RSV

About six weeks or so before Ivy was born, I got really, really sick. Like, the terrible, terrible, uncontrollable coughing kind of sick. Eventually the feeling sick part went away, but the terrible cough lingered for about two months. I was still coughing badly when Ivy was born, and people don't look at you too nicely when you're hacking your head off and holding a new baby :/  oh well, what could I do. Hannah and Joshua had had their turn with the sickness (more brief) before the babyw as born, but it wasn't until a week or so after Poppy came home from the hospital that Eli came down with it. And then, of course, so did Poppy.

Now if you haven't had a baby lately you might not be aware that they always tell you to go the ER if you have a baby under two months old with a fever. But they never tell you what they will DO to your baby if you go to the ER and say they have a fever. And it never crossed my mind to explicitly ASK what they would do. I always just assumed that it was because the higher body temperature could do more damage to their sensitive little systems, but apparently that's not their concern. Anyway, when Ivy was almost two weeks old, she caught the cold (on top of the normal new baby congestion) and was really miserable. For about a day and a half we watched her closely to make sure her temperature didn't climb past the threshold, but on the evening of her two-week birthday, she crossed the line. So once again, Carmen came to the rescue and stayed with the older kids while we took our little baby to Rady Children's Hospital, assuming they would suction some mucus, check her out and send her home.

Boy were we wrong. Apparently when a less-than-two-month-old baby has a fever (for any reason -- even though in this case it was obviously from the sickness that had been in her home longer than she had), they perform a mandatory spinal tap. Having the memory of my own spinal tap fresh in our minds, this was a very unwelcome surprise to us. Why, we wondered, had the doctors we had been calling about her sickness, who had been telling us to watch for the fever and giving suggestions on remedying her illness, not told us what they would do if we took her to ER? Why the HECK would they not have said to take her in and tell the ER doctors that she is sick but not mention the fever, and let them take her temperature themselves to avoid an unnecessary and awful procedure on a two-week old baby? Because when she was actually at the ER they didn't even get a fever reading, and they said yes it's most likely because of her cold, but since WE reported a slightly higher temperature, they insisted on doing the spinal tap. Well, we watched them stab that tiny baby in the spine three times during the course of the night before they finally gave up because they couldn't get enough spinal fluid. That combined with the deep lung suctioning they performed repeatedly (tubes down the nose hooked to a machine that sucked gallons of mucus out of that poor baby's lungs)...it was torture to watch her go through it all. I will never as long as I live forget the awful sound of her screaming while they did that suctioning. Like the prolonged, tortured screaming of a piglet being butchered. Sorry that's gross and graphic but that's the only comparison I can think of! It was awful! But it was a sound I would endure many, many times over the next five days.

After abandoning their attempts to retrieve the spinal fluid, probably around 3 a.m., they informed us that she would be have to be admitted to the hospital to receive treatment for RSV. Really all that means is they do that awful suctioning every few hours, leave the baby hooked up to oxygen tubes, and watch to make sure she doesn't need  to be moved to ICU. Thank goodness, we had brought her in early enough that the constant suctioning was enough to keep the infection from getting too serious. So, Seth and I had taken her to the ER with the thought of getting her checked out and suctioned and then going home, but I ended up not leaving that hospital for five days. For five days I did nothing but sit and hold that little baby in my arms and see her through the trauma of deep suctioning. I read my books, watched a lot of Dick Van Dyke on the tablet Seth left for me, and I believe I took a shower twice. I left the hospital room once to see Seth and the kids for about twenty minutes, and Seth visited one additional time for about an hour or so. But I never left that hospital room besides that one time, and it was a very lonely, difficult experience to be watching my baby suffer alone all that time. 

Anyone who's known Ivy as a baby knows what a Mama's girl she is, and I attribute that fully to the time she and I spent together in that hospital during her sickness, being each other's only source of comfort. (Granted she was already inclined that way, since up to this time, she would not sleep during the night -- even when she was well -- unless I was holding her. I didn't lie down to sleep for weeks after she was born! You can imagine the soreness in my tuches.) But it was a precious time that truly allowed us to bond, and I'm grateful that we were led to get her the help she needed to clear out her sickness. Fun fact: every single nurse and doctor that attended us independently christened her "Peanut" because she just....was. A darling, tiny little peanut. My poor, sick little peanut. 

Poppy Comes Home

Because it was January and the middle of flu season, the children were not allowed to come to the hospital to meet Ivy, so they had to wait until we came home Saturday morning. We were so excited to bring her to meet her siblings, all of whom adored her at first sight. Well, really, who had adored her for months beforehand. You can see in their faces that there's nothing but love for this sweet baby sister! (Thanks to our friends Jarom and Alyssa Hunter for watching the kiddos for us while Seth came to pick us up!)

