovering that chasing poorly controlled post operative pain with bleeping tablets is not only very slow, but ends up in a cumulative dose that should have felled a small pony.

Instead I was a quite wide awake whimpering white thing limply begging for more with a perfectly functioning IV in my arm that could have been put to good use. Idiot that I am.

But that’s okay, Internet, because I needed it when I spent the next three days hurling my guts up and thank the deity of your choice for the invention of dexamethasone because it took two potent round the clock IV anti-pukers and the dexa to stop that delightful sensation of hideous wound pulling with every retch. It’s no wonder I ended up with a chunky lump of haematoma at one end of things, really. I’m amazed I didn’t split clean open along my nearly doubled suture line (half the baby for twice the scar, folks, but on the other bikini line hand, this one isn’t all lumpy and fat from wound infection so net visibility is probably a slight improvement).

Fortunately enough, Bhaji didn’t care about The Spew. She’s a b00b girl (the irony).

Perhaps next time I can talk about the thing I clearly want to because the rest of the week that was goes ‘spew, nurse, pills, bleed, sleep, eat, eat, eat, have extremely painful bathroom experience that serves as timely reminder about the effects of powerful pain relief on the bowels, and ends in Home).

Which is where we all still are now, unlike last time around.

G

Figures.

M’Aidez.

Send. Help. At. Once.

Have. Mastitis.

You’ve. GOT. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

How on earth does one get mastitis when I could swear ze breast milk has an intramammary half life of about thirty seconds before a bunch of primitive reflexes in a baby suit sucks it all out?

I’m rather peeved.

Also, my areolae are at that delightful mashed from the inside stage I like to call ‘scream at first latch’. The outside looks okay, but that first suck feels kind of like Bhaji is pulling the wobbly bits on the inside clean out through the nipple. With a cheesegrater.

G

Gee, Ta.

I guess it was my own silly fault for wandering out like a woman without a working brain to a teeming shopping centre of all hell-on-earth places pre Christmas avec three children, two exceedingly whiny and the third precariously balanced as she is (until things Work or I Cave or the Earth Explodes) between permanent breast attachment and a general policy of keeping but one scream away from demanding I lob a proverbial girl out in the checkout queue.

I guess it was.

But that doesn’t mean that at not yet two weeks post partum with aforementioned direct areolar hit lying in the pram it is okay to wish me well with my fecking pregnancy. I’ve already done that bit.

I don’t have any plans to do it again.

Wordless pointing to the newborn sucker of all things mammary elicited merely an ‘Oh, well your tummy’s not flat yet’.

No shit, Sherlock.

….and I thought I looked good today.

G

PS. I really shall get back to the fun and games of the whole week that was but, um, BN nurses for about eight hours solid a day and I am not kidding on that point. Suggestions gratefully accepted because I’m surprised she hasn’t sucked my skin clean off.

Also, she sleeps six to seven hours at night. I know enough about newborns to know that THAT shit is weird. Plus, um, not helping with supply department and guess which fool has to get up to pump anyway.

I’m telling her friends about it in gory detail, along with having to answer the door with my hopefully temporarily third breastacular head attached on more than one occasion when she’s eighteen and stays out too late the first time. Really. Watch me.

Now, where was I?

You’ll have to forgive the dribs and drabs of what is now a full one week old regurgitation of experience despite the fact that 2011 model newborns don’t seem to do very much different to the 2008 models back in the day, i.e. eat, sh!t and sleep sometimes all at once and without any reference to table manners whatsoever.

I guess I technically and on paper have reams of free time but in reality I am mostly stuck on the couch in my dressing gown smelling sweetly of post partum night sweat until about three pm with what is politely referred to as a ‘cluster feeder’.

I prefer to think of BN as more of a direct hit on the areolae.

Anyway, small spoiler there was quite a lot of regurgitation in the upcoming tale, of course, so the turn of phrase is truly fitting and I am keeping it.

Double anyway, although the 2008 models have moved on a bit in complexity, I think I’ve hit upon the solution to my utter lack of time to scratch own arse blog. It’s called ‘Diego’. When the cluster bomb gives my tits a break- and on THAT note I shall one day soon attempt to write a post on the whole nursing thing and the precarious nature of same because my gad but I am still scarred to infinity from the whole sobbing hormonal disaster that was the spectacular failure of lactation in any form with Saag and Naan and it’s hard to talk about the boobie thing, even now.

