Concerning Boobies

February 23, 2018 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

So I’m going to write about boobs, specifically about breastfeeding. If you’re weirded out by that, (a) might be good to talk to someone about why breastfeeding weirds you out; and (b) you may want to skip this blog.

mwmhorq

I’ve always been on the Bigger Boobs side of things when it comes to my own development. For a long time, I still fit into the “big but can still shop at Victoria’s Secret” category, a category that ends with the letter D; but weight gain and eventually pregnancy showed me a whole new set of letters to describe my chest flesh. At the moment, I’m squeezed into an older bra that’s a bit too small for my “pregnant with twins, what’s your excuse?” chest because I really don’t want to get measured and refitted when I’ve still got a while to go yet in this pregnancy.

People talk a good game about wanting gazongas like mine, but they aren’t fun. On the most pragmatic scale of all, affordability, they’re a nightmare. Some maternity stores do go up to my size for cheap(ish), but if I really want to wear something that’s cuter than beige, I have to go online to find it, and it always costs ~$50-60, which is why I own three bras and three bras only. Objectively cuter bras that exist to make me feel good about myself don’t really come in my size, or if they do, they don’t come easily (though I will say that once the twins are born, I’m totally getting a galaxy bra from Torrid and you can’t stop me).

Less pragmatically, my back hurts. A lot. Contrary to what animes would have you believe, big boobs do not function like helium balloons. They consist of fat and sinuses and chest flesh and thus actually weigh something, and that weight must be supported by something, namely your back muscles. Consequently, I’ve noticed that since I went from my high school size of “appropriate” to my postpartum size of “even turtlenecks give me cleavage,” my upper back hurts a lot more. It’s not excruciating, but it’s enough that, when lying in bed at the end of the day, I pray for the funds to get a breast reduction sooner rather than later so that I don’t develop a hunchback before I’m 40.

9enktft
(no offense Quasimodo)

Now, you’d think with these gazongas, I’d be an enthusiastic heifer, udderly producing way too much milk for one baby, let alone two.

And you would be wrong.

I felt encouraged in this direction towards the end of my pregnancy with Sam. Nobody mentions this, but you leak a lot the further along your pregnancy gets, and I kept developing stains on my favorite shirts and bras (which were more numerous then). It was frustrating, but I felt like it was a good sign: if I’m producing enough to leak right now, I’ll surely be a dairy farm for this kid, and we’ll never have to spend a cent on formula.

Ha.

Fast forward to Sam’s birthday, the day of his actual birth. After 45 minutes of pushing, the nurses lifted my child with his enormous head and baby slime to my chest, and it was time to breastfeed for the first time. This practice is encouraged for understandable reasons: breastfeeding causes your body to release oxytocin, which causes your uterus to contract, which helps expel the placenta and slow your bleeding. If, for whatever reason, you can’t breastfeed or your uterus isn’t contracting, you’ll get a dose of synthetic oxytocin (known as pitocin) to speed the process along and hopefully prevent your delivery room from turning into that scene from The Shining.

s6mz8jc

So anyway, I tried to breastfeed. I’d read all the videos, knew all the tips, and figured it couldn’t be that difficult. I held my boy tenderly against me and gently guided my huge freaking gazonga titty towards his face and his face towards the huge freaking gazonga titty. For about half a second, he put in a valiant effort of latching onto the bulbous orb that was suddenly coming towards him… but then that second ended and he decided that no, he did not want the orb.

In the moment, it wasn’t a big deal. I was still on an IV that gave me a steady drip of pitocin because of my induction. The placenta came out, and I didn’t die of too much bleeding, and Sam and I had those moments of bonding together–albeit minus the breastfeeding.

But it’s cool, it’s cool, I told myself. I’ve been in labor for 24 hours, Sam is brand new to breathing, we’ll just keep trying until we get it.

Back in those days, hospitals didn’t really go for the baby-friendly hospital movement thing, so we had the option to let Sam spend the night in the nursery and get some sleep. Exhausted from having been pregnant for what felt like 18 years and going through 24 hours of labor without having slept at all in the 36 hours beforehand, I gladly took advantage of this program. The nurses fed Sam formula while I slept and recovered, about six hours a night.

tenor

During the day, we worked on breastfeeding. A steady stream of lactation consultants came in with various tools to help Sam realize that breastfeeding was awesome, but nothing doing. Our most elaborate attempt involved a syringe with a long tube attached that went into Sam’s mouth at the same time as my boob. The idea was that he theoretically wasn’t getting into breastfeeding because my boob wasn’t producing immediate results, which I still think is true, but the syringe didn’t help with that at all. Sam just got angry when the syringe stopped and screamed instead of trying harder, a strategy I can definitely relate to.

But we went home, and I tried to put Sam on the boob every time he needed food. These sessions were, to put it gently, miserable. They lasted at least an hour and a half apiece and needed to start all over again when they ended.

See. First, I’d put Sam on the boob with the mindset of “maybe he’ll get it this time.” Breastfeeding involves a LOT of moving parts, and trying to get your infant to understand which moving parts are which is an exercise in having the patience of a saint and the stamina of a tank. And I did everything the lactation consultants suggested. I used the syringe. I avoided pacifiers at the very start and used breast-shaped bottles to avoid “nipple confusion.” I massaged and focused and switched boobs and did what I could, but even after 45 minutes of wrestling, Sam was screaming with hunger and I was exhausted.

But we still weren’t done, or well. I wasn’t done.

For the first couple of weeks, I had Kyle with me to help, since he had a week of paid paternity leave and then worked from home, returning to work in gradual steps. He would go and mix up a bottle of formula for us, and I’d get out the pump. Breast pumps are kind of weird machines, and it’s impossible to use one and NOT feel like you’ve devolved into some sort of human-bovine hybrid. Even with the most modern and discreet models, you’re being milked, and there’s no way for that to NOT be awkward.

1424986600449341
(sorry to shatter any illusions; it’s exactly like this)

So Kyle would take Sam and sit on the couch with pillows and give Sam a bottle so that the poor child would stop being so hungry. I would get myself hooked up to the milk machine, which was… an adventure, to say the least. I’m not sure if it’s easier for people whose breasts don’t fall into the huge freaking gazongas category, but getting everything aligned properly was always a Process for me. After that, I’d sit and pump for a total of 45 minutes, half on the left and half on the right. I couldn’t do anything else during these pumping sessions, because I had to hold the cups in place or else they’d just be trying to milk air, and that’s not very good. And the end product was always roughly 15 drops of milk–a generous amount for, say, a pet mouse, but not very useful for keeping a child alive.

It was exhausting. And by the time I was done pumping and Sam was done eating, we’d have a reprieve of maybe half an hour before it was time again.

I hated it.

What’s more, I hated myself for hating it. Breastfeeding, feeding in general, was supposed to be this wonderful bonding time with the two of us, but I dreaded the very thought. The best part for me was when Kyle would give Sam back to me, after all the pumping and eating and wrestling and angst, and my baby boy would curl up against me and fall asleep to the sound of my heartbeat. The worst part was literally everything else about it. I was miserable.

If I’m honest, the beginning of the end came about 3 days after Sam was born. Maybe four. Our hospital had a policy that if you left before the 48 hours you were allowed to stay following your child’s birth were up, you could have a nurse visit you at home. Sam was born at around 5:45 p.m., which gave us a solid two nights in the hospital, and we didn’t want to deal with rush hour traffic on the ride home, so we left a good four hours before we had to… and two days later, the nurse came.

She brought a scale with her and blood pressure monitors and all sorts of portable tools to measure Sam and measure me and make sure that we weren’t secretly dying. Sam went first; she took his blood pressure, checked out his jaundice (a lot of babies are jaundiced when born, but most end up better after getting some sunlight), and then weighed him. “That’s really impressive!” she remarked. “He’s gained back all of the weight he lost after birth. He’s back to his birth weight. Whatever you’re doing to keep him growing like this, keep it up!”

The remarks were both flattering and embarrassing. We were about 50/50 formula and breast-wrestling at that point, and even Sam’s pediatrician said at the one week mark, “If you want to start starving him a little so that he’ll take to the boob easier, he’s got more than enough weight on him.” But for my own sanity, I couldn’t do that, knowing what it took to get him to even breastfeed for a solid ten minutes.

I don’t remember the specific day I decided to quit breastfeeding entirely, only that Kyle was there and asked if I even wanted to try to put Sam on the boob. And I took a deep breath and I said, “You know what, I think I don’t. Let’s just give him formula.” The breast pump parts started to gather dust, and although my ginormous freaking gazongas still leaked like a haunted faucet (leading to at least one incident of which Kyle has said he learned a valuable lesson about not honking your wife’s boob affectionately while she’s lactating), things started to look up.

Sam kept up his pace of growth, and he was a much happier baby now that he was able to actually eat and not have to deal with having a boob thrust in his face whenever he got hungry. Kyle and I were actually able to function better as well, especially once we discovered various charts describing how much formula we could give Sam based on how big he was and how long we wanted to go between feedings. We were able to take shifts at night, so we both got about six hours of sleep, which wasn’t great but was a huge improvement over the three we’d been getting before.

formula-feeding-chart

And, blissfully, Sam started sleeping through the night around three months old. That night is burned into my brain: Kyle and I both decided to crash around 10 p.m., and when Sam woke us up fussing at 5 a.m., we both looked at each other and asked, “Did you get up last night? No, did you?” And then came the realization of what had transpired and life was good.

Four years later, and Sam’s a healthy, happy kid whom his teachers describe as “scary smart.” He is absolutely average in terms of height and weight, and aside from a bout with ear infections well after I would have weaned him anyway, he’s been fantastic all along. I have zero regrets.

And I could go into all of the other things that contributed to the zero regrets: how I had to have gallbladder surgery when he was three months old, how I started antidepressants shortly after that, how scientifically speaking, babies who are formula fed and babies who are breastfed have negligible differences, but… why? What matters here was that breastfeeding was making us both miserable, and everyone was much happier when we stopped.

It’s all making me lean towards not breastfeeding the twins, which is a horrifying prospect when you consider the cost of formula for two babies, but at the same time…

Well, I look at my boobs. They’re still enormous. They could have their own gravitational pulls. I look at how hard it was to convince Sam to even try the boob and imagine doing that, with all its moving parts, for two babies. I look at Kyle and Sam, with their incredible bond that I don’t believe would be nearly as strong if Kyle hadn’t been able to be so involved with Sam’s care in those early days. I look at the almost certain chaos of those early days with two newborns instead of one.

And then I go to the store and buy a dozen more bottles (20% off at Babies R Us!) and say, you know, I think they’ll be alright.

In your head

February 18, 2018 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

If I’m being completely honest, I don’t remember hearing about it. It wasn’t an event like 9/11, where the shock and growing horror you feel as you watch events unfold in real time burn everything about that moment into your memory: where you were, what you were doing, what happened before and after, how you felt.

It was the spring of 1999, and I was a sophomore in high school, watching all of my friends who were born earlier in the year getting their learners’ permits and getting our first tastes of that irresponsible freedom that comes with being a teenager. I used to tell my mom that people called them “LPs” for short, but nobody called them that, learners’ permits, I mean. And anyway, I wasn’t really focused on world events at that point in time, except for when I had to be, like in AP U.S. History.

Most of my attention was focused all over the place, because I was a very busy high school sophomore, fifteen and not-quite-sixteen. I had a pretty big supporting role in the school musical that year (stepmother in Cinderella), I had a boyfriend who was in college (automatic cool points and elimination of dating as a distraction in anything ever), I sat state standardized tests (the MCAS exam, which is highly mockable and always has been), I was miserably failing Algebra II, life was busy overall.

I wasn’t thinking at all, of course, about school shootings.

They were on everyone’s radar, sort of, not like they really are today. We all knew about Paducah, we all knew vaguely that this was a Thing That Happened, but it wasn’t something that anyone thought about. School shootings seemed like flukes, like something you’d say “damn that was crazy!” about but then move on with your life, assuming that the perpetrator was bullied or had some sort of vendetta or something.

Somehow, Columbine changed that.

I don’t really remember hearing about it, but I remember the impacts. Not long after Columbine, we had something that was like 50% fire drill but really more of a school shooter drill. This was before you had lockdown practices, of course, because we thought it was a fluke. We all wandered aimlessly out of the buildings, accompanied by our teachers, and hung out on the front lawn until we got the all-clear. It may have been a real threat; I heard rumors that someone had left notes somewhere about shooting up the school, bombing the school, but nobody was really scared by it. Columbine was a fluke, after all.

