For those of you not on Bacefook.

This sums up my week perfectly:

Don’t ask what happened to the other end.

G

PS. My breast pump is DYING. Seriously, it’s like being milked with all the throbbing power of an electric toothbrush. Bloody thing was second hand, and as far as I can tell by the manufacture date, half of the boobs in my fair land have used it and sold it on ebay for just under what they paid and yet I am once again the unlucky bastard on whom something breaks and I end up sucking up the hit for everybody. In related items, anybody interested in a lightly sucking n1pple stimulator that may or may not extract milk, complete with full set of accessories, tubing, bottles, bags, valves and fancy carry bag?

Didn’t think so.

By the way, in case you weren’t keeping count now that I am not working any more and, you know, EARNING MONEY, I am up to one massive tax demand, one broken car, car service x 2, dead coffee machine, ditto dead computer, twelve months of electricity all at once due to amusing billing error and I still need all four wisdom teeth out at some point when my face explodes again.

Bollocks.

Sleep.

Wotcha.

We’ve been having some seriously nasty sleep problems Chez MII that I may have not fully described the horror of on accounts of not sleeping for more than about two hours for, um, the best part of a month now that I think of it.

The Sleep Lady has been.

The Sleep Lady has tut tutted about the co-sleeping, the baby wearing with boob in mouth at all times, the ongoing requirement for swaddling, the boobing to sleep and the utter and total inability to transition from one sleep phase to another without the waking up sequence being invoked followed closely by the breast and the very very VERY oh-so-bloody-tired Mama unit. I think I made her bloody day for ticking off so many points on the shit parenting list in one visit.

The Sleep Lady shall be back next week to check on my homework and do a ‘settling’ with me and without my tits being involved.

Bhaji is under orders to make a new breast friend and, believe me, I have been shoving the chosen blasted Eeyore lovvie in her face until she just about goes all pre-emptively purple at the sight of the poor thing. I’ve never been over fond of Eeyore, but Eeyore it is. He’s all I have and I ain’t exactly up to a little light boob replacement shopping on accounts of The Fucking Tired.

Hold me, for today was the first day of the new order and Bhaji Nightshift still got boobed to oblivion for both of her meagre twenty minute frazzled naps and in the end tonight I also gave up on ‘natural sleep’ and swaddled her to within an inch of her proverbial, too. There’s only so much screaming a girl can take.

Maybe I could play her this instead?

http://youtu.be/3xtcB457jqQ

It’s a thought.

G

Sour.

Okay, Internet, this is the kind of post I have to confess I am only writing here because something has left a sour taste in my mouth and I want to hear that my response is completely justified and rational BEFORE suppressing the hell out of it and pretending it happened. Do humour me on this one.

It’s my own bleeping sister, too.

In other words, while I likes me a good online sell of crap I no longer plan to keep as much as the next woman, I also make damn sure that I never sell anything that somebody gave to me on a website that tells them all about it.

To do such a thing is kind of crass, if not downright rude, mais non? Or should I also give up on anybody ever RSVPing, turning up to a lunchdate at the stated hour, or calling to explain a delay and the like? I’ve long ago accepted that men no longer wear ties but surely there has to be limits. For the sake of humanity.

So, anyway, if you can forgive me the jibe about men and convenient portable nooses, my sister is selling several items I carefully and with great effort purchased for her twin girls on Bacefook. Bacefook told me all about it. For fifteen bucks. They were worth considerably more than fifteen bucks and quite frankly I feel a little bit like I’ve been slapped in the face by somebody with alien hand syndrome or something because surely she can’t have a farking idea just how offensive that little surprise was.

Geohde who is currently biting down on the urge to return all the shit she has purchased for said children’s upcoming birthday if this is what happens when I avoid gift vouchers*.

*Sister gets Offended At Gift Vouchers.**

**Feck knows why because instead she’s turning money into water and pissing off her family in one fell tactless swoop.

Grr.

