(no subject)
i started writing this at the end of october but never got around to finishing it until today.
so i never posted a 'birth story' or whatever, and im just starting to stop replaying it my head so i thought i would write it out. be warned if you are pregnant or ever plan on having a baby i wouldn't read it.
for the last 7 weeks of my pregnancy i had contractions every evening. starting about ten minutes apart and becoming three-five minutes apart. gradually building in intensity until i couldn't talk through them eventually they'd taper out in the early morning. i was so fucking exhausted and burnt out. chris works nights so every night it'd be stress city, like is it baby tonight? all signs always pointed to yes and we both were stressed about it. the whole thing was hellish.
when i was 42.5 weeks i started to have to see a doctor,due to the midwifery rules, so we went and saw this doc my midwife liked, who said to go for another ultrasound to make sure things were looking ok with kiddo. i had a bit of a meltdown that day with being so burnt out from being pregnant and things going so far from what i wanted. i was a bit hysterical. i had done every single 'natural' bullshit thing to induce labour ever invented. my midwife couldn't attend me at home anymore. it was very bad day. anyways, gilly came for my ultrasound and made me sane again and the doc said to go for a stress test on Saturday and probably be induced with cervadil. i was told that i could get cervadil, and then be 'low-risk', go to an labour, delivery, post-partum (LDRP) room that have tubs, showers, lots of space etc. i thought 'i can dig that' and got my head ok with it. my midwife could still attend me. a-ok.
couldn't sleep at all Friday night. Chris has to go to work until 4 in the fucking morning. went in Saturday morning and as the baby looked in the 95% on ultrasound and i was 43 weeks, we went ahead with cervadil at around 11 am. after the hour monitor thing chris and i went for a walk outside. not long after i started having contractions. when we got back they told me they had found me a space on the antepartum ward until i was in active labour, or until 12 hours had passed. i couldnt go to a labour room cause i wasnt 'in labour' and i couldnt go home (going home would have been AMA and my midwife couldnt then attend me and having an unassisted 43 week birth with a family history of a bleeding disorders and exhaustion seemed unappealing).so antepartum.
it was this ward room with not enough space to even walk around, in a room with someone who had been there for three weeks, with a bathroom between our room and the next room over, with a toilet and sink and bad smell. off the bat i had excruciating back pain. by 3pm i asked chris to call gilly to come down and help. the nurse came in once every four hours to listen to the baby and take my blood pressure. i couldnt freaking move. I asked to be moved to somewhere i could walk around. the said not yet. i asked to be checked and this shitty resident would come and tell me that i was going to be moved to a room 'really soon'. the nurse would tell me to 'tough it out' so i could go to low-risk when i was in active labour. i started having 'couplet' contractions, where i would have three - five contractions in a row, lasting more then a minute and having less then thirty seconds between them. then i would have a 5 minute break. i was barfing my guts out with every contraction and pissing with every barf. the stupid nurse brought me a goddamn birthing ball cause she decided i needed to 'open my pelvis' i say stupid because there wasn't enough room for me to actually sit on the birthing ball in the room because the room was too small. for awhile i was in a groove of standing in the hall in front of a fan during breaks then leaning over the bed during contractions. then the barfing started and i couldnt really do that anymore. poor gilly and chris kept having to find me clean gowns and sheets and bowls cause no matter how many times they asked, no one would help.
i had asked before things got really bad if i could go to LDRP to take a shower, as i had planned to use water a lot to deal, and frankly i was totally disgusting. they said i could take a shower on the antepartum ward. the shower was in this filthy room and was this tiny stall i don't think i would have even fit in. they had used it to dump out the ice machine immediately previously. chris, gill and i all vetoed this and i decided to 'tough it out' gill and chris took turns cleaning out my rotating puke bowls and help me change and put pressure on my back. i couldnt get on top of the pain - there was no break and no escape and no coping mechinisms available in that space. i was yelling and swearing and couldnt find a position to be in that wasn't excruciating. there was no room to move in the room and i didn't want to be screaming in the hallway on the filthy floor in a public ward. im a fairly private person at the best of times and that only increased in labour. i would go in the tiny bathroom that smelt like poo and cry and cry and feel so hopeless. the resident kept saying '20 minutes'. eventually i asked for gravol to try to stop throwing up. the bitch nurse would come in and talk to me while i was having contractions, even though i kept begging her not to. she would tell me helpful things like 'youre not really in labour yet' and 'tough it out'. i got an iv and the gravol and kept barfing. it was all very awesome.
