Practice Run

   Three days ago I thought Baby Blueberry was on her way. For the past two weeks I have been having contractions; painful practice ones that remind me that childbirth is a little bit painful.

    But Monday night they started, continued through the night, disrupting my sleep and kept going right into Tuesday. By the time we picked up Bean and Abu from school, they were rolling in every 2-4 minutes and lasting a minute at a time.
    And whew...they were painful. Suddenly, the practice contractions I had been having in the last two weeks were just minor aches in comparison.
    Hero Hottie thought we should probably go to the hospital. I agreed with him as soon as I could take a breath again. We sent the girls off to Grandma's, packed a few things, made a few calls, and left.
   He drove because frankly, I had trouble even climbing into the mini van because of how bad it was starting to hurt, let alone drive.
   At our hospital we have to check in through the ER, which I have to disagree with. Sending a pregnant woman through germ heaven seems a little silly. I tried not to touch too many things. And I stayed far away from the coughing patients waiting their turn.

   Now, during my last two deliveries, the hospital had certain policies and that was it. You had a choice...to agree with them. But this time, I wanted more control over my experience. I found a doctor that was open to the newer ways of looking at childbirth and allowed me to write a birth plan.
    (They aren't newer ways, I'm not taking the placenta home and eating it. But I want a less medicalized birth. Less policies and more just listening to my body.)

   Still, while I waited for the delivery nurse to come down and get me, I figured she would be bringing a wheelchair for me. I hate the wheelchair while I'm in labor. I don't like to sit down while I'm contracting but it's hospital policy. I guess a woman in labor can't walk anymore, even if she wants to.
   But when the nurse arrived, she didn't have a wheelchair.
   "I read your birth plan before I came down here. I saw that you want things as natural as possible so I figure you would probably want to walk."
   I was flabbergasted. Hell, yes I want to walk. And so slowly, because contractions slow you down, we walked to the maternity floor.
   And that was only the start of all the wonderful changes they had made to the concept of giving birth.
   First, the gowns were tailored made for a pregnant woman. Oh, my goodness. Seriously. How long did it take the medical system to realize that a laboring woman doesn't feel comfortable in a gown made for a 300 pound man? This gown was sewn to be fitted around my feminine form, with room for my huge belly. It was pink and soft and didn't leave a gap in the back so the entire world could see my bottom. I had been planning on just wearing my sports bra for delivery but I can deal with this gown. And on top of that...it has snaps in the front so later I can breast feed without stripping the entire thing off.
   The robes are soft, fluffy and pink. (Pink seems a little stereotypical for a pregnant woman but I don't care about the color.) They were real robes, not old, nasty hospital gowns turned backwards, and used as a robe. I wouldn't mind taking it home, it was so comfortable.

   I was taken into the triage room to determine if I was really in labor or just thought I was. The nurse offered me and Hero Hottie bottle waters, to stay hydrated. And then asked if I needed any juice and gave me a huge list to pick from. Wow. I was beginning to feel like royalty. I thought, from my previous delivery experiences, I was going to have to fight for a cup of ice cubes and some attention.

   She hooked me up to the monitors. Baby Blueberry's heartbeat was a wonderful sound and it was strong and steady. The other monitor to keep track of my contractions clearly showed that I was having strong, steady contractions. This had to be labor.
   I was breathing through the pain when they would hit, watching my uterus form a tight, little ball and then feel Baby Blueberry complain heavily afterwards, with lots of wiggles, stretches and powerful kicks. She hates being squished.

  The nurse checked my cervix. I was sure I was at least at 4cms. If not more. With these contractions I had to be quite a bit along.

  I think she thought so too, because she starts frowning as she realizes where I am at.
  "You're at 2cm." She says, sounding disappointed.

   Whoa. Back the delivery truck up. 2cm? That was it? Almost twenty four of contractions and over an hour of serious contractions and that was it.

    "Well," she says, "if you want to walk around the halls for an hour, we'll check you again and see if things pick up. Otherwise, you'll be better off at home."
    "Lets walk." I agree. I'm still contracting and I might as well try for a bit. But 2cm is depressing.
    She grins. "Just stay on the hardwood floor area. That's the maternity area. If you start walking the other parts of the hospital they get really nervous that you'll drop a baby on them."
    I nod and start walking the halls. It's a big loop and I have the entire thing memorize in an hour. I saw a couple of babies and they were so sweet. It made me want to hold Baby Blueberry. I can't wait for her.

