Birth Story, Part Four

Oh my, oh my! Looks like those other two babies either have beaten me (I'm guessing, here) or are poised to do so! Squeeee!

Where were we? Ah, yes. Monday afternoon. We were on the subway. Of course. Where the hell else would we be, with me 4 cm dilated, completely effaced, having been contracting regularly for twelve hours or so? Surely not NEAR THE DAMN DOCTOR’S OFFICE WE HAD JUST LEFT, WHICH IS FOUR DAMN BLOCKS FROM THE MOTHERFUCKING HOSPITAL.


A to B: A Rational Person's Route



A to B: My Route


It’s possible I’m not entirely over how incredibly boneheaded that decision was. All I can say is that denial is a powerful thing. (For more on how I got into this mess, see parts 1, 2, and 3.)

To make sure you understand how stupid this was, please note that not only is it 45 minutes to an hour to get home from the doctor (actually a bit faster than driving, which was part of the attraction), but also: we don’t live on that train line. Or the train line we transfer to next. So that’s three trains home, and one of the transfers is up stairs. But I wanted to be at home. I didn’t feel good. I didn’t want to eat any of the food I could think of getting in Midtown, and I certainly didn’t want to walk around there in the cold drizzle. And cabs are expensive and nerve-wracking, and the subway is familiar and cheap. So off we went.

The story would be more exciting if my water had broken on the train, it’s true, but if that had happened even I might have had the sense to get off and hop a cab back uptown. In fact, the ride was okay. I had a few contractions; they didn’t really pick up until we were under the East River, leading me to believe that the Bean just wanted to be born in Brooklyn. And a little while later, I thought he might get his wish.

My sense of time gets pretty shaky from here on out. I think we must get home around 3:30. I am ravenous. I’d tried to eat the bland food they tell you to have in labor in the morning, but my bowl of grits was left to congeal. (Grits are my go-to bland comfort food, which I mentioned in our birthclass brainstorm only to have the teacher say that although oatmeal was a good labor food, grits might be okay in very early labor. Yankees! ) Bland food made me feel gross in the first trimester, and it seems gross now. So I eat the spicy beef leftovers. And they are awesome. And I am glad I was so shameless about asking for them.

Then everything starts to happen at once. Nature, as they say, calls. Insistently and for quite a while. I discover just how very, very, very much I hate having contractions on the toilet. I know some of you were into laboring there or in that position, and I am here to say that you are out of your tiny minds. Once my body has, erm, cleared the decks, the contractions go wild. Sixty to 90 seconds long, every three to four minutes. Instead of counting and groaning, I am counting and yelling and clawing the bed. I bend over the couch, I slow-dance with Sugar; nothing helps. At one point, I accidentally bite Sugar’s leg (which doesn't help that much either).

Even before the tooth marks can fade, Sugar calls the OB office to say we’d like to go to the hospital. (For me, not her leg. I didn’t even break the skin, okay?) While she’s talking to that dumb bitch of a nurse you remember from the Vasospasm Chronicles, I have a contraction. And Nurse Helpful says, “You have to get her to calm down.” Because you know, being quiet while in bone-crunching pain is really, really important. There goes my Good Girl Gold Star for Laboring Like A Lady, I guess. (Sugar, who is wise beyond comprehension, doesn’t tell me about that comment until much, much later. I PROBABLY wouldn’t have insisted we stop by the office on the way to the hospital and throttle her anyway.) However, the nurse agrees that if I want an epidural, we should head in. So we call a car again.

Only now it’s rush-hour.

While we’re waiting for the elevator, I feel a little excited. Mostly afraid I’ll have another contraction and fall down in the hall, but a little excited. I am in labor! This is happening! Who’d have thought it would happen today? (You know, besides anyone who’d thought rationally about the events of the previous 36 hours.) By the time we get to the stoop, I am back to petrified. I get walloped with more contractions; when the car arrives, Sugar has to run tell it to wait until I can walk again. I curse my decision to deliver at Kips Bay Mega Hospital rather than one in Brooklyn. Sure, I had my reasons, but LICH is so close.

In birth class, there was a lot of talk about how giving birth in real life isn’t at all like giving birth in the movies. In some respects I guess that’s true: my water didn’t burst out all over the stage while I gave a speech for my entire company and Dr. Baby Factory didn’t just happen to poke his head into the room during the pushing so that I could grab him by the neck and scream, YOU DID THIS TO ME!!!! But this part of the story, from when Sugar trundled me into the cab until the epidural was in? This part was exactly like the movies.

Cab driver, I wish I knew your name, because you deserve a medal for patience, fortitude, and grace under fire. You could give a seminar in how to treat a laboring woman, and several of the medical professionals we dealt with ought to be required to attend. You did your job without comment and you did it well. I cannot have been your favorite fare that day, but I trust you at least got a good story out of the deal.

What he didn’t get was much peace and quiet. For the whole ride in — at rush hour, remember — I am doing my level best to cope like they said at birth class. So Sugar and I are counting out my contractions, in eights, the whole way in. And I by God keep up the counting, even though my yelling progresses rapidly to screaming.

About five blocks into the trip, I begin to wonder if I could be in transition. I can’t make any other sense of what was happening. My autonomic nervous system has gone completely haywire; I am roasting to death and convulsed with chills. The contractions get longer and longer and closer and closer together; at times there are no breaks at all. The advantage to counting through contractions is that it gives me a sense of when one might end (at about 14-2-3-4-5-6-7-8); the disadvantage is how terrifying it is to be still counting in the twenties and thirties. (Sugar says she remembers being in the forties at one point, which I have blessedly forgotten.) I am out of my mind with pain. At one point, between contractions, somewhere still deep in Brooklyn, I look up at the brick tower alongside us and it occurs to me that there will be a time in my life when I no longer feel like this. The idea is so strange that it transfixes me for a moment, until I feel a gush and yell out that my water is breaking.

(What an unwelcome thing that must be to hear as a cab driver. Luckily, we have a towel.)

At around this time, I start to feel a strong urge to push. Oh, God, the baby is going to be born in this cab and I’m never going to get my epidural. I stick a hand in my pants, but I don’t feel a head, so I try not to push. Or at least not hard.

At some point, it occurs to me that this back labor thing really is happening. To me. I’ve long ago stopped feeling anything in my belly, nor do I feel anything there for the rest of the labor. What I feel in the car is that someone has decided to replace the bones in my back and my thighs with iron rods. The rods are set on the ends of my bones, and at each contraction, they are slammed into the bones over and over like jam-hammers, reducing me into rubble. Absolutely nothing about this feels “natural” or “productive” or any of those other reassuring things. At one point, alongside the ruined houses of Admiral’s Row, I wonder if I will die.

I know I am given to hyperbole in my writing, but in life, believe it or not, I don’t go in for hysterics. (My preference to be left alone and not bother anyone when I’m sick or in pain is what leads me to do dumb things like this.) Part of why it’s taken me so very long to write this story is that I spent a terrifically long time crippled by shame over how I behaved at the points of labor when the pain was at its worst. I didn’t hurt anyone or endanger the baby or say anything rude (that I regret), it’s just that I didn’t expect to be so out of control. After everything was over, I felt so embarrassed about it (no thanks to some of what was said at the hospital), and I felt that I hadn’t lived up to the example of your stories, that I hadn’t been strong or powerful or amazing but rather weak and overwhelmed and whiny and over-dramatic. When they said in birth class that being in labor meant letting go of your “social self” I thought that meant I would shut down the way I do during the GI/endo bouts, that I would not want to talk or be talked to and that I would do some moaning. I didn’t expect to be screaming — scream-counting, but still — or making these terrible dry-sobbing noises.

But there I am, making them. When I am able to think, I am beset by a series of fears:

• What if the baby is born in this car?
• Or, oh, God, what if the baby isn’t born in this car and I just have to keep doing this?
• What if I get to the hospital and the baby isn’t born yet but they say it’s too late for an epidural (never mind that the “it’s never too early or too late” policy was part of the appeal of Kips Bay) and they make me just keep going even though I’ve made it in?
• Oh, God. They’re going to make me be on an IV for an hour, like the books say, and I’ll have to be in the hospital knowing they could give me an epidural but that they won’t.
• Oh, God! Before they’ll even do that, I’ll have to go to triage. Triage! I cannot handle triage! They’ll make me move from room to room and I will die. Or kill someone.

I interrupt my anxiety spiral to notice that we are SO not on the way to the hospital. Car service drivers tend to have their own opinions about how best to get to the bridges and it doesn’t do to tell them their business, but it has been forever and we are still in fucking Brooklyn. Traffic is heavy, and we really do hit every light. I am bent over sideways in the backseat, looking up at the world as I did on long car trips as a child stretched out across the backseat. At some point, I lift my head up and see that we are at the Navy Yards. Does this guy think we’re going to Queens? What if he’s taking us to the wrong hospital? WHY ARE WE STILL IN BROOKLYN?????

So calmly, so beautifully calmly, he answers, because it is rush hour and I am avoiding the traffic jam downtown approaching the bridge. Cab driver, I mentally send you flowers every time I think of your gentle tone and your impressive withholding of epithets at that moment. God bless you. Later, when I screamed at you that you were driving past the hospital, it was kind of you only to say that the hospital I was seeing was Bellvue and withhold any suggestion that perhaps I belonged there.

I had a few moments of clarity before arriving at the hospital. I remember thinking that because each of our cabs had chosen different bridges, we would be able to tell the baby about going over both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridge while he was coming. That seemed really cool for some reason. Later, as we crawled up First Avenue (thank you, cabbie, for not taking the FDR), there was this strange break from everything and it seemed perfectly normal to remark to Sugar on the unexpected presence of a European restaurant in the heart of Chinatown. ( “Look, they sell Swedish food.” ) Sugar reports finding that a bit surreal.

