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the business end
Thursday, May 31, 2007
A couple of people have asked who took the pictures of Maggie's birth. Not Jack, who was busy on hand-holding and brow-mopping duty, but Joeleen, the very sweet first-year midwifery student to whom we entrusted our camera in exchange for allowing her to stay and watch. This was only the second c-section she'd observed, and she clearly takes a keen interest in her profession, to judge from the graphic and comprehensive nature of the photos she produced: all I can say is, if you think the edited highlights posted on flickr are gory enough, you should see the ones we left off. However I'm grateful to Joeleen: thanks to her I have a detailed and actually quite moving record of my second daughter's emergence into the world. One that I am never, ever, going to show to anyone else.
Here's a concept: a baby who, after her 3 AM feed, settles instantly and contentedly back to sleep in her bassinet rather having to be rocked, sung to and paced up and down with for the next one and a half fucking hours.
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(forgive me, angel)
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
She is the most gorgeous baby since the last one I produced, but now and then when she squashes her tiny chin down into her chest and looks at me all squitty-eyed, she looks ever so slightly like a miniature Nathan Lane.
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one week
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
We're back, and as my pummeled innards hurt if I spend too much time slouched in front of the computer, I'll be brief. Maggie's a week old today and so far is proving to be a calm little soul, even in the face of the enthusiastic pettings and pokings she's regularly subjected to by her besotted older sister. She's also gorgeous: thick, chocolate-brown, silky hair that astonished me when they first put her in my arms, a face like a little disgruntled rosebud and bright, searching eyes.
I'll write more on her birth when I next get the time and energy, but will just say for now that it was every bit the civilised affair I'd been promised; in fact, after the speed with which Becca was extracted during the emergency c-section, I found myself, this time around, lying on the operating table thinking Tch! They're taking their time, aren't they? Where's this baby? I had her with me from the moment she was born and breastfed her as soon as I could in recovery and, miracle of miracles, it doesn't hurt! I'm actually enjoying nursing this time around, which is just as well as Maggie is an avid feeder, although a highly competent one. After two days in Wellington Hospital we transferred to the maternity unit at Kenepuru: closer to home and with big, comfortable, motel-like rooms arranged around a quiet courtyard garden and staffed by midwives so attentive they did everything short of tuck me in and read me a bedtime story. It felt like the place mummies go when they've been very good, and I was in no hurry to leave.
Many thanks for all the good wishes: I make no promises about when I'll get around to replying, but appreciate the support. And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go and get horizontal before the next feeding frenzy begins.
PS. There are more Maggie pics up on flickr, btw.
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further bulletins as events warrant
Many thanks to those who have sent good wishes for Beelzebump's Big Day Out, which is still scheduled for Tuesday. It does appear from the complete absence of any signs of labour that he/she is content to stay politely put for the next 48 hours or so, which is thoughtful as this will allow me to attend a final Rebs session tonight and have a massage (and possibly even get my hair cut) on Monday.
In the meantime we now have a transport system, hired from Plunket, and have taken Becca out to choose a bunny for her imminent sibling. Although I suspect that from her three-year-old perspective, Mummy's pregnancy has endured throughout living memory (Mummy feels the same herself most days) and the sudden actual appearance of the long-promised sibling is going to blow her mind.
This is also how I feel (I think) about having a scheduled c-section: the lack of a labour and consequent absence of any but the briefest of transitions between pregnancy and appearance of baby is, in some ways, an unsettling prospect. Still, any time I feel any romantic regretfulness concerning the lack of a 'natural' birth, I hum to myself the following cheery little mantra: 'intact perineUMMMMMM!, intact perineUMMMMMM!...'
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you know not the day nor the hour
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
I've been pondering freebirthers for the past week, having read the Grauniad article and then Crippen's response to it. And brewing up a post that, if I don't get it down now, I suspect I will never post it with mere a week to go before Beelzebump arrives and a calendar that is still, ridiculously, covered in scribbles. All I can say is that here's what I've got down so far, and that any lapses of coherence/into rantiness might be most charitably ascribed to pregnancy hormones:
I had a post-partum haemorrhage when I had Rebecca. It happened on the operating table, shortly after she had been delivered by an emergency c-section that followed a long and fruitless labour. My current midwife Margaret recently went over my UK surgical notes for me, line by barely legible line: it turns out that haemorrhage occurred when the incision in the thin and distended uterine wall extended suddenly and rapidly into several neighbouring blood vessels, resulting in a succession of hasty tyings-off and the consultant being summoned in rather urgently to help repair the damage. While I have vivid memories of Becca's birth; of feeling my belly suddenly lighten and hearing her very first aggrieved squawk, I don't remember the haemorrhage itself (although I do have a vague memory of one of the doctors tersely barking 'Get [So-and-so]!' to a colleague.) I have no memory of the hasty debriefing that followed being stitched up, during which they may or may not have explained what had just happened. Jack remembers that there was such a conversation, but funnily enough the poor lad was a wee bit shellshocked at the time too, so doesn't remember what was said. I do remember being faintly confused by the circle of upside down (and in retrospect, relieved) smiles above my head and the repeated 'Congratulations!' (Why are they congratulating me? What have I done? Oh yeah, I just had a baby...')
