our stay at the hospital

Before I continue from yesterday, I just want to toss in some stuff about yesterday.  Our daughter is now 4 weeks old, almost 5.  She’s been going through the whole evening witching hour thing that seems to be common with all babies.   The last two nights I’ve been able to get her to calm down, and then place her in her crib.  The first night, she sat and chattered and cooed to the solid side of her crib, which we have now named “Crib Wall” or CW for short.   She is fascinated with it.  She’s also fascinated with the window shade in the living room, or just “Shade”.  I’m pretty sure she likes them both more than me.  Or at least likes to look at them more than me.  She is enthralled by them. Weirdo.  It’s these stories I’m keeping for Prom night and her Wedding.  Anyway, back to the story…

So, once they stitched up my wife, she joined us in the recovery room.  She had some major shakes which wouldn’t shop, so they gave her something for that, and it stopped pretty quickly.  Until they stopped, I was still scared to death.  I know they weren’t a big deal, but like I said before, my biggest fear was something was going to happen to my wife. Irrational fear I’m sure, but you know, it’s that whole “I love her with all my heart, and I married her for that reason, and plan on growing old and gray and senile with her” thing.  So, all through this, our daughter never really slept. She just sort of looked around and was taking it all in. No crying, no fussing, just adjusting to being in the world and looking around.  They moved us up to our recovery room, and we sat and rested.  Family members came by, met our baby girl, and she was very photogenic and had pictures taken of her with various family members.  My wife needed rest though, so everyone left, and I’ll venture a guess that we watched some Friends. I could be wrong. Could have just been regular TV.  At this point, my wife’s vitals were still all over the place, and her body wasn’t able to regulate itself very well. Probably not an uncommon thing a few hours after surgery.  So, she started in with attempting to breast feed.  That sort of worked, as it does with a brand new baby trying to figure out how to latch.  We made it through the first night in recovery, and they would bring the baby in every 2 hours to eat.  In the morning, my wife still isn’t regulating her heart rate and blood pressure very well.  She’s having a hard time with things all day, and ends up with a catheter.  The feeding is coming along, and the lactation person and nurses help us figure out how to get the baby to latch properly, and eat.  So that’s going fairly well.  We make the call early in the day though that she needs as much rest as possible, so no visitors that day.

By that evening, we still aren’t seeing any improvement in my wife, and in fact, some of her vitals are looking worse.  She’s feeling worse, and, it makes me shake to even write this, and it’s hard to convey the actual emotions, and how physically drained she was. I hope she’ll tell her side someday. But she looked at me, in all seriousness, and said she felt like her body was shutting down.  The weight of this statement doesn’t come across very well on paper, nor does the gravity of the situation.  We’d been trying to let her rest as much as possible, but things just weren’t going in her favor.  And with that, we had to make a decision that wasn’t one we wanted to make at all.  Her body needed rest.  I wasn’t willing to let her risk her own health and life anymore, so we discussed sending the baby to the nursery for the night.  Which means feedings would have to be from formula that night.   So we did.  My wife was able to sleep through the night, and we saw a vast improvement the next morning.  She opted to start pumping for breast milk, and did that for the rest of the stay in the hospital, to make sure that her milk would come in.  However, once we got home, things were once again not going well in the recovery, and we again had to make one of the hardest decisions we had to make as parents.  We switched fully to formula.  If you know us at all, you know that wasn’t even something that we had contemplated. Ever. We were firm believers in “breast is best”.  I didn’t even want to think about formula.  I’m pretty sure my wife had never considered it either.  It just didn’t fit into our beliefs for how to feed and raise a child.  But once we were put into a situation where it became detrimental to the health of my wife, it wasn’t hard to make that decision at all.  There’s no question in my mind that we made the right decision for us.  Because my fear was that if we continued down that road, there wouldn’t be an us.  Now, that’s not to say that it wasn’t tough. Like I said, we firmly believed that breast feeding was the way to go. But it was taken off the table for us realistically.  And adjusting to that reality wasn’t easy. There have been issues with finding the right formula, and baby constipation, not feeling bonded with baby etc.  But we still have my wife. And the baby needs her mother.  It’s funny, I still feel like I have to defend our decision.  It’s kind of a reaction to the militant “Breast is Best” people, but it’s also a constant reminder to us.  Those first few weeks are a blur, and we forget sometimes just how serious things were, and could have been.

(IF YOU ARE SQEAMISH, SKIP THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH) Back to the hospital though. So, after my wife’s first good evening of sleep, they wanted her to get up and try to go to the bathroom on her own. Well, the one thing no one really talks about is the bleeding after giving birth.  I mean, the told us in the hospital, and I  saw the pad they put on her, but NO ONE mentioned just how much.  So, my wife, for the first time in a couple days, got up out of bed. We maneuvered her IV and her to the bathroom, and before I could help her onto the toilet, blood started pouring down her leg.  Literally, pouring. I about lost my shit.  She started to also. We both thought she was hemorrhaging out, that maybe something was wrong with her internal healing stitches.  I pulled the emergency cord. And when they didn’t come running, I hollered out of the door to get people in there now.  Well, they came running then, and when they got there, looked at me funny, even though there was a pool of blood on the floor.  Turns out, everything was “fairly” normal.  I wish they would have mentioned that to us prior, that after two days of sitting, that the blood was going to pool, and once it had a chance to get out, it would, and it would be normal.  So, that gave both of us a near heart attack.   This was probably the first major thing we realized that no one talks about when they talk about giving birth.

It’s hard to really remember much of the rest of the stay. It’s really pretty much a blur after that, because things sort of became normal after that.  I did help my wife with things I never thought I’d help her with, so I guess there’s that.  People came to visit, we fed the baby, she pooped on the pediatrician, and then me.  The only other thing that really sticks out in my mind after all of that is going home. Being so very nervous to take her home.  No nurses, no doctors, just us and the baby.  Also, I had to stop and have someone make sure I put the baby into the carseat correctly. We had gone through a car seat clinic before the baby was born, but there is definitely a difference with putting a doll in and adjusting to the right tightness, and a real life baby.  So, she made sure everything looked ok, and helped make a couple minor adjustments, and then we went home.  And I’ll continue that story another time.