PS and addendum. I neutrally remarked ‘I recognise these’ on the post and she fucking ‘liked’ the comment. Am I really nutso for being offended that she’s selling my gift in a way publically recognisable to me for far less than it was worth or should I be calling in a favour for a well-deserved fish-slapping, table of sibling?

Here’s a small clue. I did not smiley face, and I almost always smiley face shit on Bacefook if it can be intertpreted in more than one clear manner. Don’t you?

Hypothetical

Okay, so I’ll get the disclaimer out at the front end of proceedings, this post is about Bacefook.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to revisit high school and dredge up any traumatic memories you may have of first periods, acne, braces and the like by going all bitchkateer on somebody I know behind their back just because I can. Honest.

I just wanted to ask you something and it has to do with the whole odd experience that can be a social media ‘friend’ who you can’t quite understand why they requested same status since, well, you’ve never been more than basic acquaintances in person at university and if one were being brutally honest only recall because she was the god bothering one that got married at eighteen so she could hold hands and kind of always used to give everybody else the shits in lectures because there was always this thing with the hand raising and long-drawn out question about a point that bothered not one of the other hundred people in the room but invariably served as a chance to release some sunbeams from her own ass.

Ahem. You get the idea.

The religion, meh. Each to their own and kudos for the social order and I bet her parents never had to worry about her. I’m cool with the religion. She never insisted that anybody else agree with her, handed out a bleeping pamphlet or generally got in the face about belief. I really don’t mind the religion.

The fucking smug on the other hand, everybody wanted to slap her for that.

She was just a bit irritating, really, and  although I do covet the admirably unsinkable self esteem she was not half as crash hot as she thought.

She’s just the IOnlyKnowHerBecauseSheHadThisHabitOfBeingNoticedByGettingOnEverybody’sTits kind of lass.

But she asked to ‘friend’ me and I am not the sort of lady that disses somebody I don’t especially love by ignoring them. That’s far too, well, high school. She has five hundred and something other ‘friends’ so she may not have noticed, but nevertheless it would have been rude to ignore and really, what does it matter?

Except for one thing.

She’s the kind of livid antianykindofabortionist that likes to publish links to various groups and publications. One that publicly likes many of same. Posts cheering pro life comments about the joint.

Does she really think not one of her 500+ friends have had to make the choice that her morality and reproductive good luck have kept her from?

What would you do, okay besides resisting urge to stick pins in suitably matching doll?

Idle minds, etc.

G

Fire

There’s an expression, excuse me if I mangle the exact turn of phrase, but I believe it goes something along the lines of never discussing politics or religion unless what you’re really looking for is a good old fashioned barney.

Honestly, I think it’s a pretty astute observation.

It’s also one I follow and the main reason I rarely blog about such items, for although just like any other thirty something woman I have Views Quite Strongly Held, I also understand that my particular set of Views are exactly that and not only are they no more valid than anybody else’s Views but trying to point out to somebody else that I think their Views are wrong not only never helps them see the light but, well, ends up in the good old fashioned barney referred to above.

Browbeating people into agreeing with you just doesn’t work and not only that, it mostly only very successfully pisses them right off. Plus, most of the time other people’s Views work in their world and my Views apply in mine and who cares, really, if some people think wierd shit about it not being okay to mix extra hot chilli sauce with carbonara at dinner time? I can and DO do it anyway.

But one thing  that really puts the fire in my belly is when some d!ckhead with Views decides that their Views are important enough to deliver in person in my face and at my front door entirely unbidden.

Hint. See above italicised observations about such behaviour.

So, I have but this to say to the nineteen year old idiot who decided to interrupt my quiet life today with their observations on family values (Oh, and I see you have a family let me talk about the ways….) otherwise known as a not so subtle cover for the true ideology of Doesn’tReallyMatterWhatFlavourOfReligionSlashOtherBeliefSystem and what women can and cannot do with their bodies and their role in society.