Another thing I had imagined was at least kind of being able to walk when we arrives at the hospital. Instead, I only have eyes for the lone wheelchair mercifully abandoned by the entrance and scream until the driver backs up, switches lanes, and brings me to it. Sugar runs around trying to figure out how to push me and deal with the luggage. Some presumed neurologist (bow-tie) leans over and asks if my “erm, companion” has gotten help. This all seems to take forever, but then Sugar is back, rushing me to the elevator. Which is absolutely packed, naturally, so I try to scream quietly while the neurologist and others chat about their weekends.

Our arrival in L&D is also cinematic: I am sprawled across the careering wheelchair, wailing. I hope I wasn’t screaming “give me my damn epidural,” but the possibility exists. However, one fear is instantly assuaged: turns out that if you arrive at Kips Bay L&D having clearly lost your tiny mind, you do not have to go to triage.

In the room, off go my rather soggy corduroys and everything else. As the nurse starts my IV, I whine at her, “Am I going to have to wait a really long time for my epidural?” She says no. “Are you lying to me??”

I am sure she is lying to me. Hell, I would lie to me. But she isn’t. The anesthesiologist comes in right away. He is a short man with comically tall hair and a horrible, sing-song, chipper-camp-counselor voice. He introduces himself and commences cheerfully upbraiding me for yelling.

I know how this works. I know that I will need to sit up, bend over, hold still. I am trying to move between contractions, only there isn’t any “between” anymore, so it’s hard. And his stupid monologue about how I need to stop carrying on is not helping.

This is when Sugar and I learn something about what is and isn’t part of that social self that disappeared on the ride in. Apparently preferring silence while in pain, which I would have bet was pretty deeply part of me, is surface stuff. But the Teacher Voice is primal.

So here I am, screaming, moaning, trying to turn to sit, wishing there weren’t so many people touching me and talking all at once. And then Dr. Jerkwad comes out with his most enraging and unhelpful line thus far, a merrily hostile, “You’ve got to get some self-discipline.”

And, reports Sugar, I go suddenly silent, to everyone’s surprise. And out it comes, low and loud and firm and clear, the Teacher Voice. And it says, heedless of the fact that this is maybe not the brightest remark to make to someone poised to put a needle in my spine,

“Sean.

"Don’t be an asshole.”

Birth Story, Part Three

Well, it’s happened. One of those overdue babies has gone and gotten herself born! Congratulations, Ms. Debbie G! And your lovely wusband, too! Biggest congratulations of all to that lucky, lucky baby girl, who is going to grow up in a super-awesome family.

In other news, while I was spacing out again, another due date I told myself I’d beat has gone and passed. I’d better get on this, eh?

(Parts 1 and 2, in case you’re just joining us.)

Sunday night: Home from dinner, cranky and crampy. Am starting to wonder just how normal it can be to still be bleeding so very, very much. And why hasn’t there been any mucous? All the books and websites say that bloody show is maybe “tinged” with blood. I start googling pictures and find nothing that looks like what I’m seeing. I figure better to call the doctor at 9:30 than wait until the middle of the night and wake her up. So I do.

The answering service takes my message and, as always, says to call back if I haven’t heard anything within 15 minutes. I wait 45, then try again. A while later, Dr. Skinny calls, sounding pissed. Which is weird, because hello, it’s not late by OB time, and anyway, I’m bleeding here. She couldn’t call sooner because she was delivering a baby (which I should have known via the Pregnant Lady Alert Network, I guess) and says she doesn’t understand why I’m calling. Um, because I’ve been bleeding like a stuck pig for nigh on 13 hours? (And must have been for quite a while before getting out of bed in the morning, to judge by the enormous clots. Which she had said weren’t big, but you know what? They were.) And all this “is it heavier than a period” business is confusing since A) I haven’t had a period in a while, actually; B) Heavier at any given moment? Or greater volume of blood overall? Because: no and yes; C) this blood is nothing like period blood; and D) WTF does that have to do with the price of milk? I’m not so much supposed to be having a period, right? And where’s that mucous I ordered?

For the record, I am not hysterical (bad pun; enjoy!) on the phone. [That came later, with the vasospasms. Apparently nipple pain trumps fear of bleeding to death.] I am calm and polite, express my hope that the birth went well, all that. Southern as all get.

Eventually, Dr. Skinny says — as if I should have known this — that I will be like this until I give birth. Pro tip: mentioning that in the morning would have saved you this phone call, Dr. Skinny. Also, how about you take a look some time at pregnancy books your patients are likely to have. You might be surprised how little information is in there. But they all say in no uncertain terms that heavy bleeding means time to pick up the phone.

She agrees with me that waiting until my next appointment on Thursday is not a good idea and says I should call in the morning for an appointment.

At nearly 38 weeks’ wide, I am a difficult party to share a bed with, so after a little while tossing and turning, Sugar goes to sleep on the chaise in the other room. I have no choice but to sleep with myself, which isn’t going well. I drift off but wake up every half an hour or so in bad pain. Still only in my back and legs. I start to wonder at all the advice I’ve heard about trying to sleep through early labor. How the hell do people do that? I try more alcohol, which just makes me feel gross.

Monday: By 4 a.m., even pretending to sleep is ridiculous. The contractions are coming about every ten minutes and lasting a minute or more each time. The pain is worst in my back but now seems to wrap around to my belly some of the time before shooting down my legs, right on the bone. I still don’t think it’s likely that I’ll be in real labor any time soon, but just in case, I decide not to wake up Sugar; I’ll want her rested for labor more than I need her help now. I spend some time in the tub until that starts to make things worse. I try to read a book. I bend over the couch, like they said in birth class. That is the only thing that feels even a little better, but I’m too tired to keep it up. Mostly, I lie on my side in bed and squeeze the cat, who is an absolute prince about the whole thing. I do some groaning and a whole lot of counting.

The pain is worse in the morning. Sugar gets up and complains about how lousy she feels, that she didn’t sleep well. I proceed to have a contraction, and she doesn’t complain anymore. Heh. We do some counting and breathing and all that jazz. The contractions hurt more, and I'm glad she's there to help me through them. Counter-pressure on my back helps some; the birth ball seems like the worst idea ever. I get an OB appointment for 1:15 that afternoon. We decide to pack a hospital bag, just in case, even though I don’t have half of the things I meant to get. Between contractions, we write — and I mean “write, on yellow lined paper;” remember that the printer has croaked — a very minimal birth plan. (“Epidural, yes. You get to come to the OR for a section. You wanna cut the cord? Put something in there about circumcision.”) At some point I write to the doulas.

Things go on in this vein until it is time to leave for the doctor. We really do take a cab this time. As is the way of these things, my contractions, which have been steady on all this time, all but stop on the drive in. I think I had three in the hour it took to get there. We feel a little foolish dragging our luggage into the waiting room, I tell you.

I pee in a cup (like you do) and some blood drips in; I’m still bleeding, though less than on Sunday. The nurse seems a bit horrified, all the same. I ask Dr. Russian whether she thinks they’ll manage to find protein in that sample. She laughs [See! This is why I liked her!], hooks me up to contraction and fetal heart rate monitors, and leaves for twenty minutes.

While she’s gone, I have only one contraction, but Lordy, it hurts. I’m sure people in the hall can hear me, as my counting is getting a little…emphatic. It’s over by the time Dr. Russian returns, though. She declares the Bean’s heart rate perfect and says there’s no evidence of a contraction on the tape. I about hit the ceiling. I had a contraction, dammit. I believe you, she says, it just didn’t show up here. As long as you’re here, let’s check your cervix.

This time, I do start to crabwalk off the back of the exam table. There has got to be a less painful way to do that. Dr. Russian is visibly shocked as she reports that I am 4 cm dilated and completely effaced.

What do you want to do, she asks.

What? Aren’t you supposed to tell me?

Well, she says, you can go to the hospital if you want, but you aren’t contracting, so they’re going to give you pitocin. I know you want to avoid that, so why don’t you go have lunch, walk around, and I’ll probably hear from you tonight.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that Dr. Russian is on call. I don’t like the other OBs at all. [And even after everything that came later, I’m still glad it was her. I didn’t rate my chances of a vaginal birth with Dr. Skinny too highly, and Dr. Sympathetic Noises said when I first met her that I’d likely need a c-section. Only Dr. Russian ever seemed to think things might work on their own.]

For some reason, I interpret Dr. Russian’s words, which now seem to pretty obviously suggest that she thinks I am in labor, as, “Go home. Maybe you’ll have the baby later this week. Like Thursday, say.”

So here it is, the hands-down dumbest thing I did in the whole pregnancy. The one thing I can definitively look back on about labor and say, I sure as hell won’t do THAT again.

We go home.

On the subway.

Birth Story, Part Two

(For backstory, disclaimers, and jokes about the Crimean War, see Part One.)

In a comment on the last post, Bunny asked whether my granny cart broke because of the hundred-ish pounds of groceries I had piled in it in my attempt to keep the cats from eating us alive. The answer is no. A superficial analysis would suggest that it broke because I was lazy the last time I fixed it (the linchpins on the axle are just wire, crappy wire at that, so the wheels fly off from time to time when the wire wears through) and didn’t neaten up the ends of the new wire, which then got bent out of shape when the cart was repeatedly folded and unfolded over the course of a month or so and, thus weakened, sheared off at a bad moment.. (And by “new wire” I mean cheap key ring, which I am telling you because I still think my discovery that those were the right gauge of wire was brilliant, not least because it means I can keep a “repair kit” of several of them jingling from the cart at all times.) But that’s not the real reason it broke, any more than the washer broke because its belt stretched out. (And while we’re on the subject of my enormous pride over trivial mechanical competence, yes, I was pretty damn pleased with myself when I thought of that and therefore saved us hauling the sucker to a handyman, thank you very. Sure, Sugar actually fixed it, but I did the intellectual heavy-lifting, okay?)