Would I have had the haemorrhage if I hadn't had the c-section? Who knows? Had I laboured longer, would Rebecca have emerged naturally? Possibly not: her position, and especially the position of her head, in the birth canal, was what was preventing her from coming out in the first place. By the time the c-section was deemed necessary, she was in distress, and I had a temperature and I was advised by doctors and midwives alike that the c-section was the safest option at that point. Heavy-hearted, I added my very wobbly signature to the consent form. Mere minutes later, a healthy little girl was hauled, protesting vociferously, out of me.
But who knows how it could have gone otherwise? If a c-section hadn't been a readily available option, what would have happened? What if I'd been living in the Sudan, with restricted access to medical intervention? What if I were a freebirther, and had decided to persist without intervention? Would Rebecca ever have come out? Would I still have haemorrhaged? Who can say? And that's my point: you can't know these things. You can't know. You just can't.
Begging the question of the, to put it mildly, unhelpful part played in the politics and rhetoric of childbirth by the naturalistic fallacy
(pain relief is cheating, or worse, weakness; the word 'intervention' must be spat out through twisted lips) I think there's another dangerous fallacy at work here, and it's the fallacy of control. We Westerners live in societies in which modern medical care is widely available; for all the problems that bedevil the NHS or the New Zealand health care system, compared with our grandparents, compared with people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, we have it pretty good.
And it is this that allows us to feel entitled to everything going our way (and aggrieved when it doesn't). The fallacy of control: nothing could possibly happen to me, and even if it does, someone will sort it out and it will all be fine. We think we know what will happen to us.
And what if something goes wrong? If it happens to me, I'm at best indignant, at worst – well, I hardly like to think about it. To someone else? Well that's different: they probably did something wrong. Baby in the wrong position? Ah, well you should have spent the last months on all fours over a birthing ball, like we recommended. Epidural instead of gas and air, which was no longer enough? Well that'll be what slowed your labour then. C-section? Well there you go. Perhaps you'll 'succeed' in having a natural labour next time. Breastfeeding sapping your will to live? Well if it hurts, you're doing it wrong.
So here I am, a week from my scheduled c-section but there is still no guarantee that it will happen on the 22nd: I could still go into labour in the next week and a notionally elective procedure could become, as the obstetrician put it, 'semi-elective'. It is, as Valmont keeps on repeatin' in Dangerous Liaisons, beyond my control. I asked my midwife what were the chances of another haemorrhage on the operating table. Far less likely, she replied, as they'll be aware of my history, I (hopefully) won't be in labour, and they'll be able to proceed in a more studied fashion, avoiding cutting near all the scar tissue. Chances are that things will be fine this time around, and I am not actually worried. But that doesn't mean that I am certain that nothing will go wrong. I don't believe I have that much control over the process. And I accept this. And actually, I'm fine with it.
So what of autonomy? With such an eventful history, even without seeing my surgical notes (which we requested from the UK when I was six months gone) there was never, according to Margaret, any question of my attempting a home birth. 'Being allowed' was how she put it, I think. And once they'd actually seen my notes, no question of my being 'allowed' to attempt a vaginal birth. Allowed by whom? By the obstetric consultants at Wellington Hospital to whom she's ultimately responsible. So effectively any freedom of choice I might have hoped for concerning the way I will give birth has been pretty much removed. Do I consider this to be paternalistic control of my birth 'experience'? Not in the least. I suppose in theory I could refuse the surgery. Hell, I could refuse all medical intervention and 'freebirth' at home. I'd risk killing the baby and bleeding to death myself, which I suppose would be rather hard on Jack and Rebecca, but I'd be reclaiming my autonomy, exercising my freedom of choice. Hell of a way to prove a point though.
