The Wind Up

Let's set the scene...it's Sunday morning and I'm asleep.  Okay, scene is set.  I wake up to pee but I'm still groggy so when I look at the clock and see 3:25 I am confused why the stove is set to 325.  When I start waking up, I realize that I'm looking at a clock, not the stove temperature.  I feel some abdominal pain and wonder why I have girly-type cramps.  Hum, weird.  The pain doesn't seem to go away.  Maybe I should wake Mike up and tell him.  I decide to wait a couple of minutes to see if it goes away and what do you know?  It went away.  Okay, back to sleep....ouch, there it goes again.  I wake Mike up and tell him, but I still didn't understand what it was.  Then we realize that they are coming and going (clue number one) so we start timing them.  Could this be labor pains?  It's not what I thought it would feel like, so I'm skeptical.  The pains get worse and worse and closer together.  I was a little hungry so I snarfed down a bowl of cereal.  There's no harm in making my stomach happy.  By mid-morning I'm in bed moaning like a lady in labor (clue number two).  I'm still skeptical, but I decided to eat a hardy breakfast, just in case.  I had eggs, pancakes, waffles, and a hash brown.  I may have been hungry.  We decide to go to the hospital late in the morning because the pains were 3 or 4 min apart (clue number 3).  I thought they were going to tell us that these were some derivative of Braxton-Hicks, but instead they admitted me and I even got to take the back-way wheelchair ride to Labor and Delivery.  The ride, by the way, was kind of scary because the lady was pushing me so fast down the hallways.  I thought I was going to fall out of the chair.  I was like, "Gosh lady, where's the emergency".  Typing that out just now, I realize that I was the emergency.  Anyway, I should have been thinking about possibly having a baby, but instead I was internally criticizing how fast she was going.  So we get there and they hook me up to monitors and after some monitoring, they tell us that it's happening.  I was like, wait, what's happening?

The nurse tells us to walk around for an hour and then they'd check me to see how much I progress.  Mike and I take a walk around the 3rd floor and then down to the cafeteria while I'm in a hospital robe!  Strangely, I didn't care.  I get a juice and I think Mike got a Snickers and I gave him a hard time about it.  We headed back up and they checked me again and she said, "okay this is it!".  Wow, this is it.  THIS IS IT!  They start prepping me.  They had a guy put in my IV that was trying to get hours in for a promotion.  My recommendation?  FIRE HIM.  Fire him and then fire needles at him.  As he's trying to jab the IV into my arm with his body weight behind it like a battering ram, a woman watching him told him that he was doing it wrong.  YOU THINK?  Then she said that he had ruptured my vein and he had to stop.  He then tries again about half way down on my forearm.  You know, that real tough muscle part of your arm?  For those unable to pick up the sarcasm, that part of my arm resembles the delicacy of a Faberge egg.  He does the same battering ram move.  This time he collapsed my valve.  I'm paralyzed with fear and pain but Mike had enough and said that he didn't get any more tries.  They guy said, "I get 3 tries".  Mike just says, "You get 2."  Needless to say, with blood running all over my hand, the guy stopped and a nurse shoved an IV into my other arm, on the side part, below my wrist.  As a side note, later on a different nurse asked if she could redo my IV since it wasn't in right.  I almost stabbed her.  The whole time this is happening, I'm having contractions, it was fun.

It's like basting a turkey

39 Weeks

I have become morbidly obese.  My coworkers are surprised everyday I come to work.  One woman gasped last week when I turned sideways even though I didn't know who she was.  She apologized that she gasped.  I was so sure that I would have had the baby by now!  He's still in there and there are no signs that he's going to come out.  I know that he's going to come out one way or another, but there's a tiny piece of me that keeps thinking that he's going to stay in there.  I don't think that there are signs of anything happening.  I keep feeling little things here or there and swear that it's a sign, but then nothing happens.  For example, I'll get out ... or rather, roll out of bed and get a muscle pain and take in a big breath to exclaim, "Mike, it's time!".  But then I realize that it's just because I strained my muscles with my massive weight rolling out of bed <big exhale>.

The baby has been doing a new thing lately.  I'm not sure what exactly is going on in there and I'm not even sure I can explain the feeling, but I'll try because he seems to like doing it...a lot, especially to my left side.  This happens almost every day now.  If you watch the Food Network constantly like I do, especially around Thanksgiving, they show you how to do stuff to turkeys.  This feels like that thing they do where they put their hand between the skin and turkey meat and wiggle their fingers to separate the skin from the meat in order to put things like butter and herbs in there.  Yes, that's what it feels like, minus the butter and herbs.  I don't know if that's okay or not, or if he's really separating my skin from my muscle (what little muscle is left).  Ew.