I remember about six sprillion 20/20 esque programs dedicated to Why This Happened, and everyone had a different thought process. Violent video games! Bullying! The goth subculture! And therefore Satanism (Satanic Panic 2.0?)! Marilyn Manson! Trenchcoats (I’m not kidding)! My boyfriend at the time wore a trenchcoat like it was his job and played Resident Evil almost religiously, so I got a kick out of those theories. I think the newspeople eventually settled on bullying as The Reason, and after that, everything faded… but then later research revealed that the perpetrators were actually more often the bullies than the bullied, so that’s probably not it.

I remember the weird capitalization on certain victims’ lives and deaths. Cassie Bernall was the big one. The story went that she was asked, “Do you believe in God?” and said yes before being murdered. It was a great narrative from a Christian perspective; it turned her into a martyr of sorts, ostensibly killed because she said yes (which was the name of the book her parents wrote about her). Christian recording artists wrote songs about the incident, it was this great wonder and beautiful tragedy and… it didn’t even happen. Students who were with Cassie when she died reported that the shooter only said, “Peek-a-boo!” before murdering her.

But it was still some good music.

And it kind of… went away. Not completely, of course, and certainly not for the victims and their loved ones, but school shootings just anywhere near as common back then as they are now. Oh, they happened. Thirteen shootings happened between Columbine and my graduation from high school two years later. That seems like a lot, but then you realize that 2018 is so far 46 days old and there have already been 18 school shooting-style incidents, and suddenly, 13 over two years doesn’t seem as high of a number.

Next year, it will have been 20 years since Columbine. A lot has changed since then. The weirdest thing to me is that if you go to certain places on the internet, you’ll find pockets of people who are huge fans of the Columbine shooters. I don’t mean assholes who say, “Man, I wish I could shoot up a school!” I mean people who look at the shooters, say they were well within their rights to massacre people or that they did nothing wrong, coo over how attractive they were, and so on and so forth.

It’s… strange.

I always talk to Kyle about meta-fears I have for our kid(s). I call them meta-fears because the likelihood of them ever happening is statistically small, but as a parent, you still sometimes lie awake at night and wonder, “but what if…?” But they’re fears that you have to put on the back burner because if you let them, you’ll become irrational and incapable of functioning because they’re fears of such HUGE things that you have so little control over.

Meta-fears are things like “what if some random person grabs my kid off the street?” Statistically, this isn’t very likely to happen. The vast majority of kidnappings are perpetrated by members of the victim’s family, and while you have some pretty famous stories where that was not the case, they’re famous because they’re so rare. So you hold your kid’s hand and watch them when you’re out of the house, but you can’t let this fear consume you or else you’ll end up locking your kid in a tower, growing out their hair to about 70 feet, and only visiting them on weekends and bank holidays.

Things like “what if my kid gets cancer?” Statistically, this isn’t very likely to happen, even though we all know someone or know someone who knows someone whose kid got cancer. We’ve all contributed to fundraisers and all watched hashtags. One of the towns around here had a big rally for a kid that had one of the worst forms of childhood cancer, DIPG. Their hashtag was #whynotdevin, and it was HUGE around here. And it was heartbreaking, and of course, it made me wonder in my parental way, what if Sam contracted DIPG? 100% fatal, a disease that deteriorates who you are, and the only thing you can do is try and make your kid comfortable until they slip away in less than a year. It’s ridiculously rare (200 cases a year worldwide kind of rare), and you theoretically worry, but you have to put it on the back burner or you’re going to end up losing your mind because it’s not something you can predict or protect against.

Things like “what if this plane we’re on crashes?” Things like “what if there’s a drunk driver?” Things like “what if an asteroid crashes through our roof spontaneously?” Things like “what if nuclear war?”

Things like “what if my child’s school gets shot up?”

This wasn’t a worry when I was a kid. We had fire drills, of course, and those were usually pretty chill. One time, we had a fire drill while we were watching a video about volcanoes, and everybody thought that was hilarious. Another time, some kids brought a ouija board to recess and apparently, the ~spirits~ told them that the school would burn down that afternoon, and when we had a fire drill that afternoon, they all freaked out and that was also hilarious.

But it’s a worry now.

One of the things I’ve had the hardest time reading lately is the swath of accounts from teachers, telling the world who’s never experienced such a thing what it’s like to have a lockdown drill. They talk about kids not knowing it’s a drill, big and tough kids bursting into tears of absolute terror when the assistant principal rattles the doorknob to make sure it’s locked. They talk about teachers not knowing it’s a drill and screaming at their students in a panic, telling them to be quiet and stop talking and giggling, because if there is an active shooter, their silence could be their lifeline.

Fearing that your child’s school could be shot up should be a statistically rare meta-fear, like cancer or a plane crash or nuclear war. It should be something that you can just put in the back of your mind and worry about that bridge if you ever come to it, but it’s not.

Lockdown drills are pretty standard across the board nowadays. I don’t know if our town’s schools do them, or how early they start, but I imagine that they do and that they start very early. It adds a new layer to the meta-fear. It adds a thousand new layers to the meta-fear. I imagine, without wanting to, my sweet little boy with big hazel eyes and blonde hair having to hide in a closet behind locked doors. I imagine him being so terrified that he can’t fall asleep for weeks. Worse, I imagine him having a hard time comprehending what’s going on, being the loud and silly voice, and it not being a drill, and suddenly, I’m planning a funeral for my first baby.

I don’t want to imagine this. I don’t want this to be a fear that we have to take logical preventative measures about, like choking hazards and SIDS and batteries in smoke alarms and car seats.

But here we are.

Of course I have opinions about the whole thing. Anyone who’s known me for more than five minutes knows what those opinions are, but I’m not throwing them out here because I don’t want to attract That Crowd, if you know what I mean. I’m also not throwing them out here because I don’t want to sit around and debate and throw statistics back and forth and scream ceaselessly into the void at a group of people who just will. not. care.

I do want to scream into the void. But I’m tired.

So instead, I take a deep breath. I take comfort in the people I love. I hug Sam extra tight, even when he’s spent the entire day being a little shit (true story: this blog was initially going to be about the emotional weirdness of being angry with a toddler over something they don’t know any better, and it was going to be about poop). I listen to the Cranberries singing, “But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family,” and wonder what happens to That Crowd when it is their family.

Sorry about the lack of entertaining or diverting gifs; they seemed inappropriate.

It’s been a week…

February 12, 2018 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Today is Sunday, a nice calm Sunday. It’s pouring rain outside, and that combined with the melting snow has made for some soupy lawn shenanigans and a kind of dreary view. But it’s peaceful and calm, and honestly, after this week, I need a nice, peaceful, calm day.

(side note: I totally wrote this last night and it’s so long that I couldn’t finish it until today, oops)

Not that this week was wholly bad, mind you. It was actually really good on a lot of levels! Just… it was one of those weeks where everything happened so much, and by the time I crashed last night, I was relieved to put a pin in it and just enjoy the good memories and the knowledge that next week will be just as crazy (but still in good ways).

Last Sunday, I guess some superb owls were around? I don’t know. We mostly spent the day either at the supermarket or at Target or home. I was craving some chips of any kind, but the superb owls had made off with most of them, which was a little depressing, but not the end of the world.

And even Monday was a calm day. Sam and I followed his usual routine, playing all morning while checking in with his favorite TV shows (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and My Little Pony, for those keeping track at home), a nice lunch (which he devoured enthusiastically thanks to the promise of dessert cookies), calm naptime and a bit of screen time before an evening filled with him enthusiastically waiting for Kyle to get home. And then Sam went to bed after dinner, Kyle and I relaxed apart and together, and Monday was a wholly normal day.

Tuesday was not.

Tuesday, I had some testing to do–specifically the dreaded three-hour glucose test.

tumblr_lat62ah3v81qcoqtho1_400

The glucose tests are for the sake of seeing if you have gestational diabetes. As pregnancy complications go, GD isn’t really high on the scale of freaking out. It’s not nothing, and you do have to keep an eye on it, as it can cause plenty of complications (especially later on), but compared to, say, preeclampsia, it’s relatively meh; and the testing for it is probably the biggest nuisance of the entire situation.

When I was pregnant with Sam, there were potentially two GD tests I could wind up taking–the one-hour and the three-hour. The one-hour was the first and was more of a screening. For that test, I had to fast the 12 hours beforehand, get my blood drawn, drink the second-most god-awful sugary drink in the history of the world in under five minutes, wait an hour, and then get my blood drawn again. The drink was awful, but the orange flavor helped… it tasted kind of like a melted popsicle with a weird aftertaste, and while that’s not a good flavor, it wasn’t horrendous. After that one-hour test, I went out for breakfast with Kat and my mom, and life was grand.

And I passed, so I got to skip the three hour test.

confetti_sue

This time around, they’d changed the screening protocol. You used to need to fast before the screening, but this time around, they told me to go ahead and eat breakfast, whatever, it doesn’t matter. I still had to drink the gross drink (it’s called Glucola, by the way, and this time it was fruit punch flavored, but really, it tasted like if NyQuil tasted worse) and wait the hour, but they didn’t take my blood beforehand, so the whole thing seemed… kind of screwy, to be honest. Without a controlled test environment, how was the test supposed to tell anyone anything except that if you chug a bunch of soda immediately after breakfast, you’ll have high glucose levels? I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure that experiments work best if you have controls in place, so why would they do any sort of testing this way? You don’t know what I had for breakfast. I may have had a completely carb-and-glucose free meal, or I may have chowed down on some chocolate cake. How is that supposed to tell anyone anything?

Which is all to say that I did not pass this time because I ate breakfast.

I figured that the breakfast was the reason, but I still worried, what if it wasn’t? Gestational diabetes is more common in people who were obese before getting pregnant (hi) and people who are carrying multiples (hi). The potential complications of GD weren’t something that worried me too much–with treatment, the likelihood of really nasty complications developing isn’t very high. On the other hand, the treatment made me nervous, since it mostly falls under the umbrella of “lifestyle changes.”

I’m entirely capable of making lifestyle changes; Kyle and I made some major lifestyle changes when we were trying to get pregnant with Sam. I know that, if I had to, I could cut out the carbs and the sugars and make it through the rest of pregnancy without issue… but I really didn’t want to. For one (comparatively minor) thing, my baby shower was coming up on Saturday (more on that in a bit), and I knew that my family had planned quite the spread, food-wise. Macaroni and cheese bakes, an ice cream cake, cupcakes to decorate, a cheese platter with delicious artisanal crackers, the works. I know I could technically still eat all of that if I had gestational diabetes, but not without paying for it, and that made me sad.

I also worried about the impact lifestyle changes would have on the family as a whole. Kyle promised that he’d join me in the dietary changes, but my big worry was Sam. Like most three-year-olds, he has a very… limited palate. He likes foods that are beige, the primary exceptions being chocolate, broccoli, pepperonis, and apples. Sometimes carrots, too. He doesn’t like meat of any kind, and attempts to change that with even the beigest of meats, the chicken nugget, have all been unsuccessful. He’s also thoroughly unbribeable unless you bribe him to do something he already wanted to do.

And, well. I could probably figure out a way to enjoy zoodles instead of noodles or many varieties of carb-free meals, but Sam?

So I went in nervous. The three-hour glucose test is a fasting test, so I went in hungry and very tired, had my first blood draw, and then chugged an 8 ounce bottle of even sweeter Glucola (for the one-hour test, you drink a mixture that’s got 50g of sugar; for the three-hour test, you drink a mixture that’s got 100g of sugar, and let me tell you, you taste every. single. gram.). And then I waited for them to call me in for hourly blood draws until my three hours was up.

The lab was mostly populated with people fighting off some sort of viral infection, so immediately, I wanted to hide. I’m not usually one to shy away from folks fighting off illness–it’s not their fault they got sick, after all–but knowing how nasty flu season has been and knowing how bad the flu can be when you’re pregnant, I was kind of wishing for a hazmat suit, especially when a tween flopped down next to me and proceeded to hack up a lung every two minutes or so without covering his mouth. Hnnngh.