No, the washer and the granny cart and also our printer and Sugar’s Wacom tablet and a half dozen other household mainstays broke that week because of a little-known fuse built into all mechanical and electric items, known as the Critical Detector. The Critical Detector, says my father, who imbued me with most of my obviously enormous understanding of the gadget world [No, I still can’t get the damn blog to import to Wordpress; why do you ask?], is that widget that, sensitive to the relative importance of a given device at a particular moment, chooses the optimal moment for said device to fail. It is the Critical Detector that causes catastrophic copier failure ten minutes before the FedEx deadline of a grant you’ve spent a year writing, that makes your car die on the way to your sister’s graduation, that killed the digital camera the day of our courthouse wedding. Naturally, with my due date approaching, every CD in the house was on alert. We’re lucky the place didn’t explode.

Back to our story, already in progress:

Saturday: You know those dreamy, drapey pregnancy photo shoots that people do? The ones that are sort of romantic and beautiful and sort of too reminiscent of douche ads? I have mixed feelings about them — who’s ever going to want to look at them anyway? And isn’t it all a bit self-indulgent? But what if I regret being too cool for them later, when it’s my stomach flesh that’s drapey and white and I realize that I Will Never Be Beautiful Again??? Better safe than sorry. Also, I always wanted to be pregnant in the summer so that I could go to the beach and for once in my life know for certain that no one was allowed to even think boo about what my stomach looks like in a two-piece, but here it is cold weather and yes, I was pregnant at the beach last year but only enough to look chunky except for the time I didn't know I was pregnant yet but I looked 5 months gone because of the OHSS, and so maybe we should just cover the bedroom in white cloth and get out the camera and give it a shot? Or is that cheesy and hypocritical?

Oddly, Sugar prefers draping the bedroom in white and spending a few hours with her camera to listening to me deliberate. Can’t imagine why.

While she digs the wedding tablecloths out of the depths of the “nursery” closet, my body does what our bodies do when we prepare to drape them in white cotton: start bleeding from the hooha.

It’s not a lot of blood, but it is blood, so I call in. Dr. Skinny is on call assures me that an abruption would hurt, that this is probably just the Return of The Irritable Cervices. She asks if I’m having contractions, and though I am plenty achey, I say no, because I’m not having any rhythmic belly business, and I’d know if I were having contractions, right?

The bleeding stops after a couple of hours, and the photo shoot goes on. I figure the light is too good to put it off and anyway, this way we’ll have time to reshoot if it doesn’t go well.




[Sugar only ever got around to fixing up one of those pictures, and it is sad but true that no one really cares how pregnant you looked once the baby is out. Someday, when I get Wordpress working, I will get her to spruce up some of the others for a password-protected post and I will g-d FORCE you all to look at them and say something nice. Because in fact, I am not 100% overjoyed with the current state of the ol’ bod, and while I’ll probably one day go back to aggressively wearing a two-piece bathing suit despite never having had a “bikini body,” it ain’t going to be this summer.]

We go to a friends’ house for dinner, and realizing that I’ve invited guests for brunch and accepted another dinner invitation for Sunday, I make some joke to Sugar about how typical it would be for me to use all my nesting energy on socializing, leaving the house a disaster when the baby comes. Ha.


Sunday: God, I felt good Sunday morning. I slept pretty well — I understand that may happen again in 18 or 20 years — and even in a bit. Then my BFF calls and Sugar brings me the phone in bed and I lie there and talk to her while Sugar runs around making quiche and getting the house ready for our brunch guests. BFF talks to me about her labor; the only thing I remember is how much she hated laboring on the ball, but the conversation leaves me feeling relaxed about the prospect of labor, since after all, I have a few weeks before anything is going to happen. [You may find all this foreshadowing heavy-handed, but the idea that I had another 3 weeks really was in my mind constantly.] Eventually, Sugar says it’s time to get going if I want to be wearing clothes when our guests arrive in 20 minutes — and that seems like a nice idea, since I’ve only met one of them and her only once — so I get off the phone and head towards the bathroom, thinking things feel a little mucous-ier even than usual in the pants department.

But I am wrong about that: there’s no mucous at all.

Just lots and lots and lots of blood.

I stay put on the toilet while I call the doctor again. Sugar ruins the pie crust, which I have never, ever seen her do. Dr. Skinny calls back and says again that I don’t have an abruption, that of course I’m worried by blood but it is really okay. Am I having any contractions?

Funny thing about that, I say. Last night in bed I was thinking about it, and the only thing that comes and goes in a wave-like pattern is my backache. Is that a contraction?

Turns out it is. Dr. Skinny suggests that rocking on my hands and knees and doing some walking might ward off back labor, but I’m not all that worried because that’s not going to happen to me.

We debate canceling brunch, but the thing about city life is that no one has cars. They’ll be on the subway already, and even if we can reach them (possible, since most of the line they’re on is above ground), turning around will be a giant pain. Plus, we don’t really know them and it’s rude to uninvite people. Exsanguination before awkwardness!

I clean myself up, Sugar makes a new crust, and we all have a nice time at brunch. In fact, those guests are the perfect ones to have, since not only are they charming but one of them had a severe postpartum hemorrhage and is hence able to assure me that bleeding too much in an obstetric context is not something I’m likely to be in doubt about: I will know for sure that something is not right. I spend a while gawping at their baby, who is objectively fantastic but at that moment seems huge and terrifying and given to unfathomable moods and sudden noises.

After brunch, Sugar and I go for a walk in the Botanic Garden. We both remark on how much farther I’m able to walk than last time we went, not up to my normal standard, certainly, but over a mile. In fact, I’d been very sad after our last trip, because I’d imagined spending early labor walking here, but it seemed like I wouldn’t be able to manage it. Wouldn’t it be funny if this were the famous burst of energy that precedes labor? It’s not, of course. This would be a ridiculous way to use that. Just let me sit here for a minute until my back stops hurting again.

By dinner time, it is hard to ignore that I’m having some contractions, maybe two or three an hour. Obviously these are Toni Braxtons because I’m not having this baby for weeks yet. We take a car to our dinner friends’ anyway, though. Wait, I just remembered that we actually took the subway and then walked! Hilarious! I thought we had taken a car because only an insane person would have been too cheap to do so. Ahem. It occurs to us that even though these friends are usually good for some very nice wine, there might not be any because the wife and I are both pregnant. We promise each other that if GOD FORBID that happens, we will BY GOD get some wine on the way home. And yes, we are feeling strongly enough to use that many GODs.

Decency prevails! There is wine! I have two honkin’ glasses of it and remark that while I find the idea one of the women in birth class had of waiting until the night she went into labor to have a glass of wine (to slow the contractions) very sweet, I need a drink, dammit. The Oscars are on. We eat some very spicy beef that seems like the best thing in the whole word; I all but demand to be sent home with leftovers. The contractions — which still just feel like wretched back pain — keep coming. I can talk through them, but I’d rather not. Still bleeding like crazy. We really do take a cab home.

Birth Story, Part One

This is hard to write. I still feel strange about parts of this story, and I can't seem to get it to coalesce into better writing. But I told myself I would get it done before the arrival of several specific babies, two of whom are now past their due dates. So here goes. The first of ...4, maybe? [Ed. -- who am I kidding? Maybe 8.] parts, which I'm going to post as soon as I have them written, since sitting around thinking about how to do it better isn't getting me anywhere.



Right after the Bean was born, people started asking whether it had been a long labor. I always said emphatically not, that it had been the shortest first-baby labor imaginable, barely a blink of an obstetrical eye. …Which is only true if you take in account that I was in deep, deep denial about what was happening until nearly the end. So while I want to include the week before, which now seems part of it, keep in mind that any sense of inevitability is strictly revisionist.

Since this is so long overdue, let's start with a little context, shall we? Y'all might have forgotten what brands of crazy I was.

Monday, 2/21: Week 37 begins. Sugar and I meet the pediatrician our friend has recommended, who holds information sessions for expectant parents on Monday nights. Sugar thinks she’ll be late because she’s coming from work; instead, she is on time and I am 20 minutes late because I’m too tired to walk there and the subway is all messed up. I use both hands to haul myself up the railings of the subway staircases.


Tuesday: Hahaha, Tuesday. That was a fun one. Crampy. Exhausted. I get told my insurance has been canceled. This is all my disastrously fragile mental state needs. (I’d forgotten how bad it was until I reread this post. Yikes.)


Wednesday: First cervix check. One cm dilated, 50% effaced. Or one of them is; Dr. Skinny claims only one is active, which she somehow knows without checking. I don’t argue, because ouch. Spotting afterwards and feelings of general emotional turmoil, such as always seem to accompany any cervix-poking. I trot out my fancy math skillz and figure I’ll be pregnant for another six and a half years.

I spent another hundred years on hold, trying to figure out what the hell is going on with my insurance, while I wander Target, looking for that dark-colored nightgown and robe they say you’re supposed to have for the hospital. I can’t find anything, which I figure doesn’t matter since I have another six and a half years to deal with it, and I can't bear the thought of taking off any clothes to try on nursing tank tops, so that will have to wait. I buy a pack of newborn onesies, since I’ve just found out that “newborn” isn’t the same as “0-3 months.”

I go to my last pre-term acupuncture appointment and plan to start the “preparing for labor” series in a few days. Oh, but supposedly my insurance is fine, no need to panic. (Aside: basically this same thing just happened to us again, only with Sugar’s insurance. And after the panic attacks and the insomnia and the endless waiting on hold, it turns out everything is okay, but I WANT EMOTIONAL REPARATIONS, DAMMIT. Or at least someone to really, thoroughly yell at.)

I am finally driven to drink.


Thursday: I visit Schroe and meet the illustrious Speedster, Speedy, and the whole marvelous menagerie. We eat cookies and drink tea while Speedy gives the dogs acupuncture treatments and exclaims over her new love of cooking dry beans. Speedy wins my heart by stating with absolute assurance that my didelphic tendencies aren’t going to be a problem in labor.

