Hi, blog. It has been MONTHS. So good to see you! Have you lost weight?
Ha.
Lots of topics I'd like to cover. What I have been cooking. The continued joys and travails of nursing. Difficulty of integrating a child into my schedule. Hired help: guilt at working and having hired help, dread at not having hired help. Difficulties of managing hired help. Division of labor within the house. Fun milestones like pulling up to stand, bouncing, crawling, shouting "birthday" randomly, when you can't even talk. And of course, solid foods for my kiddo. That makes me smile.
Should I start with solid foods? This blog is supposed to be about eating. Actually, let's briefly discuss what the adults in my life have been eating. Since we cannot go out, we have been eating a lot of homecooked meals.
* In fall, I'm addicted to the following things: roasted vegetables. parsnips, you've got my number. beets. brussel sprouts. tiny onions. garlic. broccoli. i even sliced up and roasted an orange the other day, to eat with some irish sea trout. (slice through skin and rub a bit of good quality olive oil on the orange. into an enameled cast iron gratin dish. into the oven for about 10 minutes at about 400 degrees. SCORE. skins and burnt bits were the best part. nice over the fish. served with some broccoli with whole coriander seeds, cumin seeds, a dash of chile powder, and salt.)
* slow cooked meals. recently I did a braised short rib recipe a la giada. short ribs are fantastic. for the uninitiated, season and sear; add ground savories, tomato products, broth and wine; braise until the meat is falling off the bone. then remove the bones and cartiladge, and return to the sauce. over fresh linguini. and giada's twist is to grind a bit of bittersweet chocolate over the top, to bring up the flavors. hoy hoy umami!
* Another slow cooked meal -- indian lamb with lentils, from "the complete meat cookbook." This book is one of the go-to reference books in my kitchen. I'm linking to Amazon so you can buy if you don't have. I'm so happy to finally live in a house with cardamom seeds. Those plus cumin and coridaner, and this curry had coconut milk in it. Sometimes, i think my own mother must've been a coconut, is how soothed and wonderful coconut milk makes me feel. And i made some saffron rice, albeit with shorter than called for grains. Still, good stuff. Oh, on the Indian thing but not on the slow-cooked thing: i tried a superfast and easy tandoori shrimp, too with a yogurt marinade and served with a cilantro chutney. (Was inspired to buy the chutney at the crazy "Eastern Market" emporium of treasures and rotting fruit near my house. Then had to find something to serve it with.) Loving the foray into indian flavors, which is totally new for me.
* Brownies. They replace the summer's ice cream obsession. But it's not like i don't think about brownies a lot when it's summer, too. I try not to make that many of them, though, because they are one thing that I eat until they are gone. I like the kind from the box, but i also like the kind that you make with ghirardhelli sweet ground chocolate. Those taste like brownies from a box, just richer. For what it's worth, I have absolutely no interest in getting brownies at a bakery. They don't approach what I like, which is a total harkening back to childhood. I believe that they are a primal comfort food. I have a crystal clear memory of a very special evening: January 29, 1976. It was the night the muppet show debuted. My mom, knowing that something special was on deck, made brownies, gave me two hot from the pan with a huge glass of milk, and sent me into the den to watch TV. What happened next amazed me, but it is the brownies that I remember the most. I had just turned 4. I still need a huge glass of milk with them.
* Pizza. I got some dough at Fairway (I know, I know, I could make it myself, but the joy is that I didn't, and that dinner was done pretty much right after baby was in bed.) I made a pancetta, thyme, and onion topping. Just used ground tomatoes from a jar, made less brusque with a little cinnamon, and then a combo of fresh and "nonfresh" mozz. Husband asked me to put on the "delicious so make a lot" list that we have on our fridge.
That's all for now! As always, I am interested in hearing what people who love to eat make for special, but, but also, for delicious midweek meals. Do you have a list on your fridge?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Near-Pro Status
This morning, as I was nursing my baby and making my breakfast concurrently, I realized that it’s finally time to write about breastfeeding.
Let me set the scene. My husband generally gives a bottle of milk I’ve expressed the day before in the morning, then he puts baby down for a nap. At that point still trying to catch up on fractured sleep from being multiple overnight feedings. But on most days, I force myself out of bed before Baby's nap concludes ends so I can start the coffee, express a few ounces of milk, and make some oatmeal porridge. On really special days, I also get to shower.
So this morning I’m making some decaf coffee – Baby H cannot tolerate caffeine – when I notice that the coffee maker is taking an awfully long time to finish what, frankly, is its only task. The coffee is not dripping into the pot. I can hear it frothing and burbling around in there, so, where is it going? I also notice a suspicious red light on, and above that light is a tiny sign that says “self clean.” Perhaps the coffeepot actually does have more than one task? Cook coffee and clean itself? Well, everyone knows that cleaning is not as important as coffee, as evidenced by my own choice to get coffee rather than get clean. Perturbed and not sure what to do, I move on to start the other parts of breakfast.
Oatmeal for whatever reason helps ladies make lots of milk, so it’s my morning staple. I used to find oatmeal punishing, but that was before I started making it with milk instead of water. I also make other modifications. I add a pinch of salt, a swig of vanilla, and copious cinnamon to the milk. I sprinkle in dried fruits – some combo of raisins, blueberries, cranberries, or apricots, so they can steep and become delicious, instead of gritty and bad, like plain dried fruit. I top it with whatever sort of chopped nuts are around, and either sliced banana or sliced apple. I stir a little butter through the oatmeal, and then add a little maple syrup. I read somewhere that one of the advantages of breastfeeding is that it allows a new mom to eat like a professional wrestler and still lose weight; I love this oatmeal.
I am getting out the nuts when I hear Baby H starting to cry over the monitor. The baby, like his mother, does not wake up delighted to see the world, but rather puzzled and angry that he is still alive.
So I look quickly at the little oatmeal pot on the stove and see that it’s not quite at the bubble stage, so I rush in and pick him up and start to nurse him but instead of nursing him in my bed or in the glider in the living room, I carry him into the kitchen with me. He’s nursing still but in my arms while I walk around. I’ve done this before, when I need to get up and get the phone or the door, but I’m not wearing the magical pink pillow that straps around my waist and lends support, I am just nursing him while walking around — and cooking.
I stir the oatmeal into the milk. I look over to the coffee – there’s a little liquid in the pot. It’s approximately a third the amount of coffee that I’d intended to brew, however. I don’t know why this is, and I’m sure that it’s not going to be very good, but I want to drink my coffee, and this is apparently my coffee. So I pour it into a cup, slosh in a bunch of milk, and it’s still sort of brown. It tastes like sludge. I decide to add . . . coffee lovers, avert your eyes . . . I decide to add water. Cold water, from the tap. “It’s an Americano,” I think. No wonder it’s lame to drink Americanos.
The oatmeal is ready, so I put it into a bowl, and sprinkle on the nuts. I’m almost ready to sit down and finish my appalling, cold, decaf Americano and eat my beloved oatmeal – but where is the fruit? I’m a maximalist, and I love the fruit. I look around and realize that while there is a half an apple on the cutting board, it has neither been peeled nor sliced. I’m pretty embarrassed to tell you about the coffee, but I should draw the line at the apple. I consider the situation. I can’t easily use a large knife; aside from the sharpness, I can’t make too many sudden moves, since my nipple is encaged (sleepnessness enhances my vocabulary) in the jaws of steel. Which makes me think about my own jaws of steel. So I bite tiny chunks off of the apple, and spit them into the bowl with the oatmeal. Breakfast is complete. Voila!
I’m getting to be a pro. “You’ll really be a pro,” a woman with three children told me, “when you find yourself flipping a grilled cheese sandwich and nursing at the same time.”
The woman who suggested this was watching me try to nurse publicly at a wedding shower, about a month before. The baby, at that point, looked like a precious figurine of a child who’d been out Christmas caroling, with little white dewdrops of snow stacked up delicately in his eyelashes.
I had firehosed him, yet again, with my milk. I was having a difficult time that day with supporting the baby properly while nursing and not sharing intimate information about my body with other people. But when it came to the learning curve of breastfeeding, a Christmasey looking baby and some public indiscretion were the least of the problems. But this is a happy post! I will write more about the challenges of breastfeeding another day.
For now, I am celebrating near-pro status.
Let me set the scene. My husband generally gives a bottle of milk I’ve expressed the day before in the morning, then he puts baby down for a nap. At that point still trying to catch up on fractured sleep from being multiple overnight feedings. But on most days, I force myself out of bed before Baby's nap concludes ends so I can start the coffee, express a few ounces of milk, and make some oatmeal porridge. On really special days, I also get to shower.
So this morning I’m making some decaf coffee – Baby H cannot tolerate caffeine – when I notice that the coffee maker is taking an awfully long time to finish what, frankly, is its only task. The coffee is not dripping into the pot. I can hear it frothing and burbling around in there, so, where is it going? I also notice a suspicious red light on, and above that light is a tiny sign that says “self clean.” Perhaps the coffeepot actually does have more than one task? Cook coffee and clean itself? Well, everyone knows that cleaning is not as important as coffee, as evidenced by my own choice to get coffee rather than get clean. Perturbed and not sure what to do, I move on to start the other parts of breakfast.
Oatmeal for whatever reason helps ladies make lots of milk, so it’s my morning staple. I used to find oatmeal punishing, but that was before I started making it with milk instead of water. I also make other modifications. I add a pinch of salt, a swig of vanilla, and copious cinnamon to the milk. I sprinkle in dried fruits – some combo of raisins, blueberries, cranberries, or apricots, so they can steep and become delicious, instead of gritty and bad, like plain dried fruit. I top it with whatever sort of chopped nuts are around, and either sliced banana or sliced apple. I stir a little butter through the oatmeal, and then add a little maple syrup. I read somewhere that one of the advantages of breastfeeding is that it allows a new mom to eat like a professional wrestler and still lose weight; I love this oatmeal.
I am getting out the nuts when I hear Baby H starting to cry over the monitor. The baby, like his mother, does not wake up delighted to see the world, but rather puzzled and angry that he is still alive.
So I look quickly at the little oatmeal pot on the stove and see that it’s not quite at the bubble stage, so I rush in and pick him up and start to nurse him but instead of nursing him in my bed or in the glider in the living room, I carry him into the kitchen with me. He’s nursing still but in my arms while I walk around. I’ve done this before, when I need to get up and get the phone or the door, but I’m not wearing the magical pink pillow that straps around my waist and lends support, I am just nursing him while walking around — and cooking.
I stir the oatmeal into the milk. I look over to the coffee – there’s a little liquid in the pot. It’s approximately a third the amount of coffee that I’d intended to brew, however. I don’t know why this is, and I’m sure that it’s not going to be very good, but I want to drink my coffee, and this is apparently my coffee. So I pour it into a cup, slosh in a bunch of milk, and it’s still sort of brown. It tastes like sludge. I decide to add . . . coffee lovers, avert your eyes . . . I decide to add water. Cold water, from the tap. “It’s an Americano,” I think. No wonder it’s lame to drink Americanos.
The oatmeal is ready, so I put it into a bowl, and sprinkle on the nuts. I’m almost ready to sit down and finish my appalling, cold, decaf Americano and eat my beloved oatmeal – but where is the fruit? I’m a maximalist, and I love the fruit. I look around and realize that while there is a half an apple on the cutting board, it has neither been peeled nor sliced. I’m pretty embarrassed to tell you about the coffee, but I should draw the line at the apple. I consider the situation. I can’t easily use a large knife; aside from the sharpness, I can’t make too many sudden moves, since my nipple is encaged (sleepnessness enhances my vocabulary) in the jaws of steel. Which makes me think about my own jaws of steel. So I bite tiny chunks off of the apple, and spit them into the bowl with the oatmeal. Breakfast is complete. Voila!
I’m getting to be a pro. “You’ll really be a pro,” a woman with three children told me, “when you find yourself flipping a grilled cheese sandwich and nursing at the same time.”
The woman who suggested this was watching me try to nurse publicly at a wedding shower, about a month before. The baby, at that point, looked like a precious figurine of a child who’d been out Christmas caroling, with little white dewdrops of snow stacked up delicately in his eyelashes.
I had firehosed him, yet again, with my milk. I was having a difficult time that day with supporting the baby properly while nursing and not sharing intimate information about my body with other people. But when it came to the learning curve of breastfeeding, a Christmasey looking baby and some public indiscretion were the least of the problems. But this is a happy post! I will write more about the challenges of breastfeeding another day.
For now, I am celebrating near-pro status.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
HERE COMES TINY VALENTINE
Two years ago on Valentine’s Day I was explaining to a friend that aside from being my cat's birthday, the day held no real significance for me.
It’s a holiday that you notice most when you are lacking romance, and once you’re not bemoaning a terrible lonely life, you don’t attach so much importance. And as for going out, I’d far prefer not to pay extra, fight crowds, go public with romance.
It was blizzarding that day and M had been to Philadelphia for work. When he got back to Brooklyn it was on the late side, and I surprised him with a dinner of linguini and clam sauce.
After dinner M gave me some fancy chocolates, then we danced to Nina Simone in the living room. When we sat on the couch for a break, he asked me to marry him. No kneeling and the ring came later.
The whole thing was very much in keeping with our life together – cozy, domestic, wonderful.
So now our tradition is – was – linguini with clams and a night at home.
This year on Valentine’s Day, I was 4 days past my due date in my first pregnancy. If I didn’t go into labor before, I would be induced on 2/16. On the morning of 2/14, a Saturday, I walked over to the big, icky drugstore in our neighborhood. I picked out some Prilosec, a Valentine card, and a chocolate fish. The fish was modeled after the kind of fish that is hung on the wall and wiggles and sings, which is modeled on the lodge-aesthetic kind of fish that someone has caught and mounted. This fish was hollow, made of questionable chocolate, and said “YOU’RE A REAL CATCH” on it. It did not wiggle, nor was it real, nor did I expect it to taste that good, but it had a certain charm.
Before I left the store, I took my blood pressure using the dirty, public blood pressure cuff back near the pharmacy. My blood pressure was high – even higher than it had been during our false starts that resulted in visits to the labor and delivery floor. I rushed home. SHOULD I CALL THE OBSTETRICIAN?? I was practically hollering.
Supporting my theory that in any dyad, one person in a froth serves to compose the other, husband had all sorts of calm, slowly delivered reasons as to why my blood pressure might be up. I hadn’t eaten yet that day (you need to take Prilosec ½ hour before breakfast; not to mention that you need to take Prilosec so you don’t accidentally digest your own face with stomach acid). I’d had a glass of wine the night before, when in a desperate plea to put me into labor, we went out and ate a whole lot of eggplant parmesan, supposed to trigger labor at least if you eat it at one place in Georgia. And eggplant parm is also really salty, and saltiness elevates blood pressure, etc. All sorts of reasons.
Meanwhile, I was lumbering around in a panicked circle: dining room living room kitchen dining room living room kitchen. I was almost as terrified to give birth as I was to stay pregnant. “At least have breakfast before you call the obstetrician,” he advised.
I was becoming obsessed with obstetricians. They, and everyone else, kept wishing me a "magical vaginal birth," which is patently ridiculous and also, annoying. Everyone I talked with had lots of suggestions for induction.
“Intercourse! Have intercourse!,” people would urge, with an impossibly serious look on their face. Please, that clinical tone but also, PLEASE. It had been a month since I could even sit on a chair designed for human beings, and you are asking me to do what?
After eating breakfast, we exchanged Valentines. Matthew gave me a huge, gorgeously orange box of Jacques Torres truffles. I sheepishly gave him the drugstore fish. Then we returned to the store to take my blood pressure. Still up, so I called the doctor, who told me to come in that night so they could begin induction. Because my body hadn ’t yet manifested any signs of being ready, it was likely that induction would be a long, painful, possibly ending-in-surgery process. So, I did everything I could think of to try to induce labor naturally, yes everything, and then we left for the hospital that evening.
I was assigned a crabby nurse with shells woven into her hair. The belly band, blood pressure cuff, the endless questioning. At one point a doctor and a nurse were in the same room with me, each asking the SAME QUESTIONS -- please list all surgeries you've ever had, are you allergic to any medications, have you had any complications with the pregnancy, do you have gestational diabetes -- but not listening to one another, and filling out completely separate forms -- one typed, one handwritten. I wondered whether they were even aware that they were asking the same questions, except one was one question later than the other. Then a cervical check, which showed that I was physically no closer to being able to push a baby through my cervix than anyone else in the room, and finally, the insertion of something that would ripen my cervix if we were lucky, so that my water could be broken and the process of labor might start. Husband finally went home to sleep a bit, since we knew we'd likely be up all the next night. We agreed that I could call anytime labor started and he’d return. If labor didn’t start, he’d come back in the morning.
Fluorescent lights don't quite lend themselves to romance, but anticipating our first child was sort of the perfect way to spend at least some of the 2 year anniversary of deciding to make our life together.
The next morning I was in agony -- no no, not from labor, but from the fact that I’d been doomed to a night in a plastic foam hospital bed. I am not exaggerating the pain. I’d been told that I could get up and walk around, but instead I’d been in the same position, except for the occasional bathroom trip, since the night before. The crabby shell-bedecked nurse had forgotten to tell me when I could move, and I’d missed the window. When sleeping at home those days, I'd wake up and desperately need my crampy legs massaged. And this was with a fortress of pillows and my nice bed. The hospital bed, where I had one pillow and lots of things strapped to me so I couldn't turn over, nearly did me in. I needed to stretch my hamstrings, but the baby inside me kept me from bending over. On top of that, I hadn’t dilated at all. So after “manually dilating” to 1 cm by jamming a finger into my cervix and wiggling it around, the doctor broke my water and started a Pitocin drip.
Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin. Now, oxytocin is the hormone released during orgasm, and breastfeeding, is also necessary for contractions that allow birth to happen. My husband and I were at the hospital alone, after hearing that the best way to generate enough oxytocin for birth to happen naturally is to be as alone as possible.