The other most common patients I saw were babies. Babies and lab work are never fun, but they all need it at some point, whether it’s testing for lead levels or something more serious. And, well. There were a lot coming for those tests on Tuesday. The smallest was dressed in red checked pajamas and a pair of sneakers. He seemed to have just learned how to walk and kept toddling over to the lab entrance and then back to his mom when he got concerned. He had the cutest black bowlcut and was basically just charming the hell out of everyone there…

…and then he had to go get his blood drawn and came out sniffling and trying to be brave but failing miserably, and my heart shattered just a little bit.

Anyway. The test was long enough that I got to see the entirety of a snowstorm play out and see that it had all melted by the time I left.

The real snowstorm, the one that made things gross, hit on Wednesday, shortly after I called the doctor and got my results back–negative for gestational diabetes, yes! Kyle worked from home that day, as he had on Tuesday, though this time because of the snow. It wasn’t supposed to hit until that afternoon, but it would’ve made for a hellish evening commute, and he figured he could just work more easily if he didn’t bother.

So it was a typical day with Kyle working from home, and by that I mean that Sam was out of his mind with glee. He loves when his dad works from home, somehow convinced that this means he’ll get more playtime during the day (he doesn’t). He also usually has to be corralled away from the office door so that he doesn’t spend the entire day butting in on Kyle’s phone calls or trying to convince Kyle that he should stop coding and play Overwatch instead.

In short: I did a lot on Wednesday.

That may have been why, as the day wore down, I started to feel a nasty pain around my left eye. Or it may have been the weather. Whatever the reason, by 8:00, I had a full-blown migraine with aura. Now, this would usually just be a sign for me to just go to bed and pray it would improve by the morning except that severe headaches with vision disturbances are also a sign of one of the Big Bads of Pregnancy, preeclampsia.

tumblr_lat62ah3v81qcoqtho1_400

With preeclampsia, everything sort of goes wrong at once. Your blood pressure rises to dangerously high levels, your liver gives you the finger, and it’s basically a huge emergency situation that means delivery is imminent unless you want yourself and your baby (or babies) to die. It’s another thing that’s more likely with obesity, twin pregnancies, and also with the medication I’m taking for my depression and anxiety.

(and before you ask: I’m still on the medication because I like not being suicidal and/or having panic attacks, particularly when pregnant. There’s a risk of preeclampsia with the medication, but there’s a guarantee of a downward spiral without it)

Anyway, there I was with a migraine that kept me from focusing on the computer screen in the least. Kyle noticed me looking worried and asked what was wrong, so I explained the situation to him. He’s a worrier himself, even more than I am, and when I explained what preeclampsia was and how I was feeling, he said, “Call your doctor. Now.”

“Can’t I just have a drink of water first?”

“No. Now.”

He was right, of course, and I swallowed my absolute loathing for phone calls (seriously, even calling friends, I’m like… why do I have to do this??? The only people I don’t get skittish about calling are Kyle and my mom, and that’s it in the entire world) to call the 24-hour nurse line and ask for advice. They connected me with the on-call doctor pretty quickly, and she said that while my lack of swelling and so-far, so-good blood pressure readings were reassuring signs, she wanted me to come in for testing and observation so that we could completely rule out preeclampsia.

Because you don’t fuck around with preeclampsia.

While this was an overall good idea, it still created something of a dilemma for us, and that dilemma’s name was Sam. We needed to get Sam to my parents’ house so they could watch him overnight, get to the hospital, and hopefully get home, all over VERY icy roads. Fortunately, my parents were more than willing to help out with the entire situation, and Sam was so soundly asleep that the transfer between our house and theirs went almost entirely unnoticed (by Sam, at least). We packed a bag for him to stay overnight, and my mom said that she’d either take Sam to school the next day or just have him stay at the house until I was done with my doctor’s appointment in the morning.

Next, it was off to the hospital. The roads weren’t as nasty as we expected, but everything was quickly gaining a fine sheen of ice, and the temperatures were dropping quickly. If we got to go home that night, it would be a very interesting drive.

If.

Kyle and I both tried to keep things light on the drive in, but we were nervous. I’ve only just hit 29 weeks this week, and that’s pretty early for even the most healthy of babies to be born. Our twins would be looking at a fairly long NICU stay and, what’s more, we wouldn’t be as close to them as we wanted. The hospital we’re delivering at only has a Level 2B NICU, which is great for babies who aren’t that sick or are born past 32 weeks gestation… but that wouldn’t have been us. We’d have needed to be transported by ambulance to our hospital’s affiliate in Boston, Tufts and its Floating Hospital for Children. On the one hand, if you’re going to have a sick baby, Floating Hospital is the place to do it. Boston overall is the place to do it. Our medical facilities are among the best in the nation, and they’re constantly coming up with new technologies and new methods of treatment for all of their patients.

On the other hand, nobody wants to see their baby or babies that sick. And on the other other hand, Boston is a huge drive for us–without traffic, we’re looking at 45 minutes at least, and there’s always downtown city traffic. We’d figure it out, of course, but the idea had us both a little shaken. At a closer hospital, we could visit the twins often, as often as we felt necessary, and it wouldn’t have a huge impact on our lives overall. At Tufts, though?

It was after hours when we arrived, so we had to go through the ER to get to the maternity ward, up on the third level. The nurse at the front desk was more than happy to assist and even called a wheelchair for me, which I blame on the fact that even though the twins are 29 weeks along, I look like I’m at a full 40. Another nurse, apparently visiting from Florida (poor thing, what a night to be visiting from Florida), wheeled me along while cheerfully gabbing away about the weather and the superb owls and other innocuous topics; Kyle shuffled along behind us, bearing most of the nervousness for the rest of the group.

I haven’t taken the hospital tour yet, so getting to see the maternity ward was pretty awesome. It’s a nice place with private rooms and pleasant views from every window. The nursing staff are all really helpful and cool, and I’m grateful for that: although I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with L&D nurses, I know a lot of people who’ve had some absolute Nurse Ratchets, and that’s something that can just ruin the entire experience.

(the niceness of these nurses made me feel extra good about my L&D strategy of bringing in food for anyone who will be helping deliver my babies. Last time, we brought candy, and I think we will again this time, plus granola bars that they can nosh on whenever they have a couple of seconds free)

Anyway, needless to say, I didn’t deliver on Wednesday; it was just a migraine after all. The hospital visit was as unremarkable as they come: I gave urine and blood, I had my blood pressure monitored, the babies were monitored (they kept moving away from the heartbeat monitors because neither of them are fans of having their space intruded on; Carrie, in particular, kept kicking at the darn thing to try and get it off). At one point, I received an ultrasound from the on-call OB resident (who looked to be about 12) because they kept losing the babies’ heartbeats–not because either Isaac or Carrie were in distress, but because neither of them wanted to have any attention paid to them.

All told, we were in the hospital about three hours, and we got sent home after I got Hospital Brand Excedrin for my migraine. Everyone agreed that I’d done the right thing by coming in, so I didn’t feel too bad about “crying wolf,” as it were, and best of all, we learned that–at least on Wednesday night–both babies are head-down. This vastly increases my chances for a vaginal delivery, meaning shorter recovery time and, you know, a lack of major abdominal surgery.

We got home around 1 a.m. and promptly fell asleep because Kyle had to work and I had a doctor’s appointment the next day. Both were similarly unremarkable, to a point: my doctor’s appointment was a nice, quick one that lasted less than 15 minutes and mostly involved a conversation about (a) how they’re hoping I’ll stay pregnant for at least another 3-4 weeks; and (b) what I want to do for birth control afterwards.

I told my provider (not Dr. Solano, whom I’m seeing in ~2 weeks) that I want the whole system removed. I’m 100% serious on this; I don’t know if I can get a complete hysterectomy before the age of 35 without a major medical reason, but I want one like Christmas. I’ve had nearly 25 years of agonizing periods and overall misery. I’m done. I want this terrible pear-shaped organ taken out of my body, set on fire, and peed on by a dog.

burnitdown

My provider misinterpreted this to mean that I wanted my tubes tied (an option, but it means I still get periods, so not the BEST option) and told me that I could get my tubes tied during a C-section or afterwards. OR, if I didn’t want to have surgery in the first year after giving birth, I could have an IUD instead!

I took the pamphlet. I do not want an IUD.

But that was another conversation for another time. My mom and I both got back to the house around the same time, her with Sam and me with a Dr. Pepper. Sam was effusively excited to be home, hugging me and cuddling up with his blankets and having a wonderful time. My mom was glad to have further details of my hospital adventure to put her mind at ease. We had a lovely visit and, when my mom left, it was time for Sam to go up for his afternoon rest.

And this is where things got interesting.

Sam was upstairs for about 45 minutes, and he was playing quietly. I had my lunch and began to tool around online, checking to make sure the minivans we’re hoping to buy next weekend were still around, chatting with friends, the works. At the 45 minute mark, Sam called down to me, “Mommy, I pooped.”

This is not uncommon for my not-completely-potty-trained child, who will do everything in the toilet except poop there. We send him up for rest time with a pull-up on, and that’s usually when he chooses to go. “Alright,” I told him, “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

I set about gathering the things I’d need to change a poopy diaper, and Sam called down again, this time with a wail of despair. “Mommy, the poop is getting everywhere!”

tumblr_lat62ah3v81qcoqtho1_400

There are many phrases you never want to hear as a parent. Most pertain to situations in which your child is dead, injured, or in grave danger; but assuming that your child is healthy and safe, and assuming that you are caring for them at the moment, the phrase “Mommy, the poop is getting everywhere!” ranks pretty high on the list of things you DO NOT EVER WANT TO HEAR. What does it mean, that the poop is getting everywhere? Is it on your clothes? Is it on the walls? Is it on the floor? Did you clog a toilet? What happened? How afraid should I be?

Very, as it turned out.

I told Sam not to move and made my way up the stairs, carrying plastic bags, diapers, wipes, and faith. At the foot of the stairs, the stench hit me, an almost visible miasma that I’m 99% sure gave me X-Man powers. It grew stronger as I ascended and nearly brought tears to my eyes when I reached the room.

The sight that greeted me shook me to my core. Sam lay on a pile of blankets, tears in his eyes. His feet were barely recognizable as such, as they were coated with poop. Poop trailed down his legs and arms, though I thankfully didn’t see any near his face. A trail of poop footprints led from the doorway to the blankets, like incredibly pungent ancient fossils. Shadows prevented me from seeing the state of the blankets upon which he lay, but that was probably for the best.

I swore as quietly as I could. In a very PG-13 way, even though my head was screaming obscenities that would get me banned from most decent theaters.

But I had to take care of it. I pasted on a smile. “Alright, buddy!” I said in my chipperest voice, like we were just going to change his diaper in a completely normal situation. “Let’s get over to the bed so I can change you!”

Sam stood. The tears in his eyes began to trickle down, but I kept the smile on. “Come on, bud, I’ve got you,” I said. I lifted him gingerly under his arms and placed as much of his lower half as I could on a plastic bag. And then we began.

The de-poopinating took about 45 minutes, all said and done. And it was nasty. Without details, I’ll say that by the time I considered Sam clean enough for decent society, his poor hands, feet, legs, and butt were scrubbed so hard that they’d gone pink and raw. He spent most of the time crying “Mommy, that really hurts!” and I spent most of the time feeling guilty because SON YOU NEED TO BE CLEAN but oh, I imagine it hurt a lot. And I didn’t want it to.

But he got clean, and then I looked around the room and felt a wave of despair. The carpet was vile. The blankets were terrifying. And Sam himself could probably stand to have a proper bath or shower rather than the wipe down I gave him.

And I couldn’t do any of it.

As I said before, the twins are 29 weeks along, but I’m measuring 40 weeks. My belly is huge. It eclipses half of my thighs. It kicks Kyle out of bed. It weighs a ton. And I cannot bend over, even to do mundane things like putting on socks or shoes. Getting down to scrub the floor, pick up the blankets, even crouching to help Sam with a shower or bath? Absolutely out of the question.

And I still have 9 weeks or so to go!

I set Sam up in Kyle and my bed with his Kindle and told him that I’d be back soon. And then I called Kyle, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I was crying a little when I did. I begged him to come home early. Not too early, I told him, like you don’t have to leave right this second, but there’s so much to be cleaned and if we wait until the usual time you get home, at 7:30, Sam won’t get to bed until midnight.

Kyle is a good husband. He talked to his boss right then and there and was home in an hour, armed with carpet cleaner, treats for Sam, dinner stuff, and a kiss for me. He kissed me, kissed Sam, cleaned the carpets, put the blankets in the wash, and then dove back into work.