I spend 95% of the visit gawping at Schroe and internally (?) panicking. Look at the way she handles the Speedster! She knows what to do! She knows what he wants! She can nurse him and change diapers and everything. I have no idea whatsoever what to do with a baby, I realize. This is going to be a disaster. Also: they have a real washer and dryer! We just have a little washer that hooks to the sink, no dryer at all. We are so unprepared.

I spend the bus and subway ride home looking at the adorable newborn sized clothes Schroe has given us. At least the baby (Aaaahhh!! Baby! Aaaaahhhhh!!!!!) won’t have to be naked. There’s that.

I get home and the washing machine breaks.


Friday: We are having dinner guests! I drag myself to the hippie coop grocery — via subway and bus; the last time I tried to walk there and back, I couldn’t walk at all the next day — and undertake the first of what I plan to be two or three major stocking up trips. Two cases of cat food, that kind of thing. [Hindsight sez: Nesting. Check.] I assure my supervisor that I’ll be in for my next shift unless, haha, I go into labor. I look so pathetic when the cab arrives that the driver puts my bags in the trunk for me despite what I belatedly realize is a major hand wound. Blood is coming through the torn strips of cloth wrapped around his palm. Seriously: it’s like we’re in a movie about the Crimean War, shot in Park Slope. I tip well, at least. (I think. Car service tipping is confusing!)

On the way down the ramp of my building, my granny cart breaks.

In lieu of cleaning the house even a little bit, I collapse on the bed. Later, I stumble my way through a passable lamb tagine, and Sugar saves me from burning the couscous beyond recognition. I have to sit down a few times because of extreme, stabbing cervix pain, but that's been happening for at least a month. We show off our fancy stroller — the guests are the expectant parents of one of those aforementioned slightly overdue babies — and realize we don’t really know how it works. Suave. We show off the "nursery" and assure them there is a mattress in the crib, somewhere under all that junk. Good thing we have like 3 more weeks to clean up in there....

40 Weeks: Pregnancy Roundup

Hey, can we pretend I posted this yesterday? When I started writing it? Thanks.

The Bean is doing better, by the way. He'd gained 4 ounces -- FOUR OUNCES! -- on Monday, and the LC was great and not dippy and gave us more things to do. We'll see the ped and her again tomorrow.


Happy Pi Day! I hope you're celebrating appropriately. Sugar has been doing so much work around here since the Bean was born (and before, but let's not get carried away with the past...) that I don't have the nerve to ask her to get out her rolling pin, but let it be known all across the Wide Interblags that she makes the best pie there is. (Which is not to be construed, Sugar, as an answer to that horrible trick question you posed some months back, "Do you think my pie is better or my mother's?" I still have enough sense to realize that either answer would violate one of my two central rules of conversation: 1. Never Denigrate The Cooking Of The Person Whose Food Is In Your Mouth; 2. Never Insult Somebody's Mama's Cooking.) Although I know that only -- what is it? 5%? -- of babies arrive on their due dates, I did like the idea that the Bean might have Pi Day as his birthday, with Sugar's pies in place of cake. Evidently he had other ideas. Already.

Even though he's been here for nearly two weeks, I'm still surprised that I'm not pregnant anymore. It all happened so quickly (rather unlike my writing of his birth story) -- no Toni Braxton contractions or other warnings, except for the Very Bloody Show -- and the whole business of having another person come flying out of one's nether regions I found so surreal. I can't say there's much I intended to do while pregnant that I didn't get to -- we did the photo shoot on what ended up being the last possible day, but it got done -- but I nevertheless don't feel...done. (On the other hand, I feel glad that I didn't have more time to obsess over the end of the era or to build my labor anxieties any higher.)

One of the things I didn't get to was ever doing the meme below. I never intended to do it regularly, as I am more than capable of boring you with petty complaints without a bulleted list (you're welcome, internet), but I thought I'd do a full-pregnancy version around my due date, as a means of distracting myself from obsessing over my fear of induction. And here it is my due date, so what the heck. Feel free to let your eyes glaze over and skip to the picture at the end.


How Far Along?
40 weeks "pregnant"; two weeks postpartum (in 7 hours).

Total Weight Gained/Loss?

At delivery day (well, 14 hours before, when I was last on a scale), +33 lbs over what I consider my normal weight; a bit more over my weight at my first OB visit.

Two weeks later, +22 lbs over normal. (I swear it was more like +18 earlier this week, but today I'm in my trusty maternity corduroys, so that's probably a more fair measurement, since I wore them to every OB appointment after the weather turned.)


Maternity Clothes:

Pretty much the same pair of Noppies corduroys since halfway through the second trimester or so. And ZOMG the Bella Band. The sine qua non (pants) of this whole experience. However: if they can make a band that holds my pants up, why, oh why can't the same company make tights that last more than 3 steps without cascading to the ground? And, for the millionth time, why doesn't anyone make a warm maternity coat? Thank heavens my tiny mother unaccountably had a (hideous) down coat that was big enough to squeeze around me, even at the end.

Sleep?

Sometimes, thanks to my best friend, the down body pillow. And, at the end, a sofa cushion behind my back, my dad's old down camping jacket under my hip, and a heating pad on top of the other hip. And a cat under one arm. How Sugar even fit in the bed is a mystery.

Postpartum, I haven't been having such exuberantly crazy dreams -- the weirdest one that didn't involve a hemorrhaging miscarriage (of which there were many; thanks, brain) had me taking George W. Bush to the pig races at the NC State fair and (I felt so dirty when I woke up!) accepting a plug of tobacco from him after giving him some betting tips. Instead, I am back to my childhood trick of night terrors, complete with hallucinations of the Bean in various poses of doom in the bed and plenty of incoherent yelling at poor Sugar. ("CAMERAS! I had TWO cameras!!! WHERE IS HE?????????")

Aches and Pains?

Yep. Back from early on; hips at the end were pretty brutal. Let's not talk about the part of labor before the epidural just right here except to say MORE OF THE SAME.

Postpartum, hips were a mess for a week -- I felt like I was made of two very different sized lego people, with a small top half and a hugely wide bottom. Lurching galore. Now they're pretty much back to normal. Pelvic floor still a little weird when I walk more than a block or so, but mostly I am okay now. Which is a good thing, because the ibuprofen was starting to make my stomach pretty unhappy.

Symptoms:

Not so bad, as these things go. Terrible congestion the most consistent. Acupuncture was awesome for that. Bad acid reflux after 28 weeks or so, until Dr. Russian introduced me to Prevacid, with whom I will be having any future babies. Dizziness. Yucky heart palpitations and shortness of breath in the third trimester.

Medical Concerns:

A whole lot of freaking out about things that never caused any problems: that month of first trimester spotting, low PAPP-A at nuchal, fears of incompetent cervix related to mullerian anomalies, terror over prospect of birth with two cervices and vaginas. But everything was actually just fine, even the septum.


Movement:

The first thing I was sure wasn't just gas came while we were at the beach in October. Sugar and I were lying in bed with her hand on my belly, and she felt it, too. It was weeks before she could feel it again, but I love that we felt the first one together.

By the third trimester, some of it was pretty uncomfortable -- rib kicks and especially the cervical head-butts.

It's strange now to feel something inside and know it has to be me.


Food Craving:

MILK. Some transient ones in the first trimester, most notably beer and, on one bizarre day, fish sticks. Lots and lots of protein, including one or two small meals in the middle of every night. I never thought getting up to eat could feel like a chore. Thank heavens for ricotta cheese on toast.

In general, I ate like a four-year-old. The Bean is 80% hotdogs and tatertots.


Food Aversions:

Coffee and tea both made me feel terrible, even after only a half-sip, in the case of coffee. Salmon seemed desperately gross. Later on, cereal and yogurt made me feel sick, but I think that was an acid thing.


Morning sickness?

Yes, but mild as these things go. No vomiting; only nausea. Worst around week 6. Best cures for me (besides getting out of the record heat) were raspberry candies, raspberry syrup in my water, sour drinks, spicy food (especially the salsa verde from our local taco place), and ZOMG coca-cola. Grandma was completely right about that. And since I wasn't using my caffeine allowance on coffee....


Sex:

Opted not to find out the Bean's; glad we waited (although I would have put my money on boy if forced).

As for the other kind, yes.


What I miss:

Sleeping on my stomach once in a while. Beer (I sipped Sugar's wine sometimes and had my own a few times towards the end, but she doesn't drink much beer). Sitting in the hot tub at the beach.

My OBs gave a pretty short list of forbidden foods -- deli meat, soft eggs, sushi, factory- or store-prepared salads and dips (like packaged hummus), lox and the like...and maybe some other things? I can't remember, so it can't have been that bad. Except for the soft-cooked eggs. God Almighty, how I missed them. I've had at least a dozen already.


Baby preparedness:

HA HA HA. Ooops. Thank heavens for Schroedinger's newborn clothes stash and Shelli's pack and play, or we would have been SOL upon return from the hospital. I thought I had 3 more weeks.


Best Moments?

Tough to choose, but a few:

• Driving in the car with Sugar after getting the "good first beta" call, when we were the only people (outside of the clinic) who knew.
• Telling the friend who launched herself over the table to hug us.
• Seeing our happy extended families when they were here for the wedding.
• Feeling the Bean kick for the first time, with Sugar's hand on my belly.
• Lying in the hospital bed (AFTER the epidural, thank you), listening to the Bean's heart on the monitor.

And one category I'm adding, Stupidest Decisions:

• Forgetting about not eating prepared dips. One of the only times I threw up all 9 months.
• Various over-estimations of my physical prowess, from the time I royally messed over my ribs getting out of a chair to the time I rendered myself unable to walk after getting carried away with walking to and from the food coop.
• Going home from the OB's after she said I was 4 cm dilated and completely effaced.

