Rude Awakening

So this is how my Thursday started this past week:

*Knocking in the rhythm of “Shave and a haircut, two bits”

Answering groggily at the door: “Hey… what’s up?”

My neighbor: “Oh hey.  Your wife wanted me to wake you up because she says she wants to talk to you.  She has to sign papers at 11 for an emergency c-section and she wants you there.”

Me: “Ok… wait, WHAT?!”

Needless to say, that woke me up in a HURRY.  Just for clarity’s sake, my wife is at the hospital, she has internet on her phone, she was talking to my neighbor via Skype, and I don’t have a phone that works.  This led to this particular wake up call.  Also, my neighbor had thought that I had known about this previously, which I didn’t, so she believed she was just informing me of prior knowledge, not nonchalantly telling me that my wife was about to have her belly sliced open and the baby removed.

After frantically signing onto Skype to talk to my wife, I learned that it was not indeed a request to do surgery that day.  Instead, it was a consent form just in case something happens, and she is otherwise too preoccupied to give her permission to do the procedure.  For anyone who knows my wife, she wants nothing to do with a c-section whatsoever.  She wants this baby to be born naturally, no drugs, no medical intervention, no anything outside of the natural process.  Knowing that, her signing this paper was a direct acknowledgement of the fact that she may not be able to see it through how she wanted it.

The last few weeks have been a big fight with the doctors to make sure they know that the ONLY circumstance where a c-section may be administered is if either the baby’s life or my wife’s life is in danger.  There will be no surgery for convenience, or lame excuses so that life is easier for the doctor.  One of the doctors in particular has been somewhat glib about the whole c-section procedure, and that sort of attitude can set my wife off in a minute, not to mention my reaction.  I don’t want anything stressing my wife now, as she is in a very delicate situation.  Stress will only serve to make the situation more unbearable, so as it is right now, the only thing she needs is rest, relaxation, and some peace and quiet.

However, this whole debate has got me thinking.  While most people believe that c-sections are pretty run of the mill nowadays, it is still a major surgery.  There can be complications that arise mid-surgery that could threaten the mother’s life, or the baby’s.  Knowing that, and knowing how much of a pessimist/worrywart I can be,  it hit me that there’s the possibility that I could lose either my wife or my child.  Neither is acceptable, but if either scenario were to happen, I have no idea what I would do.  I would likely fall to pieces.

My wife and I jokingly tell each other that we have to be married and alive until we both hit the 100 year old mark.  Should we hit that mark, then we’ll negotiate.  Obviously, we have no way of knowing what will happen in the future, but it comforts me a great deal to know that she wants to be with me so deeply.  I honestly can’t think of my life without her, so this latest scare has me worrying about something that is difficult to fathom. 

I’ve told my wife plenty of times “I don’t want my life to be dramatic.  I don’t like the idea of being a widower or a single dad.  Sure, the pity sex might be fun, but that’ll get old really quick.”  Of course it’s said tongue in cheek, but I really do just want a nice, boring life.  Be married to my wife, have kids, raise them to be good people, watch them grow up and move on with their lives, raising their own kids.  This is probably the only real dream I have.  It’s simple, it’s comfortable, and it’s important to me that it happens.  All these things happening with the baby, with my wife, it has caused me no end of stress.  I’m pretty sure it caused me to be ill this past week, and will probably age me more than I’ve aged in the last decade. 

It will all be worth it once the child is born, and we’re all home again as a happy family.  It’s a cliché, but the only thing I hope for now is a healthy child, a healthy wife, and for them both to be able to come home.   I’m grateful for all the reassurances that I’ve been getting from friends and family, as it keeps me from bouncing too much off the walls, but until they’re both home, it’s hard to really let that worry go.  The time is coming soon though.  We’ve only got a little over a month left until the due date, so hopefully soon, I will be writing about my misadventures in taking care of Tiny Tien, instead of worrying whether or not everything will end up alright.

Life is Funny (Not in a ha ha way)

It has been a very exciting week, and not in a good way.  Maybe stressful would be a more appropriate word, but either way, it’s left me feeling very drained, and a bit unable to really get my thoughts clear enough to do anything aside from update everybody on very basic news of what’s going on.  That said, I had a bit of a moment of clarity tonight, so I thought I should write while the writing is good(hopefully).

Prior to the recent series of events that led to my wife being hospitalized for the month of February,  I was going to write something about how strange relationships are.  I had said to my wife, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the time period that she would be at home due to her maternity leave would be a true test of our marriage.  This is because when you really think about it, how much time do you actually spend with your significant other?  Between work, sleep, and just generally being busy, you are around each other for maybe 4 or 5 hours a day, maybe less, depending on your life.  People believe themselves to have great relationships, when in reality, they probably spend more time with their coworkers than with their significant other.  How would you handle it when you and your wife are basically forced to be around each other twenty-four hours a day?  Anyway, that whole line of thought got blown away when about a day after conceiving the idea, my wife was forced to stay in the hospital, thus leaving me very much alone in the house.