An Angel Is Born

I was so ready to be done being pregnant by the time the new year rolled around. This pregnancy felt so much harder than the previous ones, although I'm not sure why. Maybe because it was the fourth time? Maybe because I was older (though still not old)? Maybe because I was so stressed out my body just couldn't handle it gracefully? My sickness was less - I only threw up 17 times, yes I actually counted - so that was an improvement. But I did have varicose veins, which I'd never experienced before, and wow those are painful.

Still, I was not at all looking forward to the experience of giving birth again. During this pregnancy, I finally accepted the reality that nothing I could do in the way of breathing, imagery, relaxation techniques, etc. would ever reduce the agony of childbirth, because apparently my body just doesn't work that way. Unfortunately, because of my last two harrowing and drug-free labors, I was terrified to go through it again and had many episodes of fears and tears during my pregnancy because I was sure I was going to die during the birth. I honestly did not see how I could live through it again! I was planning on having an epidural this time, but being my paranoid self, I was worried about going that route too. Obviously there was nothing I could do about it, and the due date arrived just the same.

Although I didn't want to go through the labor, I definitely did want to have my sweet baby out of me. Poppy was due January 20, and as usual I was hoping she would decide to come earlier, but more than that I was hoping that just for once I could go into labor on my own. I've been induced in one way or another the past three times, after trying many recommended methods of inducing labor naturally -- walking a ton, walking uphill, spicy food, etc. -- and even though those have never ever worked, still I had to try something! So late in my pregnancy I started bouncing gently on our indoor trampoline regularly, and around week 38-39 I started drinking three cups of raspberry leaf tea every day. And lo and behold, I actually dilated to a two before I went into labor! That in itself was a miracle. It was even more miraculous when, around 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday Jan 23, I started having a combination of contractions/pain in my abdomen. Of course at that time I was at the furthest point out on my walk around Mission Bay with Eli, and the pain started while he was playing at the playground. I continued having pain on my walk back and while we were going to school to pick up the kids. The whole drive home (about thirty minutes) I had pain regularly 4-5 minutes apart, they were excruciating even at this stage.

I called Seth to notify him that this maybe could be something, so to get ready to come home if I still had them after taking a hot shower, and sure enough, they kept coming. So he came home, and I remember I fixed pasta with broccoli and parmesan for the kids for dinner, all the while doubling over in agony every few minutes. When Seth finally got home and they were 2 minutes apart, I thought I was going to die but was trying to keep it together for the kids, while waiting for Carmen to come stay with them (bless her!) Around 6 p.m. I said goodnight to the kids and went out to wait in agony next to the car so we could leave the second she pulled up. They were so close together and so incredibly painful, it was an awful ride to the hospital. but we finally made it there and it took fifteen minutes just to get from the parking lot to L&D because I had to pause every time I had a contraction (every minute!). I was beyond ready for my epidural. The midwife checking me in suggested that it might be over fast enough to not need the epidural, and I remember saying I didn't care if it was only ten more minutes, I WANTED that epidural! After all that time and squeezing I was only dilated to a 4 so I knew I had a long way to go. It felt like an eternity before the anesthesiologist got there, but boy, was it a relief to have that epidural. It's amazing to me how my mental clarity increased once the pain was under control. I hadn't realized how foggy I had been during the thirty minutes at the hospital before the epidural, but once it kicked in, I realized I didn't even recognize the various people who had been in there -- I couldn't even identify the anesthesiologist. Crazy how intense labor is to be able to create such a mental block.

Anyway, the epidural kicked in, the intensity of the labor increased, the broccoli dinner came up (that's why I remember what I fixed), and finally the moment we'd all been waiting for arrived and our little Ivy Elisabeth slipped into the world, at 9:49 p.m.. And she was an absolute darling. I'd known she was tiny all along because even at full-term, I hadn't felt "stuffed" as is usually the case during the last weeks of pregnancy -- no baby kicking up in my ribs, no fullness and pressure in my pelvis -- but I wasn't prepared for just how tiny she was. She was 19 1/4" and weighed in at slightly under 6 lbs 3 ounces and was just as tiny and sweet as could be. No matter how agonizing the pains of childbirth are, there truly is nothing as incredibly amazing and sweet as the moment of birth, when that tiny, slippery creature emerges and is placed in your arms and makes her first tiny cries. That is an experience I could repeat a million times without ever tiring of it. It is truly a miracle. Especially with babies as beautiful as ours.