April Fools!

I have suffered with extremely painful periods since I was a teenager.  I'm not talking about cramps.  I'm talking pain.  Pain so bad you can't feel your legs. Pain so bad you pass out.  Pain so bad you hit your head and end up in the ER with a concussion.  That kind of pain.

In my adult years these heavy painful periods were debilitating.  We knew that my fertility issues were probably related.  Over the years I gave up on doctors finding a solution because most of them didn't want to do anything invasive if I was hoping to have a baby.  Basically they just kept putting me off.  I'll spare you the details, but I often ended up in the ER due to such heavy bleeding and cramping along with various IBS issues.  I slept with towels covering the bed, overloaded on pain meds and was often house bound while dealing with these extreme symptoms on a regular basis.

The last few years I had been in more pain than usual.  I have felt a lot of pressure on my bladder.  My right lower back hurt all the time and often lifting my leg was extremely painful like I was ripping something apart.  For a time I wondered if I was having kidney issues, but I never had a fever and doctors sent me on my way.  But the cancelled plans and missed events were piling up as I was often found lying on the floor in pain.

Finally after spending the whole weekend together Kenneth decided he had had enough when I asked to leave a Mariners event early.  (Missing baseball?  obviously something was wrong!)  He demanded we go to the ER.  I had already changed into my pajamas and you know sometimes when you are really sick it just sounds better to stay home and be miserable in your own bed rather than sit in the uncomfortable waiting room of the ER.  After a bit of an argument Kenneth said, "Pack a bag, what do you need to take?"  I replied in my typical bratty way, "Fine, this chapstick."

And that's how I ended up in the hospital awaiting surgery with nothing but a chapstick.  The ER doctor found an endometrial mass the size of a softball over my right ovary.  We were planning a trip to Disney and I had already packed my bag as we were leaving on Friday. I begged them to do the surgery after we got home.  The ER doctor firmly told me that I wasn't leaving.  But they would probably only have to do a laparoscopic procedure and the recovery wouldn't be too bad.  As each doctor came into the room they were amazed I had been living in so much pain and kept commenting to Kenneth that I must have a really high pain tolerance. 

Actually, did you know redheads have some kind of code in their DNA, the same place that dictates lack of pigment in the skin, that actually makes them less tolerant to pain.  So there... I must really be a trooper.  Anyway I really don't feel the need to prove how much pain I was in to anyone.  Over the years living with endometriosis it's amazing how many people don't get it.  Unless you or someone close to you has never dealt with it you probably just don't get it.

So they scheduled surgery for the next morning, April 1st.  Apparently things were in such bad condition that just a laparoscopic procedure wouldn't cut it and I ended up with the equivalent of a cesarean.  The mass was so large it had obliterated my right ovary so they removed that and the tube.  It was also connected to my bowels and my bladder (yeah, fun stuff)  so they cleaned that all out.  The surgeon reported the other ovary was in pretty bad shape.  It was full of scar tissue and probably has had cysts growing on popping (yes, more pain)  for years.  He wasn't sure that there would be much left to work with, but left it and my uterus so we can take our chances one more time at a fertility clinic.  At this point I feel like maybe we should have just let them take everything.  Kenneth feel extremely guilty that he let this go on so long. 

Either way we now realize even more what a miracle our little Awsumb was!  Stars must have aligned for that one to work out because I am just a mess!

Kenneth really stepped up.  He owed me after his two foot surgeries last year!  I don't think Kenneth slept at all the first couple nights.  Back and forth between the hospital and taking care of Awsumb.  We are so lucky to have close friends that stepped up to make sure everyone was taken care of. 

4 Days later I was so over the hospital.  Although we had a nice room and a window with a view of the city of Bellevue, and don't forget all those great intravenous pain meds, I was just done with the whole scene.  That last night another mother joined me.  Because a simple curtain doesn't really give much privacy I heard all the details from her doctor regarding her surgery.  Although it was a simple procedure and nothing like I was going through I still felt bad for her.  She had this little girl who was scared and worried. I felt guilty she didn't have the window and the little girl couldn't play on the couch. Also the bathroom was on my side of the room.  So both Kenneth and felt really bad that she didn't have complete privacy on her first (and only) night after surgery.