You’re nineteen and quite frankly, you’re a fuckhead, and on top of this you have no fucking idea about the world and what you would or wouldn’t do if your sheltered self got a serious dose of reality and don’t presume that because I am white and polite and have a neat home and small children that I haven’t had the scarlet A for something you couldn’t even begin to wrap your silly little head around as the best thing I could do at the time for a baby that was going to die, sweetheart, because that wasn’t you.

It isn’t you.

You’re only nineteen and you don’t have a fucking clue and that’s the only reason that I put a lid on the fire in my belly for people to believe what the fuck they like as long as they leave other people to do the same long enough to say ‘no, thank you, sorry’ and shut the door.

You’re nineteen. Your mother was a hampster and your father smelled of elderberries. I fart in your general direction.

Come talk to me in twenty years.

G

Well, THAT was farking traumatic.

Lovely ladies of the internet at large I do apologise for I think I left you derailed somewhere along the barely coherent train track of tramadol, panadol, ibuprofen, panadeine forte, um I must fess up, leftover endone from my csection  + glass of wine.

I think I was screaming something about my bloody jaw and how much she hurts but that’s okay because life sure has it in for me and decided that what I really needed to keep me fully and totally miserable was for my computer to shit itself with great determination to never work meaningfully again, right along with my important precious backup external wireless clever hard drive gizmo. The former happened in attempts to fix the latter because my PC, she is of a delicate constitution these days and can’t be having with multiple restarts all in a row.

Turns out the latter is a mighty fine paperweight if nothing else on a bad day and it also turns out that tech support are based on the other side of the pond and are also retarded types who like to blame the software if they are from the hardware mob and vice versa and if all else fails, rather unfairly the end user, but have nothing in the way of useful contributions as to why their shiny and not-cheap product suddenly stopped working on two computers which were not changed in any way but right after their product automatically updated itself.

Yerhonour, I rest my case.

Can I have a new computer now?

It’s been a farking rough week and whilst I am down to piffling paracetamol for pain control thanks to a course of antibiotics, I have found via the wonders of a whizzing dental xray better known as an OPG that I in fact am the proud owner of four wisdom teeth, three of which are deeply impacted and working seriously bad juju on the teefs I quite approve of in front of them, and that the forth partially erupted bastard has a nice cosy pocket of bone loss behind it where my friends Oral Flora are hanging out and generally having a fun time.

When I said it felt like I had pus under pressure back there I was pretty much right. If I was coherent enough to utter such a thing.

At least the most recent dentist was not a farking idiot and therefore sensibly asked why I wasn’t on flagyl too, to which I muttered something vaguely polite about her previous colleague thinking it for the best to avoid it on accounts of booby stuff and me not wanting to be a pushy bastard know it all doctor because although I am rather good at examining business ends I leave the mouths to those with the inclination for that sort of wierd stuff. In return I got both a snort of derision for pansies who also think women with three young children pop out to the dentist because they’ve chewed awkwardly and just bruised up the old gum a bit and a good saline rinse shall fix all (ha!) and a fresh shiny prescription for both drugs I need and an urgent referral for an oral surgeon. Plus heavy encouragement to go before my mouth explodes again which it invariably shall.

Happy days. I like this dentist and I hope to see her in happier circumstances like holding down two screaming three year olds for a routine checkup sometime soon.

Internet, apparently I now need all four blasted teeth out in hospital and under GA, a financial event called ‘send the surgeon’s children to school camp this year and buy a lot of pot noodles and tinned tuna for dinner for the next six months’ and a pain and emotional event called ‘ain’t going to farking happen because I have three children one of whom is very young indeed’. Um, well, no.

The last time I saw somebody who had had four wisdom teeth extracted, they could barely open their mouth far enough to vomit without swallowing it for the best part of a week and I need to be a little more chipper than that right now.

Universe, you have got to be shitting me. What’s next?

Pah.

G

PS. Something tells me the PC situation is the least of my worries right now.

Do you have a dental emergency?

 This Information for Idiots bit is from my local dental hospital ’s website:

Do you have a dental emergency?

