This Week

I think you could say I’ve had a big week this week. It feels a bit like the day I got married: it seemed to never end, and be over in a moment. Anyway, below is a summary…

Day 0
12:00pm: Was reading in bed and felt a sort of jolt, or at least something moving, or dropping. I got up and felt a gush of liquid running down my leg. I also felt my heart in my throat. I immediately called the hospital and spoke to a midwife, she clamly and matter of factly got the info out of me that she needed, and then said that it would be a good idea if I came in to the hospital. She then asked me if I’d felt the baby moving. I had to quietly answer “No.” I called Jeremy who arrived in about 5 seconds on his bike and he drove us in to the hospital, as an after thought I asked him to bring the bag that we’d packed for the hospital stay.

11:00pm: No sighting of our private obstetrician ( J calls him the ‘bloodsucking vampire’), but he has been in contact with the hospital right from the start and has been directing them at every point. If feels like I’ve seen about 20 different hospital staff, ranging from excellent to incompetent. Mum has been and gone, and we are not sure if I going to have the baby shortly or in a weeks time. I thought about calling my friend V but she started a new job this week, and maybe the baby won’t come yet… A nurse has come up from the ‘Nursery’ and shows us an album of pictures of babies that have been born prematurely. I don’t really process what this all means, but J does, and he tells me his mood has darkened.

12:00am: I’m getting contractions. I know I am, but the last nurse had be hooked up to a machine that told her I wasn’t. I’ve never given birth before so I supose how the hell would I know, but I can feel that my uterus is contracting, it aches to the point that I can’t talk while it is happening, and it is happening every few minutes. I call to J, but he’s asleep! I finally wake him up and we call for a nurse. This time it’s a different nurse, she hooks me up again, comes back in 15 minutes and says “Yup. Contractions. We’ll be sending you down to the labour ward”.

12.15am: A midwife (K), has wheeled me in to a rather large clinical room with a bed and various other equipment that I can’t recognise. This is totally unlike the bedroom like atmosphere of the Birth Centre rooms that we had planned to give birth in. I ask K if I will be giving birth here. She says “Yes.”

2.36am: I’ve given birth to a baby boy. There’s not really much point trying explain what it feels like to give birth. Like most things, if you’ve never done it you’ll never know. In my earlier post I mentioned the fear of pain that I imagined in women who have not given birth. Even though I couldn’t talk during the last contractions, to me the ‘pain’ was nothing, and having a brilliant baby boy makes the memory of the discomfort fade into oblivion. But then like Henry Ford said, “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Day 1
Over the moon about the baby. Immediately after the birth we were taken into the Nursery – the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. As J and I were looking at our son in the humidicrib with all the wires and probes on him J says to me, “What do you think of the name Spike?” I love it. I ask J where he got the name, and he says he doesn’t know, it just came to him. I’ve expressed that I wish Spike to be breastfed, and that means expressing breast milk, a nice nurse shows me how to do it.

Day2
This is weird. All my life I’ve relied on my brains to get the things I want and to get me out of trouble. My brain is not in charge any more, its my body. Expressing breast milk is really hard. There are lots of things to remember, every midwife gives a different version of what you need to do, I’ve never done this before, and I’ve got to share equipment with the rest of the mothers in here. I’m told to just relax, the milk will come, and then I get a call at 1am saying we need breast milk NOW. I can hear mothers trying to soothe their crying babies in the night. But I can’t hear Spike, because he’s not in my room, he’s not even on the same floor as me. When I pass another parent carrying their baby, they smile at me, and I look at the floor.

Day 3
I haven’t slept, the food here is awful, and there is no privacy. Even though we have a great private room to ourselves medical staff seem to bust in at all hours, usually at the precise moment you don’t want them too. Of course when you need them they’ve vanished. It’s all John Howard’s fault, why doesn’t he give the bloody baby bonus straight to the maternity wards, then I might be able to find a breast pump that works and not have to share it. I’m starting to be scared about Spike. He’s a completely normal, bigger than average 33 week old baby. This means he has a tube going straight into his stomache via his mouth so he can feed, he’s stopped breathing several times and had to be resusitated, he’s jaundiced so has to receive light therapy which means we can’t hold him very much. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve held him. Like the doctors keep saying – totally normal. We watch as a catheter gets put into his tiny arm so that he can receive a drip and a dose of caffeine to stimulate the part of his brain that regulates breathing. The nurse gives him a dummy soaked in sucrose to take his mind off the pain. J wanted to tell the medical team that we wanted to wait until Spike was at least one year old before starting him on crack.

Day 4
Very bad day today. The counsellor told me to be prepared to leave Spike in the hospital while I go home. I think I’m going insane. Definitely paranoid and delusional. The slightest comment seems to set me off. The only thing that really calms me down is talking to J. I wish complete strangers would stop asking me how I am.

Day 5
Back at home. Walk into our bedroom and see a picture of J and I. I immediately slam it face down and start to cry. J comes in, see’s what I’ve done and says gently, “Don’t like that picture?” All I can say is “Where’s Spike?”

Like I said just a summary. Stacks more has happened, but I don’t really feel like going into it right now. I think this is the happiest and saddest time of my life.