That night Kenneth went home to sleep as the weeks event were finally catching up with him.  I was more coherent and really starting to wish I could just be home in my own bed.  Then I had the overnight nurse from hell. No she wasn't mean, just forgetful and really did a poor job.  Giving meds with out logging them, logging things hours after not really remembering if she did them...  Basically I didn't want her to touch me!  I feigned sleep when she would come by so she wouldn't bug me.  BUT I did beg her to make sure I didn't go more than 4 hours without my pain meds because I was starting to be more aware of my staples and was kind of uncomfortable.  Plus despite the surgeons thinking I was a total pain trooper, I am really a woos.  I ended up 9 hours with out meds.  Yep, these days you really have to have someone advocating for you at all times. You can't rely on nurses who are probably stretched too thin to keep up.  I am just glad that nothing worse happened because she sounded like she was causing all sorts of havoc on our floor.

So Friday morning I went for a little walk. I was just so determined to get out of there I was bouncing around the room trying to show the doctor I was good to go so they would release me.  When I get back the other mom is packing up. I tell her, "Oh if you get to leave first I am going to be so sad"  and she turns to me and says, "if you knew the kind of surgery I had you'd feel sorry for me." 

WHAT?  Um if you knew the kind of surgery I had, the 19 years of marriage with fertility issues... hello it's not a contest!  Who says that?  In the meantime I'm reading stupid April Fools posts on Facebook and such about people so glad they aren't pregnant etc.  Well, April Fools to me.  Major surgery, pretty bleak odds for another child, and the worst was missing my trip to visit Auntie and Uncle and going to Disney to meet up with old friends.

We ended up sending Awsumb on his first solo plane ride to visit Auntie and Uncle.  He had such a wonderful time and I am thankful he is so close to them and that they love him so much to step up and take him!  Awsumb also went to Disney to meet up with our old friends, Kimberly and Caleb Erickson. It's so nice to have family and friends willing to step in and love your child when you need to concentrate on just getting better.  Kenneth and I had a fun week together, just the two of us.  And I appreciated all the visits from friends... and the flowers, oh the flowers!  So fun!  Thank you everyone for all the visits, phone calls, meals, treats and flowers!

Healing was slow going.  About 4 weeks post surgery Kenneth went out of town and I decided to just "get back to normal" and started driving the Ford Explorer and doing regular things around the house.  Uh, yeah, not a good idea.  Major pain and I was put back on strict rest for a couple more weeks. I don't know how women recover from this surgery with a newborn to take are of. Actually I hear that helps because you just concentrate on cuddling that newborn.  A few friends who have had both a C-section with a baby and this type of procedure said the recovery from this was worse.   I'm not looking forward to doing this all over again.  But I do think a planned surgery when I can prepare my family and home for me to be away and out of commission for 6 weeks will be much easier than emergency surgery.

And in the fall... we'll see what the fertility clinic has to say....  I'm not getting my hopes up.

The Business of Being Born

Add this movie to the list of things NOT TO WATCH when yet again you are bleeding to death (signifying how NOT PREGNANT YOU ARE!) and trying to decide if you should go to the emergency room or not.  I know TMI... I have endometriosis - it's not pretty.  I have actually seen this before, just after it came out. But The Business of Being Born has been on The Movie Channel again recently and I just couldn't resist.

Because of some of the complications I had during my pregnancy such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, a natural birth was just not possible.  In my case, induction saved the life of my baby and my own. But even then I saw how those interventions actually hindered the process.  The induction required 24 hours with a  folley catheter, which did begin dialation and contractions.  But nothing was going to happen with out pitocin. The problem is the more pitocin I was given the stronger the contractions and the less chance I could deal with them without stadol and eventually an epidural.  And of course the pain meds caused me to need more pitocin.  I became totally suspicious that they were just pretending to give me pain meds and lying about it (later I found out this was a side effect of the stadol, feel like everyone is against you).  Oh and then there was the bunny breathing and cookie oven hallucinations. 