You may need emergency care if you have: an injury to your teeth severe bleeding in your mouth swelling around your mouth area dental pain

My mouth says that last item is missing the opportunity to use words like ‘internal explosion’ and ‘jawbone threatening to take off and reach orbit’ and ‘fucking ouch’ and that’s after downing paracetamol then paracetamol+codeine, tramadol, nurofen, amoxycillin and a glass of red wine in increasing desperation.

My local dental hospital also kindly tells me I should seek normal hospital emergency department care after 9.15pm. Since it’s now 10.40pm, I guess I’m having my dental emergency at an inconvenient time and even more irritatingly I did actually see a dentist today who told me I’d just bruised the gum chewing on something or other and that saline rinses were nice and safe in breastfeeding so Have a Nice Weekend While The Clinic Shuts.

I’m pretty sure that the above list of drugs all at once is not precisely ideal in breastfeeding and despite them anyway my-fucking-god-my-mouth-is-still-a-white-hot-zone-of-throbbing-pain. Depressingly, I am even more sure that if I braved the pissing rain (do excuse the foul language but decent pain gives me serious potty mouth) to turn up my emergency department as advised, one I have worked in, nobody would give me the fun drugs because of the whole booby thing and even worse I know for sure that none of them buggers know how to do a dental block because I don’t either and did I mention how much my jaw hurts right now and I can’t really think with the pain and I’m too scared to take any more strong stuff in case I stone Bhaji Nightshift to oblivion?

Oh, and I just had to replace my broken dishwasher after it flooded my kitchen in the middle of the night and my coffee machine is in for repairs.

But mostly, my mouth really bleeding hurts.

G

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Handiwork.

Lovely Internet, send! help! at! once!. M’aidez et cetera.

Am drowning in bodily secretions, excretions and all other kinds of cretions you can name for Bhaji Nightshift has a cold and so do I and, accordingly enough, I am not sure which of us is more prone to fits of low grade febrile irritability and crying for no externally discernible reason. My damn throat hurts.

As for Bhaji, well, she can’t whinge as fluently as the twins can because they have about three years jump on her in the whole complaints department, but she’s very clearly about as happy about the whole thing as you can expect an obligate nose-breather to be when chock full of snot and in case I have failed to make my not so subtle point I mean that Bhaji is rather UNhappy and UNsettled and prone to sleeping sounding a little like Darth Vader’s hiterto-unknown apprentice, complete with wakings on the hour pretty much every hour without reference to the actual time of day.

Or night.

Sob.

Also, she wants ze boobie almost constantly because only a thirty seven degree squishy pacifier shall do and I have two observations to note from this development.

1. Your nipples start to hurt when abused in this fashion.

2. Your baby will literally overflow with ze product of ze boob that comes with the squishy pacifier and thus you will frequently be coated in your own modified apocrine glandular output (in various stages of acidic maturation) rather more than is considered polite from the newborn set.

Actually, there’s also observation number three: You will get really farking tired really farking quickly and this doesn’t help the personal human versus virus battle one damn bit. I am zombie boobie mama right now. Lightly puke-ly marinated.

Screw those polite TV commercials advertising product huggy-boo for baby’s special first wee fever. I want the shite that kills virions with one fell swoop, drains sinuses better than a good dose of curry and gives a better night’s sleep than a propofol infusion.

G

PS. No I don’t know who the b@stard is who Let The Germ In. They usual suspects are suspiciously chirpy and whine free. Ergo in about three day’s time, they will be wiping their noses on my clothes and whinging. Can hardly wait.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Things I can now do with varying degrees of confidence.

Dear Internet,

You’ll have to excuse the brevity because it has been a fecking long forty eight hours on accounts of some of my nastiest narrow-squeaks almost bleeding to sheet white death patient experiences ever to date, events during which I was extremely glad to have a clever senior person around doing most of the Anti Dying action, leaving me time enough to be considerably pissed that some random gynaecologist took the holdup for HIS non-urgent case as a kind of personal affront when we had a woman who had already lost two and a half litres of blood all over the delivery suite half dead but anyway, sigh, I just hung up on his stupid complaints about cancelled dinner reservations and got on with finding out just how much blood somebody can lose and survive with a little bit of luck.

