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

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..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.

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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.