Postpartum Hair Loss Monday, Jan 12 2009

Ah, pregnancy.  Even almost six months after giving birth, you still manage to throw me a curve ball.

I knew that your hair stopped falling out, i.e. grew, more than usual during pregnancy.  But what no one tells you is that more than usual hair follicles go to sleep when your hormones plummet after giving birth.  And when all those follicles wake up again and grow a new hair, the old one falls out.

Thus an awful lot of hair starts falling out anywhere from 1 to 6 months after you give birth.

An awful lot of hair.

Even though I read about this weeks ago, it never prepares me for shampooing or brushing my hair and coming away with long tangles of lost hair wrapped around your fingers.  It’s surreal.

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In 3 Hours… Tuesday, Jul 22 2008

…I have to call labor & delivery to see if they’ll have a bed for me today for an induction.  Yes, that’s 4am.  I’m not particularly thrilled about that.  I’m not particularly thrilled about any of the circumstances, actually.

Tomorrow, I’m only 41 weeks.  That’s not even past term, but I had to argue with my OB to let me go this far – he wanted to induce me before my due date!  I had to argue and fight and read and back out of having one a week ago, it was just too damn early.  I thank God I took that epidemiology master’s course.  It gave me a good understanding of risk as a concept, and helped me differentiate between risk that is in my power to control versus risk that is not.

The risks of induction scare me.  A lot.  There’s risk for the baby, there’s risk for me, there’s a heck of a lot more pain involved.  I’ll have to be continuously monitored, so I won’t be able to walk around.  I’m most comfortable walking generally, and least comfy lying down.  Maybe if I bring donuts the nurses will let me sit calmly on my exercise ball next to the pitocin pump and monitoring apparatus.  But I don’t hold out a lot of hope.

There’s the increased risk of a c-section, which means I’ll never be allowed to have a vaginal birth.

The Husband has had the bad luck to get sick NOW, of all times.  And he never gets sick.  He hasn’t even slept in the same bed as me for the last 2 days.  And they might not let him into the maternity ward, which just breaks my heart.  And frankly, scares the shit out of me, because I need him.  He helps me be better, he always has, and the idea of facing this without him has me in a (carefully concealed) emotional puddle.  Letting him see how much him not being there will bother me just makes him feel worse, and he feels pretty damn miserable as it is.

And people are driving me crazy checking up on me.  For some reason, “we will call when we know ANYTHING” means precisely nothing.  No one trusts us, no one will leave us alone to try and relax in these last few, very stressful, days.  When we manage to forget about the looming medical intervention, someone calls, or IMs, or emails, or smoke signals, or whatever.  I just can’t get away.

But worst of all, I am having contractions.  They just don’t hurt, not usually, or if they do, not very much.  They’ve been going on all week, and I can’t help feeling that if I just had a little more time, things would happen on their own.  And I can’t forgive my body for not cooperating in this.  It took us three tries to keep one, and now he won’t come out.

So right now, the summation of my mental state is:  I can’t sleep because I’m stressed, and I haven’t been sleeping well for the last week.  I’m emotionally lonely, and trying not to show it so it doesn’t make The Husband even more miserable and guilty feeling than he is now.  I’m worried about the legitimate risks of the medical intervention.  I’m contract-y, and achey, and sore.    I’m tired of my uterus not cooperating.  I’m tired of the “this baby, he’s just like his mother” jokes about my procrastination, or my stubbornness, or whatever uncomplimentary trait people choose to twit me about.

I know I can do this.  I made it up to that glacier last summer, I can survive giving birth this summer.  But whoever’s reading this, if you would pray for me tomorrow, I will really, really appreciate it.

[Edit:  Oh, and did I mention there's a tropical storm bearing down on the Texas/Mexico border that has everyone freaked out?]

[Edit 2:  Called at 4am, told to call back at 8:30.  Called at 8:30, told to call back at 10:30.]

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Insomia-Driven Blogging Saturday, Jun 21 2008

The perils of blogging when you can’t sleep are great.  They are orders of magnitude greater when you can’t sleep because something is bothering you.

One friend mentioned that she didn’t really understand what I was getting at in my earlier post.  And while I look back at it, and know what I’m getting at, you have to get inside my head a little to understand it.  Coherence is in low supply at 1am.

The root of the problem, I suppose, is I don’t like my childbirth instructor.  The Husband and I are taking a Bradley Method class, taught by a very well qualified certified nurse midwife, and literally, the only one we could find in our area.  There’s not a lot of interest in or support for drug-free childbirth.  But really, all she does is scare me and stress me out.  Not of the pain implicit in childbirth, but of the nurses, the doctors, the experience of giving birth in a hospital.