Regardless.

Anyway.

I think I have become a slightly bigger girl in the world of surgical nerd-tools because now it seems I can assemble something that is probably worth more than my beat up car, put a camera all up in your uterus and even hold it the right way up and take happy snaps for later, if you like. All on my own, if only because my boss is too pissed about his speeding fine to bother staying in the room. I’ll throw in a bonus mi.rena and polypectomy on a sunny day, too.

You can thank me later.

G

PS. The poor bleeder? Was twenty four. Had had one Mo/Di twin die three weeks back, brain injury in the survivor, got nasty, stinky chorioamnionitis and then delivered at twenty three weeks and six days. Then nearly died. Screw the gynaecologist, really.

Tired.

One of the hilarious side effects of being the size of a small gestating truck, well apart from all the cretins who like to wink and say ‘any day now, dear!’ like they have a secret hotline into my immediate future and the cretins who also like to wink and point out that March must have been a relatively television dry month like they have a slightly creepy secret hotline into a complete stranger’s sex life, and, um, at this point I think I shall stop and try again because I have seriously digressed.

Ahem.

One of the hilarious side effects of the third trimester is that you get to enjoy all of the gestational fun that came with the first two, but now with added bonus bone crushing fatigue.

Everybody knows that being so tired that sleeping in one’s car on the way to work starts to seem merely like using time efficiently is really funny.

It’s nearly as funny as winding back to about a fifty hour week because one’s ankles look more like they belong attached to the knees of an elephant than anything else. Or fart jokes. Fart jokes never get stale.

In other words I am still here, I am slightly over-dramatically dying by very tired inches, and if I see one mor drug addicted pregnant woman who swears who is ‘clean’ but leaves my consultation room smelling like weed and goodness knows what for the rest of the morning, well I might just vomit in protest.

I’m awfully good at that, in case you wondered.

I mean it, the very next lady who feels the need to keep reproducing despite the fact that her other billion spawn are in fostercare and doesn’t feel the need to care for the current uterine tenant properly because her own doctor is dead/away/horribly booked out/wants to charge her actual money gets her tubes tied for free at one hundred paces.

They never look tired. It’s all that having nothing to do all bleeping day.

I am not exactly in the mood.

There. That’s slightly better.

G

Chivalry

In case you wondered, it’s probably still dead.

In other words, I emerge from the precipice of my last night of…..

Dear Gad I Hope This To Be True Or I Shall Go Battier Than I Already Am

…..nightshift before the arrival of Bhaji Nightshift (who, co-incidentally is still managing to measure three weeks ahead while transverse at the time, not that THAT is much of a feat because, well, it seems that having Saag and Naan perform dual occupancy duties shagged my uterus into something floppier than a very rude joke and resultingly, um, BN has one of the most unstable intrauterine positions known to a foetal whirling dervish) to bitch about something dreadfully important.

Please, Internet, if you happen to be snoring in ressies at my work tonight and you have seen the size of my bloody belly plus the strangled whimpers I make as I try to move up and down from the crappy plastic mattress on the bleeping FLOOR due to one late-to-the-repeat-c-section-memo failing sacroiliac joint, don’t take the fucking couch. Like my ever chivalrous co-nocturnal worker did.

It’s precisely half a metre easier to get on and off of, for a start.

Also, while I can forgive one accidental careless discarding of bleeper on the bench, causing a buzzing like a million deeply peed-off hornets as it scutters clean across the length of the thing each time somebody randomly decides to summon him from his sweet repose, I can’t forgive for the keeping on putting it right back there.

Actually, he’s lucky I didn’t shove it clean up his daft bum upon reflection, because just quietly I think he might just be a bit of a snoring asshat.

Yours,

Geohde.

Moments.

Do forgive the excessively medicalised whinge, I think everybody has the nimrod-colleague experience from time to time and I just happen to have the good fortune to work in healthcare where the lingo is particularly obtuse.

Feel free to substitute you own colleague and/or profession of choice.