at least an hour had gone by from the '20 minutes' and the evil nurse came and told us that i wasnt going to LDRP, that id have to go to the high-risk side, where the rooms were tiny and no showers and constant monitoring, but that wouldnt even be soon because all the rooms were full, and apparently im 1 cm dilated after 11 hours of contractions. i couldnt go to LDRP because i had been induced. (remember they originally told me it would be fine) and i would need 'constant monitoring' (remember i had had the fetal heart rate checked with a doppler for one minute maybe three times so far this whole induction). also my midwife couldnt be the boss of the whole medical side of things anymore, that some dude would be cause it was 'high-risk'. finally after all this and the evil nurse talking to me during a series of contractions with all this bad news and still barfing i was like 'gimme drugs now' and got morphine (couldnt have gotten an epidural or used gas cause im on a goddamn hospital ward, not labour floor). can i also just say i felt SO BAD for my poor roommate who had to listen to 10 hours of barfing, swearing and sobbing.
anyways, got morphine, made me feel fucked up but a bit more awesome, and they were like 'theres a room on high risk'. i finally got my head together enough in morphine land to demand someone call my midwife. talking to chris about it after he says he was totally just in coping/survival mode and couldnt really think of solutions. hence not calling janet sooner or demanding to see a better doctor or just leaving or whatever. this is about 1130 at night. they tell me this during a series of contractions and my water breaks. i move right away. the room is like the size of a closet, cause theres no delivery rooms available, so still very little space to even move and no bathroom at all, not even a toilet. im screaming through contractions in this mini room. they hook me up to the monitor and check me. i think i was 3 cm. they decide while checking me that the tracing looks like shit (i had just had 10mg of morphine)and put in an internal monitor without any sort of consultation or consent, so trapped in bed again. Now apparently im not allowed out of bed at all. The whole things sucks so fucking much and im so exhausted and demoralized and its all so so so far from any possible scenario i had planned for or placed out in my head as a possibility. gilly says the tracing does suck so im also now worried. cant move, such bullshit. so i decide 'screw this, i want an epidural'. takes a couple tries but eventually have an epidural in. somewhere in there my midwife Janet who i love more then anything shows up. I tell Gilly and Janet to go home and sleep, so chris and i can sleep too. Gill and Chris decide to just go get some food and Janet goes home. this is i think 2 am. im still feeling the contractions, but a bit of the edge is off. at 3am, an hour after being 3cm im 8 cm, so they miraculously come up with a proper room.
move to the nicer room. Gill, Chris and Janet come back. I have a bit of granola bar and some ice chips and start my projectile vomiting again. The epidural totally wears off. I have like half a cm left or something. I use that gas stuff (which is stupid fun) for awhile. i dont remember much at this point. i know i somehow get talked into getting my epidural 'topped up' which renders me completely incapable of moving my left leg, but still in writhing pain. at some point, for some reason i still dont know they give me pitocin. Im now running this stupid fever that keeps getting higher and higher until its 104. apparently im delirious with drugs and fever and sleep deprivation and pain and asking where my grandma is. weird. they give me antibiotics (which i refuse multiple times)and tonnes of fluid.