And there was morning and there was evening on Thursday.

Friday was blissfully calm. Sam had a wholly normal day, I had a wholly normal day, and Kyle had a wholly normal day. We were all sort of holding our breath for Saturday, though, because Saturday was my baby shower.

My mom and my cousins especially were adamant that I have a baby shower for the twins. It’s been four years since Sam was born, I needed a lot of stuff, and on my part, I really wanted to celebrate this rainbow pregnancy with the people I love most. And they, along with my aunt and uncle, planned a fantastic little party for me, complete with cupcake and onesie decorating, an ice cream cake, Mad Libs, and everyone I loved surrounding me.

I was even more excited about the party, too, because my aunties on my dad’s side were planning to attend. I adore them, honestly, but we live so far away from each other than I rarely get to see them outside of Major Life Events, like weddings and baby showers and so on. BUT they all RSVPed, which caused me to break into my happy dance, and I was seriously bouncing with joy just to see them there. I’ve missed them! I think the last time we were all together was at my cousin Tim’s wedding in 2015, so seeing them again was just awesome, absolutely awesome.

And the whole party had the net effect of making me feel a million times more loved and supported than I already did. I know how much my family loves me, and how we have a very strong sense of being there for each other as a group, but it’s always awesome to have that reminder, seeing the people you love all together and telling you how much they care.

Which is to say, it was a really good end to a crazy week. Next week is going to be similarly busy, though I’m hoping we can avoid the whole hospital visit thing. And I’m hoping that the weeks that follow will be chill enough that we can prepare for the twins’ arrival in relative calm.

…

But we’ll see.

Who needs sleep?

January 17, 2018 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

When I was pregnant with Sam, I had Plans.

(not these kinds of plans)

Specifically towards the end of my pregnancy, I Planned to get as much rest and sleep as possible because I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much–if at all–when the Child arrived. Logically, I know you can’t save up sleep like you can save up Target gift cards or reward points at your favorite clothing boutique, but the thought of getting exactly zero sleep frightened me, and I thought that perhaps I could mitigate its potential damage by sleeping a lot beforehand.

But nothing doing. I had a lot going for me in my attempts to sleep before Sam arrived, but none of that lot helped me. The night before I went into the hospital to deliver, I didn’t sleep at all (not from excitement or anticipation, but simply because pregnancy insomnia is actively the worst). Our hospital offered a night nursery so that moms could recover and get some rest, and I gleefully took advantage of it–by the time Sam was born and safely in the night nursery, I hadn’t slept in nearly 48 hours and was getting desperate.

And weirdly enough, once Sam was here, I actually got more sleep. After about two weeks of insomniac misery, we devised a system of shifts, where one of us would stay up with Sam for three hours at a time while the other slept. We actually each got about six hours of sleep a night until Sam started sleeping through the night at three months, and let me tell you: it felt good.

Somehow, I’d forgotten about the pregnancy insomnia this time around. Maybe because my mind has been on the fact of twins or because I’ve just had so much to think about, but I’d forgotten.

I remember now.

On average, it takes me about an hour and a half to fall asleep, and that hour and a half follows a specific pattern. First, I lie on my back to stretch out my muscles, which are all exhausted from a day of carrying around not one but two babies inside. This feels very nice for about 20 minutes until the itching starts. The itching is a full body thing, probably related to a mild case of intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (which I had last time but haven’t been diagnosed with yet this time–likely because the itching starts long before you reach bile acid levels that are required for diagnosis), and it’s hell. HELL. Everything itches, from my stretching belly to my hands to my feet to my thighs to, worst of all, my entire back. For another 10-15 minutes, I claw at my body as if trying to remove my skin because, really, that would be a huge relief about now, but eventually, I’m forced to admit defeat and roll onto my side.

Rolling onto my side is a feat of strength and coordination that always wakes Kyle up, because while I’m usually as graceful as a concussed duck on roller skates, pregnancy has upped the ante so that I’m now a walrus whose entire left side fell asleep. This walrus also has three or four pillows around her “glowing” body, including the miraculous C-shaped body pillow that enables me to sleep at all, several pillows for my head (including the necessary memory foam pillow that prevents neckaches), and a nastyass nasty ass pillow for between my knees and feet. Between all of this–my lack of coordination, my multiple pillows, and trying really hard not to punch my darling husband in the jaw–it takes me a good 5-10 minutes to roll onto my side.

And I get comfortable there because now, my back is no longer resting against sheets at all; instead, I’ve awkwardly flailed the blankets away from my body so that my back is exposed to the chill winter air of our bedroom, which isn’t actually chilly, but I made Kyle turn the fan on right after we went to bed. For about 45 minutes, I’m elated: I’ve finally found a comfortable position for sleeping.

But it’s too good to be true. Though my itching is no longer aggravated, my shoulders and hips now have the distinct pleasure and pressure of supporting the enormous pregnancy belly and my mammaries, which have expanded so much during pregnancy that they’ve graduated from “jugs” to “gazongas.” As I finally begin to drift off, the pain starts, just an ache at first, but it soon becomes unbearable. Now comes the other half of rolling onto my side: rolling back.

While rolling onto my side requires a great deal of strength and coordination, rolling from my side to my back requires only one thing: a high pain tolerance. The actions required to roll onto my back aggravate my already overtaxed groin muscles, sending jolts of burning pain radiating from said muscles back to my butt and down my thighs. The pain is brief, but it’s intense, and more than once, I’ve let out a yelp of pain as I performed the act of rolling over in bed.

What happens next depends on how well I’ve pleased the nebulous pregnancy gods on any given day. On good days, the itching has subsided enough or I’m tired enough to ignore it, and I fall asleep quickly. On bad days, the itching reaches excruciating heights again, and the cycle restarts itself. And that’s leaving off the nights when I have an RLS (restless leg syndrome) flare, in which my legs ache and burn unless I’m performing a Riverdance at all times. On those particularly bad nights, I eventually just give up and move my legs incessantly while reading articles on my phone and waiting for the itching to calm down just enough that I can force myself to sleep.

(shown: what my legs want; not at all relaxing)

On a good night, I will then sleep through the entire night and wake up at around 7 for the day, groggy and miserable but functional at least. On bad nights, however, something wakes me before I’ve gotten those precious few hours of sleep, and the cycle starts all over again.

Last night was not just a bad night; it was a HORRENDOUS night.

It started as just a bad night. I tossed and I turned, I itched and I rolled over, I yelped and I squirmed. For a brief period between midnight and 12:30, I became the actual Lord of the Dance (eat your heart out, Michael Flatley), but finally, finally I fell asleep, long after Kyle had drifted off entirely.

(eat. your. heart. out.)

Now–a tangent. About 15 years ago, a horrendous cold combined with some end-of-the-college-semester stress to morph into a bad case of bronchitis around Christmastime. The bronchitis wasn’t bad enough, though, oh no. When I came home for Christmas break and my mother saw me looking pale and weak, she insisted on taking me to the urgent care clinic on Christmas Day itself; there, I received a diagnosis of “illness-induced bronchial spasms,” which is a fancy way of saying that if I get a cold that’s bad enough, I have asthma attacks. Fun, right?

On the plus side, I don’t usually need an inhaler to control these attacks; if I catch them early enough, I can calm myself down and convince my lungs that they’re overreacting. On the minus side, I never know which cold will be bad enough to induce an attack, so it’s always a surprise, like opening a present on Christmas morning and finding out that someone wrapped an inability to breathe.

The attacks also usually happen at night, so I’ll be blissfully tucked away in dreamland when all of a sudden, I can’t breathe. It’s always a riotous time.

So cut back to me, around 3:30 a.m. last night. Kyle is sound asleep still. I was sound asleep when all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. Thankfully, my body is smart enough to know that this is a major problem and jolted me out of my blissful slumber and into a coughing fit. This has happened often enough that I immediately recognized it for what it was, thus avoiding anything but (a) some coughing and (b) an inconvenience that lasted the rest of the night.

The coughing was the bigger immediate problem; if I’m going to stop an attack from reaching its full potential, I need to focus on calming my breathing and reminding myself that I can breathe, that I’m alright, that I have control. The trouble was that my bladder was painfully full, so every time I coughed, I ran the risk of flooding the bedroom and ruining Kyle’s night as well as my own. That in mind, and still trying desperately to catch my breath, I staggered off to the toilet, pulled an Elsa with my bladder…

…and finally stopped coughing. Now, of course, I faced an entirely different problem: I was itchy again. So for an hour and a half, I once again turned into the paraplegic walrus version of an egg beater and Riverdance star, desperately seeking a comfortable position that would allow me to sleep. Finally, finally, at 4:30ish, I found one, and prayed that my struggles were at an end.

How naive of me.

I don’t know if it was the coughing or the movement or what, but something prompted Carrie into a fit of hiccups. Obstetrically, this is a great sign–it means that she’s practicing breathing by moving amniotic fluid in and out of her lungs, so yay Carrie! Good job! But at 4:30 in the morning, the sudden powerful spasms of a baby the size of a 7-11 Double Gulp were not helping me sleep. At all. I put my hand on my belly to wait for her hiccups to subside, which they eventually did…

…but woke up Isaac in the process. At first, his movements were the typical tentative, gentle taps I’d come to expect from him, as if he were saying, “Mom, can you please make her stop? I was sleeping.” And I sympathize, son. I honestly do. I, too, wish that I was still sleeping. But then, because I couldn’t do anything about the hiccuping Carrie, Isaac took matters into his own hands and squeezed down as far as he could away from his hiccuping twin.

This, of course, meant that he was crushing my bladder.

So out of nowhere, I had to pee. Again. A lot. I grumbled my way out of bed, grumbled my way to the bathroom, and grumbled through my duty. “You two are lucky that you’re cute,” I informed the twins as I shuffled my way back to bed, now itchy and restless once more.

Itch itch itch, turn turn turn, Riverdance Riverdance Riverdance. By now, it was 6 a.m., and I knew one thing for certain: Sam would soon be awake. The child has not yet discovered the joys of sleeping in to a reasonable hour, though we’ve been trying to train him on it. The training basically involves the use of an alarm clock, not as a signal to encourage him to get up but as a signal to tell him “DO NOT start yelling for us until you hear this beeping.”

At one point, he was committed to learning as much, but that process has gone out the door lately. Instead, what we get is 45 minutes of him yelling through the monitor, variants of “DADDYYYY. DADDYYYYYY. DADDY I FARTED,” and the like until Kyle hears the alarm clock go off and gets up to bring Sam downstairs while I try to sneak another ~hour of sleep (if this seems unfair, remember that I’m with Sam the rest of the day and also have twins in me).

So this morning, as the hours grew small before wake-up time, the sense of dread I felt was overwhelming. I knew that soon, Sam would wake up and start yelling. I knew that it would happen right as I fell asleep. And I knew that I couldn’t sleep through it, the way that Kyle seems to, and that staying awake through the yelling would start me on another itching, turning, Riverdancing cycle.

And I was afraid.

(listen, Pennywise. You can try and make balloons scary and have a floating fetish all you want; just let me sleep)

Sam, still allergic to sleeping in (we’ll get our revenge when he’s a teenager, and oh do I look forward to it), woke up at precisely 6:22 a.m. At first, he talked and sang quietly to himself, but it took only five minutes for the gentle, quiet talking and singing to erupt into yelling. “DAD! DEE!” he hollered into the monitor. “I WANT TO GO DOWNSTA-YERS.”

Kyle responded in a typical way. “Your alarm clock didn’t beep yet,” he grumbled into our half of the monitor, which functions as a walkie-talkie. “I’m not taking you downstairs yet.”

But Sam kept yelling, and I was now on the verge of tears. My heart and mind wanted to be more threatening, to tell Kyle, “If you don’t take him downstairs or turn off the monitor RIGHT NOW, your day will be a living hell because I will sleep through all of it.” And the pregnant, hormonal, exhausted snarl was in the back of my throat, but some part of my sleep-deprived brain remembered that you catch more flies with honey than with arsenic, so instead of snarling, I warped my gravelly, exhausted voice into something that sounded sweet-ish to me.

“Honey,” I whispered to my husband, who’d snored through the whole ordeal. “If you aren’t going to bring him downstairs now, can you just turn off the monitor? Because I’ve been awake since 3:30.”

The sweetness worked. Kyle sighed heavily and said, “Alright, I’ll just bring him down now.” About ten minutes later, they were in the living room and very quiet; and I was, at long last, asleep.