One of these days, we will make the move to wordpress and post various belated pictures (as passworded posts; no intention of taking the blog as a whole private). For now, here's a face-less picture of me at 37 weeks, 5 days. I thought I still had 3 weeks to go, but this turned out to be as big as I got.

Resolve

Update: 1-minute contractions every 10 minutes from 4am on. They start in my back, then come around to belly and shoot down legs. Maybe a bit more frequent now.

Talked to Dr. Skinny late last night, because I didn't understand that this blood business was just going to go on and on (intermittently). Frankly, she was kind of a bitch about it. Poop on her. (Actually, if she ends up at the delivery, perhaps the opportunity to do just that will be the silver lining....)

So, FYI, since all the books and stuff just talk about "blood-tinged mucous": apparently if your bloody show looks like a heavy period and the doctor says that's okay, you should not expect it to stop.

I don't know if this is early labor or pre-labor or what, but I do know that whatever it is, it is not shaking my resolve vis-a-vis that epidural. Just for the record.

This, On The Other Hand

...probably IS bloody show.

And boy, is it bloody.

No need to give me your abruption stories; I've already talked to Dr. Skinny in a moderate panic today and she is not worried.

Instead, how about your labor/hospital bag lists? It's starting to seem like we ought to pack one.


To answer a few questions from the comments:

H2 -- Yes, we did the shoot. A picture or two will make it here eventually. Maybe more than a few, if we get our acts together to move to wordpress and passworded posts.

May -- Ebola, most likely.

Lady Parts Pop Quiz

Okay, class; clear your desks.

Q: You have arranged to cover or otherwise surround yourself in white fabric -- wearing white pants, a white dress, a white bathing suit, or, in my case, the many white draperies Sugar has thrown around our bedroom in preparation for one of those slightly cheesy pregnancy photo shoots. What happens next?




˙ǝsɹnoɔ ɟo `ƃuıpǝǝlq ʇɹɐʇs noʎ :ɐ





(Don't worry -- not very much. I already talked to Dr. Skinny, who agrees with me that it's likely the Return of The Irritable Cervices, nothing more. It's just amazing to know that my body, which I so often doubt, still responds to primal cues like white cotton.)

Reports of My DOOM Greatly Exaggerated

Good things happened today:

I took another look at those stretch marks. They haven't disappeared, but they aren't as bad as I'd remembered, either. As no one has ever thought my stomach was my best feature, perhaps I can Build A Bridge And Get Over It.

Following another 45 minutes listening to the same "song" on hold (I like synth glockenspiel and rhythmic static as much as the next lass, but I do wonder how much my tax bill would have to rise in order for buy them more than a 4-minute loop), today's phone agent says, no, my insurance isn't canceled, everything is as it should be, why would you think otherwise? I guess yesterday's report to the contrary was just a stress test of my cardiac function.

Cervix check was not super-fun but not really that bad either. And did you catch the use of the singular there? Dr. Skinny only checked one. I tried to figure out if she knew there were two without actually accusing her of not reading my chart. She said the Bean is pushing mostly on one -- as in my fondest hopes, as that is the way it needs to go for a vaginal birth to work. I'm a little skeptical that she could tell without checking both (they are *very* close together, unless pregnancy has changed the geography of my ute a great deal), but not nearly doubtful enough to have insisted she dive back in. It did hurt a bit, and I spotted quite a lot afterwards and am still a bit crampy (though that is likely partly because of wandering aimlessly through our mostly-useless Target while on hold), but on the whole it was much better than I'd feared.

Dr. Skinny says I am 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced. I know that can last for weeks, but I feel hopeful that my body is doing things on its own. I figure if 1 cm took 37 weeks, I should only be pregnant for another six and a half years.

The fruit stand lady on my way to acupuncture let me choose my own banana. That never happens. This is totally a pregnancy perk, as was the lady at the post office being nice to me. (Note: this was not my local post office, where I've had an employee threaten me physically; this is in a much nicer neighborhood. If it had been my post office, I would just assume I had slipped into a coma or was otherwise living in a dream world.)

The White House seems to have located their collective gonads. (Just as the legislative branch loses its mind -- Keiko has done such a fine job on this one; you should just read her post. I do not have her knack for explaining why this matters without insulting or enraging those who disagree with me.)

Finally, I have decided that I am having my own glass of wine tonight, dang it. Down with quests for perfection, up with rationality. Aside: I don't really mind not drinking per se, but I find it enraging to know that no number of studies showing that doing so is okay this late in the game will ever change the medical recommendation that the preggos OMG STOP KILLING UR BAYBEES WITH TEH DRINKKIN. 'cause if you give those ladies an inch...well, it's just Exhibit Z in Women Cannot Be Trusted With Their Bodies (see above). Whither science, I'd like to know.




Thank you for your hand-holding and other comments on yesterday's post. Much food for thought. As soon as I locate my brain, I will have to get on thinking about it all more.

Lucky Me

This was going to be a nice, neurotic little post about how I'm freaking out about the idea of having an actual baby in the house, how I still can't wrap my head around the idea, all that sort of thing. With some weepery about newly-discovered stretch marks thrown in, for spice.

But I just got off the phone with the Department of Civil Service -- I have been working for the state -- who told me that, contrary to what I'd been told by my own HR department, my insurance was canceled at the beginning of February. Not March. Close observers will note that it is FUCKING LATE FEBRUARY ALREADY. WAS ANYONE PLANNING ON TELLING ME THIS INFORMATION AT ANY POINT?

I am hopeful it will get resolved quickly and only require me to resubmit all my bills for this month or that, worst case, it will become clear in time for me to retroactively join Sugar's insurance, which was the plan for March (but costs more than mine -- let's not even get into the extra month of imputed income taxes, fuck you, DOMA -- and so would be nice to avoid as long as possible). Of course, that isn't even remotely the worst case.

Also, I am not going to insert the boilerplate here about how grateful I am that I can get on Sugar's insurance, because dammit, we're married, and having that relationship recognized in basic ways shouldn't be something we have to say "thank you" for every time.

Ahem.

Now do you want to hear about my stretch marks? Sure ya do.

They're on the part of my belly below my navel, which I can't even see in our one full-length mirror (which I rarely look in, as it isn't in our bedroom) without the extra effort of hauling my belly up to look. Consequently, I didn't see them until today and was blissfully ignorant of any marks other than the almost-cute dots over by my hips. Apparently, they've been there for several weeks. I am not best-pleased, although I know that's irrational. Partly, I don't like how they look (vertical, purple, angry); partly, it's unnerving to find out that I don't even know what's happening to the front of the outside of my own body.

(You'd think I'd be used to the idea that I don't know what's going on with my body by now, wouldn't you? What with the endometriosis and the cyst-riddled ovaries and the surprise cervix? I guess I don't learn.)

You might also think -- or hope, at any rate -- that I could be classy enough not to complain about stretch marks, sore hips, and exhaustion, given my great luck in being pregnant at all. Even if whatever the Bean is doing to my cervices does make me wonder at times whether we're having a unicorn, whining about it isn't seemly. I realize that.

As long as we're on unseemly topics, might as well go for broke:

I haven't been very interested in narrative in the past few months. I haven't wanted to watch movies and, very odd, I have scarcely been reading. (And I am always, always, always reading.) I couldn't figure out why until the other day, curled up on the couch with Sugar, watching something perfectly innocuous. Without realizing it, I had slipped into that state where you are so immersed in the story that you forget you exist outside of it. I love that feeling. More than anything else, that's what I read for. It is so freeing to forget myself for a while.

And then the Bean started kicking. And I jolted back to myself, immediately into a state of anxiety. It was like that moment when you wake up...and then remember you have an exam or a funeral to go to, that you got bad news yesterday, that the world has weights for your shoulders. Every time this happens, it takes a few minutes to calm myself back down, to remember to not be scared about the approaching unknown -- or at least try not to be scared. The truth is, I am pretty scared. About labor, yes; but even more about what comes next.

I am terrified at the idea of this baby actually being here. What was I thinking? What if it's all a terrible mistake, this parenthood thing? A bit late for cold feet on the subject, I know. And of course it is only part of my brain that's terrified -- much of it is excited and (guardedly) happy -- but boy is the scared part loud all of a sudden. Despite the very deliberate nature of all this, despite having pictures of the Bean as a blastocyst, for heaven's sake, I often feel like I'm having one of those dreams where you are suddenly in labor, never having known you were pregnant, and you're trying to figure out how this happened.

The IF-style kicker to all that, of course, is how damn guilty I feel for ever having thoughts like that, for ever allowing something other than pure gratitude into my heart. The sucker punch is knowing how deliberate all this was. We conscious conceivers -- lesbians, IFers, that sort -- talk a lot about how whatever situation has made us unable to have children easily has the silver lining of making us sure we want them, careful in our decisions, grateful in our parenting. To some extent, that's true, I think. But right now I am a little envious of those people who are surprised by pregnancy, who get to react it and know they are doing the best they can, rather than always knowing the decision was intentional and perhaps sometimes fearing that their choice was not the right one.

But, right or wrong, what is there to do but go forward in faith that it will all work out?

With that in mind, we have ordered a mattress for the crib. The stroller (so expensive and trendy that we won't discuss it, but I love it and am telling myself that it's a lot cheaper than the car we don't have) came in the mail today. Last night, we went to meet the Bean's probable pediatrician, whom we liked a lot. She recently parted ways with her practice partner and opened a new office next door, I assumed over something mundane like money disagreements. But from the way she talked last night about the search for new partners, for "more intellectual doctors...who like to discuss medicine," I wonder if there isn't a more interesting story behind the split. As you might imagine, I prefer intellectual doctors myself, and I'm happy to have found her.

I almost wish, seeing how small her hands are, that she were my doctor. Tomorrow brings my first cervix check, which I hear is a barrel of laughs. To answer the question on everyone's mind: yes, just as with pap smears, I get two. Lucky, lucky me.