I’ve been in academics long enough to know that everyone has an axe to grind, and this is obviously hers.  Rationally, I can grasp that between The Husband and myself, the nurses are not likely to shoot painkillers into my IV while I’m in the middle of a contraction because I’m scaring the rest of the patients, or have The Husband escorted out by security because he stands up for my preferences with which they happen to disagree.  I trust my OB will support me in what I’m doing, and he knows that in return I won’t fight him on something he believes is really medically necessary.

But I’m still pregnant, which doesn’t always translate into rational.  And so I’m scared.  And I try to understand myself better, to understand why I’m being ‘difficult’ about this.  It comes down, ultimately, to the fact that I do not like the feeling of being out of control.  I drink (when unpregnant, please no hate mail!), but I’m rarely worse than tipsy.  My emotions are continually frustrating because they occasionally get the better of me.  But the moments in my life where I feel I willingly relinquished control, when I hurt that badly, stand out vividly in my memory.  And I don’t want to experience that again.

Medically necessary is one thing.  Just because someone else thinks I should is something else altogether.

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…That Doesn’t Mean It Will Hurt Monday, Jun 16 2008

I’ve decided to have this baby without pain medication.  And every time, every single time the concept comes up, I get a universally negative response.  The exchanged looks and facial expressions from the kind.  The confident pronouncements of “oh, you’ll change your mind” or “when those contractions hit, you’ll be begging for the epidural” from the unkind.  And that doesn’t even cover projecting remarks along the lines of “oh, I could never do that, it would hurt too badly.”

Well, I happen to know something about hurting.

One year and eight months before this baby is currently scheduled to make his appearance, I was in the ER.  Earlier that day, I’d been to the doctor.  I’d seen the ultrasound with a dead baby 4 weeks too small in my uterus.  I was scheduled for surgery the next morning, but started to bleed heavily around 1 am.  I did everything my OB wanted in this circumstance.  I saved the tissue and clots that I passed at home and brought them with me.  I went straight to the nearest ER.  I gave the triage person a concise rundown on exactly what was happening – that I was in the middle of a missed miscarriage, that I was scheduled for surgery in 6 hours, that about 15 minutes ago I felt a pop and began bleeding so heavily that I soaked a sanitary napkin in under a minute, and had bled steadily since.

And as I lay in a bed in that ER, the doctor on call walked in and said “So I hear you’ve gotten your period today.”

God help me, but had I been my normal self, I might have assaulted him.  On top of everything else, that doctor made me feel like an idiot, that I had no idea what was happening to me.  But these were not normal circumstances.  I just hurt too badly to do anything but lie there and cry.  I didn’t argue when they gave me 4 mg of morphine.  It wasn’t the physical pain.  Everything that was me hurt.  I’d just had the one thing I knew for certain I wanted in life turned into a source of agony.  I hurt so badly I couldn’t stand being myself at that moment.  I wanted to go away.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back.  

“Wow, I can see why people get addicted to this.”

I said that.  Once they’d determined I wasn’t going to have an allergic reaction to the stuff, they left me there.  No one told me how to call for a nurse if something happened.  Roughly every thirty minutes, The Husband would help me change my thoroughly soaked sanitary napkin, I went through at least six of them while I was there.  I didn’t care about anything anymore by that point, I just lay there in some half-asleep stupor.  Morphine is powerful stuff.

So yeah, I know something about hurt.

Of course labor will be painful.  You don’t get something that big out of an opening that small without pain. I’m not afraid of the pain.  I am confident in my ability to cope with the pain.  Just because labor is painful doesn’t mean it will hurt.  Not as bad as I know it can.

But on dark nights, like tonight, when I’m lying awake in bed, there is a little voice whispering “…but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

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Early Nesting Friday, May 23 2008

I must be nesting early, because all I’m doing is cleaning and organizing, even at work.

I made up a calendar this week, and realized I only have 2 completely unencumbered weekends before my due date.  That’s, well, not a lot of time, and the apartment is a disaster area.  A hot disaster area, I might add; summer has reached Texas at last.

I confess, I’m dreading these next four months of interminable heat and humidity much more than I’m dreading childbirth itself.

So I’m using this free weekend to thoroughly clean the apartment.  When I get the whole place meticulously cleaned, I get to buy On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness for the 360, but not before.  This may not sound like much of an incentive, but it is.  Really.

I already have the bathroom done.  Apart from the floor, which wants sweeping, it is clean.  Even the evil plastic apartment complex tub.  I’ve cleared off half the countertop for tiny baby diaper changes and baths, and half of the below sink cabinet for storing diapers.  Now we just have to keep it clean for two months, which is easier said than done.

I think I can be playing the Penny-Arcade game by Monday night.

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