There’s no moral to this long story, no nice little bow to tie things up. I’m still exhausted, even though Kyle let me sleep until 10:30 despite that he was working today. I know that tonight will probably be just as bad in terms of falling asleep, though maybe better in terms of staying asleep (I’m not counting on it).

But I also know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The twins are coming soon, and that will bring an end to my walrus body, my itching, and my housing hiccups. Kyle and I will take shifts again, and I’ll sleep in three-hour spurts, but I will sleep, and that’s almost as great a reward as having my babies here with me.

Happy New Year (?)

January 3, 2018 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

Hooooooly shit what a day. I don’t think I’ve had this eventful a start to the new year since I accidentally and tipsily got unintentionally vulgar with a youth pastor at a New Year’s Eve party before driving home at 2:30 a.m. in a literal blizzard.

This was much crazier.

New Year’s started as it does for most parents. Kyle and I finished our nightly gaming before heading out to the living room at 11:58 to watch the ball drop. The ball dropped, it was 2018, we kissed and started to head up to bed.

Which is when the fun began.

I just dragged myself straight up to bed, pausing only to check in on Sam and make sure he was sleeping comfortably. Midnight is an hour past when I usually crash, and I was already feeling it. Both Carrie and Isaac were awake enough to be questioning the situation (via kicks), and I was more than a little eager to get into bed. No sooner had I snuggled under the covers, curled around my maternity pillow (my blessed nest, I call it), than Kyle came upstairs very worried.

“I think something is wrong with the furnace,” he said.

We’ve had “I think something is wrong with [x]” conversations at bedtime before. Nine times out of ten, nothing is wrong and it’s just something completely normal. I expected this conversation to go the same way. “Why do you think that?” I asked.

“It’s making kind of a pulsing hissing noise? I heard it in the living room.”

Now, it was 12:30 a.m., and I knew that Sam would have no consideration for that fact when he woke up in… probably 6 hours, tops. That was the first thing on my mind when I said, “Well, if you’re really worried about it, we’ll check it out in the morning.”

tenor

But Kyle was convinced something was seriously wrong and first took the step of turning the thermostat down to 50 so that we could avoid overtaxing the furnace. I’d protest this any time but the balmiest of summer days, but last night, it was well below zero outside… -3 with a windchill of -18, which is probably colder than it was in Barrow, Alaska. I vehemently protested the furnace being turned down and Kyle compromised by turning it up to 60.

Only the furnace didn’t kick in. We didn’t hear the reassuring hum and roar of forced hot air, except for a few false starts. Kyle went downstairs to inspect again (it was now 1:30 a.m.) and found the furnace hissing, squeaking, and then falling silent with the lockout light on.

He called a 24-hour HVAC service, hoping to catch someone on New Year’s Eve, during a huge cold snap, at 2 a.m., but after about half an hour of holding, he gave up on that endeavor. We made a plan: at 7, he would get Sammy and bring him into our room so that Sammy could get dressed in approximately 32 layers of clothes. Then Kyle would dig out his car, pack us some bags, and send us off to my parents’ house (with the cat as well) to ride out the coldest of the incident. With any luck, the problem would be resolved sooner rather than later.

It was 2:30 a.m. at that point, and the two of us fell into an exhausted sleep that lasted until 5:30 a.m. for no good reason. It wasn’t that Sam woke us up or Tinkerbell woke us up, we just woke up at 5:30 and, knowing what the day held, couldn’t fall back asleep.

But we tried. Oh my god did we try.

4fd

Around 7, Kyle went to bring Sam into our room, where he could burrow under the covers and keep warm until it was time to leave. Sam thought it was all a wonderful game, especially because he got his Kindle straightaway and because he had Mommy and Daddy there to play Kindle with him. He showed off his favorite games and tried to get us to participate, but I’ll be honest–I was still in a twilight space of not even slightly awake, so it all sort of blurred together.

Kyle dug out his car, Sam got very excited about Tinkerbell being on the bed with him, and around 8 a.m., it was time to make tracks. I bundled up–five layers on top, two on bottom–and we packed up the car to head out to my parents’ house, leaving Kyle to wait for the HVAC guy and stopping for Dunkin Donuts on the way.

Stopping for Dunkin Donuts ended up changing the morning somewhat significantly. As we drove down our street towards the nearest Dunkin, I saw a woman crossing the road. At first, I felt a stab of annoyance that wasn’t even logical–we’re in the middle of nowhere and don’t really have sidewalks at all, much less crosswalks. So of course she’d be in the middle of the road, and I don’t know why I was irritated.

Anyway, she flagged me down, and once I slowed and stopped, I could see that she was really distressed–tears running down her cheeks, all bedraggled and out of sorts. At the same moment, I remembered that, oh yeah, it’s three whole degrees outside. There’s no reason for someone to be out in that kind of weather unless they’re either really dedicated to their fitness routine or in really dire straits.

She was the latter. I didn’t really piece together the whole of her situation, but I gathered enough–that her sister had kicked her out, that she needed to get back to her apartment in the next town over (coincidentally, right on the route that Sam and I were taking to my parents’ house), that she didn’t know what to do.

So I told her to get in the car.

She was effusively grateful and offered to pay me something, but dude, I’m not even going out of my way here. It’s alright. Just hold the donuts for me and don’t turn out to be a serial killer and you’re good.

And, well. Like I said, her apartment was on the way. We chatted the whole way there, friendly conversation about nothing, and she got upstairs alright. And then Sam and I (and Tinkerbell, who she thought was actually a baby?) continued on to my parents’ house.

I’ll be 100% honest–my recollection of the morning at my parents’ house is pretty fuzzy because my exhaustion had started to hit by that point. My mom had to work, but my dad was home for the holiday, and he and Sam play off each other really well, so I knew Sam would be in good hands despite my zombie-like state. I mostly remember the series of games they played: dragon vs. castle (with the old play castle my brother and sister and I had when we were kids), Wall-E and Silly Songs, Sorry, and finally, drums and piano.

That last bit involved the new drum machine my dad got for Christmas, which had Sam all excited because it made noises, and my dad plugged it into the living room sound system, so it made loud noises. Nothing in the world is better to a three-year-old than loud noises, except perhaps loud noises sanctioned by and shared with his grandfather. The two of them had a marvellous time.

As for me? I… tried to sleep. I tried really hard, but comfort is just not something my body is capable of lately except under very specific circumstances. I laid down on Sam’s bed (which used to be mine, until I moved out of the house wayyyy back in 2009) and tried to sleep, but my weirdly shifted center of gravity didn’t really lend itself to a comfortable rest in my childhood bed, so that was a wash. At some point, right when I was getting to a stage where I could ignore my discomfort long enough to pass out, Sam burst into the room crying and tattling on my dad, something about donuts? I have no idea.

The HVAC guy got to our house around noonish, give or take, and found that the furnace had just shut down because–get this–it’s so cold outside that the oil line literally froze. I guess this can happen sometimes when you have an outdoor oil tank (which we have because our house is kind of low on storage for literally anything) and it’s cold as balls out, which it has been (but hey! Next week, it’s going to get into the 40s, so break out your bathing suits, citizens of Massachusetts!). The problem was fixed within 5 minutes and for less than $200, both of which had us sighing in utter relief–when things go wrong in our house, those things tend to be massive fixes that cost at least $500.

And, well. Money has been tight since I left my job, which we knew it would be. We had enough squirreled away that we could afford to pay for some minor repairs, but furnace repairs have a pretty wide range of costs, and we didn’t know what range we’d end up on. That the costs were on the low end of things basically took an awful situation and made it infinitely more palatable.

disastrousexemplaryaustralianshelduck-max-1mb

When Kyle told me all of this, he also said that he’d keep an eye on the interior temperature and let us know when it was back to being livable (that morning, when we’d all gotten up, the temperature inside had dropped to 40 degrees, which was admittedly significantly more than the -3 degrees outside but was still not even slightly livable), and I told him that I was coming home by 3 regardless. This was at least partly because of the one piece of chaos that we were expecting: the arrival of our new dryer.

Let’s rewind a bit to when we bought this house, three years ago. The former owners kindly left the washer and dryer behind for us, which was fantastic–before moving in, we’d had to either use our apartment complex’s machines down three flights of stairs and costing about $6/load or make a weekly jaunt to my parents’ house to hang out while doing 1-2 loads of laundry (we learned to be frugal with our laundry in those days). Any washer and dryer were an improvement over that situation (much though I love spending time with my folks, it’s better to be able to do laundry in your own place, especially when you have a baby).

And the washer, at least, is great. It’s not brand new, but it’s lovely and functional and has all the different settings and is basically a Washing Machine For Grown-Ups. Having it handy to take care of various messes–cat-induced, baby-induced, otherwise-induced–has been a joy.

The dryer… eeeeeh.

It was quirky from the start. It only ever worked on the medium setting, meaning that we basically had to throw everything in and pray for the best. What was more, it didn’t turn off on its own after any period of time–if you forgot about it, forgot to set a timer or what-have-you, it would just keep running and running and running, wasting so much energy and threatening to burn down the house and shrink your clothes in the same breath. The lint trap was also a hilarious mistake: it caught lint in the filter, alright, but the lint also often got stuck in the trap holder, which made the entire thing pointless.

I probably could’ve lived with it for a while, but my parents weren’t fans of that strategy and bought us a new dryer for Christmas. And it was scheduled to arrive January 1.

January 1: the day of the broken heater, the wandering stranger, the playing at my parents’ house, and no sleep.

As Sam and I were preparing to pack up and leave, Kyle called again to let me know that the dryer would be delivered in the next 20 minutes, which was wonderful timing, as it takes about 20 minutes to get home from my parents’ house. I rushed out the door a little bit, letting Sam get away with abducting a Santa hat he found, ignoring the loud protests of the cat as we slipped her into her carrier once again, and trying to drive safely despite the fact that I was seeing double by that point.

We got home to see a truck parked outside the house and a man running from the front door back to said truck. And the truck drove away, and Kyle poked his head out the door and told me to go into our laundry room.

And, well. My new dryer is beautiful.

26165767_10155121262840592_1631067740820553886_n (it makes pretty little music noises when you turn it on and off)

And that’s how my year started! Dinner and evening activities passed in an absolute blur, and both Kyle and I were asleep almost as soon as our heads hit our pillows, only to find when we woke at around 7 a.m. that the furnace had died again sometime during the night. This time, though, it came back to life after a bit of swearing at and cajoling by Kyle… and after protesting with concerning squeaks and clanks that had us calling the HVAC company back again (they still haven’t arrived–it’s almost 9:30 p.m., and our window for service was approximately from 7:30 a.m. until midnight, so yay).

I think I need another holiday.

Sweet dreams are made of this…

November 21, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

To preface, I love my antidepressants/anti-anxiety meds, which are really just one drug, an SNRI by the name of Venlafaxine/Effexor. It has its side effects (risk of high blood pressure, drowsiness, absolutely wild dreams), and withdrawal is a b i t c h (migraines, severe vertigo, and then night terrors forever, and that’s just with missing one dose), but my god does it help. Since being on the current dosage, my panic attacks have completely evaporated, and I haven’t had anything remotely close to a depressive downswing. As the joke goes, if you can’t make your own neurotransmitters, store-bought is fine.

el7rpw
(also if you’re one of those people who posts the memes about how mountains are antidepressants and meds are shit, I will personally come to your house and make you touch old wet food)

The weird thing about Effexor is that the anxiety ends up manifesting when I’m sleeping instead of when I’m awake, which is both nice and annoying. It’s nice because yes, I’d much rather have anxiety dreams than a panic attack. I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever had a genuine panic attack would rather have anxiety dreams than a panic attack. With an anxiety dream, I can wake up and reason with myself: “It’s okay that you didn’t buy the calculus book because (a) you’re 34 years old and not in school; (b) you never took AP calculus to begin with; and (c) the math teacher that’s featuring in this nightmare has probably been retired for almost 20 years now.”

With a panic attack, there’s nothing to do but ride it until it subsides–the chest pain, the feeling of being unable to breathe, the heat and claustrophobia, the desperate need to get out even though you don’t know where or why. Your stress response goes absolutely haywire for no goddamn reason, and no amount of logic or reasoning makes it calm the fuck down because it’s coming from your most base instincts that are trying to save you from a deadly threat that doesn’t fucking exist.

