April 22, 2008

My birth stories: Or - More things than you really wanted to know about my reproductive health/history Part 1

Well, as you will find out by reading my How I Met My Honey post, I was a mama for the first time really young (19). Since the day I started having my period, I was like clockwork---every 29 days.

About 2 weeks after T and I got engaged, we snuck off post and had a rather interesting intoxicated (yes, I was 19, I only really had a buzz---dude, don't tell my mom, she doesn't know all this, okay? T was SLOSHED) liason at a friend's daughter's apartment. It was just me and him in the bedroom, I know that for sure. Heh...anyhow...I think back to that time now, and wonder how some things got so crazy. There are a lot of things I don't even think about now. This is probably the hardest I've thought about that night in a long time.

So, anyhow, because I was so regular, I actually knew going into that weekend that I was ovulating. I just didn't tell T until after we had our fun (and, frankly, got in trouble for it too! #2 of my Article 15s. Because of sneaking away, not because of getting pregnant). That was the weekend of September 15 & 16th, 1995.

2 weeks later, I took a HPT, and sure enough...I made a sick call appointment, and told my mom by phone on October 3rd, while she was watching the verdict to the OJ Simpson trial (no kidding), that I thought I might be pregnant. She remembers it vividly, in part because she remembers not being able to catch the verdict while I was telling her. She suddenly had much more important things on her mind.

When I told T he was definitely going to be a daddy, you couldn't keep the smile off his face! Our drill sergant (you need to read my post on how I met T to understand that jerk some) told me once if T didn't live up to his responsibility as a daddy, to really let him have it. I knew deep in my heart that T was going to be a great daddy, and I knew that he was going to prove that drunken-fraternizing-jackbutt wrong! And he has :-D

A month and a half later, T and I were married. It was a VERY small ceremony---there were 9 people there TOTAL, and that included everyone in the wedding party. No big deal---later, in 2005 when we renewed our vows, there was actually just one more person attending. Then, another month later, we were discharged. I came here, to live with my parents because it was my Home of Record, and he went out to Colorado for the same reason, so he could try to find a job and make a home for us. He didn't keep any one job for long---he got one of the worst jobs for him, telemarketing---he's not a big talker on the phone unless he really knows you. Like his mom or his friends or me.

He wasn't able to find much of anything so on April 1st, 1996, my mom told him that if he doesn't find a job by the end of the month, he can come out here. You thought that she was going to have us divorce or something, didn't ya? No, that was his mom's suggestion a month later---I don't think she remembers, but my mom will never forget it. Mid May, he came out here on a Greyhound bus, we met him at the old terminal in Erie, PA.

From then until the day before I had D, he looked for jobs, going with my dad to just about every place he could, putting applications in. He ended up getting the job he's got now---he went in for orientation the day before I had D, and was to start that next morning.

I was determined to go without any meds or anything when I had our son---we were thinking that, because most of the men in his family had made only or mainly boys, our kids were going to all be boys. We only had a boy's name picked out, though we went over girl's names too.

The morning of June 11th, 1996---my mom's 51st birthday---at 2:30am, I felt a pain I hadn't felt for 9 months up until then. I got up and said something to my mom about it (we were living with them still, and the bedrooms were right next to each other). She said to walk around a bit, and see if it made it any better. I was actually 5 days overdue at this point, so I was happy at the idea I might finally be getting done with this. I walked around a little up on the landing, and it felt a bit better, but 45 minutes later I started hurting again. And from then until 6:36am, just 4 hours after I felt the first real pain of my labor, it didn't stop. My contractions were so close together, we couldn't time them. I was in agony. There are pictures. And it didn't stop there---my parents' house was 20+ miles away from the hospital I had decided I'd have this baby at---the one that I was born in, as well as my mom and my sister. Once it was determined that we should rush to the hospital---by my mom calling the doc and telling them that they were so close together we couldn't time them---off we went. Gees, it's a good thing gas didn't cost an arm and a leg, because after he dropped us off, dad headed back to get my sister. Dad had to take the BUMPIEST route to the hospital---down a street that had lots of factories, so lots of railroad tracks :-( I just recently told him, in the last few years probably while we were driving out to see my mom while she was still down in Ohio, that I could have killed him that night.