But Pitocin, oxytocin's unpopular, if not evil, cousin, is supposed to kickstart labor with none of the warm fuzzy feelings – just a fast ramp up of contractions, and it frequently leads to a mom needing an immediate epidural. However, I seemed immune even to the Pitocin. They dripped in bag after bag until I had contractions 2 minutes apart, but not ones strong enough to open my Fort Knox-style cervix. I had no problems asking for an epidural, but I wanted to wait until my contractions were productive enough that it wouldn't slow down my natural progression. And according to my cervical checks, this wasn't happening. I wasn't comfortable, by any means, but I didn't NEED an epidural. This was in contrast to a woman in the room next door who sounded like she was being declawed. We'd recently seen ROOTS on Netflix, with Kunta Kinte's gallantly lovely mother holding onto a pole and giving birth in a comparatively elegant manner. She was acting, of course, but I wanted very badly to preserve the Mandinka image and what I was overhearing was not helping me do that.
Every time the dr. would come in I'd say -- no, I don't need an epidural right now, except, I DO NOT WANT TO BECOME LIKE THAT WOMAN, so do not let the epidural administrators go too far. The obstetrician assured me that I did not seem to be on that trajectory.
I was not on that trajectory because, of course, I was notprogressing.
Waiting around in the hospital forever is boring. So I just sat on my friend the yoga ball, and waited, listening to podcasts, reading George Saunders essays aloud to my husband, playing cards, grimacing at the build in what midwives call "sensation," but what is actually called pain. Still, it wasn't bad.
After 9 or so hours of strong Pitocin, and no food but a couple of illicit slurps of unsolidified Jello I’d brought in a Poland Springs bottle, we had a meeting with my obstetrician. I was back in the bed and horribly, horribly uncomfortable due to the cheap foam mattress. I was at 2.5 or 3 cm – again, this was from doctors reaching inside me and stretching manually, rather than any movement of my cervix. I was not yet in active labor, and they couldn't give me any more pitocin without possibly putting stress on the baby. I was tired, hungry, far from comfortable, and not appreciably closer to my goal. My goal was multi-tiered -- have the baby before the mean nurse came back on the night shift, and get something to eat. So after 26 hours of trying to get induced, they asked whether I wanted a c-section. What I really wanted was a plan, and that sounded like a fine one. The baby did not seem to want to come out, but needed to come out, so they would take him out. Fine.
The hospital is all about waiting, but suddenly once the c-section was inevitable, a team crawled out of the woodwork and bustled into action, scrubbing in and bringing consent forms and giving me a tiny cup of antacid and explaining the spinal.
Less than an hour after we’d decided, I was on an operating table in a pretty periwinkle room, behind a blue tarp strategically placed so I couldn’t see my insides coming out and piling up on my belly. I'd had a little crisis of confidence as we started. I'd been well assured that the baby looked wonderful and strong through all of the contractions. He'd been monitored for hours. But the spinal is somewhat harrowing, so they'd asked my husband to wait in the hall. I thought they'd forgotten him. So did he. We later figured out that it's a precautionary measure to keep partners calm. But I remembered how much I hated the feeling of total lack of control that anaesthesia brings. I couldn't flex my legs and kept worrying and then also thinking about how terrible life must be for my sister, how claustrophobic she must be losing control over her whole body. Then I needed to throw up and I didn't feel like anyone was paying attention to me so I got a little panicky. They attributed nausea to my blood pressure dropping and administered some sort of medicine to raise it, and gave me a tiny kidney shaped bowl to vomit into. Why does anyone think those are good for vomiting?
They finally brought my husband in and started the process. A c-section doesn't take long -- about 10 minutes of actual surgery and then getting sewn up takes much longer. One of the most notable parts of it -- aside from astounding, incomparable miracle that a baby comes out of you -- is that you are required to have your arms spread to the side. Wide open, in a position that feels quite vulnerable, which is not what you're interested in with a full awareness that your bladder et al are on the outside.
Additionally, the medicine they give you makes you shiver uncontrollably, so your arms are nearly flapping. This would have been extremely disturbing if I hadn't heard it from a friend, but as it was, it didn't surprise me.
But what I did not expect was the extreme force required to remove Baby Henry from my belly. The story about caesarian surgery goes that you can feel pressure, but not pain. Well, someone was leaning down on my ribs as hard as possible while someone else was pulling up on the baby to remove him, thuckkkkkk, from my uterus. It was like a cartoon of being at the dentist where the dentist has to use a wrench and put his boot up on the arm of your chair to get the baby out. I mean, the tooth. That baby, he did not want to come out, and in the days afterwards when the hospital staff would check on my incision, I consistently asked them whether my aching back could be from broken ribs.
The biggest surprise, of course, was the arrival of the baby. We hadn't found out the gender but various details -- lots of morning sickness, the way I was carrying, and the fact that I couldn't picture having a boy -- made us both think we would have a daughter.
"It's a boy," someone yelled, then since he had just been through surgery he was bundled over to some pediatricians for assessment, siphoning, weighing, and footprinting before he was bundled over to me. He was two ounces shy of nine pounds, and the operating room staff were marveling at his loud, insistent, nonstop cry before he was brought over to me. This, I admit, made me nervous -- having a baby whose cry surprised the staff at a hospital. I heard his Agpar scores of 9 before I ever saw his dear, dear, swollen face. Henry, our tiny valentine, you're here!
In the recovery room, the first person to try to help me breastfeed was a gay Philipinno male nurse who grabbed my breast first then backtracked to ask if it was alright. Yeah, it's alright. The pregnancy adventure was over -- but parenthood, and its attendant adventures, were just beginning.
It’s a holiday that you notice most when you are lacking romance, and once you’re not bemoaning a terrible lonely life, you don’t attach so much importance. And as for going out, I’d far prefer not to pay extra, fight crowds, go public with romance.
It was blizzarding that day and M had been to Philadelphia for work. When he got back to Brooklyn it was on the late side, and I surprised him with a dinner of linguini and clam sauce.
After dinner M gave me some fancy chocolates, then we danced to Nina Simone in the living room. When we sat on the couch for a break, he asked me to marry him. No kneeling and the ring came later.
The whole thing was very much in keeping with our life together – cozy, domestic, wonderful.
So now our tradition is – was – linguini with clams and a night at home.
This year on Valentine’s Day, I was 4 days past my due date in my first pregnancy. If I didn’t go into labor before, I would be induced on 2/16. On the morning of 2/14, a Saturday, I walked over to the big, icky drugstore in our neighborhood. I picked out some Prilosec, a Valentine card, and a chocolate fish. The fish was modeled after the kind of fish that is hung on the wall and wiggles and sings, which is modeled on the lodge-aesthetic kind of fish that someone has caught and mounted. This fish was hollow, made of questionable chocolate, and said “YOU’RE A REAL CATCH” on it. It did not wiggle, nor was it real, nor did I expect it to taste that good, but it had a certain charm.
Before I left the store, I took my blood pressure using the dirty, public blood pressure cuff back near the pharmacy. My blood pressure was high – even higher than it had been during our false starts that resulted in visits to the labor and delivery floor. I rushed home. SHOULD I CALL THE OBSTETRICIAN?? I was practically hollering.
Supporting my theory that in any dyad, one person in a froth serves to compose the other, husband had all sorts of calm, slowly delivered reasons as to why my blood pressure might be up. I hadn’t eaten yet that day (you need to take Prilosec ½ hour before breakfast; not to mention that you need to take Prilosec so you don’t accidentally digest your own face with stomach acid). I’d had a glass of wine the night before, when in a desperate plea to put me into labor, we went out and ate a whole lot of eggplant parmesan, supposed to trigger labor at least if you eat it at one place in Georgia. And eggplant parm is also really salty, and saltiness elevates blood pressure, etc. All sorts of reasons.
Meanwhile, I was lumbering around in a panicked circle: dining room living room kitchen dining room living room kitchen. I was almost as terrified to give birth as I was to stay pregnant. “At least have breakfast before you call the obstetrician,” he advised.
I was becoming obsessed with obstetricians. They, and everyone else, kept wishing me a "magical vaginal birth," which is patently ridiculous and also, annoying. Everyone I talked with had lots of suggestions for induction.
“Intercourse! Have intercourse!,” people would urge, with an impossibly serious look on their face. Please, that clinical tone but also, PLEASE. It had been a month since I could even sit on a chair designed for human beings, and you are asking me to do what?
After eating breakfast, we exchanged Valentines. Matthew gave me a huge, gorgeously orange box of Jacques Torres truffles. I sheepishly gave him the drugstore fish. Then we returned to the store to take my blood pressure. Still up, so I called the doctor, who told me to come in that night so they could begin induction. Because my body hadn ’t yet manifested any signs of being ready, it was likely that induction would be a long, painful, possibly ending-in-surgery process. So, I did everything I could think of to try to induce labor naturally, yes everything, and then we left for the hospital that evening.
I was assigned a crabby nurse with shells woven into her hair. The belly band, blood pressure cuff, the endless questioning. At one point a doctor and a nurse were in the same room with me, each asking the SAME QUESTIONS -- please list all surgeries you've ever had, are you allergic to any medications, have you had any complications with the pregnancy, do you have gestational diabetes -- but not listening to one another, and filling out completely separate forms -- one typed, one handwritten. I wondered whether they were even aware that they were asking the same questions, except one was one question later than the other. Then a cervical check, which showed that I was physically no closer to being able to push a baby through my cervix than anyone else in the room, and finally, the insertion of something that would ripen my cervix if we were lucky, so that my water could be broken and the process of labor might start. Husband finally went home to sleep a bit, since we knew we'd likely be up all the next night. We agreed that I could call anytime labor started and he’d return. If labor didn’t start, he’d come back in the morning.
Fluorescent lights don't quite lend themselves to romance, but anticipating our first child was sort of the perfect way to spend at least some of the 2 year anniversary of deciding to make our life together.
The next morning I was in agony -- no no, not from labor, but from the fact that I’d been doomed to a night in a plastic foam hospital bed. I am not exaggerating the pain. I’d been told that I could get up and walk around, but instead I’d been in the same position, except for the occasional bathroom trip, since the night before. The crabby shell-bedecked nurse had forgotten to tell me when I could move, and I’d missed the window. When sleeping at home those days, I'd wake up and desperately need my crampy legs massaged. And this was with a fortress of pillows and my nice bed. The hospital bed, where I had one pillow and lots of things strapped to me so I couldn't turn over, nearly did me in. I needed to stretch my hamstrings, but the baby inside me kept me from bending over. On top of that, I hadn’t dilated at all. So after “manually dilating” to 1 cm by jamming a finger into my cervix and wiggling it around, the doctor broke my water and started a Pitocin drip.
Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin. Now, oxytocin is the hormone released during orgasm, and breastfeeding, is also necessary for contractions that allow birth to happen. My husband and I were at the hospital alone, after hearing that the best way to generate enough oxytocin for birth to happen naturally is to be as alone as possible.
But Pitocin, oxytocin's unpopular, if not evil, cousin, is supposed to kickstart labor with none of the warm fuzzy feelings – just a fast ramp up of contractions, and it frequently leads to a mom needing an immediate epidural. However, I seemed immune even to the Pitocin. They dripped in bag after bag until I had contractions 2 minutes apart, but not ones strong enough to open my Fort Knox-style cervix. I had no problems asking for an epidural, but I wanted to wait until my contractions were productive enough that it wouldn't slow down my natural progression. And according to my cervical checks, this wasn't happening. I wasn't comfortable, by any means, but I didn't NEED an epidural. This was in contrast to a woman in the room next door who sounded like she was being declawed. We'd recently seen ROOTS on Netflix, with Kunta Kinte's gallantly lovely mother holding onto a pole and giving birth in a comparatively elegant manner. She was acting, of course, but I wanted very badly to preserve the Mandinka image and what I was overhearing was not helping me do that.
Every time the dr. would come in I'd say -- no, I don't need an epidural right now, except, I DO NOT WANT TO BECOME LIKE THAT WOMAN, so do not let the epidural administrators go too far. The obstetrician assured me that I did not seem to be on that trajectory.
I was not on that trajectory because, of course, I was notprogressing.
Waiting around in the hospital forever is boring. So I just sat on my friend the yoga ball, and waited, listening to podcasts, reading George Saunders essays aloud to my husband, playing cards, grimacing at the build in what midwives call "sensation," but what is actually called pain. Still, it wasn't bad.
After 9 or so hours of strong Pitocin, and no food but a couple of illicit slurps of unsolidified Jello I’d brought in a Poland Springs bottle, we had a meeting with my obstetrician. I was back in the bed and horribly, horribly uncomfortable due to the cheap foam mattress. I was at 2.5 or 3 cm – again, this was from doctors reaching inside me and stretching manually, rather than any movement of my cervix. I was not yet in active labor, and they couldn't give me any more pitocin without possibly putting stress on the baby. I was tired, hungry, far from comfortable, and not appreciably closer to my goal. My goal was multi-tiered -- have the baby before the mean nurse came back on the night shift, and get something to eat. So after 26 hours of trying to get induced, they asked whether I wanted a c-section. What I really wanted was a plan, and that sounded like a fine one. The baby did not seem to want to come out, but needed to come out, so they would take him out. Fine.
The hospital is all about waiting, but suddenly once the c-section was inevitable, a team crawled out of the woodwork and bustled into action, scrubbing in and bringing consent forms and giving me a tiny cup of antacid and explaining the spinal.
Less than an hour after we’d decided, I was on an operating table in a pretty periwinkle room, behind a blue tarp strategically placed so I couldn’t see my insides coming out and piling up on my belly. I'd had a little crisis of confidence as we started. I'd been well assured that the baby looked wonderful and strong through all of the contractions. He'd been monitored for hours. But the spinal is somewhat harrowing, so they'd asked my husband to wait in the hall. I thought they'd forgotten him. So did he. We later figured out that it's a precautionary measure to keep partners calm. But I remembered how much I hated the feeling of total lack of control that anaesthesia brings. I couldn't flex my legs and kept worrying and then also thinking about how terrible life must be for my sister, how claustrophobic she must be losing control over her whole body. Then I needed to throw up and I didn't feel like anyone was paying attention to me so I got a little panicky. They attributed nausea to my blood pressure dropping and administered some sort of medicine to raise it, and gave me a tiny kidney shaped bowl to vomit into. Why does anyone think those are good for vomiting?
They finally brought my husband in and started the process. A c-section doesn't take long -- about 10 minutes of actual surgery and then getting sewn up takes much longer. One of the most notable parts of it -- aside from astounding, incomparable miracle that a baby comes out of you -- is that you are required to have your arms spread to the side. Wide open, in a position that feels quite vulnerable, which is not what you're interested in with a full awareness that your bladder et al are on the outside.
Additionally, the medicine they give you makes you shiver uncontrollably, so your arms are nearly flapping. This would have been extremely disturbing if I hadn't heard it from a friend, but as it was, it didn't surprise me.
But what I did not expect was the extreme force required to remove Baby Henry from my belly. The story about caesarian surgery goes that you can feel pressure, but not pain. Well, someone was leaning down on my ribs as hard as possible while someone else was pulling up on the baby to remove him, thuckkkkkk, from my uterus. It was like a cartoon of being at the dentist where the dentist has to use a wrench and put his boot up on the arm of your chair to get the baby out. I mean, the tooth. That baby, he did not want to come out, and in the days afterwards when the hospital staff would check on my incision, I consistently asked them whether my aching back could be from broken ribs.
The biggest surprise, of course, was the arrival of the baby. We hadn't found out the gender but various details -- lots of morning sickness, the way I was carrying, and the fact that I couldn't picture having a boy -- made us both think we would have a daughter.
"It's a boy," someone yelled, then since he had just been through surgery he was bundled over to some pediatricians for assessment, siphoning, weighing, and footprinting before he was bundled over to me. He was two ounces shy of nine pounds, and the operating room staff were marveling at his loud, insistent, nonstop cry before he was brought over to me. This, I admit, made me nervous -- having a baby whose cry surprised the staff at a hospital. I heard his Agpar scores of 9 before I ever saw his dear, dear, swollen face. Henry, our tiny valentine, you're here!
In the recovery room, the first person to try to help me breastfeed was a gay Philipinno male nurse who grabbed my breast first then backtracked to ask if it was alright. Yeah, it's alright. The pregnancy adventure was over -- but parenthood, and its attendant adventures, were just beginning.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sounds Like Two Deaf Parents in Here
I went out with a guy once who looked great on paper — talldark&handsome, architect, motorcycle, lots of wooing. We'd go swimming at night, he'd leave notes on my car, he made me a bouquet made entirely out of roasted corn. (Listen: the bouquet of roasted corn was better than it sounds.) But our chemistry was off, and we broke up, and finally, we both realized that he was gay. Is the gayness the punch line? It is not.
While it lasted, I also thought that his parents sounded very interesting because they were both Jehovah's Witnesses. They were also both deaf.
Where the heck is this going?
Well, whenever he told people about his two deaf parents, they'd comment that his house must've been very quiet. He would reply that to the contrary, his house was QUITE LOUD — that deaf people are far less aware of how much noise they are making, especially if they have started a household with another person who is immune to loud noises.
I think about this a lot lately because when I wake up in the middle of the night, the baby, who is 10 weeks old, is making about as much noise as I imagine two deaf parents might make.
I'm not talking about crying. There's a loud suctiony pop that happens when he's sucking his wrist or fingers but isn't yet coordinated to quite get purchase on them before he jerks his arm and the thumb goes flying out. POP! This is in addition to slurping, gurgles, grunts, clucks and snorts. He sighs and lets out yawns that have a little vocalization attached. And, HICCUP! HICCUP! And he has started to talk, in a manner of speaking. "ahhh, ahhh, ahhh," he says.
The one-man band is punctuated by the occasional prolonged fart. He's sharing a room with us but is completely matter of fact about the farting situation, which I admire, at least in someone so tiny.
There is also the noise that only a twelve pound human zipped into a little fleece blanket bag could make, which is achieved by the flinging of legs up into the air. He can't flip over or move much on his own unless his legs are pushed against something, but he's sort of at sea in the middle of the cradle. The idea behind the flinging, I think, is that the legs come down in a slightly different position, and if he flings them high and hard enough, he can dislodge himself from the little foam mountains we wedge him between in order to keep him on his back, or wiggle the whole package -- body and mountains -- towards the bars of his cradle.