at around 720, its shift change and i say my body is pushing. i still cant move my damn leg and have this stupid fever and am constantly puking and haven't slept for days. it was awesome. so fun. i push and push and push. they try to get me to move but i cant feel my leg and i'm still delirious and out of it. hours pass. eventually the doc comes in and decides that i need forceps and will have to go to the OR. fun! so its like 1130 am, i've been pushing for 4 hours. finally they decide since the forceps thing is happening and i may need a c-section they should get someone to try to fix my epidural. (this is about 8 hours after it hasn't been working properly). i tell them there is no way i can possibly sit up and still to put in an epidural (transition-type contractions for 8 hours now).
sanjay, the dreamiest man alive, comes to do my epidural and knocks me out with fentayl and versed first, two dream drugs, and i wake up and i have a proper epidural five minutes later. sadly it still doesn't work how they're supposed to, i can still feel all the contractions intensely, but i can now move my left leg, so for this im slightly pleased.
go into OR. chris and janet are allowed to come, looking snappy in scrubs. theres like seriously 15 or 20 people in there, setting up to do a c-section. talk about pressure. sanjay tells me this is all going so bad because i'm an ER nurse and so is his wife and ER nurses have bad labours. he then decides since my epidural doesn't work properly, he will be a labour coach instead of anesthesiologist and starts bossing me around (in an awesome way) and holding my hand and Janets being awesome and i decide i probably would be really bad to have a c-section or forceps for that matter and i'll just push baby-big-head out myself thanks anyways. janet tells me after that sanjay was giving such weird advice but was sounding really confident and i was listening to him and she thought he was so funny and wasnt doing any harm that she didn't stop him.
get baby-16-inch-skull pushed out and the fuckers take him away. he's just fine, janet says, like 8 and 9 apgars and its just cause the fucking pediatric nurses and doctors are there and they want something to do i think. so they steal my kid for like 10 minutes and im crying hysterically, cause i want my kid back, and chris is coming back and forth between us but they wont let him take him and finally janet flips out and is going to try to take him and they let chris have him so i can see him
so finally they wheel me off to 'recovery' where i finally get to hold him. we decide to name him malachy. we had been planning to do the oral vitamin K but poor kid had the most incredibly bruised skull i had ever seen. probably due to being pushed out for 5 hours. so he gets a vitamin k shot, which hes not pumped about. my recovery nurse is my buddy alli from nursing school i used to get wasted with. shes all nervous about taking my blood cause she thinks im going to get all judgey-pants on her case im an ER nurse. they 'have to' take my blood since in RH-. i ask if she cant just take it through my ginormous iv already in place but apparently they have rules about that kind of thing. i decide L&D is all stupid fucking arbitrary rules that make no sense whatsoever. she has to poke me twice, even tho i have monster veins, but after 24 hours of brutal labour im all 'whatever' about such little things like needles. i nurse my boy a bit. i call my folks. i get in a wheelchair and go to use the phone to call some people. the don't have any postpartum rooms available so we stay in the recovery area for several hours. Janet and Gilly go home to sleep.
finally move upstairs. we all fall asleep. my sis and Gramma come to visit. they kick out Chris because its 'not visiting hours' and apparently new fathers aren't allowed to stay with their families. He goes home to sleep and let puppy out and bury Malachy and I's placenta in the berry patch. The nurses tell me they need to monitor malachys blood sugar because hes so big. whatever. then they tell me his blood sugar is 'bordering on the low end of normal' and since hes not nursing well (he didn't feel like it, he was tired) they needed to give him sugar water. i'm like 'no'. they keep taking him away to test his sugar and then demanding to give him sugar water. after like four hours of this and being awake for 4 days i say 'whatever'. the give him the damn sugar water (which will undoubtedly spike his sugar and then cause it to crash). three days later malachy has a raging case of thrush.