After 24 hours of this I was finally prepped for a c-section.  At this point I didn't care, just get the baby out. I would do whatever they said I should... and remember because of the preeclampsia who I was to question anything they told me I needed to do.  And if it weren't for another patient across the hall, also named Wendy, who decided to give birth before her doctor could arrive, I would have been taken straight to the O.R.  But somehow my symptoms normalized again and stayed that way for a few hours.  Long enough for my body to finally catch up with all the meds and give birth.

There were still a few more hurdles to go through as Awsumb was born with no heartbeat, no muscle tone, not breathing and an Apgar score of 0.  But when all that was finally worked out I had a healthy baby boy.  Although the birth wasn't natural, I was so thankful that at least I didn't have to have any further complictions from a c-section to interfere with normal attachment, bonding and even breastfeeding issues.

The more you learn about natural childbith the more you realize how totally amazing our design is.  The hormones released to help mother a cope with and forget the pain, and to bond with her baby are just amazing.  I don't know how our society began to see pregnancy as a condition that needs to be cured instead of a natural process.  No wonder so many women have trouble with attachment, breastfeeding, and depression after giving birth.

And I haven't even mentioned the costs involved.  You would think in a time when cost of healthcare is such a topic that people would realize this is one area that we could really save money if we really waited to intervene until absolutely  necessary. 

However you gave birth, whatever your complications, you and a couple girlfriends will love watching this documentary and will be able to relate to these filmakers as they tell their stories.  If anything just to remember how sweet to hold that little baby of yours for the first time!

Blue Womb

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

You may have heard this short story before. Though there is no proof Hemingway actually wrote it, it is a beautiful and tragic short story and honestly if you have experienced the loss of a little one there is probably no more that needs to be said. I imagine a brand new, scuff free pair of white baby shoes with tiny laces in a box, stuffed with crisp tissue paper. I can smell the leather and feel the cardboard box. Though many might see this story as a tragic story of a small babies death, if you have ever spent any time in a fertility clinic or made the mistake of buying a baby item before you carried a baby to term this sentence carries much more weight that the 25 innocent letters that made up this complete tale.

When Awsumb was about 3 or 4 he began to realize something was different about our family. Other families had babies and more babies. Ours did not. To this day he tells me on a regular basis how "lonely he is" and asks for a brother. After all these years I think he has come to accept our reality, but when he was little he was demanding answers. I simply explained to him that my body just didn’t work correctly and that HE was OUR miracle baby.

One day, out of no where Awsumb asked me, “Mom is your womb blue?” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. “No, I don’t think so?” I replied. “Well, maybe that’s the problem,” Awsumb said. And the conversation ended there.

A few weeks later I went to check on Awsumb before I went to bed. I usually find him in asleep, covered in books and stuffies. This night I found him in bed with his children’s encyclopedia. Ya know, with all those pastel colored pictures and simple statements describing our bodies. The book was open to a page featuring a side view of a baby in a mother’s womb. To represent the amniotic fluid the space was colored blue. When I lifted the book I realized the spine of the book had been broken to turn automatically to this page. It was obvious that this was the reason little Dr. Awsumb had diagnosed my infertility to be “Lack of a Blue Womb.”

Awsumb’s diagnoses is wrong.
My woom is empty and very blue.

Where do babies come from?

The question every parent dreads...

A couple years after the "blue womb" discussion as we were having dinner at a nice restaurant. There wasn’t anyone sitting too close to us, but it was quiet in the restaurant. Awsumb was coloring quietly and then all of a sudden piped up in a LOUD voice,

“Mom, ya know that special place on a woman that’s hidden….”

------PAUSE------

The second I heard “special place” I knew we were in trouble. I gripped the table ready for anything as he continued,

“where a woman has a baby out of if she doesn’t need surgery…”

---Second Pause---

And I quickly tried to figure out what I was going to say that would shut him up without him asking more questions OR getting louder.