If it were your roommate or spouse or two deaf parents making these noises, it might be aggravating, but when it's your baby making them, holy moly, it's just delightful.
He used to cry or not cry and that was about it, but as the weeks have gone by he's become far more active, noisewise, and the best way I can describe it is that he's more colored in. It's a developmental thing I've witnessed in other babies as well.
First, it happens physically. A friend had a baby last summer. Eli was sweet when he was born but had the appearance of the very new or the very old. At the time wasn't thinking that so much but it was clear when I saw him a few months later, and his lips had bloomed into red and his cheeks were rosy, eyes bright and focused, skin more jelled on his face. I was amazed at the change, and Henry has seen the exact same trajectory, physically. I thought he was pretty handsome when he was born but look back at pictures and he looks comparatively squinty and gray and collapsed. Henry would grasp his hands together and hold tight and glower with the air of an aging male Russian politician.
These days, with smiling and laughing, he seems a lot more like a baby.
While it lasted, I also thought that his parents sounded very interesting because they were both Jehovah's Witnesses. They were also both deaf.
Where the heck is this going?
Well, whenever he told people about his two deaf parents, they'd comment that his house must've been very quiet. He would reply that to the contrary, his house was QUITE LOUD — that deaf people are far less aware of how much noise they are making, especially if they have started a household with another person who is immune to loud noises.
I think about this a lot lately because when I wake up in the middle of the night, the baby, who is 10 weeks old, is making about as much noise as I imagine two deaf parents might make.
I'm not talking about crying. There's a loud suctiony pop that happens when he's sucking his wrist or fingers but isn't yet coordinated to quite get purchase on them before he jerks his arm and the thumb goes flying out. POP! This is in addition to slurping, gurgles, grunts, clucks and snorts. He sighs and lets out yawns that have a little vocalization attached. And, HICCUP! HICCUP! And he has started to talk, in a manner of speaking. "ahhh, ahhh, ahhh," he says.
The one-man band is punctuated by the occasional prolonged fart. He's sharing a room with us but is completely matter of fact about the farting situation, which I admire, at least in someone so tiny.
There is also the noise that only a twelve pound human zipped into a little fleece blanket bag could make, which is achieved by the flinging of legs up into the air. He can't flip over or move much on his own unless his legs are pushed against something, but he's sort of at sea in the middle of the cradle. The idea behind the flinging, I think, is that the legs come down in a slightly different position, and if he flings them high and hard enough, he can dislodge himself from the little foam mountains we wedge him between in order to keep him on his back, or wiggle the whole package -- body and mountains -- towards the bars of his cradle.
If it were your roommate or spouse or two deaf parents making these noises, it might be aggravating, but when it's your baby making them, holy moly, it's just delightful.
He used to cry or not cry and that was about it, but as the weeks have gone by he's become far more active, noisewise, and the best way I can describe it is that he's more colored in. It's a developmental thing I've witnessed in other babies as well.
First, it happens physically. A friend had a baby last summer. Eli was sweet when he was born but had the appearance of the very new or the very old. At the time wasn't thinking that so much but it was clear when I saw him a few months later, and his lips had bloomed into red and his cheeks were rosy, eyes bright and focused, skin more jelled on his face. I was amazed at the change, and Henry has seen the exact same trajectory, physically. I thought he was pretty handsome when he was born but look back at pictures and he looks comparatively squinty and gray and collapsed. Henry would grasp his hands together and hold tight and glower with the air of an aging male Russian politician.
These days, with smiling and laughing, he seems a lot more like a baby.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
LEADING UP TO THE BIRTH
It’s been hard, to say the least, to get anything posted on the blog since the baby came. During most spare moments during the day, I must do something important, like look for the housekeys I lost due to sleep deprivation. Or look for my spare housekeys, which I have also lost.
Or do something crucial, like try to get a nap in, generally to the tune of escalating hunger squeaks, then coughs, then cries, of a waking baby with an eager tummy.
Or do something hypothetical, like wonder why no one ever coaches the baby, “You know what you need to do, right? Sleep when Mommy sleeps.”
If you are a parent, you undoubtedly know the correlative phrase well: well-wishers of all shapes and sizes almost sternly admonish you to “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Chances are that you, like your baby, would get a lot more sleeping done if your meals were delivered directly into your mouth as you snuggled on a pillow in a near dream state, and you were not interested in keeping “going to the bathroom” a literal phrase. Or if the word on the street was that you really only needed to bathe once visible cheese had accumulated in the creases of your wrists.
I digress.
The weeks leading up to Henry's birth were largely uneventful. And I do mean, LARGELY, ba dumbum. As I came closer and closer to 4 digits on the scale, I fell into a pattern of going to one of the three obstetricians every few days
1. to see whether Henry was breech again (he was not)
2. to see whether his head had descended into my pelvis (nope)
3. to see whether I had become effaced or dilated yet (uh, no)
Another thing they do at these appointments is to look for signs of pre-eclampsia – a condition where the placenta, the organ invented during a pregnancy to nourish the baby, starts to deteriorate in function. Pre-eclampsia is indicated by elevated blood pressure, protein in urine, headaches, and visual disturbances. For the sake of a baby and the sake of a mom, it is important to avoid.
Most of the time, I’d leave the dr.’s appointment with no signs of a problem, nor any signs that I was any closer to having the baby. “Honey, at this point, MY cervix is riper to give birth than yours is,” explained the gayest and funniest obstetrician in the practice. I liked his humor, except, huh. Time was marching on, and I simply did not seem ready to give birth, though it’s all I thought about. Was I having cramps? Was there any sort of unusual and meaningful feeling in my belly?
One thing that the labor classes tell you is that you don’t want to show up at the hospital before you are really ready – going into the part of labor where you want to bite people. The doctors I was seeing advise patients not to leave for the hospital until they are screaming in raw animal pain. Why? You will get sent home, and getting sent home is bad for morale. Also, in our case, home is about an hour away from our hospital of choice. So if there’s one thing you know, it’s that you shouldn’t see the inside of the hospital until it is time to have the baby!
However, during a routine appointment at week 38, my blood pressure was a bit high. A sign of pre-eclampsia? "Well, at the hospital," another obstetrician calmly explained, without leaping about the room in a crazy anticipatory dance, or frankly even looking me in the eye, "they have a lab. It’s faster to get some the bloodwork done there." Sure, they have labs in hospitals. But he didn't indicate in any direct manner, YOU MIGHT HAVE THE BABY LATER TODAY, so my husband and I didn't get it.
This was something we would come to understand more and more during the process. You are having a baby, but everyone who is helping you has a job where they help people have babies every day, so it’s hard for them to muster the sense of wonder and urgency that you are feeling. It’s frankly sort of hard for them to muster anything at all: unlike they experience you are having, they’re just at work.
"So . . . what time should I tell my office I'll be back?" my husband asked. The OB shook his head. Then looked me. “You may have pre-eclampsia, and the cure for preeclampsia during week 38 is getting the baby out. There is a chance you will get sent home from the hospital. But a better chance that you will have your baby overnight.”
We explained to him that we didn't have any of our bags. This, as it turns out, means exactly nothing to the medical community.
After all of our carefully concocted plans to bring an iPod with the correct music and the birth ball and 5 extra pillows and all of my carefully chosen pajamas and the camera and the copy of Great Expectations that we read aloud to one another . . . and my snacks . . . I’m sorry, you just want us to GO?
The truth is that to have the baby, you just need you.
The baby?
Huh. The baby. I'd thought of little other than having a baby for months -- for like, a year -- but faced with actual possibility that it might really arrive, I was just sort of blank. With the details of the PREGNANCY overwhelming me from every angle, and the potentialities and possibilities of BIRTH, I hadn’t been able to think about the outcome – the baby – for a while. I’d gone through a time when whenever I’d drive I’d picture the money shot, the moment of eeking out the baby, with attendant pile of slick goo slithering out shortly thereafter, and I’d hear it let out its first lusty wail, and someone would say, “you have a . . .” whatever I was going to have, and they would put the baby on my chest, and I would say the first sentence to welcome the baby into the world, into my arms, into our lives, but in the middle of my sentence, I’d have to stop, because I’d be overcome with a sob. And I wouldn’t just sob in my daydream, I would sob in the car.
However, these reveries were all before week 38. It was when I was less tired, still small enough to drive the car, 10 pounds lighter. It was when my maternity clothes still fit, and I didn’t have to order 2 desserts at a time. But at a certain point, I was just marching forward as the carrier of the baby and I could not even hold a particularly excited thought about the birth anymore, anything more complex than “When . . .will . . . this . . . come. . . out.” Or, “Will it hurt wicked bad?” Or, every day after dinner – "do not let me go into labor tonight, I am far too tired." Birth vs. baby is like the difference between a wedding and a marriage: easy to lose sight of the big picture in all of the commotion, and I had lost sight of the baby and could only consider the birth. And when faced with the birth, I guess I sort of wanted to procrastinate.
The dr.’s office is on 43rd street and before going to the hospital, we stopped at Grand Central to get a book. I’d heard that there was a great coffee shop in there and wanted to look around for it. We’d been told I could have a light snack . . . where should we go?
Matthew finally reminded me that we had to get to the hospital, and started in the direction of the subway. He figured we could take the shuttle across and then the A train up to 59th street. “You want me to take the TRAIN to the HOSPITAL?” I was fake-scandalized but secretly delighted, since I could tell everyone that I took the subway to the hospital to have the baby, and it was clearly the best way to travel there at rush hour.
And, after months of deferential treatment by the traveling masses, no one gave my big jouncing stomach and I a seat. Even better, since the trip wasn’t long and it added to the drama of the NOW I AM HAVING A BABY narrative unfurling in my head. When I walked into the hospital lobby, someone crossing the lobby to leave looked me up and down and exclaimed “I hope you make it upstairs in time!” Sort of rude, but also, exciting. I was ready to have a baby! And everyone could tell!
We checked into triage. I liked the nurses and they set me up with a series of monitors.
In case you haven’t been in this situation, I will explain what the baby monitor is like: you take off your normal clothes in order to put on a hospital Johnny. You are handed a garment – and in this instance garment should probably be in quotes -- that looks like gigantic granny-style underpants without a crotch. It is a tube. You know it has to do with having a baby since pink and blue things are knitted into it the white fabric, so it looks like a newborn hat. Except you could get 30 newborn hats out of that amount of material. After the nurse stretches the tube out enough – and that takes a while – you pull it delicately up around your huge, huge belly and then recline, on your back, in the bed. The tube holds monitoring devices close to you so the heartbeat of the baby and also, your contractions, can be recorded onto a spool of paper that drops to the floor and someone periodically comes in to nod at apprasingly, then fold into a neater pile. However, this was set up by someone normal, not someone 9 mos pregnant, since being reclined on your back is so uncomfortable at that point. If you shift position, like if you try to sit up so that heartburn acid doesn’t shoot out of your mouth like a fountain and your uterus isn't crushing you, then the monitors can shift and things are not properly recorded and someone will come in and look at the flat lines on the paper and either give you the stinkeye and tell you have to recline again, or they will tell you nicely.
And you cannot eat, or even take Tums.
In my case, since the baby hadn’t descended, and I was not at all dilated or effaced, they recommended a c-section since an induction would likely end in a lot of labor, then surgery anyhow, under those circumstances.
It is not possible to have a c-section until it’s been 8 hours since you ate. A certain set wil find me evil for saying it but that evening, I was far less concerned about the vagaries of surgery--something I was relatively unfamiliar with and had grown accustomed to the idea of when the baby was breech--than I was the immediate and escalating discomfort of heartburn leading to sleeplessness and barfing, which was my specialty. The heartburn was just going to escalate if I couldn’t eat, which I couldn’t, and it was going to be a long, long night, the prospect of which was exhausting. And when I was through, someone would hand me a baby, and I would never sleep again.
Crap.
Except, I was not to have the baby. After being in the hospital for a short period of time, and having my sinking blood pressure andtotally normal blood tested, it became clear that I wasn’t pre-eclamptic, and I was sent home, with nothing but a whale-sized container in which to collect my urine for the next 24 hours, and a heightened sense of anxiety about how uncomfortable the hospital beds were going to be when I did manage to have the baby.
Or do something crucial, like try to get a nap in, generally to the tune of escalating hunger squeaks, then coughs, then cries, of a waking baby with an eager tummy.
Or do something hypothetical, like wonder why no one ever coaches the baby, “You know what you need to do, right? Sleep when Mommy sleeps.”
If you are a parent, you undoubtedly know the correlative phrase well: well-wishers of all shapes and sizes almost sternly admonish you to “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Chances are that you, like your baby, would get a lot more sleeping done if your meals were delivered directly into your mouth as you snuggled on a pillow in a near dream state, and you were not interested in keeping “going to the bathroom” a literal phrase. Or if the word on the street was that you really only needed to bathe once visible cheese had accumulated in the creases of your wrists.
I digress.
The weeks leading up to Henry's birth were largely uneventful. And I do mean, LARGELY, ba dumbum. As I came closer and closer to 4 digits on the scale, I fell into a pattern of going to one of the three obstetricians every few days
1. to see whether Henry was breech again (he was not)
2. to see whether his head had descended into my pelvis (nope)
3. to see whether I had become effaced or dilated yet (uh, no)
Another thing they do at these appointments is to look for signs of pre-eclampsia – a condition where the placenta, the organ invented during a pregnancy to nourish the baby, starts to deteriorate in function. Pre-eclampsia is indicated by elevated blood pressure, protein in urine, headaches, and visual disturbances. For the sake of a baby and the sake of a mom, it is important to avoid.
Most of the time, I’d leave the dr.’s appointment with no signs of a problem, nor any signs that I was any closer to having the baby. “Honey, at this point, MY cervix is riper to give birth than yours is,” explained the gayest and funniest obstetrician in the practice. I liked his humor, except, huh. Time was marching on, and I simply did not seem ready to give birth, though it’s all I thought about. Was I having cramps? Was there any sort of unusual and meaningful feeling in my belly?
One thing that the labor classes tell you is that you don’t want to show up at the hospital before you are really ready – going into the part of labor where you want to bite people. The doctors I was seeing advise patients not to leave for the hospital until they are screaming in raw animal pain. Why? You will get sent home, and getting sent home is bad for morale. Also, in our case, home is about an hour away from our hospital of choice. So if there’s one thing you know, it’s that you shouldn’t see the inside of the hospital until it is time to have the baby!
However, during a routine appointment at week 38, my blood pressure was a bit high. A sign of pre-eclampsia? "Well, at the hospital," another obstetrician calmly explained, without leaping about the room in a crazy anticipatory dance, or frankly even looking me in the eye, "they have a lab. It’s faster to get some the bloodwork done there." Sure, they have labs in hospitals. But he didn't indicate in any direct manner, YOU MIGHT HAVE THE BABY LATER TODAY, so my husband and I didn't get it.
This was something we would come to understand more and more during the process. You are having a baby, but everyone who is helping you has a job where they help people have babies every day, so it’s hard for them to muster the sense of wonder and urgency that you are feeling. It’s frankly sort of hard for them to muster anything at all: unlike they experience you are having, they’re just at work.
"So . . . what time should I tell my office I'll be back?" my husband asked. The OB shook his head. Then looked me. “You may have pre-eclampsia, and the cure for preeclampsia during week 38 is getting the baby out. There is a chance you will get sent home from the hospital. But a better chance that you will have your baby overnight.”
We explained to him that we didn't have any of our bags. This, as it turns out, means exactly nothing to the medical community.
After all of our carefully concocted plans to bring an iPod with the correct music and the birth ball and 5 extra pillows and all of my carefully chosen pajamas and the camera and the copy of Great Expectations that we read aloud to one another . . . and my snacks . . . I’m sorry, you just want us to GO?
The truth is that to have the baby, you just need you.
The baby?
Huh. The baby. I'd thought of little other than having a baby for months -- for like, a year -- but faced with actual possibility that it might really arrive, I was just sort of blank. With the details of the PREGNANCY overwhelming me from every angle, and the potentialities and possibilities of BIRTH, I hadn’t been able to think about the outcome – the baby – for a while. I’d gone through a time when whenever I’d drive I’d picture the money shot, the moment of eeking out the baby, with attendant pile of slick goo slithering out shortly thereafter, and I’d hear it let out its first lusty wail, and someone would say, “you have a . . .” whatever I was going to have, and they would put the baby on my chest, and I would say the first sentence to welcome the baby into the world, into my arms, into our lives, but in the middle of my sentence, I’d have to stop, because I’d be overcome with a sob. And I wouldn’t just sob in my daydream, I would sob in the car.
However, these reveries were all before week 38. It was when I was less tired, still small enough to drive the car, 10 pounds lighter. It was when my maternity clothes still fit, and I didn’t have to order 2 desserts at a time. But at a certain point, I was just marching forward as the carrier of the baby and I could not even hold a particularly excited thought about the birth anymore, anything more complex than “When . . .will . . . this . . . come. . . out.” Or, “Will it hurt wicked bad?” Or, every day after dinner – "do not let me go into labor tonight, I am far too tired." Birth vs. baby is like the difference between a wedding and a marriage: easy to lose sight of the big picture in all of the commotion, and I had lost sight of the baby and could only consider the birth. And when faced with the birth, I guess I sort of wanted to procrastinate.
The dr.’s office is on 43rd street and before going to the hospital, we stopped at Grand Central to get a book. I’d heard that there was a great coffee shop in there and wanted to look around for it. We’d been told I could have a light snack . . . where should we go?
Matthew finally reminded me that we had to get to the hospital, and started in the direction of the subway. He figured we could take the shuttle across and then the A train up to 59th street. “You want me to take the TRAIN to the HOSPITAL?” I was fake-scandalized but secretly delighted, since I could tell everyone that I took the subway to the hospital to have the baby, and it was clearly the best way to travel there at rush hour.