anyways, at some point i fall asleep and they take malachy away. i wake up and ring the nurse and some broad comes in and says i cant have him back cause my nurse was on break. i'm all 'did she take my son with her on break?' and she leaves. an hour later i'm still trying to get him back and finally at like 630 i get him back after getting out of bet with m fucked up cooch and exhaustion and going to find my little boy. assholes. hes still not interested in eating, which is totally normal int the first 24 hours, but they're all freaking out about it, so i start lying and saying hes nursing. whatever. i tell them im going home. they say i have to stay for 48 hours. i say 'like hell i do', the only reason i didn't go home the night before is i couldn't walk on my own. so i say my midwife says i can go any time i want. they say malachy isn't nursing well enough. i say hes 9.5 freaking pounds. hes fine. Janet will come over and check on us as soon as were settled. they say since i was officially attended b a doc i sw for about 30 minutes altogether during my entire pregnancy, labour and delivery HE'd have to ok it. i say im leaving as soon as chris gets here, doctors ok or not so find the doc or find an AMA form. they call Janet to whine and say im trying to leave and janet is like 'i cant believe shes still there, tell her ill come to her house later in the day'. they get all huffy and call the doctor. doc comes to see me. i say im going home. he says 'ok, do you want any prescriptions?' i ask for one for methadone, which he thinks is funny, then he leaves. now the nurses are all huffier. chris comes around 10. i slowly get all packed up and we leave.
Epilogue is we're just fine at home. Malachy gets a brutal case of thrush and wont nurse. i have to pump and feed him cold breast milk. poor lil guy. it takes him 6 weeks to get back on the boob, but he never has any formula ever. that im proud of. poor lil boy has a scratch on his head for at least 6 weeks from the fucking electrode thing. takes a couple weeks for his bruises to go away. Janet is awesome and comes over every day. chris goes back to work when malachy is 5 days old which is really hard on all of us. janet tells me that shes afraid i'm going to have post-traumatic stress disorder due to malachys birth and urges me to go to counsellings. i play i over and over in my head ever night and cant sleep. i start talking to chris about it a lot and start writing about it and eventually come to terms with it. i think if someone had just called janet hen things started to go bad, absolutely everything would have been different. chris and i were not at all prepared for the way things went down. it'll never happen like that again. in the end i got my awesome little boy, but it was a lot harder to adjust because i felt so haunted by his labour and birth. if i had to do it again i would have done everything differently, bt i feel like i did everything i could given the circumstances.
so i never posted a 'birth story' or whatever, and im just starting to stop replaying it my head so i thought i would write it out. be warned if you are pregnant or ever plan on having a baby i wouldn't read it.
for the last 7 weeks of my pregnancy i had contractions every evening. starting about ten minutes apart and becoming three-five minutes apart. gradually building in intensity until i couldn't talk through them eventually they'd taper out in the early morning. i was so fucking exhausted and burnt out. chris works nights so every night it'd be stress city, like is it baby tonight? all signs always pointed to yes and we both were stressed about it. the whole thing was hellish.
when i was 42.5 weeks i started to have to see a doctor,due to the midwifery rules, so we went and saw this doc my midwife liked, who said to go for another ultrasound to make sure things were looking ok with kiddo. i had a bit of a meltdown that day with being so burnt out from being pregnant and things going so far from what i wanted. i was a bit hysterical. i had done every single 'natural' bullshit thing to induce labour ever invented. my midwife couldn't attend me at home anymore. it was very bad day. anyways, gilly came for my ultrasound and made me sane again and the doc said to go for a stress test on Saturday and probably be induced with cervadil. i was told that i could get cervadil, and then be 'low-risk', go to an labour, delivery, post-partum (LDRP) room that have tubs, showers, lots of space etc. i thought 'i can dig that' and got my head ok with it. my midwife could still attend me. a-ok.
couldn't sleep at all Friday night. Chris has to go to work until 4 in the fucking morning. went in Saturday morning and as the baby looked in the 95% on ultrasound and i was 43 weeks, we went ahead with cervadil at around 11 am. after the hour monitor thing chris and i went for a walk outside. not long after i started having contractions. when we got back they told me they had found me a space on the antepartum ward until i was in active labour, or until 12 hours had passed. i couldnt go to a labour room cause i wasnt 'in labour' and i couldnt go home (going home would have been AMA and my midwife couldnt then attend me and having an unassisted 43 week birth with a family history of a bleeding disorders and exhaustion seemed unappealing).so antepartum.
