NotSheep

I was going to write a post today about what had gone on in the past week, but:
a) there isn’t much to tell, and
b) I’m a bit distracted right now, having apparently lost the mucus plug and having a few goodish contractions. Nothing definite, just goodish. Weird. I mean, 40+4…

As regulars will know, we’d planned a home waterbirth. After five previous good births, four of them at home, we weren’t expecting what we got.

After I’d laboured at home through Saturday afternoon and evening, Scratchy phoned the midwives in the early hours of Sunday - I was no longer coping well with contractions and things were taking a lot longer than he’d expected. The midwives arrived and found me panicky and out of control. They could feel no presenting part, and recommended we transfer to hospital. I was past caring, and an ambulance was called.

When we arrived at the hospital, I was taken straight to the operating theatre. An ultrasound scan showed the baby to be head-down, but with the head still very high. We spent the next few hours continuing to try everything we could to get the baby moving downwards, but it never moved further and I never dilated past 3cm. Eventually, after about nine hours in theatre, and about two hours of the doctors trying to convince me to agree to a c-section, and it becoming more and more clear that the baby was getting distressed and things weren’t getting any further along, I signed the consent form. The two midwives who’d been with me at home had stayed throughout, and I remember one of them telling me she was surprised they hadn’t done this hours ago. Everything swung into action very fast - Scratchy wasn’t even gowned up - and within minutes I’d had a spinal block and was draped and the surgery was started.

I remember lots of pulling at my abdomen, then Scratchy leaning in close to me and saying “it’s a boy”, then the consultant’s voice saying “put her out” - and that’s all I knew until about 2.5 hours later.

When the surgeon cut into my lower uterus, the first thing they found was a huge fibroid, about the size of a cricket-ball, right over the cervix. That’s what caused all the problems - there was no way the baby could move down with that there. Had it not been there, I suspect he’d have been born between midnight and 3am, when we transferred to hospital.

They cut the fibroid away, and lifted the baby out - and my uterus tore downwards from the incision. After so many hours of labour, the whole uterus was very thin. That was when I was given a general anaesthetic, and a complicated surgical repair-job begun.

I’m told the baby wasn’t in very good shape when he was born, but he seems to have recovered quite quickly - his apgars were 8 and 9 and 1 and 5 minutes. He’s beautiful, and healthy, and I’m glad to have him. And I’m alive, and I know that the c-section was absolutely necessary. But I’m still in a lot of pain, and the physical recovery is going to take a while - and my emotional coming-to-terms with all of this is going to take even longer.

I’ve been told that if I ever had another baby, going into labour would not be an option. Although I had not planned to have any more babies anyway, that still feels like a loss - that the decision has been taken out of my hands.

I know my health and that of the baby are important, and I’m glad that he’s well and I know that I will be, eventually - but there’s so much more that I’m going to have to work through in my head, so much to come to terms with. This couldn’t have been very much further from what we’d planned, what we’d expected.

Thank you to everyone who left comments, sent emails, tweets and other messages. I cannot tell you all how much they meant to me. There are a couple of you who I will be telephoning when I’m able to get more than half-way through a sentence without dissolving into tears.

In acknowledging how horrendous the experience was, however, I don’t mean to minimise my gratitude and love for my new son. There is an odd sort of parallel-lines thing going on with my feelings, with me looking at him in wonder and adoration on one line, and falling to bits at all I feel that he and I lost on the other. It’s all very complex; Merry’s description of being “lost in a well of sadness” rings very true with me, although at times I feel like I’m the bucket in the well - going up and down and sometimes dry and sometimes drowning, and not in control of any of it.

Anyway, photos were demanded, so here’s one, and if you click on it, you’ll find a bunch more:

I think we’re boring him…

He - to be known here as Louie - certainly likes to sleep. I’d worry, but he’s bright and alert when awake. I’d read how some babies slept many hours a day, but I always thought they were mythical until now. Sometimes I wonder if he’s thinking, “I was meant to have another two weeks of peace and quiet before I came out and dealt with all this racket, you know.”

(I found some interesting information about fibroids, including that they can cause labour to occur about two weeks earlier. That would explain my going into labour at 40+4. That article also mentions something called red degeneration or carneous degeneration, a rare condition in which there’s bleeding into the middle of the fibroid, and which can cause sudden, severe but short-lived pain in the second trimester - which would fit well with what happened here at 29 weeks.)

Much of Louie’s sleeping is done on the chest of one person or another - and there are plenty of willing volunteers.