And, after months of deferential treatment by the traveling masses, no one gave my big jouncing stomach and I a seat. Even better, since the trip wasn’t long and it added to the drama of the NOW I AM HAVING A BABY narrative unfurling in my head. When I walked into the hospital lobby, someone crossing the lobby to leave looked me up and down and exclaimed “I hope you make it upstairs in time!” Sort of rude, but also, exciting. I was ready to have a baby! And everyone could tell!
We checked into triage. I liked the nurses and they set me up with a series of monitors.
In case you haven’t been in this situation, I will explain what the baby monitor is like: you take off your normal clothes in order to put on a hospital Johnny. You are handed a garment – and in this instance garment should probably be in quotes -- that looks like gigantic granny-style underpants without a crotch. It is a tube. You know it has to do with having a baby since pink and blue things are knitted into it the white fabric, so it looks like a newborn hat. Except you could get 30 newborn hats out of that amount of material. After the nurse stretches the tube out enough – and that takes a while – you pull it delicately up around your huge, huge belly and then recline, on your back, in the bed. The tube holds monitoring devices close to you so the heartbeat of the baby and also, your contractions, can be recorded onto a spool of paper that drops to the floor and someone periodically comes in to nod at apprasingly, then fold into a neater pile. However, this was set up by someone normal, not someone 9 mos pregnant, since being reclined on your back is so uncomfortable at that point. If you shift position, like if you try to sit up so that heartburn acid doesn’t shoot out of your mouth like a fountain and your uterus isn't crushing you, then the monitors can shift and things are not properly recorded and someone will come in and look at the flat lines on the paper and either give you the stinkeye and tell you have to recline again, or they will tell you nicely.
And you cannot eat, or even take Tums.
In my case, since the baby hadn’t descended, and I was not at all dilated or effaced, they recommended a c-section since an induction would likely end in a lot of labor, then surgery anyhow, under those circumstances.
It is not possible to have a c-section until it’s been 8 hours since you ate. A certain set wil find me evil for saying it but that evening, I was far less concerned about the vagaries of surgery--something I was relatively unfamiliar with and had grown accustomed to the idea of when the baby was breech--than I was the immediate and escalating discomfort of heartburn leading to sleeplessness and barfing, which was my specialty. The heartburn was just going to escalate if I couldn’t eat, which I couldn’t, and it was going to be a long, long night, the prospect of which was exhausting. And when I was through, someone would hand me a baby, and I would never sleep again.
Crap.
Except, I was not to have the baby. After being in the hospital for a short period of time, and having my sinking blood pressure andtotally normal blood tested, it became clear that I wasn’t pre-eclamptic, and I was sent home, with nothing but a whale-sized container in which to collect my urine for the next 24 hours, and a heightened sense of anxiety about how uncomfortable the hospital beds were going to be when I did manage to have the baby.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Henry
Last I wrote, we hadn't met Henry. It has been nearly three weeks now and I want to get the word out, blogstyle, that on 2/15 at 11:57 pm Henry Atticus Phillips Schuerman was born.
At birth Henry weighed 8 lbs., 14 oz. and was 31 inches long.
Except, perhaps I mean 21 inches long? Whichever length is just slightly longer than the average baby -- but not like, a lengthy, serpentine, snake baby from the Guinness Book of World Records. I think actually Henry was 21 inches long -- which is a generously sized baby.
He is beautiful and extremely spunky and seems -- knock on wood -- like a very, very vital boy. More on this in the story of the birth! I am working on more comprehensive post but wanted to get this out and up.
It's very surreal that Henry is here. In part because I am so sleep deprived that I want to call in the National Guard so they can hold down the fort while I nap, but in part because it's like anything else huge, like getting married. I keep telling myself "I have a son." WE have a son. But it's hard to get it. I still can hardly believe that I am married, and now, this!
Also, I get to start to recognize the physical gestures from the person who was knocking around inside of me for all of those months!
Welcome to you, dear Henry.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Breech, Breech Baby
There is so much great stuff going on to write about – I mean, I don’t know whether it’s that great to read about – but this has been a week of implementation of a lot of interesting tactics because we found out on Monday (I started this post on Jan 9th) that the baby is breech.
Lots of people don’t know that much about their own births. Because my mom has always told me the story of my birth on my birthday – with great warmth and fondness, no less, bless her, I have always known a few key things about mine.
1. I was huge -- 2 oz shy of 10 lbs. This, owing to the fact that
2. I was three weeks late, which they would never let happen today, especially if
3. A baby is breech, or with its head up rather than down, which I was.
So. I’ve always viewed my mother as sort of a superhero for various reasons, but when I think about these facts, especially. And I’ve always been sort of proud of the breech detail – in the same sort of way that I like that I am left-handed.
However.
The obstetrician confirmed the other day that the large round place which, depending on the moment, is either nesting comfortably near or chipping painfully up against the ribs on my right hand side – the spot that if I scratch it, lightly, produces a referred flutter of movement low, low in my pelvis – was a head. My sister had been speculating that it was a bottom up there, and that when I scratched it, I got punches in my lower abdomen. But it’s a head rather than a bottom, which is the other big round hard sticky outy part that babies have got.
That means that the head is up, which means that the baby is not head down. These days, being head down is a pre-requisite for being born through the most obvious exit.
(Obstetricians used to be trained to deliver breech babies, but that is no longer standard practice – these days, if a baby is head down at the time when a mom-to-be goes into a labor or need to be induced, the solution is a c-section.)
I was told that one way to deal is to see an expert in turning at the hospital. Apparently, just as they sent us to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital to see a specialist in doing amniocenteses, they have a special who does something called a “versioning,” which basically means that this person is specially trained to manipulate the position of a baby inside of a person from outside of the person’s stomach. By pushing. It's generally done at 37 weeks, and may or may not include its own epidural: it doesn't feel good. It can result in placental tears, and emergency Caesarian section, and bruising to the mother, and I would think, discomfort for the baby.
I asked whether there was anything I could do to try to change the position of the baby.
There are three obstetricians in our practice and the 3 docs within have very different modes of operating. Counter to the way I often fee, I like and trust all of them but the one I was with that day is clearly the least amenable to say, woowoo practices, like the hiring of a doula. He told me: “WELL. If I were a midwife – which I am clearly not – I might tell you to get your hips up off of the ground several times a day to let the baby turn. Other people recommend acupuncture. I’ve never seen any of these things work. But these are the things that people try.”
The versioning sounded frankly terrible, so I decided to pull out all of the stops to avoid it. Below, I will detail the hocus pocus we tried to move the baby. And tune in at the bottom to see whether or not it worked!!
THE HOCUS POCUS
MUSIC DOWN THE PANTS
This is the most obvious and easy-to-try-at-home trick: put headphones low, low, low on your belly and wait for the baby to dance down to listen. They definitely do react to music even while still inside – for months this one been expressing opinions about swingtime music, the song Back in the USSR, anything with a blastpunch of happy horns. The problem is that you never know whether the kicking and punching means “more!” or if it means “the outside must be scary. why would you put me through this?” I always prefer to think, “more!,” but the things I listed are all things that I love.
ACUPUNCTURE
I contacted Laurel, an acupuncturist I’ve seen before for help with nausea (and out and out vomiting) in the first trimester. She told me to come on in. She did some points in my feet and elsewhere to help with reflux, but also, burned "moxibustion" sticks near points on my toes to try to encourage turning. Lots and lots of people had recommended this Chinese medicine therapy. I’d heard about Chinese medicine you can put on your toes to make a baby turn and this is the stuff.
Moxibustion sticks are like incense sticks but not as stinky. She burned a few in her office, then she gave me a bunch to take home. At night, M would have me sit in my glider and put my feet on the ottoman and he’d burn it near the "spleen points" on my smallest toes and try get them hot but not burned. And inside I could feel Baby start to flounce and scrabble. And outside I could watch M’s eyes water, not from emotion: from smoke.
The doctors had told us that the baby was really pretty big – possibly too big to turn again, so we didn’t know if it was in vain, but we tried this for several evenings, in conjunction with . . .
YOGA
Laying on your back when pregnant isn’t pleasant –unless you have a thing for being smothered by your own outsize organs. (I would like to say something about my uterus: at one point, I swallowed my pride and asked one of the obstetricians whether it was possible that it had actually expanded to the degree that a portion have climbed to the outside of my ribs. He said, "uh, no." But the head was RIGHT THERE, so that is to give you an idea of the size.) And laying on the back is bad for circulation, so it’s bad for baby, but like many things about pregnancy – like nutrition – the mother’s health gets compromised first. Ie, a pregnant person would puke or pass out before anything happened to the baby. But my yoga friend / teacher Marisa came over with a bunch of information and some hilarious props and we did a supported bridge – an arching pose we’ve avoided during pregnancy except for in this situation. But she’d checked it out and it was the solution, plus she was monitoring me and the OB had basically mentioned it. And it's not dissimilar from the old “propping the ironing board up on the couch and laying with your head down and feet up” that people recommend for turning breech babies.
Anyhow we tried this after some chanting of things to activate certain chakras and also, playing a little gong she brought over. It was great. There we were, pulling out all of the stops! The supported bridge made me immediately clammy and nauseous, though, and I had to roll off and we put me into the supported chauvasana that makes me nap and snore and smile. In contrast to the supported bridge, it is pretty much the most comfortable I pretty much ever get during pregnancy. This is not a picture of me but it shows you the position. If you are pregnant and can’t get comfortable, I recommend a yoga session ending with this!
HEADSTANDS IN THE POOL
This is another thing that was highly recommended by many people as helping out with flipping a baby, with no real logic provided, but it’s hard not to try to think about the logic, and this is all I can come up with: “well, if I am a baby who likes my head up, and my nest gets upended, I will not know, being a baby and stuck in a cocoon of goo, but will be conscious enough to claw my way around to have my head up, which is actually down.”
Huh.
We went over to the Chinatown YMCA. I wasn’t big enough to need a maternity suit last summer, and just never got one, and couldn’t find one to borrow, so putting together the swimming outfit was going to be a challenge.
I ended up with a bikini top I have that ties rather than clasps, some boy shorts which are my normal bottoms but worn a little lower, and a t-shirt over it. We don’t, though, have a full length mirror in our house, so seeing my, uh, splendorous body in the mirror at the Y was really something! I think that I gasped. Everyone at the pool was very tolerant and tried not to stare.
Anyhow, I did a few laps then some headstands, but water does not negate heartburn in the way that it negates weight, and so as the acid started to sizzle my eyes, it was pretty quickly time to get out of there.
If the towels at the Y wrap around you, consider yourself lucky! Well, normal, but I certainly missed that feeling.
CHIROPRACTOR (The Webster Technique)
Rather than in needles, the acupuncturist seemed to put most of her baby-flipping faith in moxibustion and in something called the Webster Technique, which is a thing that chiropractors do with ligaments connected to your hips to ensure that a breech baby has enough space to get head down. The acupuncturist actually shares space with a chiropractor but suggested I go to a specialist in Park Slope.
For some reason, I have always been suspicious of chiropractic endeavors though I am, if not the first, definitely not last in line to sign up for other hocus pocus. But I’ve had the experience with some acupuncturists and it has been my impression of chiropractors that what they REALLY want to do is get you to commit to going twice a week for the rest of your life. So you can pay them a lot? And to do this, they ask just a few targeted questions before telling you that your life is going to hell in a handbasket.
But I trust the acupuncturist I see now and wanted to give this a try, so I called and set up an appointment with the chiropractor. I was told it would take alternating sessions – regular adjustment, then Webster Technique, regular, then, etc. I made an appointment for the next day.
My jury remains on whether chiropractic stuff is brilliant or bullshit. I met the woman, she looked at my posture, I got on her table belly down on a maternity-style pillow with a stomach cut out, I felt horrible in that position but she told me it wouldn’t take long.
First, she touched my back for a second. Like you’d expect a chiropractor too, right? Right before they started crunching you and twisting you around? But then she quickly moved her hands down and got to business in my, uh, butt crack. Or gluteal cleavage, as they say in the bodywork business. This part of me was wholly clothed in corduroy pants, but I can’t describe what she did to me in any better terms than . . . slowly stroking up and down my butt crack. Sorry – ahem. Gluteal cleavage. She did, to her credit, briefly acknowledge that it was an unusual place to pet me. Then she would do a rapid hand movement that felt like nothing more or nothing less than she was picking up and flicking away a piece of lint.
From my butt crack.
In order to turn my baby.
There was no crunching, twisting, aligning. It was just energy work. When I left I called my husband, who expressed concern that I was getting all sorts of things done that he figured might harm an otherwise healthy baby. A valid concern, but I tried to explain to him that she just lightly stroked my buttcrack and then picked lint off of me. I cannot remember whether or not I mentioned the fact that it cost $175. But he asked me to PLEASE call the obstetrician to get this okayed. This time, I got a different of the 3 docs on the phone, who said that as long as she didn’t manipulate my belly, it was ok with them.
I saw the chiropractor again the next day when she did the actual Webster Technique. This time I had to lay on my back (also very uncomfortable) but she stuck her finger into my -- sort of in between my abdomen and my hip crease. On my right side. For a matter of seconds. Then she released it and sent me home.
I was ready to never go back. And I didn’t.
WHAT NOW?
The baby still had a hard round spot crammed up under my right ribs and I thought we had failed. It was time to go back to the obstetrician, but I wasn't that interested in the versioning. I wholly expected the obstetricians to try to talk me into it, but it was just the opposite. The one I saw for my next appointment said he’d schedule if it I like, but he also told me that in my situation he’d never opt for it.
I was glad to hear this – because one thing I’d learned through all of the breech madness is that my MOTHER had experienced a versioning on the day I was born.
She went into labor at 43 weeks and when the dr. poked around and determined that I was still breech, he called in a very large nurse.
Now, my father had asked to be present at the birth – unusual for that time period. And he hadn’t seen my sister be born 5 years previous, so when he saw a gigantic, Brunhilda-ish nurse climb on top of the table where my mother lay, and straddle her, begin to push on the bump, he figured that this was a part of all births. (No one had mentioned to him that I was breech.) Because of my mom's experience, I should at least be willing to try it if it was recommended. I apparently was squooshed into a better launch position and born vertex -- ie, head down. I thought that both she and the OBs would figure I should try it.
As it turns out, my mom's scenario with me went as good as it could have. Versionings are now done at 37 weeks, which is an acceptable time to be born, but not an ideal one.
If the baby wanted to or could turn, I thought, it would. I wasn't sure about forcing it. I talked with my mom, who absolutely agreed. And then, the obstetrician I saw that day decided to put a c-section on the calendar for 39 weeks. C-sections are things that typically make women feel bad. Bad in a way because someone slices through their tummy muscles -- but more than that -- emotionally put through the ringer. People feel like failures because of something that I actually feel we should be happy was invented -- it's a procedure that keeps death from childbirth at a FAR lower rate that used to be. It is not what I had pictured, but I had talked myself into the fact that if I needed a c-section, then that would be okay. I sort of refuse to be a woman who feels bad about something that I can't help.
But then he did a sonogram, and alas, baby was head down!
Not to switch gears so fast, but it wouldn’t stay that way, of course. Big baby, schmig baby. It swam around and about for the next several weeks. Now I am at 39 weeks and as of last appointment, was head down, so I did not go through with the scheduled c-section, which would have been on Friday.
There have been other excitements in the pregnancy, which will come in the next post. But as for breech, I will check in again at the OB in a few hours and we will see!
Lots of people don’t know that much about their own births. Because my mom has always told me the story of my birth on my birthday – with great warmth and fondness, no less, bless her, I have always known a few key things about mine.
1. I was huge -- 2 oz shy of 10 lbs. This, owing to the fact that
2. I was three weeks late, which they would never let happen today, especially if
3. A baby is breech, or with its head up rather than down, which I was.
So. I’ve always viewed my mother as sort of a superhero for various reasons, but when I think about these facts, especially. And I’ve always been sort of proud of the breech detail – in the same sort of way that I like that I am left-handed.
However.
The obstetrician confirmed the other day that the large round place which, depending on the moment, is either nesting comfortably near or chipping painfully up against the ribs on my right hand side – the spot that if I scratch it, lightly, produces a referred flutter of movement low, low in my pelvis – was a head. My sister had been speculating that it was a bottom up there, and that when I scratched it, I got punches in my lower abdomen. But it’s a head rather than a bottom, which is the other big round hard sticky outy part that babies have got.
That means that the head is up, which means that the baby is not head down. These days, being head down is a pre-requisite for being born through the most obvious exit.
(Obstetricians used to be trained to deliver breech babies, but that is no longer standard practice – these days, if a baby is head down at the time when a mom-to-be goes into a labor or need to be induced, the solution is a c-section.)
I was told that one way to deal is to see an expert in turning at the hospital. Apparently, just as they sent us to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital to see a specialist in doing amniocenteses, they have a special who does something called a “versioning,” which basically means that this person is specially trained to manipulate the position of a baby inside of a person from outside of the person’s stomach. By pushing. It's generally done at 37 weeks, and may or may not include its own epidural: it doesn't feel good. It can result in placental tears, and emergency Caesarian section, and bruising to the mother, and I would think, discomfort for the baby.
I asked whether there was anything I could do to try to change the position of the baby.
There are three obstetricians in our practice and the 3 docs within have very different modes of operating. Counter to the way I often fee, I like and trust all of them but the one I was with that day is clearly the least amenable to say, woowoo practices, like the hiring of a doula. He told me: “WELL. If I were a midwife – which I am clearly not – I might tell you to get your hips up off of the ground several times a day to let the baby turn. Other people recommend acupuncture. I’ve never seen any of these things work. But these are the things that people try.”
The versioning sounded frankly terrible, so I decided to pull out all of the stops to avoid it. Below, I will detail the hocus pocus we tried to move the baby. And tune in at the bottom to see whether or not it worked!!
THE HOCUS POCUS
MUSIC DOWN THE PANTS
This is the most obvious and easy-to-try-at-home trick: put headphones low, low, low on your belly and wait for the baby to dance down to listen. They definitely do react to music even while still inside – for months this one been expressing opinions about swingtime music, the song Back in the USSR, anything with a blastpunch of happy horns. The problem is that you never know whether the kicking and punching means “more!” or if it means “the outside must be scary. why would you put me through this?” I always prefer to think, “more!,” but the things I listed are all things that I love.