Notes from Week 36

Item: Thank you for the nice comments on Sugar's painting. The likeness is a tad off, but the boobs are exactly accurate. Um, Sugar? My face is up here.


Item: We had our last growth scan on Monday, and all is well. As Sweet Sonographer covered my midriff (sounds too cute...mid-raft?) with icy glop, I said lightly that she ought to make them buy her a fancy glop-warmer, like they have over at the high-risk place down the block. "Oh, I do have one. It's over on the counter."

I still love Sweet Sonographer, and it was cute that she tried so hard to find something adorable for us to see at this scan (we settled for hiccups, since the Bean's face/dragon snout was obscured by its low position in my pelvis), but I must admit that her halo is a bit tarnished by this revelation.


Item: According to the u/s, which I understand has a remarkably enormous margin of error, the Bean weighs in at a respectable 5lbs. 7oz. at 36 weeks, which means it's been listening to my chanting "over 6, under 9" at it. Good Bean.


Item: It has recently come to my attention that "0-3 month" size clothes (of which we have a respectable number) are not the same as "newborn" size clothes (of which we have none). What the hell is 0 months if not newborn? Do we need newborn clothes? How in the hell is a person supposed to figure these things out, anyway? And what hope have I of managing the actual work of raising not killing a baby if my limited brain power is being wasted on stupid clothing sizes?


Item: Thanks to Schroedinger, there are at least some diapers in the house. Lord knows if they're the right size, but diapers I know where to buy.


Item: Group B Strep test was also Monday. The GBS test involves a vaginal and anal "swab," which caused me much worry on Sunday, as Sugar had celebrated Valentine's Day early by giving me the GI bug she'd had on Saturday. (Sub-Item 1: despite what you may have assumed, bouts of diarrhea are emphatically not improved by having someone kick at your intestines throughout. Sub-Item 2: Nor by things-we-are-not-calling-hemorrhoids.) I needn't have worried. I scarcely noticed the butt part, so distracting was the vaginal aspect. "Swab" might be better described as "vigorous scrubbing with what appears to be an old mascara brush." "Just wait until the cervix checks," said Dr. Russian, with an evil grin.


Item: Dr. Russian loves shoes. On Monday, she was wearing black patent leather platform stilettos with wide ankle straps. They did complement the mood, I must say.


Item: I will not be in pretty shoes any time soon, as it's all I can do to waddle around in clogs. Speak to me not of stairs, either. I am even taking what elevators (not enough!) exist in subway stations, despite the aromas inherent in that process. Today, an old lady cut me in line for one, forcing me to wait for the next round. It was a blatant cut, too, no simple misunderstanding. Those hooligans think they can do whatever they please, all tricked out and speedy with their canes.

Baby is gravid

the view from here

Yesterday I decided to test out our new storage location for my paint and sketchbooks by getting them out and painting the view across the street. Our living room window looks out over the parking lot next to a church (once an old synagogue) that makes amplified grumbling noises every Sunday morning. On the other side of the parking lot you can see the backs of two 3 story buildings and some old trees. This very Brooklyn view has little resemblance to anything from my childhood, but for some reason the faded blue of one of the buildings and the overhanging trees remind me of a specific short road with a blue Victorian house at the end of it that I would see when I walked to my piano lessons back home.

Updates and Thanksgiving

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your kind and helpful comments and emails about the last post. It's not that I thought y'all were the type to poop on a person about something like that, it's just...I worry. (But don't YOU worry, MFA Mama -- I promise I will still have more than enough angst when the Bean is here. Limitless supply, I tell you what.) Starhillgirl, I can't believe you'd even suggest cooking a placenta. You're just going to turn all the life-giving nutrients into toxic free-radicals that way, you know. SMH.

All this Actual Baby business is seeming suddenly very, very close. As of a week ago Monday -- 34 weeks on the nose, by my OB's count (which I've reconciled myself to, because these days I don't need time speeding up) -- I suddenly understand why people get tired of being pregnant. Though I am in basically good shape, all things considered, a lot of things do suddenly hurt and I have definitely entered the "waddling" stage. I've learned the hard way that my days of walking to and from the hippie coop are over, and I think I'd get much more comfortable rest if I could only figure out how to sleep sitting on the giant sitting ball (which I feel silly calling a birth ball, since we've had it for years and years as a desk chair). Poor Sugar is liable to be suffocated in our bed, as I have lately supplemented my beloved down body pillow with a throw pillow jammed against my back and have laid my father's old down jacket down in an attempt to get my hips to hush up for five or ten minutes at a time. Lucky for her, my snoring keeps her from sleeping deeply enough to succumb.

Despite her trials and tribulations, she has found energy to work a miracle in the second bedroom/office/music room/junk room/black hole: we now have a nursery! Like all good nurseries, it features a piano, several huge bookcases of non-children's books, a jankety metal cabinet with painting supplies (Mental Note: Remove prior to home study), and a filing cabinet. Filing promotes early literacy, fine motor coordination, and attention to detail. I can't believe Baby Einstein hasn't gotten in on this. We don't have a mattress for the crib -- your suggestions happily accepted -- but I'm sure babies do better just on the slats, right? Better ventilation and all that.



We've copied Shelli's excellent trofast changing table/storage juggernaut. Here's a closer view of the fabric covering the plywood top (which will ultimately have a changing pad or at least some strong fly paper):




The cats are very happy with their new room, especially the chaise.


Michaela can't believe it's taken us this long to get her a boppy.



Orson during the "little brother/sister" talk. "We're having a WHAT??"


Some very nice friends threw a little baby shower for us, during which no one played any humiliating or poop-themed games. I KNOW: sometimes it's like we're not even Americans at all. People gave us some very cute socks, nice books (I'm particularly partial to this one), and that all-important baby staple, a fleece viking hat with horns and yellow braids.

All this activity is very cheering and a good distraction from the "HOLY SHIT" moments that do beset a person. Not that the outside observer would notice much anxiety, I'm afraid, since I mostly sit around looking like this:

A Confession, A Rant, and The Rest

I keep thinking that if I wait, all these things in my head will coalesce into a real post, but it isn't happening. So here comes a big mess. If you'd prefer not to see a bunch of mental clutter, here is an alternate post for you:

What should we be registering for that we've forgotten? Discuss.

Still here?

Okay then.

First, the confession part. It concerns birth stories. Yours and yours and yours and probably yours, too. Your amazing, beautiful, dramatic, powerful birth stories that you put so much care into and that I never comment on, even though I read them again and again and again. Even though I can see page after page of comments making it perfectly clear that all I have to do is say, "Amazing! Beautiful! Congratulations! Thank you!" and my work will be done, I don't write a thing and (if you think about it at all) you must assume I don't read them, since half the time I'm writing a novel in your comment box. I hope that doesn't hurt your feelings.

The truth is that I don't comment because your stories scare the ever-loving crap out of me. Half the time I have to have a little meltdown after reading them. The other half the time, I have the meltdown while reading them, to save time. I know enough to know that I shouldn't say *that* in your comment box -- I am hopelessly self-centered, but I am aware, in a conceptual way, of manners -- and for some reason I can't bring myself to say anything else.

So now you know. I read your story -- and yours and yours and yours -- probably more than once. And I was glad it was there to read, because I am an emotional over-packer, and I know that stories help me. So please accept my inadequate thanks for writing yours.


Two, the rant part.

Dr. Sears, please go fuck yourself sideways on something pointy.

Ahem.

Maybe I should start by talking about Wednesday's birth class instead. This week was "Interventions and Things that Can Go Wrong," and I have never been happier that we picked this class over the others we were considering. Although most of the class (at least the ones that talk about it) seem to be planning for unmedicated births -- at least half of them in the local birth center rather than a hospital -- and although the previous three classes have been all about non-medical ways to deal with contractions and so forth, both teachers were calm and even-handed when talking about monitors and epidurals and all that. One even went so far as to suggest that even though lots of people love The Business of Being Born, that possibly it had gone a tad far in its excoriation of pitocin. [Holy Moly -- I just went to youtube and watched that part, since I've never seen the movie. Heart now racing. Talk about your scare tactics! What the hell is up with that cartoon?] Our favorite teacher talked about a patient of hers who had apologized to her when requesting an epidural and told us in no uncertain terms that she did not disapprove of that decision. The only editorializing -- and it was announced as such -- was a plea to please not ask for an induction for a frivolous reason, which seems pretty sound.

When we were shopping around for birth classes, I wrote to various teachers and explained that, due to the double-cervix situation, I am at a higher-than-average risk of needing a c-section, and that it was important to me not to set myself up to think of a vaginal birth as successful and a c-section as a failure. One of the major reasons we chose this class is because I felt good about the teacher's response, and last night bore that out. The whole course has been about letting your body do its thing, asking doctors and midwives for all the options, etc. Our classmates are not the elective c-section type -- if they were, they wouldn't be in this particular class. But who can predict what will happen in labor? I loved that the screen of notes on c-sections began with "C-Section: An amazing, life-saving procedure" (or words to that effect).

None of that stopped me from weeping through the discussion of how emergency c-sections worked, of course. Possibly I have a little hangover from all the furious speed of egg retrieval day. We learned that, in the event of an emergency, the surgical team would work efficiently and fast, "just like NASCAR." I can only hope the OR isn't covered in logos for Laughing Clown Malt Liquor.

The whole evening, I was impressed with how calm and open the teachers were, talking about things that probably weren't on their ideal birth list when they decided to become midwives. I'm sure they knew that the Other Pregnant Lesbian and I have been comparing notes on epidural policies at the hospital we're both going to, because I have a nasty habit of being that person still shouting as the room goes quiet after break, but neither had anything especially bad to say about epidurals during that section of the class. They passed around an epidural catheter so we could see how slender it is and explained how to keep changing positions even with one in. It's almost as if they meant it when their response to my email said their goal was,

"to offer childbirth education that focuses on making your birth experience a satisfying and joyful entrance into parenthood, no matter what twists and turns and challenges you face, no matter what your personal desires and goals."