   After an hour. Recheck. 2cm. Contractions are starting to finally...slow down. In three more hours they will stop.
   Damn.

   The next day I had a doctor's appointment. She says that can happen. The body is warming up, doing things in stages so when it's time, everything isn't changing all at once. My first two weren't like that, once I started with the contractions, I didn't stop until I had a baby.
   This little one is teaching me patience. Perhaps she got shy. She does tend to get really quiet and still when she hears unfamiliar voices.
   Perhaps she just needs a little bit longer.

   I just need to enjoy these last few days of quiet. Enjoy the wonderful feel of her moving in my womb and responding to my voice.
  I just need to remember that she made it full term and all those months of bed rest and taking it easy has allowed her to grow strong.
   Some time in the next two weeks Baby Blueberry will be here. She just wanted to test things out. Prepare herself for the real deal.
    She just needed a practice run.
   
   

Home Again

      If this story was a blockbuster movie, than after I got done folding my load of laundry, Hero Hottie and I would have looked at each, blissfully happy and that would be the end of the story.
       It wouldn't take years to truly recover our relationship, but when we did it was better than before. It wouldn't take years to recover our lives and it wouldn't take years to heal emotionally from that tough time. But it did.

     We watched a movie that afternoon. And if you can believe it, we watched Nanny McPhee. It was an odd choice but the only thing available.
    And for once, I actually remembered the movie. In the nine months before the hospital, any time we watched a movie together, I was in so much pain and my brain was so foggy that I wouldn't recall much of the story at all. Even to this day, Hero Hottie will mention a movie we watched during that time and I can't remember it. It's a blank. A frustrating and ugly reminder of that time period.
    
   The girls stayed with Grandma and Grandpa for a few more days until I was ready to have their busy in the house again.
    It was the sweetest moment when they came home and their little arms wrapped around me. I closed my eyes, savoring their unique smell. Their little kid scent; freshly washed and then warmed in the summer sun.
    Their eyes were wide as they studied me, especially Bean's since she was older. Her attention never wavered off me that day, following me around, watching for signs of me being sick, slow smiles creeping across her face as she realized things were better.
 
   The next morning, when she got up; she hopped out of bed and went right for the kitchen. Just like the days before she was going to pour her own cereal; make her own meal. I was already up. What a victory. I was already out of bed and had the energy to take care of my children right from the start of morning.
    It was such a simple thing...managing to get out of bed without feeling like I was going to black out...and it was such a blessing to start feeling normal. Mundane. Routine.
    I stopped her in the kitchen and told her to sit down at the table. She frowned, sitting down, her intense focus on me, never wavering. Abu joined her, clutching her blanket but with grins on her face.
    It was just cereal. But I got it out. I poured the milk. I set it on the table in front of my children.
   Bean and Abu stared at me, spoons in their hands and for a moment- time was frozen as we all looked at each other. Mommy and daughters.
    We had gone through a dark and hard journey together. Day in and day out, just struggling to hold it together.
    And in that simple, sunny moment with just a normal bowl of cereal and a kitchen table; we all realized that we had made it through that journey.
   That we could move on to the next chapter in our lives. A better chapter.
   In that second, we turned the page...and found a new beginning.

   It wasn't easy from that moment on though. I had two wild children who weren't used to routine, schedules, and having to ask permission to do things. That summer was fairly rough as we all tried to figure out how to interact with each other.
   I was still having my bottom packed with cotton twice a day but finally the fistulas were healing and the length of gauze was less than two inches. Another small victory, which filled me with hope that they would totally heal.
    Slowly, ever so slowly I gained weight. But it about more than just packing on pounds. I had lost a massive amount of muscle mass and tone in my ligaments and tendons. It would take literally years for me to rebuild my strength and in fact, it would only be in the last year and a half once I started P90X that I would succeed at not only regaining what I had lost but going beyond that.
   But even a better benefit to the exercise, besides feeling good about the way I looked, was the fact that it helped regulate my Crohn's. I couldn't believe it. Daily, sweaty, Tony Horton is nearly killing me exercise was helping in keeping my flares under control.
 