My last real panic attack happened right around the time I started Effexor, just after I’d started taking it regularly. It was the weirdest thing: my stress response was still going haywire, but I was looking at it objectively as it happened and acknowledging that this was entirely pointless, body, there’s nothing threatening us and we’re absolutely fine. Before being on the Effexor, the stress got to my brain as well, as it does for pretty much everyone who’s ever had a panic attack, because it honestly feels like you’re dying. You can’t reason it away because you are having chest pain and trouble breathing and the walls are closing in, of course you’re dying. But being on Effexor, it was so bizarre, just looking at it as an outside observer and saying, “Idiot, you’re not dying, your stress response has just decided to fritz out, you’ll be fine soon.”

And after that, it’s been mostly smooth sailing. I think I’ve had one panic attack since then, and again, it was just the same thing: “calm down, body, there is literally no reason for you to be doing this.”

Which brings me to the dreams. The dreams are always vivid, and I always remember them. From what I’ve read, that’s the norm on Effexor. Usually, the dreams are just weird like “we’re at Disney World and I’m juggling bananas while Mickey Mouse cheers for me!” but since this pregnancy started, things have taken a decidedly more anxious turn.

The most common dream is the school dream. Naturally, I’m running through the halls naked, but that’s not the anxious part. The anxious part is that I get to my AP calculus class (again: I never took AP calculus because math and I are not friends), and there’s my high school math teacher, glaring at me as always. He announces that it’s time to take the final exam, and I feel all confident… until I realize that I never bought the AP calculus textbook and never came to class and never did any homework and never studied. I’m pretty sure literally everyone on the planet has had a variation on this dream, but it’s been especially recurrent in the past ~4-ish months.

tenor2
(actual footage of me in honors pre-calculus)

A couple of weeks ago, as I got my ducks in a row to leave work (which I have since done, yay!), I dreamed that I was in a graphic designers’ version of Chopped. We were each assigned a different document to produce and refine, and we had 8 hours in which to do it. Objectively, for me, producing and refining a document probably would take about ~4 hours, maybe less, but in this dream, eight hours was nowhere near enough. Worse, there was this table on the document that was all horribly misaligned, as if someone had just drawn a bunch of squares and haphazardly stuck them together and I could not get them to realign, and time ran out and I had to turn in a document that looked like complete ass.

Last night’s dream was the worst, if only because it was so real. I dreamed that Sam was in kindergarten, that he had a group of four friends and that teachers called the lot of them the “Fab Five.” Sam wasn’t in school for the day–it was Halloween, and I think we’d taken him to Texas again in the dream story. Regardless, I dreamed that while Sam was out of school, a maniac came and shot up the place, badly injuring the rest of the Fab Five and one of their dads. The rest of the dream involved me in a rage, going to dispense some justice to the inexplicably noseless shooter with my fists. I woke up right as I found him and couldn’t go back to sleep for another hour because the emotions I felt were so awful. Instead, I got up and made sure Sam was still asleep and in bed (he was) and then quietly played with my phone until I relaxed enough to fall back asleep.

tenor
(look at these adorable pandas)

I have no idea where all of this latent anxiety is coming from, honestly. My stress levels have dipped way down in recent weeks. We’re done traveling for the foreseeable future, so that stress is missing. I left my stressful job, so that’s done. We’re not in the best place financially, but we’re stable. Sam is healthy and mostly happy (though impatient to stay home with me). It’s the holidays, which makes me happy, and I’m objectively and at least to my overall knowledge stress-free.

Of course, there’s the meta-anxiety that comes with raising a kid nowadays. Everyone’s always had multitudinous fears for their kids; the fears just change shape depending on the world overall. School shootings are now so common that seeing one in the news barely registers as a blip on my radar; it’s become like seeing “there was an accident on 495 during the morning commute,” where I objectively know it sucks for the people involved, but it’s so damn common that I don’t have the emotional energy to work up a major shock and horror every time it happens (which is complete and utter bullshit because this should not be a common thing). And that commonality obviously translates to anxiety as a parent; what if Sam’s school is next? And there are other fears: what if Sam gets taken in by a predator online? What if he’s the unlucky child to contract one of six billion forms of brain cancer? What if he’s bullied into suicide when he’s older? What if, what if, what if…

But I call it meta-anxiety because I have to push it to the back of my mind to even function during the day. Everything is terrifying, and if it’s constantly at the forefront of your mind, you can’t live your life. You can’t help your kid to cope or teach them to deal with the bad things that come their way. You’re just always afraid. So the meta-anxiety lurks back there but doesn’t rear its head often, except apparently in last night’s dream.

More specific anxieties also get pushed to the back of my mind lately, largely because again, I need to be able to function. Those anxieties are all tied to this pregnancy and how Sam will cope with everything. They edge into health concerns, emotional concerns, and the overall how in the hell am I going to take care of twins panic that’s always lurking whenever I tell someone how excited I am.

Health-wise, it doesn’t help at all that 99% of twin birth stories you can find online are honest-to-god horror stories or stories of someone having a completely unassisted homebirth in a stream or something with a dolphin doula and little birds singing.

rpya68suspki4
(no offense if a stream birth is your dream birth, but all I can think about is EELS)

I have exactly zero interest in the latter–I’m a big fan of giving birth in a nice, sterile hospital with a wonderful doctor at my side–so the former is what I get. And these stories are basically all the same. Mom goes in, somewhere during labor we realize that the twins aren’t getting born vaginally, it turns into a C-section, everything seems fine but then Mom’s vision gets blurry and lots of people yell and the next thing she knows, it’s four days later and she’s been given like 72 gallons of someone else’s blood and half of her internal organs are removed. But the twins are fine!

Obviously, this is not the norm. Obviously, it’s not even close to the norm. But goddamn, would it hurt for people to write about a completely boring birth experience, even if it’s twins? “They gave me a spinal block so I was numb from the waist down, I didn’t feel any pain, they took both twins out, the bleeding stopped very quickly, and I recovered in a pretty typical way.” My kingdom for those stories, because at this point, I’m at least 75% convinced that I’m going to spend a month in the hospital after these babies are born.

And, of course, there are other health concerns. What if I get a pulmonary embolism and randomly die? (having a cold is really helpful when you’re worried about that, let me tell you) What if my blood pressure skyrockets and I develop pre-eclampsia? What if my liver decides “you know what, no” and I have to deal with that? What if I just randomly stroke out? What if, what if, what if…

Again, these are all just in the back of my mind because I couldn’t function otherwise. But that doesn’t mean my dreams aren’t tapping into them for material.

And then there’s Sam. Objectively, I know he’ll be just fine with the transition from only child to oldest sibling. Kyle and I both were. But he’s still my baby and I still want to do everything in my power to keep him from experiencing things in a rough manner, to keep him from feeling jealous or left out or lonely. And I know that’s not necessarily possible, but I still sit there and worry about it… in the back of my mind, where apparently my brain is going to get dream material.

Pregnancy is a weird time for dreams anyway. It’s common for folks to have weird-ass dreams while pregnant, because hormones be like that sometimes. But oy, I wish that my brain would just clue me into what’s the matter and let me fix it so I can have some less stressful dreams. Like ones about Disney World. Those would be good.

videotogif
(and hey brain, if those dreams can be vivid enough that I wake up tasting churros, that’d be great)

Holidays are coming…

November 6, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

It’s time for a rambly, unfocused, totally all over the place post because this is my blog and I can be rambly and unfocused if I want 😀

Last week, Kyle and I took Sam down to Texas for a visit with Kyle’s family and to celebrate Halloween. We do celebrate Halloween up here, to an extent, but our neighborhood is really not built for trick-or-treating (our little house is halfway up an enormous hill, and our road is twisty, turny, and poorly lit). Kyle’s parents’ neighborhood, on the other hand, is PERFECT for trick-or-treating, so that’s where we went.

Sam dressed as Jack Skellington, a costume he decided on after roughly two months of debate (first, he wanted to be Darth Vader, as he has been for roughly the past three years; then he wanted to be the cat from the Simon’s Cat videos; then he wanted to be Darth Vader, Simon’s Cat, and Jack Skellington at the same time; and finally, he settled on just being Jack). Kyle’s mom made the costume, since every store was sold out of Jack costumes by the time Sam made up his mind, and it honestly looked a thousand times better than any store-bought costume would have:

jack

It took Sam a little while to warm up to the idea of Halloween overall, mostly because he’s not a fan of change, and last week threw him for a loop (I mean, we flew down to Texas and then he was sleeping in a hotel and at his Nana’s house and there was no school and our singular cat had been replaced with three dogs and it was just wild). He was overtired, too, and reluctant to get into costume at all before Halloween itself. Still, he dove into Halloween crafts with his Nana (including ghosts for the doorway and little skeleton finger puppets and Halloween cupcakes) and was all too happy to help carve the enormous pumpkin we got from the local pumpkin patch:

As trick-or-treat time approached, Sam was still reluctant to put on his costume, despite all of our arguments in favor of it (you’ll get candy! Look, we dressed your stuffed puppy up as Zero the dog! You can sing all the songs from the movie! You’ll look so cute!)… until Kyle told him, “Sam, if you put on your costume, you can have this umbrella.”

For some reason, that worked. The mind of a three-year-old is an enigma.

Trick-or-treating was still a challenge for the first couple of houses, though. Sam’s never really been, so the idea of walking up to complete strangers and saying, “Trick or treat!” to get candy was a little out of his league. He eventually got the hang of it, though, and by the time we’d canvassed the street, he was happily exclaiming “TRICK OR TREAT! THANK YOU! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!” at every door.

And he got a TON of candy that we’re still picking through.

So it was a good Halloween. I didn’t dress up, except to put on some Princess Leia buns I got for $10 at the Disney Store; in lieu of pictures of that, please enjoy this picture of me dressed as an “angel” (or the physical embodiment of the spirit of disco, depending on how you look at it) when I was seven.

angel maybe
(shown here on the far right, with my younger brother as a cowboy and my younger sister as a ballerina)

While we were down in Texas, we got word from Kat that the huge windy storm that blew through Massachusetts about a week ago had not left our property unscathed. One of the many, many oak trees on our property hadn’t been able to withstand the storm and toppled over onto our driveway. Thankfully, it didn’t do any damage to our cars or property, but it was still a pain in the butt to deal with until we had a tree removal company come and take it away on Saturday.

tree

(we had several suggestions that we put up a sign that said “FREE FIREWOOD; CUT YOUR OWN!”)

So that was a thing when we got back. The other thing, the more exciting thing, was that I had a doctor’s appointment on Friday. Everything has been copacetic since the last bleeding incident, so this was just supposed to be a routine visit, and it was. Twins are harder to get individual heartbeats for, so we had an ultrasound to check on those (both very good!), and we saw some good movement as well (Baby B made “hook ‘em horns”–the hand sign for fans of UTA–so Kyle was happy). We were hoping to get a shot that would give us some insight into the sex of our Doublemint Twins, but nothing doing–Baby A was positioned diagonally, so we couldn’t get a clear look, and Baby B was just uncooperative.

But oh well, we figured. We’d had genetic testing done to check for any abnormalities, just so we could know what to expect, and while the test results came back clear for abnormalities, a mix up with our forms hadn’t given us any information on the gender(s). The office faxed another form over to the lab, and we expected to get the results at this appointment…

…and, well. We did. Just the results were “inconclusive,” which I don’t understand how that could be the case (look, either there are Y chromosomes in there or there aren’t), but okay. Error 404: Gender Not Found. Cool.

I laughed about it. It’s frustrating, sure, but not nearly as frustrating as two years of failed transfers and miscarriages and sickness leading to this point. The twins are alive and healthy, the ultrasound tech said it looked like one was a girl, and I’m okay with that. We’re going back for our big anatomy scan on December 7, so in theory, we’ll know at that point… assuming everyone cooperates.

(I’m looking at you, Baby B)

And then, my birthday was this weekend, the big 3-4. It was a pretty typical adult birthday, lowkey and laid back. On Saturday, my mom took me shopping for maternity clothes, my biggest need at the moment, and I got some really cute stuff. We had a good day together, with lunch at the Cheesecake Factory and a side trip to the American Girl store (hush, I need to pretend to be 8 sometimes), and it was cool just getting to spend time together (and to go shopping with someone as enthusiastic about going into Pottery Barn Kids as I am).