Perhaps I should leave it at today I am breastfeeding and I have no idea what tomorrow brings. Hopefully that’s enough. If I get enough ‘today’s’ tomorrow never comes, right?

Regardless.

I didn’t go into labour in the end, despite predictions to the contrary and that is how I came to turn up to the hospital not-promptly at 8am for intended 7am arrival slightly decadently decked out in actual makeup, with brushed hair and fasted to grumpy oblivion, only to be bumped all damn day for actual emergencies.

After about one pm I started telling each bearer of bump news that the next bastard that came in and told me that would be supplying the meals because lack of food tends to focus my mind on, um, food.

I think I was probably a little obsessional upon reflection, because when somebody tells you that you’re being bumped for a genuine emergency and your only comeback is a half-snarled ‘McChicken’, it’s time to grow some empathy.

When the entire labour ward had finally had their emergency c-section one after the other for a net rate of about one hundred percent that day, it was finally my go to be wheeled down in one of those breezy backless gowns, expose my bum to a theatre full of people I know and have the anaesthetist confidently and without difficulty do the spinal.

And not go numb in any useful fashion unless they were planning to extract the baby from my left foot.

And demonstrate how I could still walk.

And make the poor anaesthetist, a colleague of LS’s, frown and start muttering about how ‘most unusual’ it all was and ‘never happened to me before’  and ‘something VERY strange about one Geohde subarachnoid space since this happened with Saag and Naan’ etc.

And that’s when they set up for the GA and that’s the bit where I cried like an overtired toddler in front of my colleagues because having an unexpected general anaesthetic for an elective well-planned much awaited babyectomy was all to bloody much and being last to the birthday party for my own child suckethed more than I could take at that point without at least a Happy Meal and a scotch to warm me up to the possibility.

So that’s how everybody in theatre XX and hospital YY came to go home about two hours late that day because it’s amazing what having a husband who is a direct colleague of the poor beleaguered anaesthetist will do for about an hour’s epidural placement and farting around topping-up time  if the patient inconveniently bursts into tears.

Somehow I think there are several people who would like to kill me in that theatre, upon reflection, but I got my awake babyectomy and the bit where Bhaji shrieked her bloody head off  before even being completely ex-utero was something I appreciate all the more, because I so nearly didn’t get to hear it.

She could have shut up a bit sooner, though.

Next time I’ll explain the vomit.

G

PS…most humiliating point of the day was not the kleenex moment over the spinal. It was having somebody I work with every day learn where my urethra lies in intimate detail placing the catheter. I think we’re both going to pretend it never happened and I hope she isn’t prone to genital flashbacks.

Bhaji

Excuse the delay.

The hospital staff wi-fi network I was planning to non-professionally use ate my homework, etc (actually, the hospital wi-fi turns out to have a great big fecking black hole right about where my room was but that is a complaint for another day).

Bhaji Nightshift is here, we’re home.

Lots to say about how much it sucks to have one’s spinal fail completely again, how vomiting with sutures is Not Fun and how BN wants to marry my left breast while conducting a sneaky affair with the right but unfortunately both tanks are always pretty much empty* and thus I live in seriously interesting times**, but for now I have to go and do boobie stuff again. It’s a long story.

Anyway:

Bhaji Nightshift

8 Dec 11

8 pounds 2 oz

52 cm.

Back soon. Promise.

G

*and am trying not to Lose Cool given the disaster that was Saag and Naan’s brief affair with ze boob.

** Bhaji doesn’t Do bottles.

Not Today.

Officially on stupid ‘overflow’ list tomorrow with consultant who likes to slit from hip bone to hip bone for ease of ’access’. I’ve also seen him cut inconvenient rectus muscles clean out of the way.

Afraid.

Very afraid.

May mark edges of old incision myself with ‘Do Not Extend’ warning.

May also decide not to turn up. Wondering if I could cross my cervix and make it another week to same list next Wednesday with Nice Surgeon I Was Meant To Have (waah).

