Gaga For Lulu

I think I am hormonal today. I even had a good cry, thank you very much Oh The Joys (by the way, this is one of my favorite sites). Every once and a while I reflect on the birth of The Babe. It was 2 1/2 years ago and I still remember it like was yesterday! The 7 weeks that followed were so damn scary!!!

How can a women who doesn’t have any of the inside girlie parts be so ding dang emotional and hormonal, you ask? Who the hell knows? I am convinced that even after a hysterectomy us girls still get our monthly boo hoo’s. You can’t convince me other wise, partly because I have researched this topic at length and partly because I am so flippin’ bull headed.

Ok, getting back to the birth of The Babe and the days that followed. I was induced at 38 weeks or so, due to being eclamptic. I was so fortunate to deal with that with all 3 of my pregnancies. LOL. She was born at 10:10 P.M. and everything was great. She was perfect and we were moved to the mother baby unit shortly after.

By 2 A.M., I was bleeding uncontrollably in the bathroom. I remember calling to The Big Guy while I was in the bathroom, “I think you should call the nurse now, something is not right, there is too much blood”. With that there was a lot of hustle and bustle and I was put back in bed and had a good ol’ manual evacuation of, for lack of better words, “stuff”. How freakin’ fun.

You want to know the really funny part? They still sent me home the next day. Thats right, my hematocrit was in the toilet and I couldn’t close my legs due to 2 hands being shoved up there right after giving birth. Not to mention the amount of cramping I had due to having prolonged pitocin for 24 hours, thanks to the good ol’ bleed.

I am going to share with you an interesting fact: redheads bleed more than anyone else, also we have an increased tolerance for pain. I have now been told this by at least 10 doctors and it is in most labor and delivery nursing text books. Kinda funny, huh? Go ahead, Google it.

To make a very long story short, I was readmitted to the hospital 4 days after coming home with my new baby. Yup, you guessed it, I was hemorrhaging again. In the 7 weeks that followed, I was in the hospital a total of 32 days, had a total of 4 D&C’s, 2 uterine arterty embolectomies, by the way I was the first to ever have one of these procedures at this institution, many and many units of blood and finally a total hysterectomy (that means I am in cited in medical research, I can just picture the big ol’ picture of my “down there” parts, I am so proud).

Thank the sweet lord that number 1, I didn’t die, I was quite close a couple times, and number 2, that I had the eneormous support system that we were surrounded with. The Big Guy was a full time worker, full time daddy, full time worrier while I was in the hospital, but he always held it together when he came to visit me. He even brought The Babe to see me a couple of times, which kept me smiling. It was so damn hard to see your kids maybe 3 times in a month, and one was just a wee little baby.

Oh, I cried so much. My mom and mother in law kept the house running and kids taken care of. My close friends helped out at the house and took turns visiting me, even stayed in the room when my big ass got a bath. God bless them! Their eyes were probably burned by my flesh! My dad came and sat with me almost everyday and never showed a look of panic or urgency. Knowing what I know now, that was a big job.

I know, I should probably see a therapist due to the fact that I still think about this every once in awhile. I do think that this has actually made our family so much stronger though. I know I am sarcastic, crass and even seem ungrateful with some of my writing, but believe me, when I look at my kids and think, “what if”, I say a big thank you to the guy upstairs. I could have missed out on all this craziness! And damn it, this is my craziness!!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Family Life, The Babe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.