The Truth About Having A Baby

I read so many of blogs and Facebook posts about pregnancies, birth stories, and the early days with babies. Everyone seems to have had such lovely experiences. I think that's why I never wrote anything of substance about mine: other than the outcome -- my delightful daughter -- my experiences were not pleasant (understatement of the century). I had a challenging pregnancy; I had a long, painful, and traumatic childbirth experience, the high point of which was the surgical intervention; my first few weeks with my daughter were painful because of complications from surgery and panicked because of breastfeeding difficulties. None of it was pretty, and almost a year after the baby's birth, I am still traumatized.

Don't read any further if you're squeamish.

I want to relate to the people who posed for glowing maternity pictures, in adorable outfits, with their husbands' hands on their cute large-but-not-gigantic abdomens. Then I remember what I looked like, with blotchy skin, feet that stopped fitting into shoes at week 25, and a belly so large that I couldn't even fit into maternity pants at the end.

The best way to explain how uncomfortably huge I got is through this vignette: at 33 weeks, I had to be on an airplane.  I tried to put the tray table down and it didn't fit. I had to ask the person in front of me to refrain from reclining their seat back. Humiliating.

But that was at 33 weeks.  My watermelon belly kept getting bigger and bigger. But wait! It wasn't just a watermelon - it was a watermelon with an angry, violent monkey trapped inside.

There were the colds that didn't stop, repeat sinus infections and UTIs. Eczema on my legs, feet, and hands. Muscle cramps and spasms. Joint pain. Early in my second trimester, I had to pack up boxes in my office, which caused back and hip pain for weeks afterward; it didn't really go away until after I had the baby. I had reflux so bad that I had a hard time sleeping, but that when I did, my nasal congestion made me snore so loudly that my husband couldn't sleep either.

Then my husband came down with shingles, giving me the chicken pox. Of course, that was right before he had to go out of town for five weeks of my third trimester, and I had to go to childbirth class by myself. I was so jealous of all of the other women in that class, with their boyfriends or husbands sitting next to them, holding their hands, practicing their breathing techniques. I cried after every class.

I remember being afraid all the time. At the beginning, I was afraid because we were over 35. And then I had a thyroid disorder diagnosed, so I got to worry about that, too. Then the aforementioned chicken pox, and the worry about complications from the disease or the antiviral medicine that they gave to me.

Oh, and the same week that I came down with the chicken pox? My grandmother fell and broke her shoulder for the second time in three years. I found out about that the day of my glucose test, which, of course, I failed.  Then I couldn't get re-screened until after the chicken pox virus had cleared up, so I spent two weeks worrying more than usual about gestational diabetes.  I was lucky though: the first test wound up being a false positive.

Thanks to all of that -- my advanced age and the medical scares -- I got to have weekly follow up appointments with fetal medicine specialists, where they did ultrasounds. They kept telling me how big my baby was, which made me even more nervous. Late in the pregnancy -- at the end of my husband's five weeks out of town --  those bonus ultrasounds started indicating that my amniotic fluid levels were low, which scared the crap out of me.

A few weeks later, my fluid levels returned to normal. Then, just when it looked like I was in the clear, after I hit 36 weeks and had started to have contractions and dilate, I caught a stomach bug that had me throwing up for days -- and ultimately stopped the progress of my labor. That was the week of the derecho, where there were widespread power outages, temperatures over 100 degrees, and limited air conditioning just about everywhere. In July.

I absolutely hated being pregnant. I hated it so much that I am skeptical of anyone that says otherwise. But no matter how bad pregnancy was, childbirth was far worse. The problem is that by the time you get to it, you are so fed up that you just want the pregnancy to be over, at any price.

Less than 48 hours before labor AND AT WORK!

One year ago today, there I was, giant, uncomfortable, AND AT WORK -- on my due date. Earlier that week, I practically begged the doctor to schedule an induction for the next week, and I was just starting to schedule everything around the induction date.  Three work days left.

And then, out of nowhere, my water breaks. No signs of labor, no contractions. Just sticky fluid trickling down my leg, approximately two hours after my husband had begged me to stay home that day, and approximately 90 minutes after he dropped me off, against his better judgment.

Why did he drop me off? Well, first and foremost, he didn't want to argue with a crazy pregnant lady with cabin fever.  Second, his attempt to bribe me with bagels and lox didn't work.  And last, well, YOU try taking the subway in July when you're 40 weeks pregnant. 