It’s funny how life tends to smack you in the mouth when you least expect it.  Here I was, preparing myself mentally for being around my wife all the time, and then we’re separated in quite an alarming fashion.  While I try to remain somewhat level-headed, and at least outwardly remain cool, to be honest, I was worried sick.  I have felt completely helpless these last couple of weeks, as I can do nothing but wait until the doctors give the ok for my wife to come home.  At this point, that’s all I want.  I’ve always been a guy who enjoys his alone time, but not when it has been forced upon me, and not when there’s a chance that whatever led to it could lead to very bad things. 

That having been said, it has made me very aware of my interactions with my wife as I’m hauling myself to the hospital every day.  Because we don’t have the luxury of having easy access to each other every day, what time we do have has sort of become a condensed version of what we do on a regular basis.  We sit, we talk, we hold each other, we nap.  Napping in one of those single hospital beds is a lot more comfortable than you would think, but maybe that’s because I just miss alternately holding and being held by my wife, and I’ll suffer any discomfort to enjoy that particular sensation. 

It just strikes me as funny, because if you were to observe it from an outside perspective, we’re not doing anything special, but I think that’s actually what makes our relationship work so well.  We just enjoy being in each others company, and don’t need a lot of hoopla in order to be happy around each other.  This actually makes me more secure in the fact that we’re going to be parents, and I believe we’ll be good ones.  We don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to be happy with each other, and that will somehow translate to how we take care of our kid.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, neither here on the blog, nor in my head, but there is a correlation, even if I can’t express it at the moment. 

I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to be a good person, and it will only get worse once the baby is actually here.  I have to fight my natural urges to be selfish and get things the way I want them, and instead try my best to do what I can and what I must in order to try to meet my own expectations.  Being with my wife makes it easier, because most of the time, I want to do things for her and for others because she makes me feel like I actually am a good person.  Having been separated from her in this way has made me realize just how much of an affect she has on me in that regard.  I am better when I’m around her, and when I’m not, it’s a struggle.  It might not be an epiphany of epic proportions, but it does make me realize that her being on maternity leave would not actually have been a test at all.  It would have just been time that we could have enjoyed together.

Gotta keep an eye out for that silver lining…

Another week leads to a little more drama.  I was hoping the pregnancy wouldn’t be so exciting, but I guess you can’t always get what you want.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, there was the possibility that our child could potentially be born premature.  Well, at this point, the doctors seem to almost be guaranteeing that it will happen unless they intervene in some way, so we are now in a situation where my wife is now in a hospital for the next month, more or less confined to a bed.

Of course, the preterm birth of the baby isn’t really the big worry.  The baby is past 7 months at this point, so she will have a pretty high chance of survival (at this point, north of 90%, raising even higher once we hit next week).  The real problem, at least from the doctors point of view is that the baby is in complete breech position.  For those not familiar with what that means, it means the baby is currently head up, butt down, with the feet bent at the knees so that she’s in sort of a cannonball position.  Optimal birth position is with the baby head down, butt up in a standard fetal position.  With the feet down, there is the possibility that the baby’s head will not fit through the birth canal properly since the body comes out first.  There’s also the possibility that the umbilical cord could come out first and cause the baby to lose oxygen during the birth, and that leads to a whole other mess of things. 

Even that by itself, wouldn’t be a problem.  There is still time for the baby to flip itself over.  The issue is that the breech position is in tandem with the fact that my wife’s cervix has shortened quite dramatically in the last week.  Standard cervix length during this part of the pregnancy is 30mm or more.  When we first went to the doctor, it was 24mm.  When we went for a follow up this past Tuesday, it was down to 16mm.  My wife then got sick on Thursday and was vomiting so frequently, that the tension and strain on her body had shortened to 10mm.  The rapidity with which her cervix shrunk, and the breech position had the doctors worried that the umbilical cord could potentially slip out, and so they admitted my wife immediately into the hospital, and will now keep her for a month to monitor hers and the baby’s condition. 

It has been a lot to take in, and I’m surprised that I haven’t had a nervous breakdown yet.  It’s a lot to take in, especially when it’s my first child.  I’m anxious for the health of my wife and of my child, and all of this news is just stressful to get, especially in such rapid succession.  Fortunately, I’ve been able to keep myself calm by realizing two things.  One, that the infant mortality rate in this country is the third lowest in the world, and two, that while the illness that afflicted my wife may have caused her cervix to shorten, it is also possible that her cervix had shrunk to that point anyway, and that if she hadn’t gotten sick, we might not have discovered the problem until it was too late.  There’s that silver lining I was talking about. 

With the sudden shortening of her cervix that she was experiencing prior to this recent visit to the hospital, I would not have been at all surprised if it was the case where we were fortunate that the sickness had been bad enough to drive her to the hospital, or it might have progressed to the point where the baby could have just popped right out.  The last thing I want for my wife is for her to have to undergo a Caesarian, because that causes so much stress and damage to a body.  Not to mention how it screws up the bonding ritual between a woman and her child.  So maybe her getting sick when she did was a blessing in disguise, or a stroke of really good luck, depending on how you want to look at it.  Either way, she’s in the care of a really great staff, and even though this wasn’t the ideal situation for us, I’m at least relieved that she is in good hands. 

I do want to thank everybody for their well wishes during this time.  It would be even harder to have to face this completely alone, and this event has really opened my eyes as to all the love and caring that we get from our friends and family.  The concern that has been shown for us has been incalculable, and we are grateful for everything.