I did not have fun at work yesterday. I had anti-fun.

In retrospect I think it took me a while longer than it should have for the ‘I am working with a female Doctor Nick’ penny to drop.

In other words when your night colleague wants to piddle about handing over the minor dross of the previous twelve hours while BOTH the outgoing night and ingoing day consultants are currently running around like blue arsed flies because one woman has just fitted and another needs to be delivered NOW, perhaps that should be seen as a bit of a flashing neon Sign.

Especially when aforementioned quite sweet colleague merely goes ‘Oh, yeah, so and so just had a fit, I think. I sent bloods!’ and doesn’t actually know anything as such about either patient. Because she hasn’t been in the bloody room. But that’s okay, Internet, because the midwives and consultant seem to be handling whatever it is. So we can hand over, right?

Sometimes I despair because I hate being snarky about nice people but incompetent nice people are the very worst. Nobody wants to tell off a puppy.

I settled for brightly smiling, saying ‘don’t worry about the handover, I’ll figure it out, go home and get some rest!!’ before sprinting from room to bloody room all morning sewing, reviewing, magnesium’ing, phone-calling and arranging transport OUT urgently for the fittee and a proper pre-eclampsia workup for the other on accounts of a blood pressure best measured in the richter scale in labour. I mean, it was nice to hear from the night resident that the blood pressure had settled down with meds, but I kind of personally felt that THAT was probably missing the point and we’d already had one proper fit that day.

Perhaps the next clue should have been the time I finally made it downstairs to review the gynaecology patient who was thirty nine degrees and shaking all over and had been half of the night as it turns out. I’d been told that she had ‘anxiety issues’ and her diazepam was all charted now. Awesome. I love me a little rigor with benzodiazapines, personally.

A pink fluffy cloud is one way to cushion the blow of gram-negative sepsis.

The nail in the coffin was the bit where I handed back over at the end of a very long and sweaty-armpitted day only to find myself answering ‘so what condition are we looking for with these bloods?’ with another no-puppy-slap even-voiced ’Pre-eclampsia, except it looks more like it was HELLP syndrome brewing and it’s really REALLY lucky she just turned up and delivered when she did.’ Overnight. With aforementioned Richter scale blood pressure. On her watch.

Um.

Yes, I did slap my forehead and call the hospital back on my drive home and suggest she call the consultant for advice about that last tenant of the Hotel Of New Mothers. It took that long for the penny to finally drop that she had no earthly idea what I’d asked her to review the blood pressure, urine output and reflexes for overnight as well as how to interpret the repeat bloods and I just hope the consultant got the hint that a little more of a hands-on approach overnight might be warranted because I couldn’t really tattle tale to the boss that I thought I was working with a pre-schooler that day.

I just whine to the internet in complicated medical jargon, instead. Everybody needs to let of a little steam sometimes.

I promise I shan’t do it again for a long time and, also, I am equally sure there are many people out there complaining equally bitterly about my f*ckups. The f*ckups just get more complicated as you go along. It’s the beauty of specialising.

G

Dog.

I have a flat tyre. I also have several people who wanted to point it out to me with glee as I was rolling the last fifty metres after it happened home but, really, folks, not needed. Please do not remind. It went all ‘bang’ and stuff.  Ta very much for your consideration. I KNOW.

Ergo, tomorrow, before my next run of nightshift when I should by rights be sitting in my dressing gown blowing my nose intermittently and whinging about my lot in life (I have a cold that has just about outlasted the most recent ice age in progress in my sinuses. Still) I have to fork out to replace said flat tyre, or more accurately, remove one bloody insolent long screw from the outside of aforementioned flat tyre and hope they can patch the bleeping thing because otherwise it wasn’t really worth driving to work to get paid today.

Also in matters domestic, I still have a wet wall plus a dirty great big inconsiderate hole in the plaster and am waiting for the plumber to come back and charge me fifty thousand dollars for finishing the whole ‘let’s fix the leaking bathtub’ game.