When I was examined, it turns out I was 9 cm. When my mom found that out, she was surprised because she realized I could have had D in the car. We got to the hospital at 4 something. Mom waited out in the lobby because she didn't want to see me going through all that pain, so it was me and T and the docs coming in and out. I was wreathing in pain, it was so bad. It turns out there was some lady who had lost a multiple pregnancy, and the nurses asked T to tell me to quiet down. It wasn't easy, but I did some. But man was I in pain. I wanted drugs then---but I couldn't have them because I was so far along. The only thing that made me feel better was him stroking my sternum, and focusing on a specific spot on his tshirt. He was wearing a band shirt for Metallica, for their song "Unforgiven." I focused on the stamp the character on the shirt was holding in his right hand.

Finally it came time to push---my body told me it was time. The doc wanted me to slow down a bit, but I ended up just pushing thru---and ended up tearing some because her head didn't quite go through the birth canal as it was supposed to. That got sewn up, but it wasn't the end of my troubles---they had just begun.

I said before that with D, we had only picked out a boy's name, but we had kicked around girl's names. Imagine our surprise when the doc took her out and put her on my belly, and we discovered "he" was a "she". We sorta looked at each other and (unlike my mom's exaggeration, where we didn't know what to do), conferred with each other, using names we had talked about and liked---a name I liked that I had picked out when I was 14 and had a friend who said she was pregnant, but only the first name and not the whole name I had back then (it was 4 names long, but the reasoning still holds true), and the name of the girl he had liked in his junior year, who was his friend but that he had never asked out (again, something you'll have to read Our Story to understand). So she became DD. :-D

I went to recovery, and then to my room. I breastfed D some, off and on---there are pictures of me doing so. I didn't take her to breast as fast as I did P, but at the hospital I had P, they had a practice of leaving the baby with the mom and dad for an hour, for bonding purposes. But I still tried.

By 8am, 9, I had started to have some real discomfort, and when I felt down there :-S, I could tell something was wrong. A nurse brought her to my room, but I felt so bad and also was so worried about what was going on, that I couldn't do anything with my baby, I didn't even want to touch her :-( I told the nurse something was wrong, and she checked. I had a hematoma---a collection of blood, in the area of the tear. I was rushed to an operating room, and it was drained and taken care of. I wasn't given blood, though the doc later told my mom that he had thought about it.

Other than that, the next 2 days of my stay were relatively uneventful. I have fond memories of holding her and singing to her. I just couldn't keep my hands off my baby. I also seem remember being able to room in with her, but I could be mistaken. The only thing is I had no bowel movements before I left---something rather extraordinary. I've ALWAYS been regular with that, but I guess the prevalance of people not being so regular (like, everyday, at least once a day) isn't the "norm" any more. So even without the bm, they let me go. Which wasn't a good thing.

2 days after I left the hospital, I was back in the emergency room. With a clogged bit of plumbing (I'm trying to put it nicely for you). And an infection. During this 2 day stay is when the doc told my mom that he had thought about the blood transfusion during the draining, but had decided against it. That pissed her off. Why we didn't decide to stop going there right then and there is beyond me, because we were both going to that office then. It might be because the doc that had delivered me when I was born was the other doc in the office. Either way, things didn't get better. Oh, everything was basically okay with me after coming home after getting all those strong antibiotics for the infection---it burned some, and they were so strong I couldn't even pump for D. :-( My mom had to give her formula, which it's great there was a larger sample can in the stuff that came home with us.

No, there's another issue I have with the office, that has little to do with my first pregnancy. In fact, it's in the prevention of another. I didn't want to take pills, because at that time I believed that I was so bad about it I'd probably forget and get pregnant again. The first time was such hell that I didn't want to relive it any time soon. So I did a little (and I do mean LITTLE---we didn't have the internet as prevalently back then) research, and decided that Depo Provera would be my best bet. No way....

To Be Continued

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hang in there, kid.