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Histrion
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Location: Indiana, United States
Gender: Male
Interests: Music. Theatre. Languages, both natural and constructed. PC games, when I have time (City of Heroes still rocks!!!)
Occupation: Education/training
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
3/28/2003
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| I've been thinking about this for a long time: I'm going to close down my Xanga account.
Frankly, I spend my time on FB and Twitter now. And to be honest, Xanga's gotten pretty darn ridiculous in the past few years - as unwieldy as MySpace at its worst, maybe even more so.
*If* I start another blog, separate from my FB notes, I'll use a different service. Maybe TypePad, maybe Wordpress, I dunno.
So anyway, if you read my blog, and you want to keep in touch, send me a note in the next week or so with your contact info. Meanwhile, I'm gonna see how I might go about exporting my Xanga entries.
God bless!
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| So it's Sunday, 12:15 a.m., about one week before the baby's due. Peebs and I have both drifted off to SNL, or so I think: the voice of Peebs coming from the bathroom wakes me.
"Honey, we have to get to the hospital."
"mmm uh? Roo mmm labor?"
"The contractions are three minutes apart."
"I'm up!"
We both dress quickly. I have a slight advantage in this as my water doesn't break while I'm putting on my clothes. Peebs packed her bags a couple weeks ago, and it's only about a 20 - 30 minute drive to the hospital, but nevertheless by the time we arrive Peebs is ready to start pushing. (She will decide, later, that she was probably in labor for about 24 hours and didn't know it; she had been led to believe that the contractions would feel significantly different than the false "Braxton-Hicks" contractions she'd been dealing with for weeks, and as it turned out, she didn't sense much of a distinction. So we really should have left for the hospital right after the play we saw that night.)
The advanced stage of labor is a problem because, while they're able to get her right into one of the birthing suites (they forego the exam room once they see how she's soaked the wheelchair), it's too late in the game to administer an epidural. Peebs has said she wanted an epidural since the pregnancy began, and now she's understandably upset. But she, we, dutifully begin breathing and pushing under the guidance of the nursing staff while we wait for the OB to arrive.
Peebs strains for an hour and a half but, while she's dilating just fine, the baby isn't making any progress down the canal, and the doctor decides it's time for a C-section. The nice thing about this development is that now Peebs will get the epidural she wanted. So they wheel us down for surgery, and while they're cutting her open they suit me up with the usual hazmat gear. They usher me into the room, where Peebs smiles at me and says, "I feel much better now." They give me a small stool so I can sit up by her head and talk to her. At one point I take a peek over the napkin: oh, look, a slimy phone cord! That must be the small intestine! How cool is that!
Turns out that Peebs has a bicornuate uterus. That's a fancy term for what's common called a "heart-shaped" uterus. As a result, all the efforts she was making were actually just pushing the child to the side, not down the canal. So she could have strained for days and done nothing but wear herself out. Should we ever decide to have another child, a C-section will be automatic.
Anyway, he's a slippery little bugger, but they fish him out of there, and two nurses proceed to clean him up and get his lungs working (common with C-section babies, since there's no passage through the birth canal to squeeze the gunk out) while the main surgery team records the time and sews my wife back together. I go back upstairs, the new kid following soon after, where he's weighed and measured and subjected to my amateur photography. Before too long they wheel mom back in to the suite, where she sleeps off the anaesthetic and there ends our happy little tale.
Yeah. If only.
See, at some point - possibly during all the pushing, possibly during the surgery - Peebs burst a blood vessel behind her uterus, where it went unnoticed. While she was recovering, all that blood start filling up the broad ligament (see pic ). So a few hours later, the doctor comes back to check her incision, notices some inappropriate swelling, and after some thought, tells us, "You appear to be hemorrhaging internally."
Now, this is serious enough, but it helps to have some context: this exact same surgeon had done some surgery on Peebs a few years ago, and nicked some small blood vessel in the process, and she slowly bled internally for several days, and almost died. In this case, it's happening much more quickly. So we are now both very frightened. Especially me, because I am not currently drugged.
They prepare to operate again, while the hospital chaplain comes up to soothe the terrified husband/father. Fortunately, the doctor this time is able to find the source of the bleed, and because of that he doesn't have to do a hysterectomy, but he does remove the ovary and tube on that side and ligates (ties off) the blood vessels to that side of the uterus. Fortunately, the human uterus has blood supplies on both sides, a neat little bit of redundancy, which means that if Peebs and I are ever stupid enough to want to do this again, we can.
The only really positive aspect of this whole experience is that the medical staff at the hospital, especially the nurses, are absolutely wonderful to us from Sunday to our discharge on Wednesday, making sure we got some sleep, while teaching us to feed him and wrap him in blankets burrito-style. Special kudos to Jennifer, the lactation consultant, who spent 90 minutes with Peebs Tuesday night working on techniques, and who has kept in touch with us by both email and cell phone since then as Peebs struggles to make this nursing thing work.
She's worn out right now, in a lot of pain and very emotional on top of it. She's taking care of Burrito Boy while I take care of both her and Burrito Boy. We're both exhausted and wondering why on earth people actually have children on purpose.
By the way, another reason we call him Burrito Boy is because of the sheer amount of intestinal gas he generates. There, I ended on a humorous note. :)
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| Sorry, I've been really bad about updating this. Let's see, when last we left our intrepid hero, or at least when our intrepid hero last left, he was contemplating working on NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy or one of those, I don't feel like looking because I'm certain the date of my last blog will depress me to no end. Since then, I've been pretty busy: - I took a one-act play that I wrote last summer, and rewrote it as a short screenplay (about 20-25 minutes). That got filmed back in January, and is waiting on me to do the animation.
- I wrote another short screenplay (45 minutes), which was mostly filmed earlier this month, though one day got, er, rained out (you may have heard about it, you know, the 100-year flood), so the car chase and stunt will have to be filmed on a reshoot day.
- I'm still teaching and tutoring.
- Oh, and lest I forget... Peebs and I are pregnant.
I'm told it's not her that's pregnant, it's us. As a couple. We're due in late November. November 23rd, in fact. I kid you not. Any of you who remember my love for all things Doctor Who will get a kick out of that. Even though very few babies come on their estimated due date, I still figure this is God's way of telling me that he knows I'm a geek and loves me anyway. So I just might "repurpose" this blog to be about my impending fatherhood. If it changes color scheme in the next few days, that's why. Oh, hey, go download the new version of Firefox! Edited to add: ok, theme's changed. That didn't take long. 
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| I'm bringing Xanga back - drop a comment if you're with me! | | |
| This year, however, I have script projects that really need to take priority.
Mind you, that might not be enough to stop me.
I might wake up early tomorrow morning with excess energy or inspiration and just START.
Stranger things have happened.
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