   Our finances after the hospital were horrible. We owed over $85,000 in medical expenses and credit card bills that had been used to pay for living expenses. Bill collectors started calling, even after setting up payments because the payments weren't large enough.
    Except I only had so much money and I had over a dozen and a half different doctors, clinics, and credit cards wanting a chunk of our limited funds. At first I would send something to them every month, but it wasn't enough for them. They started adding interest and fees to the amount.
    Because adding more to the bills helps. When the hospital made it very clear they were going to put a lien on our house and take the money from us, we decided on bankruptcy.
    It was a tough decision for us. We had always, always paid our bills on time, kept our debt limited and tried to do the right thing.
    But we couldn't risk our house, not with two little girls. And having a lien of ten of thousands of dollars on it was scary. If we couldn't pay it, we would lose our house. Our children would lose their home and their only security.
   We declared bankruptcy due to medical reasons.
   

   In my head I rolled all this stuff into an image of the hospital and hated the place for it. But the hospital wasn't to blame.
   And it would take Abu to point this out. When I was discussing how difficult it was to write these pieces and how much I hated the hospital, she stops what she is doing and looks at me with the most puzzled frown on her face.
   "But Mom, it's where you got better."
    To her, the hospital wasn't a terrible and horrible place. It was the place, that she can't hardly remember because she was only three at the time, but it was the place that her very sick Mommy went for two weeks...
   And came back healed. Happy. Joyful. Able to be her Mommy.
    It's about the only thing she remembers from that time period. Thank Goodness.
    But to her it's the place where I got better.
    She's right.
   And now...I'm ready to deliver Baby Blueberry because it's also the place I'm going to have my beautiful, unexpected surprise.

   

The Hospital Stay

And now we're finally to the point of why I don't like hospitals. Of course, as I'm writing these blogs I realized something important...the hospital is just a place. It was the image in my head that I would see when I thought about that horrible time in my life. It become the icon for what happened. But my illness was a collection of events and procedures and dark days, well before I stayed at the hospital.
   It's just when my brain filed it all away, so I wouldn't have to dwell on it; it slapped a label on it and the label said, "the hospital."
    But my brain was wrong. I didn't realize that until just this very moment. I needed something to represent that time in my life and for what ever reason I picked the image of the hospital. And perhaps that's normal. Hospitals are not the prettiest buildings. Our hospital is eight or nine stories of hard, gray concrete, rising above all the other short and flat buildings around it. You can see it from quite a few places in our small town and it just seems imposing against the blue sky.
   It's an unforgiving sort of structure and it doesn't ask to be anything it's not. It's not decorative, it's not relaxing; it's not soft.
   It serves a purpose.
   Which is to save people's lives.

   The ER was a blur of more procedures, blood work, and lots of test. I had a great ER doctor whose job it is to fix people in emergency situations. And I was in crisis.
   He took tons of blood and found that I was dangerously low on my iron. And when I mean dangerously low, I mean that. Much lower and it could have killed me.
   I was given blood. Which is the weirdest thing ever. To watch someone else's blood drip into my veins. But I started to feel better right away. It was crazy.

   I had a CT scan, in which I reacted violently to the contrast dye and started breaking out in huge welts and started having trouble breathing.

   I was assigned a room, and I was even given a single bed. Which, without insurance, doesn't happen often, but someone was watching out for me and the doctor decided that I needed my own bathroom and the privacy to use it. I could have cried with gratitude.
   I had lost so much weight I had a line inserted into a major vein inside my arm, that traveled up my arm, across my shoulder and dropped down to my heart. If I twisted my arm wrong I could actually cut off the line. They used this central line to give me a liquid diet since the doctor decided I shouldn't digest anything for the next nine days or so.
    I had a long list of tests to check on the condition of my intestine, which surprisingly was not in horrible shape. A different GI doctor, the specialist in Crohn's, tried to convince me to have most of it removed anyway and live with a bag for the rest of my life.
   I looked at the photos. It was an unhappy intestine; swollen and sore but I wasn't bleeding and I didn't have dead areas.
   My surgeon was shocked that he wanted me to go under the knife in the state of health I was in. He didn't say anything unprofessional about the other doctor but basically to para phase it he did say what the hell was this guy thinking because in my condition, having surgery would probably kill me.