Barney isn’t volunteering this morning, though - he isn’t here. He’s away for the day with Air Cadets, at the local RAF base. Since he’s away, we all fit in one car, so I took the opportunity to get out of the house for the first time since coming home from the hospital. I’m not allowed to drive for a few weeks (not even my lovely new car!) and since we don’t all fit in one car, that means we can’t all go out together. It might be just as well though, as this morning’s exciting, less than half-hour-long outing to the bank has left me exhausted.

When Toby isn’t declining to have his own photo taken (left), he can sometimes be found on the other side of the camera (results below).

I wondered if Louie’s apparent love of sleep was because of all the painkillers I’ve been on, but I’m down to a couple of over-the-counter pills a day now, and he’s still sleeping. I’m trying to avoid the next round of drugs now - some pretty strong antibiotics, prescribed because a swab of my drain-wound grew staph aureus and strep a and some other nasty I can’t remember now. I’ve had septicemia before, so I know it’s nothing to trifle with, so if I felt at all unwell I’d be on the antibiotics like a shot. But I don’t feel at all unwell: I’ve no fever, no shivers, no aches and pains apart from the normal post-abdominal-surgery ones - and it’s a week since the swab was taken, so I’d expect to feel fairly horrendous by now if I were battling all those nasties and losing. And I want to be enjoying my new son, spending time with my family - not coping with nausea and stomach upsets and all the other potential consequences of antibiotics - nor passing yet more drugs into this little one’s body. So I will continue to check my temperature regularly and hope that the second swab, taken yesterday, has a much better result.

I went out yesterday, for only the third time since we came home from hospital. The first time, I had to go to the bank, the second, I walked to the end of the street and back. This morning, I went to register Louie. Registering a birth, they call it. But that feels wrong. I don’t feel that I gave birth, or that he was born. I feel he was taken, removed from my body. There was nothing birth-like about it. Somewhere in my sub-conscious, I’m still waiting to give birth, because I haven’t done it yet. I’ve done labour - about 21 hours of it - but not birth. And I don’t know how to get past that.

I’ve tried to write about it in an articulate way, or in an unemotional way, or even in a way that makes sense, but I can’t. I can’t put into words the strength of feeling. I hate how things went. I didn’t ever want to have a baby while I was unconscious, and although I was awake for his first cries (having had a spinal block), I was given a general anaesthetic seconds later, and I missed the first few hours of his life. I hate that. I hate that he was taken away from me, that he was suctioned, that his first touch outside my womb was a surgeon’s gloves, rather than the hands of his mother. I hate that I have spent the first weeks of his life recovering from surgery, rather than enjoying time with my new baby and the rest of my children. I hate that in this dull, wet summer, I cannot get my children and myself out of the house for a while, because I can’t drive. I hate that this feels like a recovery period, rather than a babymoon. I hate that there are parts of it all that I remember only fuzzily, or not at all. I have no memory of the first time I held him. I am vaguely aware of having breastfed him in Recovery, but I don’t actually remember the experience. I hate that I can only fall asleep with the television on, because when I lie quietly, I cannot stop thinking about it all. I hate that I can’t roll over in bed without pain. I hate how my belly looks and feels - even though that hasn’t dramatically changed, because I already had a scar and an overhang as a result of an ectopic pregnancy sixteen years ago - but now it’s a reminder of so much more. I hate that the possibility of giving birth again - normally, not by surgical means - is no longer an option for me (because of complications from the obstructed labour and then complications of the surgery). I didn’t plan on having more children, but that was my choice - not something forced on me by circumstance - and somehow, that makes a huge difference.

I believe that if it hadn’t been for the fibroid, the birth would have been straightforward - Louie was in the right position, labour was going well, there was no reason to expect any problem. But the fibroid - a great big one - was in the way, covering his exit-route. And none of us knew - it wasn’t picked up on ultrasound at 29 weeks or when I arrived in hospital in labour. I know that we all did everything we could to get him out the usual way, but it was never a possibility, because of that fibroid. I hate that fucking fibroid with every fibre of my being, and I will curse it until the day I die.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Louie and am glad I have him, alive and well. I realise that the c-section was completely, 100% necessary. I know it wasn’t a consequence of anything I or anyone else did or did not do. I saw the fibroid, with my own eyes, while I was in Recovery after the surgery (don’t ask me why I wanted to see it - I asked instinctively) and I’m glad I did, because it was obviously far too big to allow him out past it, and it would have been even bigger before it drained of blood and fluid. I know that the surgery was, quite literally, life-saving for both of us. I am not ungrateful that modern medicine was there when we needed it. But I cannot ignore the way I feel about the experience. Perhaps some women can; perhaps they can put such feelings behind them or bury them deep inside and get on with their daily lives. Perhaps at some point, I’ll be one of them. Perhaps not.