The only certainty is that I shall be deeply pissed off at several points in the next twenty four hours, not including the first time I see what I look like with a scar twice the size it currently is for half the baby I previously shed, because at THAT point I shall be what is better known as ‘fucking livid’.

Probably will draw helpful incision limits, screw tact.

G

Waah.

In itemised order, because am going to go to bed Fasted and a Good Girl just in case and Get Up Farking Early for similar probably wasted reasons and it does very little for my mood.

1. Because NICU couldn’t take the baby with gastroschisis today on accounts of already drowning in a sea of ventilated preemies, and the baby with gastroschisis happens to be awaiting c-section and because even though I trump in gestation and am now for reasons of crappy slot availability likely to just turn up in labour, technically scoring an emerg c-section and it’s slightly higher risk than elective at some ungodly hour, well I think you can see where this is going, NICU beds are like special gold-plated hen’s proverbials and so the gastroschisis baby gets my slot tomorrow. I also can’t really bump the woman with the funky metabolic disorder or the one with the placenta percreta.

2. Even if NICU still have no beds she still gets my blasted slot.

3. The only work around I have wrangled on grounds that I work in the game and am not a fucking idiot is fasting tonight anyway, make the drive in at ungodly am and, like the world’s crappiest standby ticket, if NICU say no again I get to go at about thirty minute’s notice. Poo.

4. The next option is Friday at 39+6 weeks and Friday sucks for two reasons, namely A: The consultant on that particular day would get sacked from a seamstressing job in accounts of wonk-stitch and there is no way she is closing my guts because I could do a better job in braille and B: LS is working in private-land anyway and if he cancels at short notice he also has the fun of pissing off surgeons he relies on for work, not getting paid and generally professionally suffering. I’ll take the 3am jobbie over that.

5. The next option after that is, um, 40+4. I think you get the general idea about how, really, there is a suitably sensible delay and there is asking for increased risk for no bloody good reason.

6. Also, Saag managed to lock me clean out of the house with Naan today and I spent a tortuous hour and a half alternating between soothing Saag and trying to teach her Basic Lock Opening, the pre-school edition through the screen door (with suitably spaced prompts from Mama to PLEASE go potty on the Big Girl toilet by herself because otherwise it would have devolved to urine) and soothing Naan who was stuck outside with me and did on one occasion piddle herself for lack of viable options. I couldn’t get out of sight without Saag shrieking like terrified banshee, none of my near neighbours were home and Saag and I were both in tears of mutual frustration because she couldn’t understand why I just couldn’t take the keys or phone she was trying to pass to me. Through the locked door. To call for help. Eventually a neighbour DID come home and that is how I am back inside at all, quite frankly. I don’t think I want to talk about it any more but I still don’t get how twiddling the lock button is easy and the reverse motion just impossible.

7. WHen LS came home he messily fed the twins about half a pack of biscuits on the couch, TWICE and so I vacuumed the loungeroom three times today. Did Not Help My Mood.

8. Then, on the night where the twins needed to go to bed on time for possible Clayton’s C-section in the morning, he put both their favourite bedtime lovvies in the washer and dryer. They are favourite BEDTIME  lovvies for a reason and that is why the twins have only just gone to bed, now. LS and I are currently Not Speaking.

9. I rest my case.

10. Goodnight. I have no idea what is actually happening tomorrow but whatever it is I expect something will probably go pear-shaped.

G

7.

Protected: Photojournalism.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

The final countdown.

Firstly, apologies, I know that song sucked even back when it was current.

 

Have a random photo of anonymous bits of Naan as consolation.

 

..and if that hasn’t stopped the ringing in your ears, here’s some carefully bloody useless for recognition bits of Saag, instead.

I figured it’s not twins this time, so why not be daft and double up the pictures of my guts about two weeks ago (because I am ever speedy on the turn-around)?

The stomach-boob ratio is clearly not in my cleavage’s favour and am in D cups right now. Am not used to having actual breasts, either, so finding the whole proper bra thing a bit of a pain, really. 

If it helps, my fundal height is currently a mere 41 cm, so I look about half as ridiculous as I did with the twins. Astonishingly, this doesn’t mean I feel exactly half as shit. I’ll go with seventy five percent as shit. The three weeks thus far of extra gestation earns bonus points.

