Gypsies know when to roll, and we always roll into an amazing camp without even trying. When we first moved into this apartment we thought we were settling for a roof over our head and no less, a desperate grab for shelter before the baby came. The only apartment manager that would accept our jobless status and trust that we would somehow manage to make the rent each month. We're on the outskirts of town, next to 3 gas stations and a busy street. I made the best of it in my mind by imagining that we were convicts on the run and had to live on the outskirts so that we could avoid detection and get out of town fast if we needed to. However, it turns out that we stumbled onto a hidden gem of a neighborhood whose many amazing sites are found like hunting for easter eggs--but really easy to find easter eggs. We are walking distance from a community farm that we now have a share in--we get a huge box of produce every week for $25, a 40 mile hike and bike trail that leads us to a marsh with ducks and canadian geese among many other things, and which we can use to get to the laundrymat, the great Mexican restaurant, the off-track (which has a huge fenced in kid's play area, so Joe and Siobhán can play while me and Michael bet the ponies) and the Max (Portland's city train) which takes us anywhere we need to go. We are also a stones throw away from the Leach Botanical Gardens which is a huge 14 acre woods with lots of trails, we have a sweet park with an awesome playground, 20 minute walk from a grocery store, a HUGE thrift store, and we'll probably discover more things. When something like this happens it's like God literally just placed a gift in my lap. Here, since you would have been thankful for a shit hole, I give you: a gold hole. I just invented that term, gold hole.
Speaking of gifts from God I will use that to segway into the story of the birth of my daughter, Siobhán. We knew that she was coming early, April 4th was the date of the scheduled C-Section, but she ended up coming even earlier! March 31st I went to the hospital for one of my twice weekly fetal monitorings, which until then was just an excuse to watch a half hour to an hour of television while sitting in an armchair with monitors on my belly. That day the monitors actually picked something up--I was having contractions every 3 minutes! I couldn't even feel them! With my condition going into labor was a no-no. If my water broke me and the baby could die. I hate even writing that, but that's what it was. If I hadn't have been sitting in that chair at the hospital being monitored, and I was back at our apartment, not feeling contractions, my water could have broken and I would have been far from the hospital. So within an hour I was having a C-Section. At first when they told me I FREAKED OUT--I had been scared of C-Sections and wanted to first have a chance to "prepare", maybe bring my ipod so I could not think about how my belly was being cut open with a knife. Also we had Joseph with us and I was afraid Michael wouldn't be able to come into surgeory with me because he would have to look after him. But thankfully Aviva rushed over and watched him for 5 hours--which is an amazing feat! Watching Joseph is literally like being in charge of a wild monkey. The most painful part of getting a C-Section is the numbing stuff they poke you with before they do the epidural. So it's painless, is what I'm saying. Afterward however when my pain meds began to wear off, it was more painful than the 3rd stage of natural labor. But when I got more pain meds, as long as I kept perfectly still it was fine. The problem is you are high on oxycodons and want to laugh or cry, but if you laugh or cry you hurt. I flipped through the T.V. channels to try to find something unfunny and unsad, which is hard. I settled on American Pickers, a show about men searching for antiques to resell. A C-Section, although sometimes necessary to save lives like in me and Siobhán's case, is not ideal. I actually didn't even get to see Siobhán until hours later. She had to be put on a breathing machine in the NICU and I was in the recovery room. The nurse kept asking me what level (between 1 and 10) my pain was at. 11. 10. 9. 7. 5. 4. as the drugs kicked in. Finally she whispered: "if you say 3 you can go downstairs to see your baby" and I was like, "WHAT? I would have said 3 a long time ago!" It is not good to be separated from the baby you just had, it is very unnatural and cruel, but if it weren't for the C-Section she wouldn't be here so I just had to keep that in mind. When she was born I heard her crying which was a huge relief but I couldn't see her because of the sheet that was up. However, the doctor DID wheel over my placenta to show me. (How considerate, doctors are strange.) She told me my placenta was "impressive". It was an anomaly, large and in 2 parts with a vein running in between. They took pictures of it and it may end up in a medical textbook.
The next few days I kept waiting for Siobhán to leave the NICU and come up to be in my room---I had no idea she was going to be there for 2 weeks. After 4 days I had to check out of the hospital and she had to stay. That meant I still was at the hospital all the time visiting her in the NICU, just without the comforts of my own little room to retreat to for naps. Making me exhausted. In the NICU I found beautiful displays of the goodness of human nature. There are tiny 1 pound babies in plastic boxes that are being cared for and although they are too delicate to hold all of the time, their mothers sit next to them for the entire day caressing them through the hole in the box and talking and singing to them. They will probably have to do this for 6 months. There is also a harp player who volunteers her time to play music for these little cuties, wheeling her harp from room to room. Although Siobhán was technically "premature" at 36 weeks and 4 days, she was a giant compared with most other babies in the NICU. At a dinner held for the families of NICU babies, me and Michael snuck out as soon as people started to tell the stories about their babies. Would these people want to hear about our daughter's jaundice and initial feeding difficulties when their baby was born with its intestines on the outside of its body or born at 25 weeks weighing 1 pound 1 ounce? Our story was incredibly unhelpful to them, I did not want to tell it. And although we were having a hard time with her being there, I tried as hard as I could to hold back my tears. How could I cry for my situation? Look at the baby next to Siobhán--he's connected to so many wires, has a bandage on his head and I overheard that he is receiving intravenous morphine.
So after 2 weeks she made it out of there safe and sound, but she brought me a little present: MRSA. I'm just guessing that I contracted MRSA from her since I've read that it's rampant in NICU's and gets passed to the mother while breastfeeding. I got a serious breast infection a couple weeks after Siobhán's release. My breast was a hard, red painful mass and I was sent back to the hospital to have it drained of this super-bug called MRSA which requires super-antibiotics. I had to have surgeory and was left with 2 huge open wounds in my breast with a plastic drain attached. The wounds had to be packed with gauze twice a day and I still had to pump that breast of its milk. If that wasn't painful enough, when I got home I began to get an allergic reaction to the antibiotics which caused an itchy rash to develop all over my entire body, well actually it spread from my chest downwards onto my belly and upwards onto my face but it was stopped by getting off the antibiotics and taking benedril just in the nick of time if you know what I mean (think: where are the worst places you could get a rash? Thank you benedril!!!)
Let this be a warning to all: GET AN ULTRASOUND! If I didn't we would have DIED! I have had this revelation about my thoughts on medicine, since I think hospitals and western medicine do so much harm, but at the same time mine and my baby's lives were saved by them. During crisis situations western medicine is great, it's just not great for our everyday preventative health. Like, I'll go to the hospital if I break arm, but I will use natural medicine for my regular day to day health. For instance had I been using preventative medicine I may not have gotten this infection in the first place, I could have taken garlic extract the whole time I was spending in the hospital and perhaps nipped that MRSA in the bud before I even knew I had it. However it got serious and I needed surgeory. Now, since my immune system has been ravaged by antibiotics, I'm taking probiotic pills and Doreen's Immune Tonic. Maybe I'm preventing a further hospital stay from some disease I would have caught now that my immunities are weakened. Anyway, it's good to be alive and healthy.
1 comments:
Thank you for sharing your story and the lessons you have learned from your experience. Siobhán and Joseph are very lucky children.
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