Meanwhile, Saag and Naan are in the shower with ME everyday making far too astutue observations about the adult bikini line and pushing me out of the warm at will.

Sigh. If I had a dog I’d contemplate kicking it.

G

 

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Not Helping.

Dear Union Confidential Advice Person,

You’re an asshole, really you are.

You know what? I hadn’t actually cried about the whole bloody mess with work, the Bhaji Nightshift secret, my complete lack of certainty with regards to training or employment because of the above and the whole damn nine yards up and the until I read your reply to my email asking for help.

Pointing out that women give birth and I have rights was about as goddamn useful as tits on a bull.

I am aware I have rights. I’m really not that stupid.

I am also aware that I spent eighteen frigging months without a proper medical job when Saag and Naan made my life complicated way back when, too, and THAT also fell in the bucket of Nebulous Shit Too Hard to Prove (But, Look!, RIGHTS!). I walked that shitty, shitty mile. I did jobs I was grossly overqualified for with every sign of enjoyment without missing a beat to get back to where I am now.

It was farking hard.

A parting shot telling me that not telling my employer now might be seen as a reflection on the personality and integrity of the candidate when I have months to legally make that notification was what really cut me to shreds. I have busted and sacrificed more than I care to tally on a personal level and the insinuation from some latte sipping lawyer who goes home at 5pm that I have failed in some way is the utter final straw.

I couldn’t mean this more literally, but thanks for nothing, asshat,

Yours,

Geohde.

Read.

I have to confess that only once in my reproductive career have I ambled into a scan cheerfully. However, since that point nearly four years ago where a nice but far too excitedly clinical sonologist pointed out the absent skull vault and classic (‘classic! you know’) frog’s eye sign of PBWCLEW’s anencephaly, that’s all been blown to shit.

I’m not excited by gender, I’m relieved by normal anatomy and my god do I get pissed at the cheerful waiting room chit chat about ‘I get to find out what kind of baby I’m having! Squee!’ because a tackle-check is so not the bloody purpose of the damn thing.

Don’t they know their babies could die?

Anyway, as far as I could tell from the emotionally disconnected and rather brusque look-see today, everything appears to be more-or-less fine with Bhaji Nightshift, apart from the fact when the sonologist got to the rushed you’ve-been-in-here-ten-minutes-already ‘so, any questions?’, I asked if she’d checked for posterior fossa signs of spina bifida. The resulting ’why would I do that?’ made it pretty clear she hadn’t even bothered to read the damn referral, but perhaps the entirely innacurate spelling of my name of the screen should have given that away a bit earlier on in the game.

I can’t say that sort of attention to detail thrills me overmuch.

Also, Bhaji’s nuchal is a bit on the bulgy side, although not definitively on the ‘oh fuck’ end of the scale and so now I guess I’ll resort to biting my nails until I get the combined risk score back. Suffice it to say it’s pretty farking hard to have an amnio if nobody knows you’re pregnant.

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Puke.

Dear Internet,

I know the radio <insert slicker modern version of no-longer suitable catchphrase here*> silence MAY make it seem a little bit like I’ve abandoned complaining about my life now that I seem to be knocked up but, really, it’s not the case.

I will always need to complain heavily about my life.

Honest.

It’s mostly the two months of permanent nightshift biting my arse. Oh, and that minor matter of the first trimester fished from about the fourth circle of hell because, honestly, I did NOT sign up for the bit where I get to see my meals in bleeping reverse at least several times a day. Really, I didn’t. They weren’t even that good the first time.

I’ve done the entire first trimester in it’s entirety twice before without any such green-faced issues and so I think I am entitled to bitch about just how horrible I feel. I know I paid rather a lot of good money and loitered in the vicinity of a lot of transfer catheters and generally really ASKED to feel completely shit, but I still maintain that I am not a masochist. I (usually and with exceptions on a pissy 16 dpo beta of bloody one hundred for crying out loud it would seem) Don’t Do first trimester Yurk.

Except when I do.