it was this ward room with not enough space to even walk around, in a room with someone who had been there for three weeks, with a bathroom between our room and the next room over, with a toilet and sink and bad smell. off the bat i had excruciating back pain. by 3pm i asked chris to call gilly to come down and help. the nurse came in once every four hours to listen to the baby and take my blood pressure. i couldnt freaking move. I asked to be moved to somewhere i could walk around. the said not yet. i asked to be checked and this shitty resident would come and tell me that i was going to be moved to a room 'really soon'. the nurse would tell me to 'tough it out' so i could go to low-risk when i was in active labour. i started having 'couplet' contractions, where i would have three - five contractions in a row, lasting more then a minute and having less then thirty seconds between them. then i would have a 5 minute break. i was barfing my guts out with every contraction and pissing with every barf. the stupid nurse brought me a goddamn birthing ball cause she decided i needed to 'open my pelvis' i say stupid because there wasn't enough room for me to actually sit on the birthing ball in the room because the room was too small. for awhile i was in a groove of standing in the hall in front of a fan during breaks then leaning over the bed during contractions. then the barfing started and i couldnt really do that anymore. poor gilly and chris kept having to find me clean gowns and sheets and bowls cause no matter how many times they asked, no one would help.
i had asked before things got really bad if i could go to LDRP to take a shower, as i had planned to use water a lot to deal, and frankly i was totally disgusting. they said i could take a shower on the antepartum ward. the shower was in this filthy room and was this tiny stall i don't think i would have even fit in. they had used it to dump out the ice machine immediately previously. chris, gill and i all vetoed this and i decided to 'tough it out' gill and chris took turns cleaning out my rotating puke bowls and help me change and put pressure on my back. i couldnt get on top of the pain - there was no break and no escape and no coping mechinisms available in that space. i was yelling and swearing and couldnt find a position to be in that wasn't excruciating. there was no room to move in the room and i didn't want to be screaming in the hallway on the filthy floor in a public ward. im a fairly private person at the best of times and that only increased in labour. i would go in the tiny bathroom that smelt like poo and cry and cry and feel so hopeless. the resident kept saying '20 minutes'. eventually i asked for gravol to try to stop throwing up. the bitch nurse would come in and talk to me while i was having contractions, even though i kept begging her not to. she would tell me helpful things like 'youre not really in labour yet' and 'tough it out'. i got an iv and the gravol and kept barfing. it was all very awesome.
at least an hour had gone by from the '20 minutes' and the evil nurse came and told us that i wasnt going to LDRP, that id have to go to the high-risk side, where the rooms were tiny and no showers and constant monitoring, but that wouldnt even be soon because all the rooms were full, and apparently im 1 cm dilated after 11 hours of contractions. i couldnt go to LDRP because i had been induced. (remember they originally told me it would be fine) and i would need 'constant monitoring' (remember i had had the fetal heart rate checked with a doppler for one minute maybe three times so far this whole induction). also my midwife couldnt be the boss of the whole medical side of things anymore, that some dude would be cause it was 'high-risk'. finally after all this and the evil nurse talking to me during a series of contractions with all this bad news and still barfing i was like 'gimme drugs now' and got morphine (couldnt have gotten an epidural or used gas cause im on a goddamn hospital ward, not labour floor). can i also just say i felt SO BAD for my poor roommate who had to listen to 10 hours of barfing, swearing and sobbing.