And even if you don't have a dodgy history like mine; even if you're a first-time mother in perfect health who has enjoyed a trouble-free pregnancy (me last time, actually) there are still things that can go suddenly, horribly, awry. And this is why I am deeply disturbed by women, and the midwives who encourage them, who, convinced that if they only believe hard enough they will have the perfect, fulfilling birth experience, eschew medical intervention. (And who, it seems to me, appear to scorn those of us weaker souls who are compelled by circumstance, by our very lack of control, indeed, by our admission of our lack of control, to accept it.) Because it's a hell of a way to prove a point. Especially if it all goes wrong.
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one week to go
and my mother arrived yesterday. She cooks! She cleans! She shops! She can get Becca into her clothes without first having to chase her around the house six or seven times! If anyone wants me over the next week, I'll be in bed.
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38 weeks...
Sunday, May 13, 2007
...and if it gets much bigger I'm going to need planning permission for this thing.
Nine days to go ... although managed to put the wind up Jack last night with a rapid-fire succession of Braxton Hicks. But was I bovvered?
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no brain no pain*
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
From today's Grauniad:
Freebirthing involves giving birth alone, without a midwife and often even a partner or friend in attendance - Sarah delivered while her husband was in the next room. "I didn't have any experience of pain," she says, "there was just this really strong sensation that muscles were working. Then the baby's head appeared."
*Or as my dad says, 'where there's no thought, there's no feeling'
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tonstant weader fwowed up
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Man, little kids are suggestible: ever since watching Pinocchio the other day, in which Jiminy Cricket goes to sleep in a match box, she's been trying to convince us to let her bed down for the night in a cardboard box. This on top of a week of Piglet's Big Adventure on repeat while she recovered from her lurg and I'm feeling less than enamoured of Disney's bastardised versions of the classics. Although when it comes to Winnie the Pooh, to be fair, I don't think you could truthfully argue that the bastardised updates are any less cloying than the originals.
Next week, in Heather's Heresy Hour, why breastfeeding ain't all that...
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life begins...
Monday, May 07, 2007
37 weeks today, so the pregnancy is notionally full term as of now. Accordingly, the bump has attained such proportions that, when I approach pedestrian crossings, buses squeal to a respectful halt.
It's been a mixed week: any angst I might have felt at turning 40 last Thursday was helpfully deadened by the sleep deprivation brought about by bog-standard pregnancy insomnia combined with Becca's lurgy and consequent febrile nightmares, nocturnal coughing fits and other Bumper Family Fun. Shes been home all week, languishing in front of Piglet's Big Adventure (which I expect the folks at Guantanamo will want to borrow when their Barney DVD wears out): when you already have a kid, maternity leave is a relative concept. Happily, Jack's boss is agreeable to him working from home (no inverted commas intended, and none should be inferred) when necessary to safeguard Mummy's physical wellbeing/sanity.
Birthday itself was a quiet family occasion and a lovely one: Jack and Becca made me a cake with purple icing and J cooked me an extremely delicious romantic meal consisting mainly of a piece of salmon the size of my head. And then two days later, bless 'im, arranged a surprise dinner party. Which, being very slow on the uptake, I was extremely surprised by (even though, it turns out he had actually noted it on the calendar) – thus, when our friends showed up with bags of goodies and their pre-pyjama'd toddler, my only thought was: 'Erm, I don't remember agreeing to babysit...' Birthday presents have followed the Pamper the Pregnant theme and I now have a large collection of scented unguents with which to kit out my hospital bag. And, from one as yet anonymous benefactor, a certificate for a facial at a posh clinic in Kelburn, which I'm going to save for a few months for when I emerge, boss-eyed and hagard, from the Neonatal Twilight Zone.
15 more sleeps (ha!) until the big day and the preparations are nearly done, although I may need to get a bigger hospital bag. Curiously this is the one part of the prep I can't quite face: despite J's increasingly urgent promptings, and, for that matter, historical precedent, I have somehow got it into my befuddled little pregnant head, tee hee, that getting the hospital bag ready will kick off early labour. Still, baby clothes and linen have been hauled out of boxes in the garage and laundered and sorted, the cot's up in Becca's room and I have even succeeded in assembling the bassinet in which Beelzebump will be spending his/her first few weeks at our bedside; this in spite of the unforeseen handicap of my lack of a degree in civil engineering. We have buggies, bottles, bootees, a breast pump, a baby sling and blankies. The baby capsule and Snap'n'Go Wheely Travelly Thingy have been ordered from Plunket, to be picked up next week, the email notification list is poised in J's address folder ready for joyful bulletins to be unleashed on the waiting world, and I'm working on the phone list (well, I will be once I wrap this up). If anyone can think of anything vital I've missed, now would be the time to speak up.
Highlight of last week would have to be the arrival of (not so) wee Lias: many congratulations and much love to the happy mamas, Carla and Ceri.
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