It’s a good thing IVF taught me a thing or two about shoving needles in my own arse because that my friends is how I am even turning up to work at all these days. The only times that I feel even vaguely like I am not in the middle of a particularly violent spin cycle are when I very first wake up BEFORE I move and that half a second of intestinal bliss about halfway through a serving of piping hot chips BEFORE I make the fatal mistake of eating that one too many.

Basically, in case I have failed to be entirely clear, I feel like shit all the time. Rapidly weight gaining shit, even with the tidal nutrition problem. Thank you, hot chips. They’re about the only thing that sticks.

I also didn’t sign up for the bit where I find it hard to be in the vertical position for more than about two farking hours a day on accounts of insane need for sleep because I am just too busy for that sort of shit right now. Ask my seventy hour working week. The flow-on-no-time laundry deficit at home is getting so severe I have the best part of the last fortnight still laid out on the loungeroom floor and am now merely treating it as an all-you-can-wear buffet with regards to clean underwear and socks in the evenings (life is backwards on permanent nightshit).

I would adore telling my employer to get me the hell off of nightshift and exactly halve my hours while they are at it, apart from the bit where I can’t actually tell them I am pregnant and vomiting into the toilets between suturing shredded undercarriages (post baby ejection thereof) because I am bang in the middle of applying for jobs.

Whatever your local anti-discrimination mafia may tell you, the pregnant chick usually comes about fiftieth, not first.

Sigh.

G

PS. I really should mention the bit where I had another scan and at nine weeks Bhaji Nightshift still seems to be all alive and stuff but hearing LS sigh heavily with disappointment and hang up the phone when I told HIM kind of spoiled the hell out of that ray of sunshine for the time being. He’s being a bit of an arsehole, really.

*ethernet unplugging? Modem dysregulation?

**Knocked in the mastercard? In a Delicate Stirrup? I’m never very good at this sort of thing.

The bit I didn’t mention.

…goes something like telling LS about the scan and hearing  ‘Well, that’s nice. For you’.

Colour me seriously un-fucking-impressed. Five back to back transfers and two fresh cycles for THAT?

Next scan in two weeks.  Humph.

G

Sneak.

Beta two is officially scheduled for next week.

I wasn’t going to bother with a beta for a good week, Internet, because I figured that THAT way, well, things would either be okay-ishwaitforthescan or decidedly NOT okay. Like ripping off a beta-bandaid, if you get my drift.

But then I remembered that in a week I am going to be smack bang in the middle of more nightshift and that the last bloody thing I shall want to be doing (even suffering a near terminal case of lame beta limbo) is to rock up to the phlebotomist after working for twelve hours straight at night covered in other people’s amniotic fluid and meconium just for a bleeping beta. When I could be dangerously weaving my way home across lanes with fatigue on the freeway, instead.

So I sorted one for myself today. Unofficially.

Don’t tell.

Anyway, it was 271.

Yes, I know, inconvenient. Painfully low for this point but doubling quite prettily.

Lest I forget, my viable gestations (choose your own definition of viability at this point internet because I am having to take literary licence and include a lethal prognosis here, but anyway I digress) were stupidly high and never doubled properly.

Sigh.

It’s a crap shoot.

I’m probably going to upset the urban legend apple cart here, but whatever your Mum, sister, aunt, cousin, friend’s-dog’s-camel’s-best-mate-and-cousin-once-removed told you about the doubling being the most important thing isn’t quite true. Healthy single beta numbers are predictive on their own. Hence my own prior successful* outcomes on silly-high numbers without having read the manual on requisite doubling.

I mean, it’s nice that it’s heading northward nicely, but the odds are still something like THIS for betas at 14dpo (mine would have been solidly less than 50 with known doubling time of 33 hours so let’s go out on a 29-45 limb here):

1/3 viable, 1/3 miscarriage and 1/3 biochemical or thereabouts, if you ignore the ectopics, which I shall do on accounts of being a regular ray of sunshine these days. I can hardly wait.

Yeah, I know, science. Sorry about that.

G

* Yes, for an unusual definition of ‘successful’ in one case.