Also, I was up from two till six am inclusively deciding whether I should risk shame turning up to work because of Contractions, or wait the blasted things out on the grounds that they probably weren’t the real deal and if the price of some pethidine was having an immediate colleague crack out a speculum plus about a million points of instant humiliation, then I’d rather not pay. 

The bastard things did stop but am worried about tonight. Why is it always the middle of the fecking night, just when you haven’t slept properly in months?

Past form suggests it will be in about four night’s time, at 3am, because turning up in labour looking like shit the day before the party that is the most annoying time to trump your own date with a scalpel.

Especially when option A: turning up dressed in something other than a nightgown with actual makeup on sounds ever so much more civilised.

..and here’s S+N showing how close they are in height. Just because.

Summary? 

Babyectomy next Wednesday if I make it and rampant eating of everything in sight followed by vomiting half of same to cease closely thereafter. Hopefully followed by nearly twenty kilograms of extra arse. 

The abdomen’s a lost cause. 

G 

PS. If manage not to give birth in the next few days promise to actually do a pwp photo post. If short on content on grounds of feeling utter rubbish, divert to photojournalism.

Leave.

You know what?

I’ve been on official maternity leave for, um, one point five days thus far and I think I’m going to go completely barking mental.

It’s hot.

I’m very fat.

Strange people keep on coming up to me in the supermarket avec hyperactive twins and smiling about how I don’t have long to go and don’t I have my hands full.

I want to get about a billion things done but am hampered by one creaking, lumbering, complaining frame. I made it to the supermarket this morning for a grand total of five things. I am used to getting a little more done in my day. I don’t like huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf just because I managed to get out of my car.

I’m bored. Actually, I’m bored shitless and I’m too tired to be able to fix it.

Saag and Naan are currently running around the house with the potty held captive.

I’ve only got about half a year of this to go.

 

G

Break.

Hi, I’m Geohde.

I think last wrote something around these parts some time in the Jurassic era but then I swear a Brontosaurus ate my keyboard and a Tyrannosaurus decided I looked exactly like the right kind of sympathetic ear to unload a lengthy diatribe about all that Nasty Predator bad press and how difficult it is to find a good knitting circle when everybody thinks you’ll probably use their ribs for needles and so on.

Yes, I’m making things up and, no, I have no earthly idea when I last posted, either of content full stop let alone content of quality, I’m honestly too plain old tired to check the date. Perhaps we should stick with ‘a dinosaur ate my homework’ and THAT my friends is a shame because I work in a positive pent-up stew of human experience and the inability to share in a timely fashion clearly crimps the old style somewhat.

There was the amusing time I worked two weeks straight with the exception of my birthday at thirty six weeks pregnant, pissing off my boss with the request in the process and still sadly being denied an actual full weekend as such to whinge about my sausage legs while laying sprawled on the couch watching reruns of something or other on TV.

There was also the almost as funny time that LS decided the Internet connection didn’t seem quite ship-shape and in a fit of ‘fixing’ or ‘improving’ things managed to break it rather impressively. That took three days to fix, all done in bits and cranky pieces at the end of my cover shifts. At thirty seven weeks pregnant.

I can’t say I handed out overmuch sympathy to the whimpers of Internet withdrawal.

Lest I forget there have also been the slightly droll times LS has been interstate on Matters Professional, leaving my heavily gravid self to do it all solo. There’s been quite a bit of that, actually, and really he’s just bloody lucky I haven’t gone into labour when he’s four hours away by plane just to spite him.

I guess I could mention the time that at almost thirty eight weeks pregnant I found myself leaving work two hours late because extracting twins by c-section from somebody with a BMI in the 60s turns out to be rather hard work. The anaesthetist couldn’t hit a vein with a standard length cannula and an ultrasound machine and that was just the beginning of our collective troubles. The bit where we converted to a general anaesthetic mid-stream was kind of hairy, but I think the kicker was when she just kept on trickling blood post operatively and I had my hand to my elbow through abdominal wall and still had no earthly idea if her uterus was actually responding to enough oxytoxic agents to make cement look all soft because I couldn’t feel it.

That was today and I hope she’s okay.