Go figure.

And then there's Dr. Sears.

An old friend sent us a box of baby-related hand-me-downs recently, including the Sears' Pregnancy and Birth books. I tend to agree with Dr. Sears on about 80-90% of things, and find the other 10-20% hopelessly nutso, but I decided to take a look. In a bookshop, early in the pregnancy, I'd been very impressed with how calmly and thoroughly he dealt with first trimester bleeding -- most books just say "well, it might not be a miscarriage, but PROBABLY IT IS" which is silly considering how common it is -- and rather turned off by his section on weight gain, which took the usual tack of assuming you are just itching for an excuse to become morbidly obese and added the nicely tuned guilt trip of "plus you are making your baby fat, you lazy cow." But free is free, so what the heck. I turned to the birth stories section.

The stories themselves are what they are. Only one of them makes me actively gaggy. It is an induction story, and the second paragraph begins, "Dad likes having a baby this way." (I'm all for having both partners involved and everything, but I've already told Sugar that any statements like that of the father Dr. Sears praises for saying "we had a vaginal exam" are...unwelcome. Unless she's up for hopping in the stirrups alongside me for moral support.) Okay, I also want to do a consciousness-raising session with the author of "I Witnessed Myself Become A Woman -- VBAC Water Birth," but whatever.

Dr. Sears is a proponent of "natural" childbirth, by which he means no drugs. (I hate that term, personally -- it's a bit of an emotionally loaded dichotomy for my taste -- but whatever.) I'm a proponent of letting women decide for themselves what they do and don't want to be part of their birth. This is where we diverge. I expected that, but I didn't expect quite the level of paternalistic bullshit found in the commentary on the birth story of the Woman Who Dared Ask For An Epidural.

"A Medically Managed Birth" is about a woman whose doctor tells her to go the hospital when her water breaks. Ten hours later, she gets some pitocin. Some time after that, things get intense and painful, and she starts to feel hopeless. She can't concentrate on the baby, only the next contraction. She requests and gets an epidural, feels confident again, promptly dilates to 10, pushes the baby out -- able to concentrate on it again, rather than pain -- and feels happy about it.

How dare she! Incredulous, Dr. Sears, et al., "interviewed her about whether or not this style of birth ["American"] left her "less fulfilled" as a woman." Rude much? She says no, on the contrary, she feels great about it. "

There was no doubt in her mind that she gave birth, and the fact that she didn't experience the intense sensation of a drug-free birth did not lessen her fulfillment."

Mother gives birth to healthy baby, isn't hung up about it; everybody wins, right? Wrong. Dr. Sears goes on to remind us that she didn't have the chance to have natural, gradual contractions -- okay, fair enough. Everyone says pitocin sucks like that. It's the closing that pisses me off:

"We wonder whether her Lamaze instructor mentioned the importance of taking the contractions one at a time [...] thinking of the baby, not the next contraction."

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the instructor did mention that, since the mother mentions the loss of her ability to do that after...chronology is a little unclear, but at least 12 hours, probably quite a bit longer. Maybe, just maybe, she was trying to do that and it was too damn hard. So she should have what, tried harder? What is the big fucking problem with an adult making a decision to use a very safe drug to lessen pain? Labor pain may be "pain with a purpose" or whatever, but so is the pain of passing a kidney stone, and no one talks about how virtuous people enjoy that.

I in no way mean to denigrate women who choose to give birth without painkillers. I really, really don't. But I think that the important thing is that the laboring woman -- not some moralizing jackass judging her story later -- makes that decision. There's so much B.S. out there about epidurals -- most of which was either never true or hasn't been true in 25 years -- that the last thing I consider acceptable is telling a woman with no negative feelings about how her birth went down that she should feel bad.


You are all such clever people that you no doubt figured out 20,000 words ago what this post is really about: my fear that you'll think less of me if/when I get an epidural. Even that "if" was a pretty big lie -- birth is unpredictable, but the epi is in the plan, for sure. I've done my research, and I feel good about it from a scientific perspective: one reason I'm happy we're going to Kips Bay Mega Hospital is that their epi policies are excellent. (OB anesthesiologist on 24/7. Standard use is light-dose, patient-controlled, which all the studies agree is the way to go in terms of pain relief and side effects if you have the staff. The intent at least is to keep the dose light enough that patients can go to the bathroom themselves. No "window" -- you can have one whenever you want and the OB thinks is okay; Dr. Russian says I can have one now as far as she's concerned.) If the cervices don't behave and I need a c-section, I'd just as soon already have the epi in, and if not, I'd rather not be feeling every bit of my septum breaking, which it may well. Even without those special circumstances, useful as they are for shutting down any "your birth will be fine because mine was" stuff, I think I'd be leaning this way. I've experienced plenty of severe pain in my life, what with the migraines and the endo/GI situation, and I haven't noticed anyone giving me a medal for the times I've done so without painkillers. Other people have had worse pain than I have and make other decisions; that's okay. I'm okay with being a wimp on this one...

...as long as y'all will still be friends with me.

Big Belly, Short Arms

I'm gonna need one of these in about a minute, y'all.

What We're Up To

I keep trying to write a quick post today and it keeps coming out dull as dishwater, so here are some pictures instead. With any luck, I will convince Sugar to scan the latest Bean ones and write you a better post soon. (Bean is fine, by the way. 47th percentile for weight, head down, heart still beating nicely. I, meanwhile, have gained exactly 0 pounds since my last appointment. Believe me, there has been some reorganization. Other than the kind of petty complaints that go without saying at this stage in the game -- acid reflux, some back pain -- everything is fine. BP remains low, and Sweet Sonographer checked my cervix for me even though she wasn't supposed to because all the stabbing down there in the last couple of weeks was making me nervous.)

(On the subject of health -- and this is one of those things that really deserves its own post or at least a place in a better-written one -- please stop by my pregnancy buddy tbean's place and remind her what an amazing job she's doing for the little turtles, because it's getting really hard.)

First, the quilt, which I peeled the cats off of for these pictures. We made this to save Sugar from gouging her eyes out, which is roughly what she threatens to do every time she sees the ones available at regular stores. Not to say that I like the teal/fuchsia/screaming lime combinations so much myself, but they seem to cause her extreme pain. This quilt isn't as fancy as the one we made last year, but it is meant to be tough enough to survive an onslaught of bodily fluids and regular batterings in the washing machine. Since I utterly failed in my plan to make the top at home and mail it to my parents' house (My mother has a nice sewing machine with a quilting foot), it ended up incorporating fabric from our house (mostly bits from other projects -- I like quilts that remind you of other garments, etc.) and also from both of our mothers' stashes.

Side A:





Side B, which was tons less work and, following the rule of these things, we naturally like better:




I made Sugar take a break from the IKEA festival (crib: done! ginormous wardrobes: done! thanks to the help and electric screwdriver of a certain uffish friend of ours who really should start blogging again. Read this one and see if you don't agree (NSFW) ) and take a picture of me in the fabulously 70s dress my mother wore most days of my childhood. I used to think it was ridiculous, but holy moly is that thing comfortable. The fact that she has lent it to me indicates a high level of excitement re: Operation Grandbaby, I tell you what.

Related: should I worry that my belly is glowing?


32 weeks, 5 days with the 70s Preservation Society

In Fact...

In fact, I do not feel very guilty about the fish oil. Partly, I'm not especially convinced it does so very much good for teh bebe (see here), and partly, I think it's of some import to my delicate psyche not to get too far down the road of "perfection" in this whole parenting thing. I put perfection in quotation marks because I don't believe there is such a thing in this arena; I think that the sooner and more often I remind myself of that, the better. I don't think that not taking vitamins is bad parenting. I think this is bad parenting.

As for slippery slopes, it turns out that the one I should have been keeping an eye out for was lurking in my kitchen the whole time. After a slow, v.e.r.y careful trip home from the coop on Thursday, carrying just slightly more weight than was wise, I stepped into the apartment, pleased with myself for not falling on the snowy/icy broken pavement. One step onto the kitchen tiles and I went down like the proverbial ton of bricks, if said ton had gained 30 pounds and weighed itself down with organic produce. The good part is that I landed on my knees, so no belly worries. The bad part is I landed on my knees. Except for the parts of my legs that hit my clogs first. Related: is there anything so annoying as being badly beaten up and having the bruises barely show? Or is that tipping my drama-queen hand a bit far?

What with the bashed up knees and accompanying jarred back, I have been less than no help this long weekend, as Sugar has begun Project Nest, aka, Project Babies Don't Sleep On Bookshelves. Great masses of furniture and boxes have been moved around the house or into our Fibber-McGee-esque storage locker. IKEA has been braved; flat rate delivery fees have been efficiently taken advantage of. Flotillas of boxes have arrived, heavy with flat-packed Swedish design, and, emptied of their cargo, have sailed away to the garbage room. Today, Sugar set up a new bookcase (just because babies don't sleep on them doesn't mean we don't have need of another; this will replace two shorter ones) and a chaise (Operation Maximum Sleep -- the chaise means an adult can sleep in our bed while another dozes by the crib). Still to come: crib, massive wardrobe for our bedroom to make up for some of the lost storage space, and our knock-off of Shelli's genius changing table hack.

The end result in the Bean's room -- which, things being how they are, will still have to include several non-Bean pieces of furniture -- should be something like this:


Because Every Baby Needs A Piano And A Filing Cabinet

Progress so far has been monitored by Inspector Orson, who has given preliminary approval to the chaise (shown here with side A of the play-quilt "we" (mostly Sugar) made over Christmas.



He does not, however, extend his approval to the camera's autofocus light.

The Slippery Slope of Bad Parenting

I gave my stomach a week off to recover from a rough Christmas, but the DHA gel caps are still giving me horrible fish burps. That is just it.