anyways, got morphine, made me feel fucked up but a bit more awesome, and they were like 'theres a room on high risk'. i finally got my head together enough in morphine land to demand someone call my midwife. talking to chris about it after he says he was totally just in coping/survival mode and couldnt really think of solutions. hence not calling janet sooner or demanding to see a better doctor or just leaving or whatever. this is about 1130 at night. they tell me this during a series of contractions and my water breaks. i move right away. the room is like the size of a closet, cause theres no delivery rooms available, so still very little space to even move and no bathroom at all, not even a toilet. im screaming through contractions in this mini room. they hook me up to the monitor and check me. i think i was 3 cm. they decide while checking me that the tracing looks like shit (i had just had 10mg of morphine)and put in an internal monitor without any sort of consultation or consent, so trapped in bed again. Now apparently im not allowed out of bed at all. The whole things sucks so fucking much and im so exhausted and demoralized and its all so so so far from any possible scenario i had planned for or placed out in my head as a possibility. gilly says the tracing does suck so im also now worried. cant move, such bullshit. so i decide 'screw this, i want an epidural'. takes a couple tries but eventually have an epidural in. somewhere in there my midwife Janet who i love more then anything shows up. I tell Gilly and Janet to go home and sleep, so chris and i can sleep too. Gill and Chris decide to just go get some food and Janet goes home. this is i think 2 am. im still feeling the contractions, but a bit of the edge is off. at 3am, an hour after being 3cm im 8 cm, so they miraculously come up with a proper room.
move to the nicer room. Gill, Chris and Janet come back. I have a bit of granola bar and some ice chips and start my projectile vomiting again. The epidural totally wears off. I have like half a cm left or something. I use that gas stuff (which is stupid fun) for awhile. i dont remember much at this point. i know i somehow get talked into getting my epidural 'topped up' which renders me completely incapable of moving my left leg, but still in writhing pain. at some point, for some reason i still dont know they give me pitocin. Im now running this stupid fever that keeps getting higher and higher until its 104. apparently im delirious with drugs and fever and sleep deprivation and pain and asking where my grandma is. weird. they give me antibiotics (which i refuse multiple times)and tonnes of fluid.
at around 720, its shift change and i say my body is pushing. i still cant move my damn leg and have this stupid fever and am constantly puking and haven't slept for days. it was awesome. so fun. i push and push and push. they try to get me to move but i cant feel my leg and i'm still delirious and out of it. hours pass. eventually the doc comes in and decides that i need forceps and will have to go to the OR. fun! so its like 1130 am, i've been pushing for 4 hours. finally they decide since the forceps thing is happening and i may need a c-section they should get someone to try to fix my epidural. (this is about 8 hours after it hasn't been working properly). i tell them there is no way i can possibly sit up and still to put in an epidural (transition-type contractions for 8 hours now).
sanjay, the dreamiest man alive, comes to do my epidural and knocks me out with fentayl and versed first, two dream drugs, and i wake up and i have a proper epidural five minutes later. sadly it still doesn't work how they're supposed to, i can still feel all the contractions intensely, but i can now move my left leg, so for this im slightly pleased.
go into OR. chris and janet are allowed to come, looking snappy in scrubs. theres like seriously 15 or 20 people in there, setting up to do a c-section. talk about pressure. sanjay tells me this is all going so bad because i'm an ER nurse and so is his wife and ER nurses have bad labours. he then decides since my epidural doesn't work properly, he will be a labour coach instead of anesthesiologist and starts bossing me around (in an awesome way) and holding my hand and Janets being awesome and i decide i probably would be really bad to have a c-section or forceps for that matter and i'll just push baby-big-head out myself thanks anyways. janet tells me after that sanjay was giving such weird advice but was sounding really confident and i was listening to him and she thought he was so funny and wasnt doing any harm that she didn't stop him.