Then I remembered we recently watched a show on the health channel about a family that had 6 babies at once and the mom had a c-section, which of course grossed Awsumb . So at the time I told him that’s just because the woman had so many at once and that isn’t normal… I guess he had been thinking about this for a while. But as he drew in breath to finish I realized, I didn’t have the luxury of time or privacy to have a very informative talk about this now

“Where exactly is it and what’s it called?” Awsumb asked as matter of fact just as if he was asking for direction to the nearest grocery store.

Why do they always ask these types of questions when your least prepared and in the most public places?

A Procrastinator’s New Year

Now We Can Leave Last Year Behind!
Having a January birthday can be a procrastinators dream, come true. While others might have slipped up or even already given up on a New Year’s resolution I don’t even decide upon mine until my birthday. I have always considered January 20, which is my birthday, my own personal New Year.

I was thinking, "What’s better than a resolution, which you may or may not keep?" Answer: A prediction. But often predictions are really no more dependable than the weather forecast. If so where are our flying cars and the other amenities we drew pictures of and wrote about in 5th grade as our predictions about the year 2000?

And speaking of crazy predictions- Art Bell, a quirky late night talk radio host, who spent the long nights talking about aliens and conspiracy theories, had a prediction show each year in which he would let the unscreened callers state their predictions. He would then review these predictions during the next year while he took note of the new predictions. This show always included a few crazy “end of the world” scenarios, some personal predictions and a few funny ones.

Art Bell would have loved the spirit of the “This American Life” episode “2010” in which instead of resolutions or predictions that we really have no control over, the stories focused on real predictions, things that we know for sure will happen.

So this was going to be my, “real predictions of things that are actually – no kidding, going to happen this year, to me, to people I know, etc.” And to follow their format I was going include: "A death, a birth, a 2nd graders fate in school and the fate of the middle east.”

I decided to skip the morbid thought of death for now and move onto births. My brother and sister-in-law, Jeff and Mickie will have a new baby. Kenneth’s brother Eric and his wife will also be having another baby. As I begin typing this info I think will pity, “And we will NOT be having a baby this year.” And right then I was brought back to the year 2001.

January 2001, having exhausted the fertility treatments we were willing to try at the time we had decided to adopt a baby. We had begun working with an adoption agency and had chosen an orphanage in Russia. They kept telling us, “By the end of the year, you will have your baby.” I began repeating this phrase, to myself and others. “We are having a baby, by the end of the year we will have our baby.”

In the middle of January I lost my Grandma Awsumb and by February the adoption and a baby was the last thing on my mind while I flew back to spend time with my Auntie Laurel. I wanted to help her clean out Grandma’s house, but also to just be with her during such a sad time. My relationship with my grandparents had always been pretty formal and that week I was able to really get to know them while I cleaned out their home. My Grandpa and I made up our own silly games and inside jokess - as Laurel was the boss. As I found all the mementos she kept of us grandkids I could see how proud of us she was. And as I sorted through her personal items, I got to learn more about her relationship with my grandfather and see how much they had loved one another and their personal commitment to each other for over 60 years.

On February 28th Seattle experienced a 6.8 earthquake. Later that evening we went to dinner with a friend and his parents. The food made me so sick to look that that I lined up drinks and menus to keep me from viewing the meat, which lie naked on the plates mocking me. Bonnie asked her son, “Is Wendy pregnant?” Our friend Robert answered, “Don’t ask” knowing we had been trying to have a baby without success for years.

Of course a few weeks later we found out that by some miracle I was pregnant. And after a few scares at the beginning and end of the pregnancy we were blessed with our little miracle baby.

What was so funny about that year was that I didn’t make a resolution or a prediction. I made a statement. Do I dare make the same statement for 2010?

“We will have a baby by the end of the year.”

Maybe not yet, but from now on, no more resolutions or predictions, simply statements.

What’s your statement for the year 2010?

I Would Die For That

I am not sure how to add video directly into my blog.I know it's been around a while. And I really don't like country music (this song really pushes the limit for me). But I was reminded of this song recently. SO... This is for anyone who has struggled with fertility issues...

I Would Die For That

or copy and paste

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqfGqOx2iDQ