Tomorrow is my last hurrah at work, I am hoping to finish in a knackered blaze of sharp with a scalpel in hand and THEN ladies of the Internet, I plan to get some bastard I work with to actually recheck my enormous fundal height and my blood pressure because I haven’t had an obstetric visit myself in nearly three weeks on accounts of the clinics being overrun with too many pissed off pregnant women as it is (without losing a staff member to the other side of Angry Wait) and my legs, they dint to about my knee and my vision has been a little starry of late and honestly saying  I feel a tad on the second hand side is missing the chance to abuse the delightful expression ‘like refried shit’.

Mostly I’m just writing to say Hello and I Haven’t Given Birth Yet. I’ve also gone and pushed back my own c-section to two weeks hence because I need a bloody break before I can face a newborn.

G

PS. Am contracting like a b!tch almost all the time these days and somehow I don’t think it agrees with me.

Touchy

Dear Random Probably Better Remain Anonymous GP,

Well, THAT was a touch awkward, wasn’t it?

I mean, I get that the A word in a seventeen-year-old makes most people kind of jumpy, really I do.

It’s just that when the seventeen-year-old who had the A word is your patient, nominated YOU as her GP during her brief stint for the scarlet A and thusly we sent you and you alone a copy of her confidential discharge paperwork, we all kind of expect from the Big Hospital perspective that that means you have some kind of general clue about events.

It’s rather awkward indeed to phone you when the aforementioned seventeen year old fails to turn up for her post op review with us of Big Hospital and also won’t answer her phone and have you get all snibby about myself as a representative of Big Hospital breaching her confidentiality by mentioning she needs some kind of post-A-word follow up.

Because, really, as her primary health care professional who allegedly fulfilled ze old duty of care by bothering to read the paperwork we sent and confirmed was received, you should have known already.

It’s actually kind of embarrassing, n’est ce pas?

Also, she is only seventeen you great bollocking arse. I never met the girl but I bet she was and is sh!t scared and I doubt anybody knew. Can you imagine how lonely that must be? Reach down a little deeper into your biopsychosocial gland for some bleeping compassion next time.

In a similar vein, when I am trying to patiently explain that all I care about as a fellow health care provider with one temporarily shared patient is that the patient in question has seen some sort of doctor, had a period and got some bloody contraception organised I get a little miffed when you refuse to disclose and attempt an earful of lecture on same. On grounds of confidentiality.

Would it be overly cynical to assume that had I be discussing bunions, the reaction would have been rather different?

Random GP, I am left with but one conclusion. You’re a bit of a d!ck.

I just hope you recall the bloody patient. Also, yes I did hang up on you, it wasn’t a bad line.

Love

G

The Most.

The thing that makes a relative blogging drought, okay even an entirely reasonable blogging drought on accounts of working like a blue-arsed fly just weeks from term and sleeping like a dead elephant with a seriously bad nose-mucus-congestion snoring problem that contracts just painfully enough to wake right up three times a bloody hour every hour all damn night because THAT my friends is what I call a full and active social diary these days, anyway I am rambling.

I also realise dead elephants usually fail to snore in any way on accounts of general deadness. They probably also don’t contract for broadly similar reasons.

The thing is that not writing every day to bitch about things that currently piss one off, like, um, pretty much everything, makes it kind of intimidating when one does eventually throw some fuel on the sleep deprivation fire and stay up to the dizzying hour of nine pm to communicate. Be gentle, please, dear reader.

Basically, Internet, if a nebulous ‘it’ moved or passed into my field of vision in the last week, it probably annoyed me.

I think perhaps there is just a smidgeon of self righteous foot stamping thrown in for good measure, too, since LS has now on the cusp of thirty six weeks gestation unilaterally decided to throw the proposed consensus name out the proverbial window and wants to call this child something that sounds like it comes from a particularly excited Italian car dealer with a gift for exaggeration in ten syllables and fifty screaming vowels. Give or take.

Also, over my dead body or HIS if he keeps it up.

Additionally, I currently look like this(or a slightly more fed up version but attaching my camera-phone to my slow computer pisses me off too much to try at this point too. Unsurprisingly):

And feel like THIS:

Which is THIS much better than I felt at this point with the twins:

But despite that, my request for a small weekend reprieve from working twelve days straight at nearly term including three thirteen hour shifts in a four day period of those twelve with a mere ten hour ‘cover’ thrown in the mix (presumably for lifestyle and balance and stuff) on my birthday was deemed excessively decadent and thus I am now only working the three thirteen hour shifts instead of having an actual weekend off.