Sunday was just a chill day. Kyle let me sleep in as much as I could (which wasn’t very much; if your body’s used to getting up at 7 a.m., it’s hard to go past 8:30 without needing to get out of bed), and I got big hugs and kisses from Sam once I got downstairs. After that, Kyle, Kat, and I went to dinner at the Melting Pot, my absolute favorite place to eat (seriously, the fondue is amazing but then you have the main course stuff that just… I wish I was still eating it, it’s that good) before heading home for the night with a sleepy Sam in tow. The day overall ended with Sam curled up on my lap, chin quivering as he insisted on watching the “Baby Mine” scene from Dumbo. I, naturally, was sobbing hysterically because son, why on earth did it have to be that video? Any other video I can do. I mean, not any other video, but come on. COME ON. That video should be banned by the Geneva Convention for viewing by pregnant mothers–or any mothers for that matter.

57b51917-916d-45ab-89d6-fc40d6854b1e
(gross sobbing)

So it’s been a good time. This is my second-to-last week of work (that’s a story worth telling), and I’m spending a lot of it helping Kat get ready to move out on Saturday (she’s heading out to her mom’s place before eventually settling back in California) and preparing for my mom’s birthday this weekend (she’s requested a rum cake but without alcohol, so that’ll be an adventure). And then it’s on to Thanksgiving and Christmas… my holiday season has officially begun!

Big Brother Blues

October 6, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

Sam’s been having a rough week. Roughly every night has been punctuated with nightmares, usually about Kyle walking away from him or Kyle not being able to help him with something scary (like falling into a pond). We have these nightmare phases whenever Sam becomes aware of a big change coming up, and there are a LOT of big changes coming up, one of them bigger than the others.

didi
(hint: the big change is acquiring two babies, seen here at my 11 week appointment)

All my life, I’ve imagined having a gaggle of kids (the “gaggle” in my imagination has shrunk to a “few” since getting pregnant is such a pain in the ass). I grew up with two siblings, and my parents have four siblings apiece, so the idea of only childhood is kind of a foreign concept to me, and has been since my sister was born in 1986. Kyle only had one brother, but he, too, couldn’t imagine having just one kid, even though that one kid took a LOT of work to bring into the world and has the energy of roughly five kids combined.

So it was never a question that Sam wouldn’t be our only child, but as our attempts to have more kids took longer and longer, Kyle and I started to wonder about something that never crossed our minds when we’d talked about family size before: how was this huge change going to impact Sam emotionally?

Now, of course, that question wasn’t enough to keep us from charging forward–we’re both oldest siblings, and we turned out pretty okay (most of the time)–but it still gave us pause. Although we know that Sam will eventually adjust to older brotherhood really well, the transition is something that’s worrisome because neither of us really remember how to help him cope with it.

As I mentioned before, I’m the oldest of three. My sister was born several months before my third birthday, so I wasn’t quite old enough to feel established as THE child yet. I don’t remember any strong emotions building up to my sister’s birth; anything I remember from the nineish months leading up to my big sisterhood is completely unrelated to that and more related to things like the awesome green icing on my birthday cake or the hurricane that knocked down the entire woods behind our house.

I don’t even remember anything about when my sister was actually born. Pictures exist of me visiting my mom and sister in the hospital, sitting on a rocking chair and holding her, counting her toes, playing with my mom’s wonderful hospital bed. I don’t remember feeling anything, though; I’m sure I did, but it wasn’t anything strong that my brain decided to store as a memory.

Family lore has it that at some point when my sister was very young, I remarked to my dad, “Daddy, do you remember when it was just you, me, and Mommy? That was best.” This seems to be a pretty common thing for kids becoming big siblings, even if I don’t remember it happening. Kyle’s mom tells the story of him asking, a week after his brother came home from the hospital, “So when does he go back?” My favorite, though, is the story of Kat’s father, who apparently punched his younger brother the day he got back from the hospital.

BUT. I don’t remember this conversation. What I do remember is Christmas. As with every Christmas, we spent a good chunk of the holiday season at my grandparents’ house in New Jersey, along with the rest of my dad’s family. The two years prior, I’d been the star of the show–I was the first (and to that point, only) grandchild, and all of the aunties and uncles fawned over me and played with me and indulged my toddler whims. My grandparents made remarkable gifts just for me (some of which are still in my house, like the enormous toychest my grandfather built when I was two? Ish?), and overall, it was a good time.

But this year was different. I wasn’t the only grandchild anymore. Now there were two new grandkids added to the equation–my sister and my cousin Tim, born about six weeks apart. The attention was, naturally, almost entirely on the new babies–that’s pretty much par for the course at holidays. Any time a new baby or two or three (as was the case on my mom’s side of the family one year) shows up, that’s what everyone wants to talk about.

(as an aside about my mom’s side of the family: by the time I came along, there were four older cousins, and my first younger cousin was born a year after I was, so jealousy wasn’t an issue there)

I remember feeling really sad. I wasn’t angry, not really. There wasn’t anybody to be angry with, because it wasn’t anybody’s fault. I was still the cutest kid in the universe (Sam hadn’t been born yet, you see)…

adorbz

…and I was still lavished with presents. But I felt left out of all the excitement, like I was no longer important to the family as a whole. This isn’t logical, of course, but three-year-olds are hardly known for their feats of logic.

It was my beloved Grandma who eventually noticed that I was sad. This is the two of us in that moment (I’m playing with what I mentally called “mean Santa” because he looked like he wanted to destroy the world rather than bring it joy).

(I sometimes wonder if Sam got any of my genes, but this picture is exactly what he looks like when he’s being serious)

Grandma took me aside and gave me a big hug. She made sure to tell me how very much she loved me and that the presence of my new sister and cousin hadn’t changed that a bit. She told me that I was always going to be special to her, that nothing in the world would ever make her love me less. She took the time out to let me know all of that, and I believed her because that’s what I had been waiting for all along–for her to tell me that I still mattered.

(of course, I’m sure that people told me that from the moment my mom got pregnant with my sister, but this is the instance I remember the most, and also no, I’m not crying, I just have allergies to human emotion)

re5onya

(but I do miss you, Grandma)

So that’s been the first step of what Kyle and I are trying to do with Sam. I’ve noticed that it works pretty well: on Wednesday, when I got home from work, Sam was acting pretty aloof. He didn’t want to talk to me or give me a hug until I said, “Hey. Dude. I want you to know that even when the new babies get here, you’re still gonna be my guy, okay? I still love you just the same; that’s never going to change.”

And then he tackle hugged me, and we had spaghetti.

tenor
(the universal language of reconciliation)

By the time my younger brother came along in 1988, I was an old pro at the sibling thing. I was also five years old, which helped a lot, I think. I remember how I felt when my mom was pregnant with my brother; I knew from the get-go that he was going to be a boy, and I was SUPER EXCITED about that. The day before he was born, I remember dyeing Easter Eggs, and the kit came with a tiny sticker that said “brother.” I held onto that sticker, and when I met him for the first time in the hospital a few days later, I stood on tiptoe and placed the sticker on his swaddling blanket, just so the world would know, this was MY BROTHER.

Probably because of my age, I felt compelled to help a lot more as well. With my sister, I’d been pretty limited in what I could realistically do to help–again, two-year-olds aren’t really known for their childcare skills. As a five-year-old, though, man, what couldn’t I do? I remember helping my mom to give my brother a sponge bath when he was still little enough to have the stump of an umbilical cord (“eww,” I remember thinking, but my mom promised me that the stump would be gone soon). I remember that he cried a lot, and I remember that I could help with that–I’d play music for him from a copper windmill music box we had, and that would help him feel better. I remember feeding him baby food from a bowl, disgusted that he was so eager to eat this mush, but glad to help him do so.

Being a helper was HUGE. It made transitioning from having two siblings to having three siblings a LOT easier on my emotions; I never felt left out or like attention wasn’t on me because I was necessary the entire time. Nobody could get my brother to sleep like I could (so my five-year-old brain thought). I helped and I was needed.

That’s part two of our strategy with Sam, and it also seems to be working to an extent. All of the baby books we’ve bought to explain things to him talk about how he can help with the new babies–playing with them gently, helping give them baths, helping them calm down when they’re sad. I know I’ll be relying on him for even more than that, things like fetching diapers and feeding them and helping with tummy time and who knows what else? He seems to like the idea of being a helper, and we’re trying to involve him even now, letting him choose a few things for the babies… nothing crazy and major, but I think it wouldn’t hurt to have him choose some blankets or this season’s Wubbanubs.

wubbanub-infant-pacifier-12-pack-speciality-collection-cc2
(“What should I buy?” ask first-time moms. “WUBBANUBS!” I roar without letting them finish the sentence)

And, of course, there’s my dad’s brilliant idea: we’ll have two gifts at the hospital for Sammy “from the twins.” The more like Santa Claus he sees them, the better.

It’s a rough transition. I don’t think it could ever be anything but. At the same time, though… I think he’ll be okay. We just need to keep reassuring him that he’s loved and letting him be a helper, and he’ll be okay. Eventually.

The Right Choice

September 29, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

This was going to be a long entry in which I went through my mental list of “things we need for the babies” but when I got about halfway through writing that, something happened that made me change course.

I have a deadline coming up for my job; not for another week and a half, but it’s coming up. On Tuesday, my boss came in to talk to me about what needed to happen for the deadline. The meeting had me tensing up, at least partly because my to-do list got longer than I’d anticipated it being. When the meeting ended, I got to work on my first action item and paused midway through to run to the bathroom. I figured, I’d check the first thing off my list, have lunch, and then really dive in.

That all changed when I got to the bathroom because, you see, I was spotting.

Spotting is common in early pregnancy, even more common in twin pregnancies. Reasons for this vary–cervical sensitivity, old blood clearing out, one’s body being a COMPLETE JERK–but most of the time, it doesn’t mean anything, as long as it’s not (a) bright red and (b) accompanied by cramping. Still, when you’ve had as many miscarriages as I have, seeing any blood–brown, pink, or red–automatically sets off klaxons in your brain.

tenor3

I called my doctor as soon as I got back to the office, and the nurse on the line told me to come in for bloodwork to make sure that my HCG numbers were still high. I thought this was pretty odd–I’m 10 weeks along, so HCG should be kind of besides the point by now, right? But I needed answers, so I went, in a rush of panic; and once I’d gotten my blood drawn, I went home to rest and wait for the results. To my surprise (they’d told me that I wouldn’t get results until at least the next day), the office called me back less than 20 minutes after I got home, largely because the nurse had spoken to my doctor personally.

Let’s rewind some. My doctor, Dr. Solano, was my obstetrician when I was pregnant with Sam. I hadn’t planned to see him, but the doctor I had planned to see had apparently decided that she wanted to be a urologist instead of an obstetrician, which was weird, but okay. Dr. Solano immediately put me at ease with his friendliness and straightforward responses to my questions. He didn’t sugar coat things, but he also gave me information in a kind of enough manner that I could digest it without an ounce of panic. Even towards the end of my pregnancy with Sam, when my body went completely haywire, he stayed calm and optimistic, while still maintaining a realistic view of what was going on and making sure to get me the help I needed.

So naturally, when we found out that we’d FINALLY managed to get pregnant, I called his office right away. I couldn’t imagine seeing anyone else for my prenatal care, even though he’d since moved to an office that was farther away than the one I’d seen him at when I was pregnant with Sam. As soon as the RE’s office released me (that’s what they call it when you’ve successfully gotten pregnant and can start seeing a regular obstetrician instead of the REs), I called Dr. Solano’s office to set up appointments.

The new office handled appointments a little differently than I expected. When I’d been pregnant with Sam, I’d gone in for a blood test to confirm the pregnancy and then gone in for a complete physical with Dr. Solano a couple of weeks later, around the 8 week mark. By simple merit of the process I’d been through, I wouldn’t have been able to have an appointment at 8 weeks, but it turned out that they don’t really do that anymore anyway. Instead, I’d go in and see a nurse (in my case, a pair of nurses) ASAP to go over the whole pregnancy process. At around 10-11 weeks, I’d have an ultrasound with a nurse practitioner. I wouldn’t see an actual doctor until around 16 weeks, two weeks into the second trimester.

Odd, I thought, but alright. I went to the first appointment on Friday, September 22, and it was… well, it happened. A pair of nurses sat down with me and went through all the dos and don’ts of pregnancy with me, all of which I know by heart and could probably teach a class on. They gave me a booklet about those dos and don’ts, a slightly revised copy of the one I’d received four years ago, when I’d giddily gone in for my first appointment with Sam. The primary questions I’d had referenced any way in which twin pregnancy might be different from singleton pregnancy; mostly, their responses were “I don’t know” or “I’ll have to look that up.” When the appointment ended, they sent me to the building’s lab for bloodwork and a urine test, and then I was free to go.