ACUPUNCTURE
I contacted Laurel, an acupuncturist I’ve seen before for help with nausea (and out and out vomiting) in the first trimester. She told me to come on in. She did some points in my feet and elsewhere to help with reflux, but also, burned "moxibustion" sticks near points on my toes to try to encourage turning. Lots and lots of people had recommended this Chinese medicine therapy. I’d heard about Chinese medicine you can put on your toes to make a baby turn and this is the stuff.
Moxibustion sticks are like incense sticks but not as stinky. She burned a few in her office, then she gave me a bunch to take home. At night, M would have me sit in my glider and put my feet on the ottoman and he’d burn it near the "spleen points" on my smallest toes and try get them hot but not burned. And inside I could feel Baby start to flounce and scrabble. And outside I could watch M’s eyes water, not from emotion: from smoke.
The doctors had told us that the baby was really pretty big – possibly too big to turn again, so we didn’t know if it was in vain, but we tried this for several evenings, in conjunction with . . .
YOGA
Laying on your back when pregnant isn’t pleasant –unless you have a thing for being smothered by your own outsize organs. (I would like to say something about my uterus: at one point, I swallowed my pride and asked one of the obstetricians whether it was possible that it had actually expanded to the degree that a portion have climbed to the outside of my ribs. He said, "uh, no." But the head was RIGHT THERE, so that is to give you an idea of the size.) And laying on the back is bad for circulation, so it’s bad for baby, but like many things about pregnancy – like nutrition – the mother’s health gets compromised first. Ie, a pregnant person would puke or pass out before anything happened to the baby. But my yoga friend / teacher Marisa came over with a bunch of information and some hilarious props and we did a supported bridge – an arching pose we’ve avoided during pregnancy except for in this situation. But she’d checked it out and it was the solution, plus she was monitoring me and the OB had basically mentioned it. And it's not dissimilar from the old “propping the ironing board up on the couch and laying with your head down and feet up” that people recommend for turning breech babies.
Anyhow we tried this after some chanting of things to activate certain chakras and also, playing a little gong she brought over. It was great. There we were, pulling out all of the stops! The supported bridge made me immediately clammy and nauseous, though, and I had to roll off and we put me into the supported chauvasana that makes me nap and snore and smile. In contrast to the supported bridge, it is pretty much the most comfortable I pretty much ever get during pregnancy. This is not a picture of me but it shows you the position. If you are pregnant and can’t get comfortable, I recommend a yoga session ending with this!
HEADSTANDS IN THE POOL
This is another thing that was highly recommended by many people as helping out with flipping a baby, with no real logic provided, but it’s hard not to try to think about the logic, and this is all I can come up with: “well, if I am a baby who likes my head up, and my nest gets upended, I will not know, being a baby and stuck in a cocoon of goo, but will be conscious enough to claw my way around to have my head up, which is actually down.”
Huh.
We went over to the Chinatown YMCA. I wasn’t big enough to need a maternity suit last summer, and just never got one, and couldn’t find one to borrow, so putting together the swimming outfit was going to be a challenge.
I ended up with a bikini top I have that ties rather than clasps, some boy shorts which are my normal bottoms but worn a little lower, and a t-shirt over it. We don’t, though, have a full length mirror in our house, so seeing my, uh, splendorous body in the mirror at the Y was really something! I think that I gasped. Everyone at the pool was very tolerant and tried not to stare.
Anyhow, I did a few laps then some headstands, but water does not negate heartburn in the way that it negates weight, and so as the acid started to sizzle my eyes, it was pretty quickly time to get out of there.
If the towels at the Y wrap around you, consider yourself lucky! Well, normal, but I certainly missed that feeling.
CHIROPRACTOR (The Webster Technique)
Rather than in needles, the acupuncturist seemed to put most of her baby-flipping faith in moxibustion and in something called the Webster Technique, which is a thing that chiropractors do with ligaments connected to your hips to ensure that a breech baby has enough space to get head down. The acupuncturist actually shares space with a chiropractor but suggested I go to a specialist in Park Slope.
For some reason, I have always been suspicious of chiropractic endeavors though I am, if not the first, definitely not last in line to sign up for other hocus pocus. But I’ve had the experience with some acupuncturists and it has been my impression of chiropractors that what they REALLY want to do is get you to commit to going twice a week for the rest of your life. So you can pay them a lot? And to do this, they ask just a few targeted questions before telling you that your life is going to hell in a handbasket.
But I trust the acupuncturist I see now and wanted to give this a try, so I called and set up an appointment with the chiropractor. I was told it would take alternating sessions – regular adjustment, then Webster Technique, regular, then, etc. I made an appointment for the next day.
My jury remains on whether chiropractic stuff is brilliant or bullshit. I met the woman, she looked at my posture, I got on her table belly down on a maternity-style pillow with a stomach cut out, I felt horrible in that position but she told me it wouldn’t take long.
First, she touched my back for a second. Like you’d expect a chiropractor too, right? Right before they started crunching you and twisting you around? But then she quickly moved her hands down and got to business in my, uh, butt crack. Or gluteal cleavage, as they say in the bodywork business. This part of me was wholly clothed in corduroy pants, but I can’t describe what she did to me in any better terms than . . . slowly stroking up and down my butt crack. Sorry – ahem. Gluteal cleavage. She did, to her credit, briefly acknowledge that it was an unusual place to pet me. Then she would do a rapid hand movement that felt like nothing more or nothing less than she was picking up and flicking away a piece of lint.
From my butt crack.
In order to turn my baby.
There was no crunching, twisting, aligning. It was just energy work. When I left I called my husband, who expressed concern that I was getting all sorts of things done that he figured might harm an otherwise healthy baby. A valid concern, but I tried to explain to him that she just lightly stroked my buttcrack and then picked lint off of me. I cannot remember whether or not I mentioned the fact that it cost $175. But he asked me to PLEASE call the obstetrician to get this okayed. This time, I got a different of the 3 docs on the phone, who said that as long as she didn’t manipulate my belly, it was ok with them.
I saw the chiropractor again the next day when she did the actual Webster Technique. This time I had to lay on my back (also very uncomfortable) but she stuck her finger into my -- sort of in between my abdomen and my hip crease. On my right side. For a matter of seconds. Then she released it and sent me home.
I was ready to never go back. And I didn’t.
WHAT NOW?
The baby still had a hard round spot crammed up under my right ribs and I thought we had failed. It was time to go back to the obstetrician, but I wasn't that interested in the versioning. I wholly expected the obstetricians to try to talk me into it, but it was just the opposite. The one I saw for my next appointment said he’d schedule if it I like, but he also told me that in my situation he’d never opt for it.
I was glad to hear this – because one thing I’d learned through all of the breech madness is that my MOTHER had experienced a versioning on the day I was born.
She went into labor at 43 weeks and when the dr. poked around and determined that I was still breech, he called in a very large nurse.
Now, my father had asked to be present at the birth – unusual for that time period. And he hadn’t seen my sister be born 5 years previous, so when he saw a gigantic, Brunhilda-ish nurse climb on top of the table where my mother lay, and straddle her, begin to push on the bump, he figured that this was a part of all births. (No one had mentioned to him that I was breech.) Because of my mom's experience, I should at least be willing to try it if it was recommended. I apparently was squooshed into a better launch position and born vertex -- ie, head down. I thought that both she and the OBs would figure I should try it.
As it turns out, my mom's scenario with me went as good as it could have. Versionings are now done at 37 weeks, which is an acceptable time to be born, but not an ideal one.
If the baby wanted to or could turn, I thought, it would. I wasn't sure about forcing it. I talked with my mom, who absolutely agreed. And then, the obstetrician I saw that day decided to put a c-section on the calendar for 39 weeks. C-sections are things that typically make women feel bad. Bad in a way because someone slices through their tummy muscles -- but more than that -- emotionally put through the ringer. People feel like failures because of something that I actually feel we should be happy was invented -- it's a procedure that keeps death from childbirth at a FAR lower rate that used to be. It is not what I had pictured, but I had talked myself into the fact that if I needed a c-section, then that would be okay. I sort of refuse to be a woman who feels bad about something that I can't help.
But then he did a sonogram, and alas, baby was head down!
Not to switch gears so fast, but it wouldn’t stay that way, of course. Big baby, schmig baby. It swam around and about for the next several weeks. Now I am at 39 weeks and as of last appointment, was head down, so I did not go through with the scheduled c-section, which would have been on Friday.
There have been other excitements in the pregnancy, which will come in the next post. But as for breech, I will check in again at the OB in a few hours and we will see!
Friday, January 30, 2009
Antacids!
Every once in a while, we joke about what sort of store we could open out of our apartment.
Some of the stores:
1. Cayenne Pepper For some reason we once acquired 3 bottles in quick succession. Various recipes also required, at around that time, every single kind known to man of paprika –- be it sweet, hot, smoked, etc. -- so the kitchen was awash in containers of red dust of all sorts. However, by putting our mind to it, we’ve managed to eat up a lot of it, and while you should certainly call on us if you need some for a recipe, or expect some to show up in your food if you come over, it no longer seems like a worthwhile business venture.
2. Benjamin Moore sample jars of paint Paint is perhaps the most difficult thing to agree upon in our house, since I like secondary saturated colors and M likes earth tones. Every now and again the twain shall meet, but we find that it requires a heck of a lot of arguments and even more samples. We’ll sell you some, real cheap.
3. Most recently, it's an antacid store. I actually thought the whole store idea was a pretty good framing for a blog piece centered around antacids, but I can feel my pulse escalating just THINKING about someone selling my antacids out from under me. What we might have here is an antacid museum.
Let me explain:
I had a few good weeks in there. They were during the glorious second trimester of pregnancy, which did not start as soon as it was advertised, and also seemed to end somewhat early. But for a few weeks, there was no particular stomach upset.
Heartburn is such a dramatic term for a physical condition, if you stop and really listen to the word. But in a way another way, it seems completely benign. People get heartburn. During childhood, when I watched lots of TV, there were lots of commercials about acid indigestion, with adults waking up in the middle of the night and making theatrical faces.
And as for the commercials I was like, yeah, whatever, I cannot connect with this, in the way that I can connect with, say, the Dow Scrubbing Bubble commercial.
Then a few years, when I was old enough to have developed a sympathetic streak, my mom had really bad heartburn for months on end. I didn’t like that my mom wasn’t feeling well, but she took what seemed to be some intense steps to get out from under the thrall of something I simply couldn’t relate to. For instance, she stopped drinking tea – her favorite -- and started drinking mugsful of – warm water. I was completely confused. Warm water is so much grosser than tea. What’s the point?
I’ll tell you the point. Heartburn is completely abstract -- until you are in it! When you are pregnant, chances are about 70% that you will at some point be in it. Why? Because in addition to growing a giant uterus, all of the organs that normally are in your trunk – stomach, intestines, esophagus – are smushed and there is no room. In addition, you muscles relax, making food sit around in your already compromised belly for longer. For some, this leads to insane levels of farting. I guess I should feel lucky that the accumulated gas buildup in my system pushes upwards. Sometimes, my feet pounding the pavement is enough to send burps roaring up and out. And the last trigger is that during pregnancy, joints loosen. Joints are cartilage. And so is the flap, I think, that normally keeps one’s esophagus closed. And keeping the esophagus closed is like keeping the acid where it should be. When it gets out, it burns. Hence, heartburn.
TUMS
First, I tried Tums. I got one tiny little roll of them. They made me feel better. And I acquired more as I ramped up my habit. I started keeping rolls in various states of chewed through-edness in my pockets, my car, my purse. This is apparently quite common for pregnant ladies.
I don't understand how Tums work – I just know that they are calcium-based and either fruity or minty and cheap and you can get them at nearly any corner store. We took lots of evening walk during the summer and fall and started to refer to certain delis as "Tums stores," since, once I’d passed through the nauseous phase where I ate roll after roll of Mentos, and then chewed through pack after pack of Juicy Fruit, Tums became what we were in search of on the evening walk.
Eventually, I got a bottle of 48. This was the master, and it lived on my nightstand. I sped through the bottle.
You can run into some problems with Tums -- they're pretty unpleasant to upchuck if you take them when it's too late and you’re already too full of acid. And people were starting to tell me that if you take too many, you are defeating the purpose because your stomach will start to make more acid to compensate. Yeah yeah, this is possible, but these people weren't actively suffering from heartburn which dragged them out of bed at night to sit up for several hours, or made them sleep sitting up, or throw up. I often didn't meet the 10/day limit listed on the back, but I always had the tally going in the back of my mind.
Soon, I was onto the bottle with 96! These were extra strength. They were berry flavored. According to the bottle, you're only supposed to take 7 per day. I had about 108 days of pregnancy left at that point. “I wonder whether I could make this bottle last the rest of the time?” I considered it a personal challenge. Not necessarily one that I would undertake – but one that I would think about.
I generally work from home in Brooklyn but one day, I had a meeting at the New York Department of Education as well as a few others, so I went into the city. Normally I would have brought my laptop but I didn't want to be hauling anything around while pregnant, so the sum total of what I brought was a little black purse and my jacket. And most of what was in my little black purse was my giant container of TUMS.
At the end of the day, the container was missing. A few days later, I was talking on the phone with a colleague who had been at the meetings that day. He’s a jokester, and he was one who’d told me that TUMS can affect you badly if you take too many, and he was also one who’d recently had a pregnant wife. I got up my nerve – I knew how silly and paranoid I would look if I was wrong – but I asked whether he had taken them.
He was horrified. Both at the suggestion that he was take TUMS from a pregnant woman, but probably also at my level of desperation. He insisted we terminate the phone call and that I go out and get another huge container of them, right then and there.
I also tried Rolaids at around this time. I only crunched my way through one pack so I don’t think they get their own section. “Less chalky,” said a teenaged girl at a suburban gas station who sold them to me. What are suburban teenaged girls doing with acid indigestion? Poor baby. But I tried them and they were alright.
When I confessed to my obstetrician that I told her that I had a constant tally of how many TUMS I could take during a 24 hour period, she suggested a more proactive approach to acid. “How about Zantac?”
ZANTAC
I will never forget the first night I tried it. I was with my husband and we’d been out swimming after work. He was trying to tell me a funny story on the way home but I wanted to steer the car into a pole to end our lives right then and there, is how crabby I felt, because of my throat and the burning seeping up into it. I was able to maintain a dim grasp on reality for long enough to force him to leap out and go into a pharmacy where he came out with a pack of Zantac 150. We came home and ate whatever we were going to eat. As I recall, it might have been some horribly acidic (to a member of the ranks of the afflicted) turkey and tomatillo chile that I make that you might find enjoyable, as I used to, before I realized that it could also take the paint off of the walls, acidwise. And I think we were watching a Buster Keaton movie called “The General.” I sat up at straight as possible and prepared to eat. Right before I did so, I took the tiny, five-sided minty pill with the active ingredient called Ranitidine.
And my life totally changed. Within about 4 minutes, I felt like a happy, healthy, normal girl without fire in her throat and thoughts of arson in her head. The change was so extreme that I could only wonder what HAVOC this medicine was wreaking on me.
We had a pretty good run of it, Zantac and me. I tried to sell everyone I knew on what seemed to be a wonderdrug. About a week later, I realized that I was having irregular heart palpitations. And that my vision was blurred. I looked up the side effect and . . . I knew it! Like all of the pleasure that crack or crystal meth is supposed to afford that first time around, it’s just too good to be truly, uh, good. But I was so hooked that when I explained to a friend that Zantac had changed my life, and that though it gave me blurred vision and a weird heart, she laughed at how extreme of symptoms I was willing to put up with, I realized how intense it was. I got sick a day that week and went off Zantac.
“Mylanta,” my mom suggested.
MYLANTA
It was during a meeting of our tiny Brooklyn community association that I knew I needed a new form of help. At first, it was everything a community meeting should be – held in the basement of a Mormon church on a rainy Thursday night. In fact we’d been so excited for the meeting that we’d put off seeing friends from Texas until the next night. We were meeting our neighbors and eating oreos and talking about the feral cat problem and how to support local businesses. It was pouring rain and getting there yielded wet ankles for all the neighbors, since many of the corners were flooded with water that wasn’t able to get into the sewers due to too many leave. Never mind, the sanitation dept. had come out to the meeting to discuss our problems, as well as the policeman responsible for our part of town, who drives around fighting crime in a tiny three-wheeled box that probably can’t even go on the highway. I have no idea what he’d do if he trapped an actual criminal – it doesn’t seem that a criminal of normal dimensions and a police officer could both fit into the box.
Anyhow, we had to abruptly leave the meeting because no matter how straight I sat, my throat, like the local sewers, could not cope with the sheer quantity of acid bathing it from the inside.
“Mylanta,” I sat there inwardly chanting. “This is the night.” I’d done my research on what to get on the web. We crept out of the meeting. We needed dinner started, and it was dreadfully rainy, and we had only one umbrella with us, there were oreos crumbs bathed in acid creeping back up into my throat, and I needed Mylanta.
We went out of the way to the favorite local deli run by Mexicans, who only carried the liquid kind. I needed the other kind, that you chew. That M sent me, a wife increasingly dyspeptic in both senses, home with the umbrella and sloshed exposed to the unpleasant elements and in his work clothes, to an obscure, late-night, well-stocked Bangladeshi pharmacy to get me some baby blue minty Mylanta tablets, is proof of how much he loves me. The man should have a cape with an M on it. M for Mylanta. M for M.
Calcified foodstuffs and I have been at war for a while. But for the first few days, I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.
“Yum, honey!!” I would shout through a mouthful. “We could chop this stuff up and put it on ice cream – seriously!”
Just typing that now makes me gag. At a certain point, I hit the wall. I’d like to be able to remember and say the pithy saying about love being fickle, but I am too pregnant for my brain to achieve that sort of targeted recall; please recite the saying to yourself.