My cankles are whimpering, and my mood? She is not getting any better at the news.

Regardless, if I got to bed tonight and wake up into morning without exploding amniotic fluid all over the bathroom floor at 3am then I am officially the most unhappily pregnant I have ever been and if I DO, I think I know why.

Sigh.

At least THAT way I’d get the weekend to myself.

G

Vee Back.

Hello lovely ladies (and really I expect only an ever shrinking cohort of ladies of the Internet at large) who have the patience to watch me periodically dust the cobwebs off of the old blog and whinge about how lucky I am to extract out of infertility three probably robustly healthy children, armed solely with the powers of the good people of mastercard.

Yes, you. Hello.

It’s been a while again and I fully blame raising three year old twins, one who sounds like she has a particularly hard to shake pack-a-day habit and who, unfortunately for all of our reposes or lack thereof is the I-Do-Not-Do-Discomfort-No-Matter-How-Minor Naan. Naan has a cold. I’ve never been more pissed at a bunch of virions in my life because this means that in due course both Saag, LS and myself shall all fall sway and the only thing worse than two toddlers with a cold is having a verified man-cold situation while working full time. At thirty five weeks. Full time working pregnant women with three whiny patients at home don’t get colds, they just suck it up and run screaming to the safety of work. Lesser of two evils.

Regardless.

I am here and I am more or less well and I now have the perfect out for all the naysayers who think that listening to the urogynaecologists speak their evil words about prolapse and various bits of clever mesh is weak behaviour. BN is, yet again as far as we can tell within the limits of modern guesstimation etc and ad nauseum, very fat, floating way high and I seem to be measuring in the range known as ‘bloody uncomfortable term’ and thus today I got told that should I change my mind in a fit of whimsy, I’d probably just hear the words ‘we really recommend a caesarean’ and if I persisted, possibly a silent ‘you fool, you’re screwing our statistics’.

Not that I am exactly embracing the date with the scalpel since I am trying to put it off for as long as humanly possible, a minor contest of wills that happens at every antenatal visit where I come up with as many new reasons as fifteen minutes permits as to why thirty nine weeks is simply too soon to be strapped down to a table and all cathetered and scalpeled up and my Ob simply smiles serenely and moves on to another subject like turning up in labour because I am a nitwit.

I don’t think she even believed me when I said today that LS is working three hours away that day today and that one, my friends, was true.

Anyway, it is late, I have at least another vomit I need to fit in my crowded social diary before bedtime and, well, the highlight of last week was being extremely tardily referred a woman with a history of short cervix at thirty nine bleeping weeks because the endocrine resident, with breathtaking punctuality and unusual interest in the obstetric management of his patients decided to read the file rather than just fiddle with ze insulin.

I deeply admire the refreshing curiosity if only because it literally made my day to cheerily say ‘love, that’s how they get OUT of there. It’s kind of normal at thirty nine weeks to have a short cervix.’ It wasn’t so great back at twenty four weeks, but hey, we all moved on. Unless you were a trainee endocrinologist, it would seem and you lost what common sense you were born with in a sea of novomix.

Goodnight.

G

Protected: Difficult

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Star

Bhaji Nightshift at 32 weeks, just because I am sick of people asking if I should be out in public unaccompanied, let alone working, and so I got one of my colleagues to do the quick ultrasound once over. THEY obliged by spontaneously going all 3D:

 

Also, it was a nice break from seeing more vag.ina than a por.n star on accounts of the pregnant world losing hold of what remains of collective tiny minds today and all deciding to front up on what I have decided to declare as international ’I have this discharge’ day.

On the plus side and despite my girth, BN is not a giant foetus after all, just very fat (abdomen apparently 97th centile) and is extremely well cushioned in slosh. If my waters do break again this time, sail your arks, Internet.

On the minus side, she’s already larger than Naan at birth and rapidly closing in on Saag (again allegedly, ultrasounds are notoriously dodgy guesstimates and BN is either as big as Naan or closing on 3kg- take your pick with the margin of magical equational  guesstimation).