get baby-16-inch-skull pushed out and the fuckers take him away. he's just fine, janet says, like 8 and 9 apgars and its just cause the fucking pediatric nurses and doctors are there and they want something to do i think. so they steal my kid for like 10 minutes and im crying hysterically, cause i want my kid back, and chris is coming back and forth between us but they wont let him take him and finally janet flips out and is going to try to take him and they let chris have him so i can see him
so finally they wheel me off to 'recovery' where i finally get to hold him. we decide to name him malachy. we had been planning to do the oral vitamin K but poor kid had the most incredibly bruised skull i had ever seen. probably due to being pushed out for 5 hours. so he gets a vitamin k shot, which hes not pumped about. my recovery nurse is my buddy alli from nursing school i used to get wasted with. shes all nervous about taking my blood cause she thinks im going to get all judgey-pants on her case im an ER nurse. they 'have to' take my blood since in RH-. i ask if she cant just take it through my ginormous iv already in place but apparently they have rules about that kind of thing. i decide L&D is all stupid fucking arbitrary rules that make no sense whatsoever. she has to poke me twice, even tho i have monster veins, but after 24 hours of brutal labour im all 'whatever' about such little things like needles. i nurse my boy a bit. i call my folks. i get in a wheelchair and go to use the phone to call some people. the don't have any postpartum rooms available so we stay in the recovery area for several hours. Janet and Gilly go home to sleep.
finally move upstairs. we all fall asleep. my sis and Gramma come to visit. they kick out Chris because its 'not visiting hours' and apparently new fathers aren't allowed to stay with their families. He goes home to sleep and let puppy out and bury Malachy and I's placenta in the berry patch. The nurses tell me they need to monitor malachys blood sugar because hes so big. whatever. then they tell me his blood sugar is 'bordering on the low end of normal' and since hes not nursing well (he didn't feel like it, he was tired) they needed to give him sugar water. i'm like 'no'. they keep taking him away to test his sugar and then demanding to give him sugar water. after like four hours of this and being awake for 4 days i say 'whatever'. the give him the damn sugar water (which will undoubtedly spike his sugar and then cause it to crash). three days later malachy has a raging case of thrush.
anyways, at some point i fall asleep and they take malachy away. i wake up and ring the nurse and some broad comes in and says i cant have him back cause my nurse was on break. i'm all 'did she take my son with her on break?' and she leaves. an hour later i'm still trying to get him back and finally at like 630 i get him back after getting out of bet with m fucked up cooch and exhaustion and going to find my little boy. assholes. hes still not interested in eating, which is totally normal int the first 24 hours, but they're all freaking out about it, so i start lying and saying hes nursing. whatever. i tell them im going home. they say i have to stay for 48 hours. i say 'like hell i do', the only reason i didn't go home the night before is i couldn't walk on my own. so i say my midwife says i can go any time i want. they say malachy isn't nursing well enough. i say hes 9.5 freaking pounds. hes fine. Janet will come over and check on us as soon as were settled. they say since i was officially attended b a doc i sw for about 30 minutes altogether during my entire pregnancy, labour and delivery HE'd have to ok it. i say im leaving as soon as chris gets here, doctors ok or not so find the doc or find an AMA form. they call Janet to whine and say im trying to leave and janet is like 'i cant believe shes still there, tell her ill come to her house later in the day'. they get all huffy and call the doctor. doc comes to see me. i say im going home. he says 'ok, do you want any prescriptions?' i ask for one for methadone, which he thinks is funny, then he leaves. now the nurses are all huffier. chris comes around 10. i slowly get all packed up and we leave.
Epilogue is we're just fine at home. Malachy gets a brutal case of thrush and wont nurse. i have to pump and feed him cold breast milk. poor lil guy. it takes him 6 weeks to get back on the boob, but he never has any formula ever. that im proud of. poor lil boy has a scratch on his head for at least 6 weeks from the fucking electrode thing. takes a couple weeks for his bruises to go away. Janet is awesome and comes over every day. chris goes back to work when malachy is 5 days old which is really hard on all of us. janet tells me that shes afraid i'm going to have post-traumatic stress disorder due to malachys birth and urges me to go to counsellings. i play i over and over in my head ever night and cant sleep. i start talking to chris about it a lot and start writing about it and eventually come to terms with it. i think if someone had just called janet hen things started to go bad, absolutely everything would have been different. chris and i were not at all prepared for the way things went down. it'll never happen like that again. in the end i got my awesome little boy, but it was a lot harder to adjust because i felt so haunted by his labour and birth. if i had to do it again i would have done everything differently, bt i feel like i did everything i could given the circumstances.