That appointment left me feeling something I’d never felt during my pregnancy with Sam: processed. My appointments with Sam were never particularly long, but that’s largely because I didn’t really have any questions 99% of the time. When I did have questions, Dr. Solano answered them quickly and thoroughly, and I never felt the need to do more of my own research when I got home. The nurses were friendly and joked around with me a lot, and we all established a good rapport that continued when I went into the hospital to deliver.

This stood in stark contrast to what I’d heard about the differences between obstetricians and midwives in terms of prenatal care. For those not in the know, the obstetrician vs. midwife debate tends to be a hot one in pregnancy communities. People complain that obstetricians are too cold, that they leave patients feeling processed and rushed, that midwives are warmer and more caring and will take as much time as you need. I don’t have much experience with midwives (one checked me for dilation when I went to the hospital contracting at 36 weeks, and I later called the check “the fist of justice” because I imagine only God or an embodiment of Justice could cause that much pain to a person’s cervix), but my experience with obstetricians has always been enough for me to argue against this stereotype. Maybe some doctors are like that, but not my doctor.

And yet, after that first appointment, I had doubt. The nurses seemed dismissive of the miscarriages I’ve had (“oh, but those were part of the IVF process,” they said, not writing down the number 4 when I said that was how many miscarriages I’d had. “Yes,” I tried to explain, “I was going through IVF, but I was also pregnant and miscarried.”) and didn’t know that I was having twins until I told them three or four times, despite it being written on my file. I didn’t feel like a person to them; I felt like a number or a checkbox, just another person to process before getting to lunch.

980x

So I wondered if I’d made the right decision. Had medical care changed so much since Sam was born? Was this how all of my prenatal appointments would be?

And that brings me back to spotting on Wednesday. When the nurse on the phone told me I needed bloodwork, it seemed to confirm my worst fears: that nobody knew who I was, that nobody was going to actually treat me like an individual but simply as another cog in the wheel. And then she called back and said she’d spoken to Dr. Solano, and not only that, but he’d wanted me to come in immediately for an ultrasound and appointment.

Which, not to sound entitled to healthcare or anything, but that’s what I’d hoped for and expected.

Kyle and I hurried out to the car and drove all the way to Dr. Solano’s new office. The receptionist warned us that we might have to wait a while, but also told us that Dr. Solano was adamant about seeing us that day, even if we were his last appointment of the day. We did wait for about half an hour before being called in to the ultrasound, and though the technician didn’t know that we were pregnant with twins (honestly, I feel like I actually need to wear a shirt that says, “TWINS” or “#TWINNING” sometimes), we got to see that despite the spotting, they were perfectly healthy with strong heartbeats, tiny kicking limbs, and fingers.

bbs
(the tech said that those aren’t fingers on Baby B, but COME ON, what else could they be?)

That put my mind at ease, but not as much as the appointment with Dr. Solano about half an hour later did. Once we’d gotten our photo booth strip of pictures, we returned to the waiting room and were shortly called into a small, warm office. Kyle and I waited in there for about fifteen minutes, sipping from tiny bottles of Wells Fargo water (no, I didn’t know they made water either) and joking around about various methods of contraception until Dr. Solano came in and shook both of our hands, looking genuinely happy to see us.

Which is always a good sign.

He told us that everything looked fine, that I should take it easy and stay on pelvic rest to prevent further spotting adventures (Kyle looked sad), that heavy lifting and heavy activity were out. We all caught up on our lives since Sam was born–he was promoted to the head OB/GYN at a new hospital (which he explained using Star Trek metaphors that Kyle later nitpicked), we have a three-year-old and impending twins.

Best of all, he was able to answer questions, and was happy to do so. He told me that my pregnancy wouldn’t be very different from a singleton pregnancy, except that it would be shorter and involve a lot more ultrasounds (at least one a month to measure the twins’ growth). When I expressed my nervousness at the prospect of needing a C-section to give birth (nationally, twin births are a LOT more likely to be C-section births–about 60-75%, depending on what you read, compared to 30% for singletons), he told me that he likes to avoid C-sections for twins at all costs. He talked about having a 40% C-section rate for twins, which blew my mind–that’s a LOT better than average. And he said, “If you end up needing a C-section, I’ll be right there the whole way.”

It’s a silly thing to be comforted by, but it worked.

The appointment ended, and as Kyle and I headed back to our car, reassured, Dr. Solano made it a point to tell us, “Guys, I was really, really happy to see you on my schedule.” And all the doubt was gone.

It all reinforces some of my strongest beliefs about prenatal care, namely that it’s less about midwife vs. doctor and more about who makes you feel heard, cared for, and safe. For me, that’s an obstetrician (a very specific one, but still an obstetrician). For someone else, that might be a midwife. You really just have to go with whomever works best for you.

My next appointment is on Wednesday, an ultrasound and all that blood drawn for various prenatal tests (I still need to make sure that our insurance will cover Harmony–that’s the most accurate test for chromosomal abnormalities–even though we’re having twins). I’m seeing Dr. Solano’s nurse practitioner, whom he’s said is really great, so I have high hopes. Overall, I’m feeling a lot more confident about this pregnancy, and that’s a huge relief.

The Harvest

August 4, 2017 / lovescienceandnat20s / Leave a comment

I think egg retrieval is my favorite part of the IVF process. It means a full day off from work (and granted, you feel crappy during that time, not great, but it’s still a day off), and it means sleeping, and it means seeing the fruit of your annoying-ass two weeks of injections.

tenor
(mostly it means sleeping)

I had my retrieval on Wednesday, as I’d mentioned before. They set it for pretty late in the day, which is unusual–my last several retrievals have been pretty early in the morning, so we’ve had to fight rush hour traffic to get in on time. This time, though, the road was clear, and we made it in with a good 20 minutes to spare, which was a great change of pace. I sat in the waiting room with a whole bunch of people who were theoretically just like me (you could tell the ones coming in for procedures–they had on comfortable clothes and warm socks. Conversely, the ones who were in for just consults or the like were wearing nice work clothes and heels), and Kyle went back to what I’m calling the spank bank wank tank to make his contribution to the furthering of the species.

(he took a video of it that he showed me when I woke up from the procedure. There was a chair covered in sterile paper, a counter with a cup and Roku remote control on it, and a 36” flatscreen TV mounted to the wall)

And then I got called back and had to strip down and don a johnny, bathrobe, and slipper socks. I spent pretty much the entire morning pantsless as multiple people came into my waiting cubicle to ask me Important Questions like “do you ever die during anesthesia?” or “which vein is best for an IV?”

(the nurse didn’t listen to me at first and tried to go in my left arm, but when I pointed out my Best Vein on my right arm, she went there, and things were good)

The big thing I always do before procedures is tell everyone I can, “I will puke unless you give me an antiemetic in my IV. I will wake up from anesthesia, and I will puke on you and everything you love, unless I have an antiemetic.” I think I repeated this about five times before the procedure, hoping that it would mean the anesthesiologist would give me that antiemetic so that I wouldn’t throw up, and so that Kyle could take my woozy self to Friendly’s for lunch.

kikxpp
(I’m just saying that I totally deserved some fried food and ice cream)

(spoilers: I did not get Friendly’s for lunch)

But once I made sure that everyone knew that I would definitely throw up if not given an antiemetic, a nurse came to give me a little blue beret and escort me back to the procedure room.

Egg retrievals are really weird compared to other surgical procedures, in that you need to make sure your legs are securely way up in the stars before they give you the good night juice. I spent a lot of time positioning myself on a surgical table that seemed to be designed for only people weighing 100 lbs or less and then trying to assist the nurses as they hoisted my feet up into slings that would keep my legs way up high for the duration of the procedure. I was strapped down, and some blessed individual placed an oxygen mask over my face.

(retrospectively, it smelled a little sweet to be oxygen, so it was probably some nitrous oxide, which is GOOD STUFF)

They placed electrodes on my chest to monitor my heart, and then the anesthesiologist said, “Okay, you’re going to start feeling really sleepy, really fast, alright? See you on the other side.”

“Okay,” I answered, closing my eyes for a glorious nap. “Good night.”

The next thing I knew, I was back in one of the waiting cubicles. A nurse was talking to me, and I don’t remember what she was saying, but I do know that my knees were bent. I remembered that the waiting cubicles had reclining chairs in them and asked her, “Do you think you could help me put the footrest up?”

“Oh, sweetie, you’re in a bed,” she explained, and I opened my eyes to see that yes, I was in a bed.

“How many eggs did they get?” I asked, because this is the most important thing when you wake up from an egg retrieval.

“I don’t have the exact number yet, but I know it was at least 40.”

Forty eggs! Holy crap! When I’d gone in for my last monitoring ultrasound, I’d only had 37 follicles; another three must have popped up overnight. I eagerly awaited Kyle’s arrival and, when he sank into the chair next to my bed, told him the good news.

“We got forty eggs!” I exulted. He called me a spider mom.

The nurse was quick to correct me, though: we’d gotten at least 40 eggs. They were still counting. A few minutes later, she came back and told us that they’d retrieved a total of 54 eggs.

giphy1

Kyle and I said, in unison, “Holy shit!” We said this very loudly, and we were probably not appreciated by anyone else in the little recovery area.

The nurse went on to tell us that this was the second largest retrieval they’d ever done; the largest was a woman who’d had 83 eggs removed (bless her, she must have been feeling even more arachnid than I do). She told me that they’d get back to me the next day and let me know how many of those 54 eggs successfully fertilized.

I was concerned about this. I asked Kyle if he’d gotten 54 sperm when he did his do in the room with the paper chair. He told me that yes, he’d gotten at least 54 sperm, though he hadn’t counted.

Unfortunately, it was around then that I started feeling nauseous. The nurse had given me some Tylenol for the cramping in my abdomen (because you don’t produce 54 eggs without some cramping), and my stomach was unsure what to do with this new addition. “Did the anesthesiologist give me an antiemetic?” I asked when the nurse returned. She told me that no, he hadn’t, but he’d given me fentanyl in my anesthesia, which made me more than a little nervous: fentanyl is one of the drugs I’m supposed to avoid when on my antidepressants.

But I was more nervous about my stomach’s newfound enthusiasm for puking. “Can I have an antiemetic now?” I asked. The nurse rushed away and came right back with a syringe full of Zofran, which she injected into my IV. “That’ll take a little while to work, but you should be alright afterwards.”

Even so. The nausea did not go away as quickly as everyone hoped, and I shuffled back to the car carrying a plastic bag for “just in case” purposes. Kyle instinctively took a back road from the clinic to the highway, and the twists and turns and bumps did me no favors. “Maybe next time we can take a main road?” I whimpered as Kyle winced and apologized with every bump.

But I got home safely and slept the day away to the peaceful rumbles of a line of thunderstorms. That night, I got my Friendly’s, and even Kat–who hates Friendly’s–came along for the ride. I sent an email to my office as a reminder that I’d be in late the next day, since I couldn’t drive or shower or literally do anything for 24 hours after having anesthesia, and then I went back to bed.

While I was sleeping the next day, the clinic called me back with fertilization results. Of the 54 eggs they’d retrieved, 38 had been mature, and of those 38, 31 had successfully fertilized. Suffice it to say that I will not be doing another stim cycle again for a lonnnnnng time, even as those numbers continue to drop.

It’s been two days, and I’m feeling… meh. Not my best. If I had my druthers, I’d ruther be at home, still in bed and only getting up to replenish my supply of purple Gatorade and pee, but work calls. I’m tired, and my stomach hurts, but I’m mostly functional and can distract myself from both of those facts. I’m probably going to have a pizza for lunch because health? What’s that?

giphy2
(besides, pizza)

Assuming I don’t get worse over the next couple of days (today and tomorrow are supposed to be the worst days), we’ve got a transfer scheduled for Monday, two blastocysts. With any luck, my IVF journey will end there; here’s hoping. Until then…

Love, Science & Nat 20s

The family life of a bunch of nerds.

me

Concerning Boobies

In your head

It’s been a week…

Who needs sleep?

Happy New Year (?)

Sweet dreams are made of this…

Holidays are coming…

Big Brother Blues

The Right Choice

The Harvest