PAPAYA
I learned in the self-satisfied birthing class we took a class at an institution I find incredibly annoying because 1. They try to convince you that your obstetrician, should you have one, is likely out to get you to make bad decisions and 2. They make pregnant women – sit on the floor for 3 hour classes. As if a normal 37 year old could withstand that sort of torture. However, I really did like our teacher.
Anyhow – to start that sentence over: I learned that papaya tablets are supposed to be helpful in managing heartburn. Naturally. “Naturally!” I thought. I thought that my whole life was going to be better / different.
I picked some out at the health food store. The label said to check with a health care provider so I called my sister in law who is a nurse practitioner, naturopath, and pregnant. She also has really sucky heartburn so I knew I would have her ear. She thought it sounded good.
I take about 3 after each meal and it does quell the hiccups. But it didn’t fix it. Plus, I read that too much unripe papaya early on can trigger early labor.
On to the big guns . . .
PRILOSEC
Prilosec actually shuts down acid productions. Seems dicey – and the opposite of natural. Isn’t there some reason we need acid? Perhaps not floating up through our burp tubes into our eyeballs – but for digestion? I don’t know.
It doesn’t matter. I would like to work for the company who makes Prilosec. You take a course for 2 weeks, and it gives the esophagus a bit of room to heal. It stops constant burping and hiccupping and it mitigages the need to sleep upright. I would still never do anything so crazy as . . . sit on the couch. That is a position that doesn’t help digestion at all. But Prilosec helps the desperate!
Some of the stores:
1. Cayenne Pepper For some reason we once acquired 3 bottles in quick succession. Various recipes also required, at around that time, every single kind known to man of paprika –- be it sweet, hot, smoked, etc. -- so the kitchen was awash in containers of red dust of all sorts. However, by putting our mind to it, we’ve managed to eat up a lot of it, and while you should certainly call on us if you need some for a recipe, or expect some to show up in your food if you come over, it no longer seems like a worthwhile business venture.
2. Benjamin Moore sample jars of paint Paint is perhaps the most difficult thing to agree upon in our house, since I like secondary saturated colors and M likes earth tones. Every now and again the twain shall meet, but we find that it requires a heck of a lot of arguments and even more samples. We’ll sell you some, real cheap.
3. Most recently, it's an antacid store. I actually thought the whole store idea was a pretty good framing for a blog piece centered around antacids, but I can feel my pulse escalating just THINKING about someone selling my antacids out from under me. What we might have here is an antacid museum.
Let me explain:
I had a few good weeks in there. They were during the glorious second trimester of pregnancy, which did not start as soon as it was advertised, and also seemed to end somewhat early. But for a few weeks, there was no particular stomach upset.
Heartburn is such a dramatic term for a physical condition, if you stop and really listen to the word. But in a way another way, it seems completely benign. People get heartburn. During childhood, when I watched lots of TV, there were lots of commercials about acid indigestion, with adults waking up in the middle of the night and making theatrical faces.
And as for the commercials I was like, yeah, whatever, I cannot connect with this, in the way that I can connect with, say, the Dow Scrubbing Bubble commercial.
Then a few years, when I was old enough to have developed a sympathetic streak, my mom had really bad heartburn for months on end. I didn’t like that my mom wasn’t feeling well, but she took what seemed to be some intense steps to get out from under the thrall of something I simply couldn’t relate to. For instance, she stopped drinking tea – her favorite -- and started drinking mugsful of – warm water. I was completely confused. Warm water is so much grosser than tea. What’s the point?
I’ll tell you the point. Heartburn is completely abstract -- until you are in it! When you are pregnant, chances are about 70% that you will at some point be in it. Why? Because in addition to growing a giant uterus, all of the organs that normally are in your trunk – stomach, intestines, esophagus – are smushed and there is no room. In addition, you muscles relax, making food sit around in your already compromised belly for longer. For some, this leads to insane levels of farting. I guess I should feel lucky that the accumulated gas buildup in my system pushes upwards. Sometimes, my feet pounding the pavement is enough to send burps roaring up and out. And the last trigger is that during pregnancy, joints loosen. Joints are cartilage. And so is the flap, I think, that normally keeps one’s esophagus closed. And keeping the esophagus closed is like keeping the acid where it should be. When it gets out, it burns. Hence, heartburn.
TUMS
First, I tried Tums. I got one tiny little roll of them. They made me feel better. And I acquired more as I ramped up my habit. I started keeping rolls in various states of chewed through-edness in my pockets, my car, my purse. This is apparently quite common for pregnant ladies.
I don't understand how Tums work – I just know that they are calcium-based and either fruity or minty and cheap and you can get them at nearly any corner store. We took lots of evening walk during the summer and fall and started to refer to certain delis as "Tums stores," since, once I’d passed through the nauseous phase where I ate roll after roll of Mentos, and then chewed through pack after pack of Juicy Fruit, Tums became what we were in search of on the evening walk.
Eventually, I got a bottle of 48. This was the master, and it lived on my nightstand. I sped through the bottle.
You can run into some problems with Tums -- they're pretty unpleasant to upchuck if you take them when it's too late and you’re already too full of acid. And people were starting to tell me that if you take too many, you are defeating the purpose because your stomach will start to make more acid to compensate. Yeah yeah, this is possible, but these people weren't actively suffering from heartburn which dragged them out of bed at night to sit up for several hours, or made them sleep sitting up, or throw up. I often didn't meet the 10/day limit listed on the back, but I always had the tally going in the back of my mind.
Soon, I was onto the bottle with 96! These were extra strength. They were berry flavored. According to the bottle, you're only supposed to take 7 per day. I had about 108 days of pregnancy left at that point. “I wonder whether I could make this bottle last the rest of the time?” I considered it a personal challenge. Not necessarily one that I would undertake – but one that I would think about.
I generally work from home in Brooklyn but one day, I had a meeting at the New York Department of Education as well as a few others, so I went into the city. Normally I would have brought my laptop but I didn't want to be hauling anything around while pregnant, so the sum total of what I brought was a little black purse and my jacket. And most of what was in my little black purse was my giant container of TUMS.
At the end of the day, the container was missing. A few days later, I was talking on the phone with a colleague who had been at the meetings that day. He’s a jokester, and he was one who’d told me that TUMS can affect you badly if you take too many, and he was also one who’d recently had a pregnant wife. I got up my nerve – I knew how silly and paranoid I would look if I was wrong – but I asked whether he had taken them.
He was horrified. Both at the suggestion that he was take TUMS from a pregnant woman, but probably also at my level of desperation. He insisted we terminate the phone call and that I go out and get another huge container of them, right then and there.
I also tried Rolaids at around this time. I only crunched my way through one pack so I don’t think they get their own section. “Less chalky,” said a teenaged girl at a suburban gas station who sold them to me. What are suburban teenaged girls doing with acid indigestion? Poor baby. But I tried them and they were alright.
When I confessed to my obstetrician that I told her that I had a constant tally of how many TUMS I could take during a 24 hour period, she suggested a more proactive approach to acid. “How about Zantac?”
ZANTAC
I will never forget the first night I tried it. I was with my husband and we’d been out swimming after work. He was trying to tell me a funny story on the way home but I wanted to steer the car into a pole to end our lives right then and there, is how crabby I felt, because of my throat and the burning seeping up into it. I was able to maintain a dim grasp on reality for long enough to force him to leap out and go into a pharmacy where he came out with a pack of Zantac 150. We came home and ate whatever we were going to eat. As I recall, it might have been some horribly acidic (to a member of the ranks of the afflicted) turkey and tomatillo chile that I make that you might find enjoyable, as I used to, before I realized that it could also take the paint off of the walls, acidwise. And I think we were watching a Buster Keaton movie called “The General.” I sat up at straight as possible and prepared to eat. Right before I did so, I took the tiny, five-sided minty pill with the active ingredient called Ranitidine.
And my life totally changed. Within about 4 minutes, I felt like a happy, healthy, normal girl without fire in her throat and thoughts of arson in her head. The change was so extreme that I could only wonder what HAVOC this medicine was wreaking on me.
We had a pretty good run of it, Zantac and me. I tried to sell everyone I knew on what seemed to be a wonderdrug. About a week later, I realized that I was having irregular heart palpitations. And that my vision was blurred. I looked up the side effect and . . . I knew it! Like all of the pleasure that crack or crystal meth is supposed to afford that first time around, it’s just too good to be truly, uh, good. But I was so hooked that when I explained to a friend that Zantac had changed my life, and that though it gave me blurred vision and a weird heart, she laughed at how extreme of symptoms I was willing to put up with, I realized how intense it was. I got sick a day that week and went off Zantac.
“Mylanta,” my mom suggested.
MYLANTA
It was during a meeting of our tiny Brooklyn community association that I knew I needed a new form of help. At first, it was everything a community meeting should be – held in the basement of a Mormon church on a rainy Thursday night. In fact we’d been so excited for the meeting that we’d put off seeing friends from Texas until the next night. We were meeting our neighbors and eating oreos and talking about the feral cat problem and how to support local businesses. It was pouring rain and getting there yielded wet ankles for all the neighbors, since many of the corners were flooded with water that wasn’t able to get into the sewers due to too many leave. Never mind, the sanitation dept. had come out to the meeting to discuss our problems, as well as the policeman responsible for our part of town, who drives around fighting crime in a tiny three-wheeled box that probably can’t even go on the highway. I have no idea what he’d do if he trapped an actual criminal – it doesn’t seem that a criminal of normal dimensions and a police officer could both fit into the box.
Anyhow, we had to abruptly leave the meeting because no matter how straight I sat, my throat, like the local sewers, could not cope with the sheer quantity of acid bathing it from the inside.
“Mylanta,” I sat there inwardly chanting. “This is the night.” I’d done my research on what to get on the web. We crept out of the meeting. We needed dinner started, and it was dreadfully rainy, and we had only one umbrella with us, there were oreos crumbs bathed in acid creeping back up into my throat, and I needed Mylanta.
We went out of the way to the favorite local deli run by Mexicans, who only carried the liquid kind. I needed the other kind, that you chew. That M sent me, a wife increasingly dyspeptic in both senses, home with the umbrella and sloshed exposed to the unpleasant elements and in his work clothes, to an obscure, late-night, well-stocked Bangladeshi pharmacy to get me some baby blue minty Mylanta tablets, is proof of how much he loves me. The man should have a cape with an M on it. M for Mylanta. M for M.
Calcified foodstuffs and I have been at war for a while. But for the first few days, I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.
“Yum, honey!!” I would shout through a mouthful. “We could chop this stuff up and put it on ice cream – seriously!”
Just typing that now makes me gag. At a certain point, I hit the wall. I’d like to be able to remember and say the pithy saying about love being fickle, but I am too pregnant for my brain to achieve that sort of targeted recall; please recite the saying to yourself.
PAPAYA
I learned in the self-satisfied birthing class we took a class at an institution I find incredibly annoying because 1. They try to convince you that your obstetrician, should you have one, is likely out to get you to make bad decisions and 2. They make pregnant women – sit on the floor for 3 hour classes. As if a normal 37 year old could withstand that sort of torture. However, I really did like our teacher.
Anyhow – to start that sentence over: I learned that papaya tablets are supposed to be helpful in managing heartburn. Naturally. “Naturally!” I thought. I thought that my whole life was going to be better / different.
I picked some out at the health food store. The label said to check with a health care provider so I called my sister in law who is a nurse practitioner, naturopath, and pregnant. She also has really sucky heartburn so I knew I would have her ear. She thought it sounded good.
I take about 3 after each meal and it does quell the hiccups. But it didn’t fix it. Plus, I read that too much unripe papaya early on can trigger early labor.
On to the big guns . . .
PRILOSEC
Prilosec actually shuts down acid productions. Seems dicey – and the opposite of natural. Isn’t there some reason we need acid? Perhaps not floating up through our burp tubes into our eyeballs – but for digestion? I don’t know.
It doesn’t matter. I would like to work for the company who makes Prilosec. You take a course for 2 weeks, and it gives the esophagus a bit of room to heal. It stops constant burping and hiccupping and it mitigages the need to sleep upright. I would still never do anything so crazy as . . . sit on the couch. That is a position that doesn’t help digestion at all. But Prilosec helps the desperate!
Friday, December 19, 2008
diary of sick
It would be nice if I could find my cell phone, for a number of reasons. Communicating with the other humans is one. But also, I would like to take a picture of the blackened noodles and former soup that are glude (mispelling but I like it) to the bottom of the pot.
I have a monstrous headcold. On the one hand, it is too bad. On the other, it means I will be sick for a few days, which in the grand scheme is no big deal, because I thought that I was experiencing the rhinitis of pregnancy on a suddenly unbearable scale -- a scale that makes me snore myself awake in terror. And then look over, and see husband hiding with his head in a pillow sandwich with a look of when-will-this-end on his face. Yesterday I thought, and explained very confidently to him, that I simply wouldn't be able to breathe for the next 8 weeks. "Look at my face. My sinuses are swollen. This is because I have 150% the amount of blood of a normal human. This is just something that happens." But then I actually got sick, like the kind where there is one eye leaking all over whatever it's poised over. And as poopy as I feel, I'm sort of relieved that this is an acute condition rather than a chronic one.
Anyhow for most of the hours in the day today I didn't manage to get out of bed or to eat, other than to nibble on the cookies that the yoga instructor brought over yesterday. (I have the same dealer for cookies and yoga -- it's really a best-of-both-worlds situation.)
Anyhow in the fridge there was a pot with some big brand name chicken soup I had made from a packet a few days ago, and there was a tiny bit left over and I decided to heat it up. So I put it on a burner turned to medium in the kitchen. Then my brother in law called and I hung out in the bedroom talking to him for oh, about a half an hour, because we had a lot to discuss, like batman pajamas, and how he'd just received the Salt Lick barbeque we'd had delivered to his house as his Christmas present.
At this point in the story, I am about as offtrack as I was regarding the soup I was heating up. Or, what had become, by that point, the Burning Solid that was the Former Soup.
Because of how we are housing multiple cats who think they are on a reality tv show, or that they are perhaps outside cats, we have to keep the door between the bedroom and the front of the house closed in order to avoid scary acts of cannibalism. So the door closed in combi with an apparent lack of batteries in the fire alarm and my whopper of a headcold meant that I did not see or hear or smell or otherwise realize that the whole front of the house was was full of a throbbing gray cloud of noodle smoke. I actually believe that the noodles must've caught fire because they are whollu black, as is the entire inside of the pot.
I wish I could show you a picture.
Anyhow I was forced to open all of the windows in the front of the house and come up with a new sequestering plan for the wild animals so we could all coexist in the back of the house.
And through this I persisted in having nothing to eat. Since it's wildly snowy outside, I resorted to ordering food from the mediocre place on the main street in our neighborhood that caters to kids by serving things like popcorn. I'm not against popcorn, my any means, but a restaurant cannot live by schtick alone. I just wish that the stuffed mushrooms I ordered were as superlative as my stuffed head.
I have a monstrous headcold. On the one hand, it is too bad. On the other, it means I will be sick for a few days, which in the grand scheme is no big deal, because I thought that I was experiencing the rhinitis of pregnancy on a suddenly unbearable scale -- a scale that makes me snore myself awake in terror. And then look over, and see husband hiding with his head in a pillow sandwich with a look of when-will-this-end on his face. Yesterday I thought, and explained very confidently to him, that I simply wouldn't be able to breathe for the next 8 weeks. "Look at my face. My sinuses are swollen. This is because I have 150% the amount of blood of a normal human. This is just something that happens." But then I actually got sick, like the kind where there is one eye leaking all over whatever it's poised over. And as poopy as I feel, I'm sort of relieved that this is an acute condition rather than a chronic one.
Anyhow for most of the hours in the day today I didn't manage to get out of bed or to eat, other than to nibble on the cookies that the yoga instructor brought over yesterday. (I have the same dealer for cookies and yoga -- it's really a best-of-both-worlds situation.)
Anyhow in the fridge there was a pot with some big brand name chicken soup I had made from a packet a few days ago, and there was a tiny bit left over and I decided to heat it up. So I put it on a burner turned to medium in the kitchen. Then my brother in law called and I hung out in the bedroom talking to him for oh, about a half an hour, because we had a lot to discuss, like batman pajamas, and how he'd just received the Salt Lick barbeque we'd had delivered to his house as his Christmas present.
At this point in the story, I am about as offtrack as I was regarding the soup I was heating up. Or, what had become, by that point, the Burning Solid that was the Former Soup.
Because of how we are housing multiple cats who think they are on a reality tv show, or that they are perhaps outside cats, we have to keep the door between the bedroom and the front of the house closed in order to avoid scary acts of cannibalism. So the door closed in combi with an apparent lack of batteries in the fire alarm and my whopper of a headcold meant that I did not see or hear or smell or otherwise realize that the whole front of the house was was full of a throbbing gray cloud of noodle smoke. I actually believe that the noodles must've caught fire because they are whollu black, as is the entire inside of the pot.
I wish I could show you a picture.
Anyhow I was forced to open all of the windows in the front of the house and come up with a new sequestering plan for the wild animals so we could all coexist in the back of the house.
And through this I persisted in having nothing to eat. Since it's wildly snowy outside, I resorted to ordering food from the mediocre place on the main street in our neighborhood that caters to kids by serving things like popcorn. I'm not against popcorn, my any means, but a restaurant cannot live by schtick alone. I just wish that the stuffed mushrooms I ordered were as superlative as my stuffed head.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
The Big Show?
I realize that I said I look ready for the big show, which I remembered, overnight, pertains to baseball.
To clarify, in case it needs to be clarified: I am not, nor do I look, ready for baseball.
Whaleball, or floatball, or napball, perhaps.
To clarify, in case it needs to be clarified: I am not, nor do I look, ready for baseball.
Whaleball, or floatball, or napball, perhaps.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Plateau?
Have we talked about how big the baby is? And as the vessel, how big I am?
We were told at the dr. that we are "a week ahead," meaning . . . what? That the baby is out of the average range for this period of time? Does it mean that it will also come out early?