   I declined surgery and told the GI doctor that I rather try medication first before we talked about removing a major organ.
   He frowned and a few hours later he prescribed aspirin and blood thinners for me to take.
   I looked at the nurse, refusing the medication.
   "Why do I need these? The GI doctor says I'm bleeding so much in my gut he wants to remove it. Won't this make it worse?"
   She freezes, the pills and syringe in her hand. "Well, he doesn't want you to get a blood clot since you're so immobile."
    I frowned, shaking my head. "No. I don't think this is a good idea. He says I'm bleeding in my gut and he wants to give me something that might make me bleed even more. Does he want me to lose my intestine?"
    Her lips purse together, her eyes narrowing as she thought about the situation. "I'm going to call the doctor."
    She didn't try to bring the medications back. But to this day I wonder...and I hate to think this...but was he just not thinking about what could have happened if I took blood thinners when supposedly I was bleeding profusely...
   or did he want me to bleed more so I would consent to the surgery?

    I was lonely in the hospital. My parents had the girls and Hero Hottie had to work. He came in the evenings to see me. A few nights he spent the night with me when he could. We barely talked. Our marriage was nonexistence.
    But we still hung on.

    I started watching the Food Network. I know...I'm crazy. I wasn't allowed to eat any food...of any sort and here I was watching hours and hours of cooking. I was torturing myself with the one thing I couldn't have. But it kept me from going insane.
   I asked for my laptop. The first time in months I felt like writing. And wrote I did. Suddenly, I knew how to write.
   I realized I wasn't writing before. I was putting words on paper but I wasn't revealing emotions. I wasn't finding the nitty gritty.
    The clarity of what I needed to do to succeed at my writing was amazing. It wasn't about writing what I know...it was about writing about what I feel.
   I had to share myself if I wanted to succeed.
   The good, the bad, the ugly. The stuff that I thought made me less than perfect. The mistakes, the negative, the genuine Me.
   Not the one I tried so desperately hard to live up to. And failed at.
   I didn't have to be perfect anymore. For anyone. And in realizing that; my writing improved in ways I had despaired it ever would.

   In almost dying, I started to realize how to live.

   
   Some days I was so lonely though, I would stare down at the world below, like a princess locked in her tower and watch spring turn into summer. Abu, who had been extremely quiet for a three year old, suddenly showed up at the hospital, talking and chattering nonstop about everything.
   Light glinted in the girls' eyes now. A cloud had been lifted, a spell had been broken and there was hope again.
   I longed for their visits and their phone calls. It was the bright spots in my days. They were the reason I hadn't given up. I missed them so much it made my chest burn.
   And I was determined to get back to them.
   I talked and talked to all the GI doctors and finally find one out of that small group that was willing to work with me and find me a drug that didn't have worse side effects than the Crohn's.
  I talked to another GI doctor who was shocked that I had been put on the Ultram to begin with. In her experience, someone with digestive problem should never, ever be prescribed that drug and in fact, one of the side effects of it was clinical anorexia.
   Weight loss. Massive weight loss.
   Uncontrollable weight loss.

   It wasn't my Crohn's killing me. It had been the Ultram. All this time.

   By day eleven I was tentatively ready to go home. I had been eating solid food for three days and my bowels were doing okay with it. They had started digesting again; a good sign. I had put on five pounds from my liquid diet, which was fair but enough to try sending me home.
   My iron levels were good, thanks to someone's kindness in donating blood.
   I was worried about leaving the safety of the hospital. I was afraid to go home. All that want and need to be at home and I was afraid.
   Fearful that I would get sick again. That I would die anyway. That I would start to get sick again as soon as I left the hospital.

  But my new GI doctor reassured me that if anything went wrong; I wouldn't have to wait for an appointment. They would see me. At the first sign of any trouble.

  Hero Hottie picked me up and took me home to a quiet house. The kids would stay with my parents for a few more days until I was ready to take care of them.
  It was strange walking into my own house. For so long it had been a prison of pain, grief and despair.
  Summer had happened while I was in the hospital and sunlight filled the rooms. Bright and inviting and promising something good.
    I felt like a stranger at first, unsure and hesitant. Who was I?
   I wasn't the same person who had left this house eleven days earlier.

   It would take years to realize just how much change had happened to me. But in the meantime...

   I folded a load of laundry, simply because I had the strength to do so.