Bean, you are going to have to find a way to be smart without that particular supplement. One more thing to put on your list for therapy.

Tales from the Front

Hi, folks.

So much has been going on, and I haven't managed to tell you any of it. Mea culpa. Today's update post comes to you from the couch, where I am staring over the horizon of an empty ice cream container and into space (such as it is in an NYC apartment), worn out from a 12-hour weep-fest. (We'll get to that, but please don't worry -- everyone is healthy if not happy.)

Here are some updates and stories for you, in this so helpful style I have shamelessly plagiarized from our* May:


Item: Christmas, New Years, and the Great Middle Western Odyssey in general went fairly well. We met the famous TA, as sweet as they say, and her happy mother. I threw caution to the wind and ate my annual bratwurst at the Christkindlmarket. We went swimming at Sugar's mother's health club; after looking forward for months to the experience of grace and support I keep hearing about in re: gravid paddling, my attempts to avoid further rib injury lead to a kind of aquatic lumbering down the lane with a kickboard, a foam noodle under my ribs, and a foundering midsection intermittently covered by an old exercise top with shot elastic. Sadly, the ribs got angry anyway, possibly because of the indignity of being seen with me.


All the Grace of a Foundering Tugboat

I steered clear of Sugar's dumbest cousin on Christmas Day -- though I still managed to hear her dumb husband (whose last name is a synonym for "detumesces," which gives me great delight, even if detumesce isn't a real word, which it probably isn't) threaten to spank their child for...oh, I forget. Something dumb that all 10 (10!) kids in the house that day were doing, like being loud. So no stories for any of us there.

To celebrate arriving at my parents' house, I got a rip-roaring cold. After a day of utterly failing to breathe, accidentally overdosing on my inhaler, and subsequently freaking out about killing/brain-injuring the Bean, I was saved by Sugar's suggestion that codeine is a fine anti-tussive. My parents' house could easily be mistaken for a well-stocked pharmacy, and codeine not only stopped the coughing but also made me stop wheezing/turning blue. Mama made Dada listen to my lungs with the chimney of an oil lamp, since he had left his stethoscope at the office. I tried to teach Mama to cut and paste, so she'll stop sending me emails with instructions on how to google something she's found ("put X in. now go to the 4th result. in the corner, there's a drawing of a fish. under that, there are some words you can click on....") and instead caused a fight over dinner. We (98% Sugar) made a play-quilt. I was given (not "gifted," dammit) replacements for the water bottle and good gloves I've recently lost on my commute; I promptly lost my best wool shawl on the trip home.


Item: We returned home to a house empty of food and full of cats very pleased with the success of their efforts to drive away our vacationing guests (the Baking Dane's in-laws) by pooping all over their and our belongings. I walk the mile to the grocery store (over mostly-cleared sidewalks), discovering on the way that all that lying around in the midwest while steadily increasing in size has left me woefully out of shape for our car-less life. When I arrive at the hippie coop, I have a stupid exchange with the pregnant idiot working the front desk (this is the kind of coop where you work a shift to secure your right to Waldorf-educated kohlrabi) over her refusal to ask those working with her to rearrange the heavy carts (used to walk home shoppers who live closer than I do) so that those of us who schlep our own organic flax milk can hang our granny carts on the appointed hooks. Another woman sweetly takes my cart from me and says she'll fix it. While I am recovering myself (read: weeping in the corner by the signs about how evil Coca-cola is), Pregnant Idiot calls over to tell me it's done. I say thank you and think humiliated thoughts. On the way home, I get stuck in a pile of slush in the middle of a busy street at rush hour, oncoming traffic surging at me. Good times.


Item: We begin birth classes with the lesbian CNM and her somewhat dippy co-teacher, who keeps saying "dilatition." We are pleased at the first meeting to see that we know one of the 7 couples there: an extremely chipper lesbian and her partner, who has a very charming lack of filter between her brain and her facial expressions. I enjoy watching my own horror reflected on her gaping face all evening.

The class begins with introductions. We are all (partners/husbands/friends, too) to say our names, when the baby is due, etc., and tell a story about our birth knowledge/experience -- a birth we've been to, the story of our own, what have you. When the talking beanbag (not kidding) comes to us, Sugar goes first.

SUGAR: "Hi, I'm Sugar and this is my wife, Bionic. Our baby is due in March and we're delivering at Kips Bay Mega-Hospital. The story of my birth is that my mother gave birth in 45 minutes and is still mad that all she got for dinner was a ham sandwich."

DIPPY: "Wow! That's amazing! How lucky!"

SUGAR: "Yeah. Too bad I'm not related genetically to our child."

DIPPY: "But you're related to your mother!"

BIONIC: Yes, but not to our baby.

DIPPY: "But your hips! You'll have her genes! This is great!"

BIONIC: "BUT SHE'S NOT PREGNANT."

[Awkward pause, in which DIPPY flusters about how she couldn't really see us where we were sitting. Lesbian Teacher looks long-suffering.]

BIONIC: "Hi, I'm Bionic. My mother did not give birth in 45 minutes."

I then proceed to talk about my (not un-traumatic) birth, touching briefly on a few major anxieties. I do not cry, but I don't look calm either. Before I have collected myself, The door opens and the late couple walks in. If you've already guessed that the late couple was Pregnant Idiot and her identical twit of a husband, full marks.

Watch this space for further reports on the Happy Couple, who remind one nauseatingly of high school. Highlight of the first night came during one of the activity portions, when we were all draped on one another practicing slow-dancing to loosen back, etc. Sugar is admirably taller than I am, so my face was nicely snuggled against her chest, my eyes closed. I hear a *SMACK* on the Happy ass next to me, followed by "THAT'S a BOOTY!" Gorge rises.


Item: I begin to worry more seriously about this whole birth thing. I spend much of birth class freaking out (internally -- at least I think I didn't look as horrified as the Other Pregnant Lesbian, since the Lesbian Teacher never stopped what she was saying to ask me, "Do you have a question? Or is that just the face?"). It's all very well learning about what the cervix does, what the birth canal will do, and so on, but while I don't really wish to share the idiosyncrasies of my lady bits with the class as a whole -- Lesbian Teacher knows already -- it's frustrating that no one has a clue what my body might or might not decide to do when the moment arrives. I have found 3 anecdotal reports of cervices like mine: one reassuring, one cautionary, one horrifying. (There's much more out there on UD, but officially, single utes with double-doors do not exist, as we contravene the prevailing theories of fetal genital development.) I'm increasingly despairing that a vaginal birth will even be possible, which makes this all seem like something for other people. I know there are good reasons for us to take the class anyway, but it's still a bit hard to sit there and look like I believe this stuff will apply to me.


Item: Dr. Robot has quit the practice and returned to Canada, according to Dr. Sympathetic Noises (But No Answers To Your Questions), whom I saw last week. I was quite nauseated and asked Dr. Noises whether it could have to do with the Zantac I've been taking for reflux, given that it seemed to have coincided. No, she said sympathetically. Later, I asked Dr. Google, who reported nausea as the most common side effect. Back to pepcid, and it's a more acidic but less queasy life for me. Nice work, Dr. Noises. Thanks also for refusing to answer my questions about your practice's labor policies until week 36.


Item: We finally have our belated hospital tour, led by a horrible, scolding bitch. We chose this hospital largely because of how uncommonly NICE every staff member we've encountered, orderlies on up, have been over the course of several radiology jaunts, Sugar's surgery, and my BFF's terrifying 27-week bleeding incident while visiting us a few years ago. So we weren't expecting one of those bitter, angry people who loudly pretends to be cheerful while referring to all non-pregnant parties as "Dad," kvetching endlessly about why her department deserves more space than another, and generally yelling at anyone who asked a question. I also liked the part where -- apropos of nothing except a quiet moan from one of the rooms -- she snapped at us, "labor is PAINFUL!" Part of my reason for going on the tour at all was to see the space at a time when I wasn't feeling actively upset. FAIL. I was calmer when in the company of my bleeding friend.

The actual L&D facilities are nice, though it's a bit annoying that the much-vaunted TV/DVD/CD players are only allowed to be used with headphones -- bit of a reach from the bed. Post-partum, like everywhere in the city, is another matter. The rooms are clean and tiny. There are four, un-reservable private rooms that cost a fortune; the semi-private rooms are exactly big enough for bed-chair-crib, bed-chair-crib. There's no nursery anymore -- theoretically great; actually somewhat terrifying -- so they allow partners to sleep over...in the hard chairs, which do not recline. It's not at all clear to me how I'll get through this (especially with no nursery to give me a break) if I send Sugar home to sleep, but it's plenty obvious that she won't get any sleep in that wretched chair. Mostly, that horrid woman made me afraid the PP nurses will be like her. As far as I can tell, she's a lactation consultant. So help me, if she comes near my nipples, I will not be responsible for my actions. And I do think it would be nice to wait until we're home before beginning the Bean's profanity lessons.

It all seems so trivial when I write it, but the aftermath of the tour has had me up weeping since 4:30 this morning. Okay, it's possible hormones are playing a role here. The basic issues, as I see them: terrible fear of being left alone; much greater comfort taking care of people than being taken care of (read: vulnerable); fear that I won't be able to take care of the Bean and Sugar and that no one will be taking care of me in that strange place.


Item: Sugar had to talk to the Stupid Cow at HR today, who deliberately refuses to understand that our relationship (our legally recognized, accorded benefits by the employer relationship) exists and tells Sugar she's single all the time. But that is Sugar's story to tell.


Item: I wish there were some useful guidelines on alcohol and pregnancy, short of ZOMG POISON. I know plenty of people drink in the third trimester; so far I haven't, beyond pilfered sips of Sugar's wine now and then. But boy, I could use a drink tonight.


*Brits: I have no idea if the "our ____" usage has some meaning that's inappropriate to this situation; I just love how it sounds. I am a dumb 'merican. Feel free to attempt to (gently) correct my heathen ways.