We are glad that it's big. At our first dr.'s visit ever, when it was not even supposed to be the size of a raisin -- maybe sort of more like a currant -- it tracked 2 days behind what is should have, sizewise, and while I didn't lose sleep over this, necessarily, I was not happy. Our project was not even a whole currant yet -- should we panic?
I was nearly a ten pounder, myself, and having an underweight zygote or whatever the science word is just didn't seem right. Ever since, we've been catching up by leaps and bounds. The next time was 3 days ahead, then 5. Then they stop telling you you are ahead, but you get a length or a weight. When I get a metric, I clock it against a chart and lately, we're been one, then 2 weeks ahead of the average. But that's the average, right? And that takes into account people from . . . wherever people are sort of small. And the dr. never commented on it -- until she said we were big. And when I went home and looked at the chart after that, we were suddenly 3 weeks above the average.
We prefer a leg-bone length that indicates a future in basketball to slick and little like a weasel, if we can infer that bone length correlates to robustness.
Plus, like half of what they calculate on is head circumference, and my niece, who was at 25th percentile of overall size after she was born, was at 95th percentile of head circumference. Getting a shirt over it is still somewhat of a battle.
Whatever the case, I am only 7 months along and starting to look ready for The Big Show. "Looks like someone is just about to have a baby," said the woman at a supermarket this weekend. And suddenly the other day, I caught my husband gaping at my stomach as I changed into my pjs. "It doesn't seem like I should get more pregnant than this, does it?" "No, it really does not," he answered.
Getting bigger is a part of the process, and that is fine. As my friend H who is recovering from the birth of her second said a few days ago, "People are stretchy. Apparently."
Two people (male friends) have suggested this week -- week 32 -- that perhaps I could plateau in terms of size. Like, not get bigger.
The first conversation, which was in my living room:
The second conversation, which was on the phone:
We were told at the dr. that we are "a week ahead," meaning . . . what? That the baby is out of the average range for this period of time? Does it mean that it will also come out early?
We are glad that it's big. At our first dr.'s visit ever, when it was not even supposed to be the size of a raisin -- maybe sort of more like a currant -- it tracked 2 days behind what is should have, sizewise, and while I didn't lose sleep over this, necessarily, I was not happy. Our project was not even a whole currant yet -- should we panic?
I was nearly a ten pounder, myself, and having an underweight zygote or whatever the science word is just didn't seem right. Ever since, we've been catching up by leaps and bounds. The next time was 3 days ahead, then 5. Then they stop telling you you are ahead, but you get a length or a weight. When I get a metric, I clock it against a chart and lately, we're been one, then 2 weeks ahead of the average. But that's the average, right? And that takes into account people from . . . wherever people are sort of small. And the dr. never commented on it -- until she said we were big. And when I went home and looked at the chart after that, we were suddenly 3 weeks above the average.
We prefer a leg-bone length that indicates a future in basketball to slick and little like a weasel, if we can infer that bone length correlates to robustness.
Plus, like half of what they calculate on is head circumference, and my niece, who was at 25th percentile of overall size after she was born, was at 95th percentile of head circumference. Getting a shirt over it is still somewhat of a battle.
Whatever the case, I am only 7 months along and starting to look ready for The Big Show. "Looks like someone is just about to have a baby," said the woman at a supermarket this weekend. And suddenly the other day, I caught my husband gaping at my stomach as I changed into my pjs. "It doesn't seem like I should get more pregnant than this, does it?" "No, it really does not," he answered.
Getting bigger is a part of the process, and that is fine. As my friend H who is recovering from the birth of her second said a few days ago, "People are stretchy. Apparently."
Two people (male friends) have suggested this week -- week 32 -- that perhaps I could plateau in terms of size. Like, not get bigger.
The first conversation, which was in my living room:
friend with red hair: You are BIG in your belly.
me: Mm. And I have 2 more months to go before I'm done.
friend with red hair: Huh. Maybe you'll plateau. Don't women sort of plateau? Maybe you'll plateau.
me: That'd be great. You'll have to excuse me, I have to go take off these pants so I can breathe better.
The second conversation, which was on the phone:
friend from college: I like your MyFace picture. (get it?)
me: Thanks. That's from 2 months ago. I'd like to update but don't know that there are good pictures to be taken anymore. I'm huge.
friend from college: Maybe you'll plateau -- don't women plateau?
me: That'd be great.
friend from college: I love how radiant pregnant women are. For most of the time -- til the end, when they look all waxy and misshapen and their eyes and their nose don't match and their nose and their mouths don't match and they are like aliens. At that point, I want to follow them around with a camera.
me: Huh.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Rules
My husband and I have been going to Connecticut every other weekend to spend time with my sister, who has ALS, and help out her family. There are a lot of people who need care in that house. My brother in law has been amazing but he is the breadwinner, has 2 kids, and has a very sick wife. He has help from my parents, aunts, uncles, as well as VNA and hospice workers as well as caregivers, but it's a huge amount to organize and he also needs a break every now and again. He's 40 and sort of a superhero but my parents are over 70 and also burned out. We have finally set up a system wherein I am there every other weekend, and Matthew mostly comes with me because he can really help in ways I can't anymore since getting pregnant. (I can't lift much weight.)
For us, there is the travel and the emotions that go along with seeing someone we love so ill. There is the work associated with caring for someone very sick. And then, there are the kids.
Now, anyone who knows me knows that I ADORE these kids. My nephew, who is 8, is smart and creative and as handsome as the day is long.
He is also a full-throttle maniac. He sometimes (always) requires an extra couple of hands at school to keep him on task or ease him through transitions. Not because he's academically challenged, but because making monkey noises is so irresistible that he might have a hard time transitioning to the next part of the school day. And a constant backdrop of his monkey noises, or whatever he's doing that day, can prove academically challenging for his peers.
But he is superlative in enough ways that when I am not considering having him arrested, I am usually surprised and delighted by him. He's the sort of kid who, until recently, wore a Superman costume whenever possible. If there was no one around to help him get it on, he'd just carry it in a bag. When you play a game with him, he isn't interested in the rules as written, but he likes to make up his own. It's not that the games he makes up are, uh, good -- but this is okay because he's not yet aiming for a job at Hasbro -- but it's interesting to watch him relate to the world.
Once, when the topic of kickball came up, he scorned playing and made up a game called "kick catch" on the fly. And then forced us all to play. This started with him standing in his red cape on a stone wall, and instead of running at the ball, he stood static and flailed his little leg out, nearly upending himself. To his highly athletic, non cape-wearing cousin who was over that day, a lovely, well-adjusted kid who is a true team player and excels at sports, this whole show was very confusing. But to me, an adoring aunt who always hated kickball and wishes she'd had the chutzpah to wear whatever and make up her own rules instead, it's a sign of brilliance. Creativity. A welcome iconoclasm.
Over the summer I also witnessed my nephew building sand castles with a little girl. His structures were too close to the shore and got systematically demolished by waves. Instead of changing strategy, he dug in and changed the rules. "The winner is the person whose castle gets ruined first," he explained with utter conviction. Until that point, I don't even think she was aware that they were playing a game, but suddenly, he was winning it.
When we think about him losing his mom, we are so, so sad. But my husband looks at his character and says -- that kid, he's got a very strong character. That kid is going to be fine. I told my sister about that and she wept and thanked me for passing it on. We worry about him, so much, because especially lately, he is very withdrawn.
My niece, who is a piece of glitter on the face of humanity, is 3. Cheerful and loving, she differs from her brother in that she almost seems to appreciate rules. I recently suggested that we make up a character named "Banana Claus" who was a yellow, fruitlike version of Santa -- as if one needed to explain to you, dear reader. But she wanted no part of that scheme. Santa Claus is red, and he has to do with Christmas, not bananas. I'm not saying it wasn't a stupid idea, but her brother would have at least riffed on it for a while with me.
When she first learned to talk and I used to ask her if she was a SuperBaby, she'd very vigorously shake no and say "NO NOT SUPER JUST A BABY JUST A BABY!!!" She's hardly solemn, it's just that she's just a bit more attached to the frameworks in life that are already set up. In the family, it's sort of assumed that she will go with the flow a bit more, ie, no capes, and that this might make her a happier person overall.
I think that I'm not making her out to be the delight that she is. In the face of Beth's illness, the whole family would have likely scalped one another already if it weren't for her. I don't think she's aware of the pressure of keeping us all cheerful . However, she's beginning to understand that her mother is very ill, judging by the fact that she says things like "Some mommies can walk. My mommy doesn't walk." But this is a new phase, and exploratory. At any rate it hasn't hit her like its hit her brother, who has lost his mom's constant company and also, all of the services which frankly kids need and expect. But little niece is better able to understand her mommy's speech than almost anyone else. She LOVES her mommy and tries to climb all over her. She also wears very precious pink clothing along with spiderman socks and a Darth Vader Mark. So I guess she's not that linear, yet.
Anyhow many weeks ago we had a family outing to go apple picking. It was fantastic. My sister and her husband and their 2 kids and my husband and I took a ferry from Rocky Hill over to Glastonbury. If you haven't seen this part of Connecticut in the fall, you're missing out, because it's basically when it was designed to be showcased. Old colonials in excellent historic colors with wavery glass panes in the windows and pumpkins in the yard, winding roads and hills. We took the "ferry," which is a slatted thing that can hold about 3 cars and costs about 3 dollars and takes about 3 minutes, across the river and wound around more through Glastonbury to the Belltown Hill Orchards.
My sister had come up with the agenda for the day. It was great to get out but she wasn't going to be able to apple pick or navigate the terrain of the trees in her wheelchair. She stayed in the car while Matthew and her husband took the kids on the tractor around to get all of the apples. I took a short tour with them and then went back to hang out in the car. They continued on picking Empires and Fujis. When picking, my nephew kept telling people "you can't eat any until they are washed or paid for!" which is a rule that no one else really followed. (I, for one, hid to eat an apple without reproach.) Afterwards, in the car, we shared apple fritters, then went out for slices of pizza at Luna Pizza in Glastonbury.
We brought a zillion apples home to Brooklyn and then make THE MOST DELICIOUS PIE ever. Well, my husband made it. Pie has a lot of rules surrounding it -- all of baking does -- so I mostly undertake the cooking of savory meals, and leave the pie to him.
What I want ot talk about is my husband -- who is a very reasonable, logical, reporter type -- and his interplay with the kids but specifically my nephew, but that is for another post.
For us, there is the travel and the emotions that go along with seeing someone we love so ill. There is the work associated with caring for someone very sick. And then, there are the kids.
Now, anyone who knows me knows that I ADORE these kids. My nephew, who is 8, is smart and creative and as handsome as the day is long.
He is also a full-throttle maniac. He sometimes (always) requires an extra couple of hands at school to keep him on task or ease him through transitions. Not because he's academically challenged, but because making monkey noises is so irresistible that he might have a hard time transitioning to the next part of the school day. And a constant backdrop of his monkey noises, or whatever he's doing that day, can prove academically challenging for his peers.
But he is superlative in enough ways that when I am not considering having him arrested, I am usually surprised and delighted by him. He's the sort of kid who, until recently, wore a Superman costume whenever possible. If there was no one around to help him get it on, he'd just carry it in a bag. When you play a game with him, he isn't interested in the rules as written, but he likes to make up his own. It's not that the games he makes up are, uh, good -- but this is okay because he's not yet aiming for a job at Hasbro -- but it's interesting to watch him relate to the world.
Once, when the topic of kickball came up, he scorned playing and made up a game called "kick catch" on the fly. And then forced us all to play. This started with him standing in his red cape on a stone wall, and instead of running at the ball, he stood static and flailed his little leg out, nearly upending himself. To his highly athletic, non cape-wearing cousin who was over that day, a lovely, well-adjusted kid who is a true team player and excels at sports, this whole show was very confusing. But to me, an adoring aunt who always hated kickball and wishes she'd had the chutzpah to wear whatever and make up her own rules instead, it's a sign of brilliance. Creativity. A welcome iconoclasm.
Over the summer I also witnessed my nephew building sand castles with a little girl. His structures were too close to the shore and got systematically demolished by waves. Instead of changing strategy, he dug in and changed the rules. "The winner is the person whose castle gets ruined first," he explained with utter conviction. Until that point, I don't even think she was aware that they were playing a game, but suddenly, he was winning it.
When we think about him losing his mom, we are so, so sad. But my husband looks at his character and says -- that kid, he's got a very strong character. That kid is going to be fine. I told my sister about that and she wept and thanked me for passing it on. We worry about him, so much, because especially lately, he is very withdrawn.
My niece, who is a piece of glitter on the face of humanity, is 3. Cheerful and loving, she differs from her brother in that she almost seems to appreciate rules. I recently suggested that we make up a character named "Banana Claus" who was a yellow, fruitlike version of Santa -- as if one needed to explain to you, dear reader. But she wanted no part of that scheme. Santa Claus is red, and he has to do with Christmas, not bananas. I'm not saying it wasn't a stupid idea, but her brother would have at least riffed on it for a while with me.
When she first learned to talk and I used to ask her if she was a SuperBaby, she'd very vigorously shake no and say "NO NOT SUPER JUST A BABY JUST A BABY!!!" She's hardly solemn, it's just that she's just a bit more attached to the frameworks in life that are already set up. In the family, it's sort of assumed that she will go with the flow a bit more, ie, no capes, and that this might make her a happier person overall.
I think that I'm not making her out to be the delight that she is. In the face of Beth's illness, the whole family would have likely scalped one another already if it weren't for her. I don't think she's aware of the pressure of keeping us all cheerful . However, she's beginning to understand that her mother is very ill, judging by the fact that she says things like "Some mommies can walk. My mommy doesn't walk." But this is a new phase, and exploratory. At any rate it hasn't hit her like its hit her brother, who has lost his mom's constant company and also, all of the services which frankly kids need and expect. But little niece is better able to understand her mommy's speech than almost anyone else. She LOVES her mommy and tries to climb all over her. She also wears very precious pink clothing along with spiderman socks and a Darth Vader Mark. So I guess she's not that linear, yet.
Anyhow many weeks ago we had a family outing to go apple picking. It was fantastic. My sister and her husband and their 2 kids and my husband and I took a ferry from Rocky Hill over to Glastonbury. If you haven't seen this part of Connecticut in the fall, you're missing out, because it's basically when it was designed to be showcased. Old colonials in excellent historic colors with wavery glass panes in the windows and pumpkins in the yard, winding roads and hills. We took the "ferry," which is a slatted thing that can hold about 3 cars and costs about 3 dollars and takes about 3 minutes, across the river and wound around more through Glastonbury to the Belltown Hill Orchards.
My sister had come up with the agenda for the day. It was great to get out but she wasn't going to be able to apple pick or navigate the terrain of the trees in her wheelchair. She stayed in the car while Matthew and her husband took the kids on the tractor around to get all of the apples. I took a short tour with them and then went back to hang out in the car. They continued on picking Empires and Fujis. When picking, my nephew kept telling people "you can't eat any until they are washed or paid for!" which is a rule that no one else really followed. (I, for one, hid to eat an apple without reproach.) Afterwards, in the car, we shared apple fritters, then went out for slices of pizza at Luna Pizza in Glastonbury.
We brought a zillion apples home to Brooklyn and then make THE MOST DELICIOUS PIE ever. Well, my husband made it. Pie has a lot of rules surrounding it -- all of baking does -- so I mostly undertake the cooking of savory meals, and leave the pie to him.
What I want ot talk about is my husband -- who is a very reasonable, logical, reporter type -- and his interplay with the kids but specifically my nephew, but that is for another post.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Hunger
This post isn't about how I eat ice cream even when it isn't night. The baby makes do it, but this one isn't about the baby.
Instead, it's about other hungers. Maybe a hunger for connection with another being, or a hunger for being able to effectively help another being, however small. Lately I am too aware of the difference between situations that can be helped or things that cannot.
This is mostly because of my sister is under siege of ALS. It's a disease that, with a medicine costing $1000 / month can sometimes be slowed by a tenth -- but it cannot be banished in any sense. Whereas people whose ticket comes up saying "cancer" can sometimes cobble together a cocktail of hope and technology and diet and luck and come out kicking and even smiling -- if exhausted, in pain, and possibly missing some important body parts -- on the other side. I in no way mean to discount the horrors of cancer -- it's just that ALS is always described as a death sentence. When a person is diagnosed, the neurologist often doesn't give more information than the patient asks for -- because the trajectory is too grim. The introduction of ALS into my life underscores the difference between things that can be helped or things that cannot.
This leads us, if indirectly, into the cat problem.
There is the larger cat problem, which is rampant in our part of Brooklyn. I like to joke that we live on the inskirts of a cat compound, because if you have nothing better to do -- like my cat, Georgekitty -- then you can sit at the window and watch the action all day long. Fat orange stripey Toms looking for females in heat, a couple of new calicos -- one now dead and lying on a lawn -- and the matriarch Bad Seed Kitty, who has a torn ear but keeps watch on the tribes and subtribes all sharing her bloodline. But these brief character sketches don't begin to explain the panoply in the neighborhood, which is (not quickly enough) trying to organize and implement TNR efforts.
Then there is the smaller cat problem, who is me.
To my great horror, I've recently become a gattara -- which is a more interesting, ie, in Italian, way of saying a cat lady.
As my husband likes to point out, we're now on the 3rd I've taken in since I got married -- a year ago.
The first weighed less than a pound and had no eyes. I took it in in the brief time between wedding and honeymoon. Could you resist a howling, mud-covered runt crashing into a fence in the rain in your front yard? I should hope not. Rainy had to be medically boarded while we were in Turkey. I say she -- but it was too tiny for them to actually tell. While we were away, someone who worked at the vet fell in love and when we returned, he adopted her.
The second was just a few months ago. He was laying in our front yard pretending to have a broken leg. (I must have a reputation in the neighborhood, because shortly after we placed that one in a good home, I saw a squirrel running along Newkirk Avenue holding its wrist in an awkward position. I could SWEAR that it was faking a broken wrist to get my attention.)