The indignity of it all. Having to call my husband and sheepishly ask him to pick me up after I forced him to take me to work. Having to wrap myself in a pashmina, so no one in my office could tell I was leaking amniotic fluid all over the place. Having to go to the doctor's office so that they could examine me, to tell me what I already knew.

Here's another funny vignette: When we got to the doctor's office, the receptionist told me to sit down. I looked at the chair, I looked at the soggy shawl around my waist, looked at the puddle starting to form on the floor around my filthy flip flops, and I said, "No, I don't think that's a very good idea."

A second funny aside: My husband had been begging me to throw out those filthy flip flops for several weeks, especially after I bought a new pair. But I (smartly, it turned out) told him I wasn't going to wear the new ones, or anything else for that matter, just in case my water broke and ruined my shoes. I finally let my husband throw out the godawful disgusting flip flops when we got to labor and delivery.  He also had to throw out that pashmina.

That actually brings us back to the doctor's office. Over an hour after my water broke, the doctor finally examines me, confirms what we already knew, and calls for a wheelchair to take me over to the hospital, which, thankfully, is next door.  It still took twenty minutes to get a wheelchair, and when I get up off of the exam table to get into the wheelchair, a literal gush of amniotic fluid goes everywhere. I am so mortified.

But they get me to the hospital, get me admitted -- which took way longer than it should have, considering I had completed the pre-admission paperwork weeks earlier -- and get me settled in a room by mid-afternoon.

I was emailing work from the hospital bed.

The next few hours go by as they're hooking me up to IVs and monitors ... and I am still not having contractions. Until the pitocin. YOWZA.

What I remember next is a blur. I remember the good doctor coming to check on me occasionally, and the nurses coming into the room pretty regularly. I remember my husband falling asleep on the futon while we were watching Jeopardy. And then I remember searing pain. But the contractions weren't long or regular enough, so they kept giving me more pitocin, which meant more pain. Finally, sometime during the evening, after my husband had been sleeping for some time, I begged for an epidural. My husband woke up for a few minutes to help me get into position for them to insert the needle. And then, after the epidural, we both fell asleep.

Except my sleep didn't last for long. I kept having very painful contractions, which the epidural was supposed to relieve, but apparently, the epidural only numbed me on one side. So they decided to give me a second one, which still didn't work right. And, you know, it's a hospital, so every time you finally manage to fall asleep, someone comes in to check on you and wakes you up.

At 6 am, the good doctor went home, replaced by the bad doctor, who checked on me exactly once, at the beginning of his shift, before disappearing for the rest of the morning. He did, however, manage to tell me, 18 hours after my water broke, that I was close to having the baby -- seven centimeters. Of course, that was what the nurse had said several hours before. I started crying like I had never cried before. He had the nurse turn up the pitocin.

I started having the shakes. I kept asking for the doctor -- because even a bad doctor is better than no doctor.  Eventually I started crying.  Not the humorous yelling-at-your-husband-mixed-with-tears that they show in the movies or on tv, but the crying of someone who is in agonizing pain and is being ignored by the entire medical staff of the hospital.  Uncontrollable sobbing.  I cried for several hours.

Having read all the books and attended all the childbirth classes, I knew that if your labor has not progressed to a certain point within 24 hours after your water breaks, you are at higher risk for infection. So, 24 hours after my water broke, I got a nurse in my room and begged for a c-section. Except the nurse fought me on it: no one in the hospital even knew that it had been 24 hours, because no one had bothered to write on the chart that my water had broken before I was admitted.  They called in the back-up doctor to try to calm me down, but coincidentally, she happened to be the doctor that had examined me in the office the day before.  She scheduled me for the c-section.

Even after that, it took them a few hours to get me in to the operating room. I was on a lot of drugs. They had to strap me down to the table extra tightly in pre-op, because, by that time, I was having convulsions. But finally, over 26 hours after my water broke, there was a baby.

This baby.

My husband took care of her while they put my innards back where they belonged and patched me up. A few minutes later, we were in recovery, and she was squirming around on my chest trying to breastfeed. The three of us were finally together and everything was calm.

Tiny feet!

Sadly, that was the best breastfeeding experience we ever had.

I was so calm that I sent an email to work from the recovery room.  I still can't believe I did it.