But mostly, it was a nice break from all that cervical action and I bet that despite predictions BN turns out to be shaped exactly like other babies, after all. I shall probably be ignoring the kind warning to watch my diet in general and sugar in particular on grounds of bugger that for a lark.

Compliance never was my strong point and it’s hard to get a shoulder dystocia at c-section.

G

The fatness continues.

From back in the dark ages at around the 29/30 mark.

The fatness continues. But blessedly not quite at the rate it did with S+N. Uterine and gluteally, in case you wondered.

None-the-less and despite the ongoing all day spew diet attempts (hint, croissants are surprisingly nasty to vomit, it’s all the bastard little flaky bits that stick in your mouth and make you gag and retch and vomit again that really get on the proverbial wick after a while. Also, no, I do Not Do orange juice any more for similar reasons), I don’t recognise large parts of my anatomy and I haven’t magically acquired the ability to get a pre-pregnancy skirt over more than about one thigh. My bottom, she is well cushioned from the blows of the world.

This too shall pass. Just like a kidney stone, I expect.

I may even miss not seeing half my food twice one day in the fullness of time.

It’s hard to remember I get a whole person at the end of the tunnel from the sea of puke and fatigue, though. Must remember that bit. Ought to chase down that bloody errant crib order, too, because although a newborn baby CAN sleep in a box, it’s not ideal.

G

Primary.

Dear Internet,

My cankles forbid me from hanging them down for very long so this missive shall be brief. Also, I’m bloody ravenous and since it is the restaurant of me, myself and I cooking this evening for myself and two moderately discerning consumers I really had better be Getting On With Things.

But, Internet, guess what I got to do today?

After a year of holding other people’s bloody bladder retractors I got the be the primary operator.

Doing the caesarean is much better than retractor action, in case you wondered. Obviously.

I didn’t get out of putting in the catheter before hand, though. Funny that.

Some things about the pecking order will never ever change and I just have to live for the day I get somebody else of my own to peck into doing that one. Probably.

G The Slightly Bigger Girl who Does Operations. Sometimes.

Bonus.

LS is on a plane-slash-overseas doing conferenc-ey things trip and I probably should by rights be sitting on the couch on my ever expanding arse eating ice cream and watching singing competitions on the box (in my underwear no less) without fear of judgement, but instead I thought I’d say hello to you all.

Hello Internet.

It’s been thirty almost two long LONG weeks of vomiting my guts up and if one more person tells me how big or low or all baby or bleeping radiant I look it is going to end in bloodshed. Other people’s. I am good at making people bleed, I do it for a living except for the bits where I try to stop other people bleeding to death, instead.

Also, I write you this missive because I have somehow cleverly conned the twins into thinking that 7pm is the New Bedtime, despite the fact that one can still hear only slightly older children kicking about some kind of ball in the street and it is still dead bright outside. I am not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth. I said it was bedtime and I guess I should take up professional poker or something because three year olds, especially in combination, are usually remarkably canny suspicious bastards about that sort of thing, yet mine drank their milk and fell for it hook line and tuck-in-goodnight.

Lucky me I guess, at least right up and until the suspiciously canny bastards wake up at four aayy emm or something, but then again since I have to sort out all matters domestic on my tod for a week, an early run up at the get-exceedingly-whiny-twins-and-self-dressed-and-out-the-door-in-time-to-catch-peak-hour game might not be such a bad idea.

Did I mention I am working approximately fifty hours next week in the third trimester with rapidly expanding cankles with three year old whinebots all on my own? Oh, good.

There’s always coffee. If no adult sees me drink it then the trendy judgement never happens, either. Take note, baristas everywhere, on that last bit because the only other thing that is liable to make me bother to move my creaking frame anywhere fast with a scalpel is in response to a spontaneous and repeated offer of decaf.

Yours,

G

PS. I think I told you about the poor, poor woman who had one monochorionic twin die at twenty weeks and then went into labour and lost the other at twenty three weeks and had a nasty case of chorioamnionitis and also managed to come about as close as it gets to bleeding to death afterwards. I should really stop whinging about my life, huh?

PSS. Edited for the grammar. The shame. It’s probably still all wonky and clearly I need more sleep.