Most recently started to feed a very small, insistently friendly black and white cat. I'd walk by the giant white creepy house on the corner, which has been for sale for what seems like years. And the little cat would rush out to greet me and cavort around my ankles. Not like the ferals which populate, and populate, and populate, the neighborhood. But this one would walk alongside of me, standing on hind legs, pawing at me with soft white front feet. Like some sort of fabulous circus animal, which I found charming, but also desperate for my attention, which I also respond to.
It seemed reluctant to stray from the while house but one day it followed me 6 whole houses to my own. And galloped up onto the porch. Guiltily, I brought out a dish of food. When it finished, I tried to wash off its face and chest.
I was afraid to have too much to do with this one -- who wants to jeopardize a marriage to a good man because of a dirty little cat? But there it was on the porch, all the time, and the nice thing about it was that it seemed to want attention as much as it wanted food. (Georgekitty, are you reading this???) The neighbors upstairs -- who think I have a problem with cat stealing -- actually urged me to take this one in. They also fell for the fact that it was pathetic and charming in equal measure -- a la Oliver -- but my nickname for her was Scrappy Doo. She's a really striking looking animal -- huge, round, sea green eyes in a face with a black mask and beard. The lightest possible pink nose, with a somewhat dramatic scratch drawn through it from life in the wild.
I did the routine: asked neighbors if it were theirs; called the shelter to see whether it was full, swung it by to see whether there was a chip implanted; got it checked for the basic bad diseases, established it was starving. Oh, and got it unflea-ed. I brought it home and left it in the bathroom in a carrier while it stewed in the de-flea potion. Then I left for the gym.
When I arrived home after the gym to get them for dinner, husband astutely observed:
"There is not only 1 houseguest: there are 2." (He'd had a friend from Berlin arrive that afternoon.)
I'd be leaving the next morning for Connecticut to visit / care for family without him. "I just want to be clear," he said, in his patient, mellifluous radio voice, "that you will be leaving in the morning, and that I will be looking after this rogue cat."
He is not a cat person, per se.
But when I arrived home on Sunday night, he was already thinking up names. Since we're in the process of naming the baby, there are lots of cast-off good names floating about. Champ, CookiePuss, and Oreo are some things we probably will not name the baby but might name the cat.
A sad cat is a fixable entity. Get rid of fleas, worms, mites; get it shots; give it love; fatten it up; find it suitable person and place. Fixing problems feels great and a cat is a manageable problem.
People are always harder than animals. You expect more, you see the nasty parts of yourself reflected in a difficult person. If they can't care for themselves, or won't care for themselves, or give you lip about caring for themselves. The payoff for fixing a human problem is of course bigger.
In my own defense, I also believe in feeding hungry people, but I often have a hard time doing it. Once, when a woman told me she was hungry, I offered her the container of yogurt I was bringing to work to have for breakfast. She scorned me. "I want a nice hot breakfast. Like from McDonald's?" So do I, lady.
Another time I'd bought a banana, a bagel, and a coffee for a man in Fort Greene who asked me for change every morning. Ragged, skinny, darkness in his eyes, he looked like he needed some nourishment but refused the food when I offered it.
So recently when someone asked me for some money on my way out of a banking kiosk, I tried to avoid him. I'd been scolded and followed on the street a few nights before for dismissing him with the word "sorry" when someone asked me for money, and hadn't yet revised my strategy. (He claimed it would be better to say -- "No, I am not going to give you money," than just "sorry." Thoughts on this, anyone? I generally like to keep encounters with strangers brief.) Anyhow I sort of dodged this guy at the bank, when he asked me for money for soup. I was ducking away, when he said, sort of deflated, "or how about a banana?" And this man's true wish for food struck me. We were next to a fruit stand so I took him over and we had a bonanza, starting with a bunch of bananas. "Can I get a container of strawberries, too? What a great day! How about these plums!" I bought him whatever he asked for at the fruit stand and it cost me all of $6 but I got so much more out of it. At the end of the transaction I suggested to him that he get some protein, and I pointed out a container of nuts.
"But I ain't got no teeth, darling!" he said with a big, seemingly genuine smile, flashed to prove his point. He's smarter than I am, because the next time I walked by that bank I looked for him to feed him -- and my own desires.
Instead, it's about other hungers. Maybe a hunger for connection with another being, or a hunger for being able to effectively help another being, however small. Lately I am too aware of the difference between situations that can be helped or things that cannot.
This is mostly because of my sister is under siege of ALS. It's a disease that, with a medicine costing $1000 / month can sometimes be slowed by a tenth -- but it cannot be banished in any sense. Whereas people whose ticket comes up saying "cancer" can sometimes cobble together a cocktail of hope and technology and diet and luck and come out kicking and even smiling -- if exhausted, in pain, and possibly missing some important body parts -- on the other side. I in no way mean to discount the horrors of cancer -- it's just that ALS is always described as a death sentence. When a person is diagnosed, the neurologist often doesn't give more information than the patient asks for -- because the trajectory is too grim. The introduction of ALS into my life underscores the difference between things that can be helped or things that cannot.
This leads us, if indirectly, into the cat problem.
There is the larger cat problem, which is rampant in our part of Brooklyn. I like to joke that we live on the inskirts of a cat compound, because if you have nothing better to do -- like my cat, Georgekitty -- then you can sit at the window and watch the action all day long. Fat orange stripey Toms looking for females in heat, a couple of new calicos -- one now dead and lying on a lawn -- and the matriarch Bad Seed Kitty, who has a torn ear but keeps watch on the tribes and subtribes all sharing her bloodline. But these brief character sketches don't begin to explain the panoply in the neighborhood, which is (not quickly enough) trying to organize and implement TNR efforts.
Then there is the smaller cat problem, who is me.
To my great horror, I've recently become a gattara -- which is a more interesting, ie, in Italian, way of saying a cat lady.
As my husband likes to point out, we're now on the 3rd I've taken in since I got married -- a year ago.
The first weighed less than a pound and had no eyes. I took it in in the brief time between wedding and honeymoon. Could you resist a howling, mud-covered runt crashing into a fence in the rain in your front yard? I should hope not. Rainy had to be medically boarded while we were in Turkey. I say she -- but it was too tiny for them to actually tell. While we were away, someone who worked at the vet fell in love and when we returned, he adopted her.
The second was just a few months ago. He was laying in our front yard pretending to have a broken leg. (I must have a reputation in the neighborhood, because shortly after we placed that one in a good home, I saw a squirrel running along Newkirk Avenue holding its wrist in an awkward position. I could SWEAR that it was faking a broken wrist to get my attention.)
Most recently started to feed a very small, insistently friendly black and white cat. I'd walk by the giant white creepy house on the corner, which has been for sale for what seems like years. And the little cat would rush out to greet me and cavort around my ankles. Not like the ferals which populate, and populate, and populate, the neighborhood. But this one would walk alongside of me, standing on hind legs, pawing at me with soft white front feet. Like some sort of fabulous circus animal, which I found charming, but also desperate for my attention, which I also respond to.
It seemed reluctant to stray from the while house but one day it followed me 6 whole houses to my own. And galloped up onto the porch. Guiltily, I brought out a dish of food. When it finished, I tried to wash off its face and chest.
I was afraid to have too much to do with this one -- who wants to jeopardize a marriage to a good man because of a dirty little cat? But there it was on the porch, all the time, and the nice thing about it was that it seemed to want attention as much as it wanted food. (Georgekitty, are you reading this???) The neighbors upstairs -- who think I have a problem with cat stealing -- actually urged me to take this one in. They also fell for the fact that it was pathetic and charming in equal measure -- a la Oliver -- but my nickname for her was Scrappy Doo. She's a really striking looking animal -- huge, round, sea green eyes in a face with a black mask and beard. The lightest possible pink nose, with a somewhat dramatic scratch drawn through it from life in the wild.
I did the routine: asked neighbors if it were theirs; called the shelter to see whether it was full, swung it by to see whether there was a chip implanted; got it checked for the basic bad diseases, established it was starving. Oh, and got it unflea-ed. I brought it home and left it in the bathroom in a carrier while it stewed in the de-flea potion. Then I left for the gym.
When I arrived home after the gym to get them for dinner, husband astutely observed:
"There is not only 1 houseguest: there are 2." (He'd had a friend from Berlin arrive that afternoon.)
I'd be leaving the next morning for Connecticut to visit / care for family without him. "I just want to be clear," he said, in his patient, mellifluous radio voice, "that you will be leaving in the morning, and that I will be looking after this rogue cat."
He is not a cat person, per se.
But when I arrived home on Sunday night, he was already thinking up names. Since we're in the process of naming the baby, there are lots of cast-off good names floating about. Champ, CookiePuss, and Oreo are some things we probably will not name the baby but might name the cat.
A sad cat is a fixable entity. Get rid of fleas, worms, mites; get it shots; give it love; fatten it up; find it suitable person and place. Fixing problems feels great and a cat is a manageable problem.
People are always harder than animals. You expect more, you see the nasty parts of yourself reflected in a difficult person. If they can't care for themselves, or won't care for themselves, or give you lip about caring for themselves. The payoff for fixing a human problem is of course bigger.
In my own defense, I also believe in feeding hungry people, but I often have a hard time doing it. Once, when a woman told me she was hungry, I offered her the container of yogurt I was bringing to work to have for breakfast. She scorned me. "I want a nice hot breakfast. Like from McDonald's?" So do I, lady.
Another time I'd bought a banana, a bagel, and a coffee for a man in Fort Greene who asked me for change every morning. Ragged, skinny, darkness in his eyes, he looked like he needed some nourishment but refused the food when I offered it.
So recently when someone asked me for some money on my way out of a banking kiosk, I tried to avoid him. I'd been scolded and followed on the street a few nights before for dismissing him with the word "sorry" when someone asked me for money, and hadn't yet revised my strategy. (He claimed it would be better to say -- "No, I am not going to give you money," than just "sorry." Thoughts on this, anyone? I generally like to keep encounters with strangers brief.) Anyhow I sort of dodged this guy at the bank, when he asked me for money for soup. I was ducking away, when he said, sort of deflated, "or how about a banana?" And this man's true wish for food struck me. We were next to a fruit stand so I took him over and we had a bonanza, starting with a bunch of bananas. "Can I get a container of strawberries, too? What a great day! How about these plums!" I bought him whatever he asked for at the fruit stand and it cost me all of $6 but I got so much more out of it. At the end of the transaction I suggested to him that he get some protein, and I pointed out a container of nuts.
"But I ain't got no teeth, darling!" he said with a big, seemingly genuine smile, flashed to prove his point. He's smarter than I am, because the next time I walked by that bank I looked for him to feed him -- and my own desires.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
omg what do we need
for when the baby is just born?
1. name
2. marriage license since husband and i don't have the same last name, yet he would like to lay claim
3. coming home outfit
4. diapers of some sort
5. place for it to sleep
6. food in case the biological method backfires?
7. food delivery mechanism (bottle?)
8. carseat that has been installed into the car by the police or something
This week I'm a little more than 6 months pregnant and I started having these sudden moments where my belly gets really, really hard. These are apparently pre-labor contractions called Braxton Hicks. I have heard about them, of course. Like many things in life, they sound fine and interesting when other people talk about them, but when my tummy is suddenly hard as a rock (quick! bounce a dime off of it!!) they take me by surprise and I feel sort of uncomfortable. It's not pain, it's just a measure of weirdness.
I also read that we're basically at "viability," where the baby would likely survive if born.
The contractions combined with the possibility of actual life is coming together to make me scared that the baby is scheming to get out.
And here on the outside, we don't even have a little suit for it.
We're supposed to have about 3 more months. Well, like 12 more weeks. But multiple people have told me stories about babies born at 7 months. My cousin Susan was born then. And someone else's baby was just born then. It's not impossible, in other words. The time drawing nigh is leading to a mental shift where I'm thinking -- YOU NEED TO GET RID OF AS MANY SHOES AS POSSIBLE NEED TO GET RID OF CLOTHES THAT DON'T FIT MUST PAINT ASSEMBLE CRADLE ETC . . . . .
Normally that voice is not a voice in my head but rather Matthew's actual voice, gently prodding me to be civilized.
Anxiety leading to organizing is called NESTING. It's because I feel a primordial urge to be ready for the baby. WHICH I AM NOT. I have isolated and given away a lot of shoes and clothes (well, put them into the truck of the car, and that is at least away from the living room and my closet, for now) but I do have some basic questions. Anyone who can help answer them, please answer away.
Do I need one of those stretchy gowns with the hand muffs that you see in photos from the hospital, just in case the baby's fingernails have been growing at a similar pace to my own? Which is that every day, I grow a new set of claws.
Or will the hospital dress it in a tiny gown during the time it spends there?
Do we need to bring the world's smallest nail clippers?
Do I need to get it a really small hat?
We're going to drive home in the car. We'll be using a little-used infant car seat from friends (thanks C & M!!) Does it need to already have one of those sleeping bags to snuggle into?
Will the sun get into its eyes and irritate it? Or will it have mettle, like my husband's stock, and its eyes will be fine?
Is the cradle mattress really going to be soft enough? It's like, 1/2 an inch thick. And do I need a "bumper" so the baby doesn't crash into the walls of the cradle?
Cloth or disposable diapers?
What is the correct decision on circumcision? Sometimes, I am sad that my ears are pierced. It doesn't gross me out when other people do it, but for me -- it's not for me. It seems like a fake thing to have done to my head.* So having my possible son's genitalia altered makes me also want to be sure that it's the right thing to do. "DOES IT REPRESENT A COVENANT WITH GOD?" a friend who is not circumcised recently asked. Um, no. "THEN DON'T DO IT." We're not Jewish, so culturally it doesn't matter. I know that there are pros and cons to both. The most immediate pro would be not having someone take my baby away and cut him. But it's obviously more important to look at the big picture, and there are public health issues which would be the main ones we would consider. I actually think that this is husband's decision.
Ladies (and gents), advice appreciated.
Oh--and Matthew dreamt that it would come out with its own perfect name. Barring that actually happening, we are scouring around for fabulous things to name it. We have some ideas, but it seems like such a --- flag to the world. Such a moment of self-definition. I mean. I drive a silverish toyata camry which errs on the side of characterless. Yesterday we walked by a very low slung red and white sports car that was really fun to look at. Sort of ridiculous, but . . . why not? Names are the same, sort of. Fun to have a fast low-slung red one . . . but for every day?
*not that I don't do other fake things to my head without thinking twice
1. name
2. marriage license since husband and i don't have the same last name, yet he would like to lay claim
3. coming home outfit
4. diapers of some sort
5. place for it to sleep
6. food in case the biological method backfires?
7. food delivery mechanism (bottle?)
8. carseat that has been installed into the car by the police or something
This week I'm a little more than 6 months pregnant and I started having these sudden moments where my belly gets really, really hard. These are apparently pre-labor contractions called Braxton Hicks. I have heard about them, of course. Like many things in life, they sound fine and interesting when other people talk about them, but when my tummy is suddenly hard as a rock (quick! bounce a dime off of it!!) they take me by surprise and I feel sort of uncomfortable. It's not pain, it's just a measure of weirdness.
I also read that we're basically at "viability," where the baby would likely survive if born.
The contractions combined with the possibility of actual life is coming together to make me scared that the baby is scheming to get out.
And here on the outside, we don't even have a little suit for it.
We're supposed to have about 3 more months. Well, like 12 more weeks. But multiple people have told me stories about babies born at 7 months. My cousin Susan was born then. And someone else's baby was just born then. It's not impossible, in other words. The time drawing nigh is leading to a mental shift where I'm thinking -- YOU NEED TO GET RID OF AS MANY SHOES AS POSSIBLE NEED TO GET RID OF CLOTHES THAT DON'T FIT MUST PAINT ASSEMBLE CRADLE ETC . . . . .
Normally that voice is not a voice in my head but rather Matthew's actual voice, gently prodding me to be civilized.
Anxiety leading to organizing is called NESTING. It's because I feel a primordial urge to be ready for the baby. WHICH I AM NOT. I have isolated and given away a lot of shoes and clothes (well, put them into the truck of the car, and that is at least away from the living room and my closet, for now) but I do have some basic questions. Anyone who can help answer them, please answer away.
Do I need one of those stretchy gowns with the hand muffs that you see in photos from the hospital, just in case the baby's fingernails have been growing at a similar pace to my own? Which is that every day, I grow a new set of claws.
Or will the hospital dress it in a tiny gown during the time it spends there?
Do we need to bring the world's smallest nail clippers?
Do I need to get it a really small hat?
We're going to drive home in the car. We'll be using a little-used infant car seat from friends (thanks C & M!!) Does it need to already have one of those sleeping bags to snuggle into?
Will the sun get into its eyes and irritate it? Or will it have mettle, like my husband's stock, and its eyes will be fine?
Is the cradle mattress really going to be soft enough? It's like, 1/2 an inch thick. And do I need a "bumper" so the baby doesn't crash into the walls of the cradle?
Cloth or disposable diapers?
What is the correct decision on circumcision? Sometimes, I am sad that my ears are pierced. It doesn't gross me out when other people do it, but for me -- it's not for me. It seems like a fake thing to have done to my head.* So having my possible son's genitalia altered makes me also want to be sure that it's the right thing to do. "DOES IT REPRESENT A COVENANT WITH GOD?" a friend who is not circumcised recently asked. Um, no. "THEN DON'T DO IT." We're not Jewish, so culturally it doesn't matter. I know that there are pros and cons to both. The most immediate pro would be not having someone take my baby away and cut him. But it's obviously more important to look at the big picture, and there are public health issues which would be the main ones we would consider. I actually think that this is husband's decision.
Ladies (and gents), advice appreciated.
Oh--and Matthew dreamt that it would come out with its own perfect name. Barring that actually happening, we are scouring around for fabulous things to name it. We have some ideas, but it seems like such a --- flag to the world. Such a moment of self-definition. I mean. I drive a silverish toyata camry which errs on the side of characterless. Yesterday we walked by a very low slung red and white sports car that was really fun to look at. Sort of ridiculous, but . . . why not? Names are the same, sort of. Fun to have a fast low-slung red one . . . but for every day?
*not that I don't do other fake things to my head without thinking twice
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