I am trying, as advised by someone who knows, to grab hold of little positive moments in the experience and to, as she put it, build something around that which I can live with. I am trying to focus on my family, to enjoy these first few weeks of Louie’s life. But every so often, all too often, I fall to pieces, dissolve into uncontrollable weeping, drip tears all over me and whoever happens to be nearby.

This is not a place I expected to be, nor anywhere I want to be.

I’m trying to remember what’s been going on over the last while. Not a lot, it has to be said, and yet I can’t remember much of it at all.

I know there have been children singing. One child in particular - let’s call him “George”, whose taste in music is…well, let’s just say it’s questionable. And the almost-three-year-old brother has started to sing along. And so I have had various irritating tunes stuck in my head, including “Ooh ah ooh ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang”, “We are the winners. Of Eurovision. We are we are”, and “Burn baby burn, disco inferno”. Yes, I know those aren’t their official titles, but they’re the bits that got stuck in my head. If they’re stuck in your head too now, at least I’ve got company. Someone (George has no idea who or how) stood on George’s mp3 player and cracked the glass covering the screen, so now he sings the same tune for hours and hours days and days on end - at least when he has the mp3 player, the tunes vary. He’s still singing along (although he denies this emphatically if you point it out), but there’s not the same earworm factor.

The child who is responsible for the earworms also managed to get stuck in the airing cupboard. He was playing hide-and-seek and climbed inside. I suggested (after his rescue) that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to hide in a cupboard whose door had no handle on the inside. He told me there was a handle on the inside of the airing-cupboard door (I’ve never noticed it - never had a need for it, to be honest). So why couldn’t he get out? Because he’d been squatting on the top shelf and couldn’t reach that far down

I’ve worked on reading with Jack. He could read, if only he’d accept that the word he needs is made by the sounds which are represented by the squiggles on the page. But he’s convinced that he always knows which word it’s supposed to be, regardless of what those squiggles might be. I now realise that there was a warning sign of this several months ago, when he read “cuh, rrr, ih, sss, puh, sss” and then muttered under his breath, trying to make the squiggles fit what he knew the word to be: “packet…”. This week we’ve had “fff, oh, x…wolf!” I don’t know why I’m surprised; Jack’s personality is such that he always knows better than everyone else. No matter who or what the subject. I present more evidence: a few days ago, he tried to teach his father to make toast. In a toaster. The put-in-bread-press-lever-wait-for-it-to-pop-up kind. How could a man in his 40s possibly know better than Jack?

I’ve got a bad case of cabin-fever, but since I don’t feel up to driving yet, I’m largely stuck at home. Scratchy is back at work tomorrow, so then I’ll be even more stuck, since there’ll be nobody around who’s able to take me anywhere. I’ve begged for visitors, but few have come. Maybe I’ve been sounding too miserable, or maybe I’ve hardly any friends. I did get out today though. Scratchy drove me, along with Louie, Toby, Jack and Barney, into town, where there’s a pleasant little playground by the shore, and Barney helped supervise Toby and Jack and I fed Louie, and Scratchy drove back home for George and Freddy. And then, after all children were hot and sweaty and thirsty and scabby-kneed (well, not all scabby-kneed, but several anyway), we went for ice-cream. I wish there was more than one Baskin-Robbins on this island - or at least that the one-and-only was closer to here. The local stuff just doesn’t compete.

Anyway, it was good to get out and breathe the fresh air and get the sea-breeze. And gaze longingly at the yachts. If I won the lottery (unlikely, since I don’t buy tickets), I think I might go and live on a boat. I’d probably only last a week, but it’s one of those things I fancy trying, y’know?

It’s very quiet here now, because Toby is asleep and the older boys - the older four boys - are off cycling with Scratchy. They went out yesterday and cycled way down the hill and way back up it again; I was surprised by how well Jack managed, given that he’s only six and has a bike with no gears or anything that might help on hills. And they all enjoyed it so much yesterday that when we got back from town today, they asked to go again. I’m glad to see them getting out - the weather hasn’t been agreeable for the last few weeks and they haven’t been out enough. The forecast for the coming week (and the week after) is rain, and then more rain - so they’d better make the most of the sun while it’s here.