Much of the hospital stay was a blur of trying to sleep, trying to feed the baby, and trying to get up and move around. I was in a lot of pain. I wish I had paid more attention to that, because I thought it was normal.

Day one.

At some point, when the baby was about a day old, the nurses came in and told us that the pediatrician insisted that we give her formula, because she had not yet urinated, and they were worried about her kidney and bladder function. So after a little debate and a lot of tears, we gave her the bottle, which she gulped down like a pro. Fifteen minutes later the nurses were back to tell us that they were just kidding, someone had forgotten to write down in her chart that she had a wet diaper while we were still in the recovery room. So the baby was just fine, but thanks to that bottle, the breastfeeding quickly started to go to hell.

Tiny cuddly monkey baby!

Oh, and that was strike two on the hospital's record keeping.  Way to go, folks.

The baby did okay in the hospital, but we were nursing a lot, and OMIGOD HOLY HELL IT HURT. I called in a lactation consultant, who told me that we were doing everything right. I used their fancy hospital pump, and....nothing.  But I was determined to breastfeed the kiddo, so I shoved my boob in her mouth every time she cried.

She cried a lot.

Not crying...for now.

My husband's mother came up the day before we went home. Then my husband's brother, his girlfriend, and their three kids came the day after we got home. We were 9 people in a two-bedroom condo.  Oh, and one of the toilets wasn't working right.

And we were home for about 5 minutes before the baby peed all over our bed.  Laundry time!

Then the second toilet started leaking into our neighbor's ceiling. Surprise plumbing emergency!

Through all this, I pretty much ate next to nothing, slept next to never, and kept the baby attached to my boobs almost all the time.  By that weekend, the family had left, and my best friend had come in, and I spent the entire visit feeding the baby every 90 minutes. My nipples were bleeding.

I thought she was just a hungry kid. But when we went to the doctor, she was losing weight. We started to give her some formula to supplement. She still wasn't gaining her weight back.

She cried a lot. I cried, a lot.

Lactation consultants. Bonus doctors appointments for both of us, because she wasn't gaining weight and my incision wasn't healing properly.  Extra crying.

Finally, one of the lactation consultants said the most wonderful thing to me. "The first rule of breastfeeding is FEED THE BABY.  Do whatever you need to do to get the baby fed.  This includes formula."

It was like a lightbulb went on: we would supplement more until I could produce more milk.

But, alas, it was a flickering lightbulb in an insane asylum.

I was bound and determined to produce more milk.  I bought every book ever about breastfeeding, rented a hospital pump, and spent hundreds of dollars on herbal supplements and teas. Nothing really worked -- my production was extraordinarily low.

I was out of my fucking mind.  At one of the doctor's visits to check my incision -- which kept opening back up -- I begged the doctor to put me on a prescription medicine that, as a side effect, might increase my milk production.

Thank god she refused.  She told me not to worry, we live in a country with clean water and healthy formula.

I cried on the way home, angry that she didn't give me the drugs. I was still out of my fucking mind.

I broke down in the pediatrician's office. The pediatrician confessed that she gave her kids formula. It didn't really sink in. I fought as hard as I could to get my milk production up.  Nada.  No matter what I did, we wound up having to supplement with formula.  And to me, that was failure.

When my daughter was 12 weeks old, I went back to work -- my incision still not entirely healed -- and my production dropped even lower. I tried to pump more. Then, the baby started rejecting me: the only times she would nurse was when she was too tired to fight -- first thing in the morning, last thing before bedtime, in the middle of the night.  On top of everything else, it hurt my feelings.

I honestly don't know when I finally realized that I was being crazy.  I think it was a gradual understanding.  I do know that, eventually, we got down to just one nursing session each day, first thing in the morning, and that lasted until she got her first tooth at 8 months old -- and bit me with it. (Ouch!)  In retrospect, I can't believe I forced the issue for as long as I did.

Through it all, my husband was incredible: patient, kind, realistic, supportive.  He kept me from crossing the line to full-on crazy countless times.

Now, as I type this, the baby is on the cusp of her first birthday, and people are starting to ask us if we're going to have another.  If I were a smarter person, I would think about this story and say no, definitively. But I keep thinking that my daughter deserves a sibling. And I keep thinking that knowing what I know now, maybe I can do it "right" this time.

Birthday cupcake!

But that might be the crazy talking.