I'm back...
Temporarily at least...
Or until I have to feed, burp, change, jiggle or rock the baby. Or, maybe I will have to stop blogging so I can just sit statuesque, holding my new addition perfectly still, monitoring my own breathing to ensure it doesn't interfere with the perfect peaceful aura needed to surround him..
But I do have some stories to tell, (or blogs to write) and I would like to get them published before lack of sleep and malnutrition (who will feed me?) erodes my remaining short term memory.
Therefore I have three blogs to write, or one blog split into three parts; a trilogy of sorts:
The Last Weekend
The Baby
His First Christmas
Here I go with part one...
The Last Weekend.
So time rewinds to the weekend before my section date. the last weekend of life as we knew it, the weekend before someone else joined our family and everything tipped on its head again and the dynamics of three children would be juggled and dropped, picked back up and juggled again.. We were excited, slightly nervous, but most of all glad that the pregnancy was finally over. We planned to celebrate our last weekend of pregnancy; we were going to eat nothing but takeaways, wear nothing but pyjamas and ensure we had a huge stockpile of treats and DVD's. Well this was the last time I could use pregnancy as an excuse for such debauchery, so as a pregnant woman, I was going to go out with a bang!
Thursday arrived. I think it would be fair to say, as it was my last week of pregnancy, I was emotional. Emotional to the point that losing an eyelash would have bought on a blubbering, incoherent soliloquy. In addition, I was so forgetful that I had misplaced my glasses 3 times in a ten minute window.On this fine evening The Future Husband arrived home only to be sent straight down to the supermarket. Even though I was very pleased with myself for having done the weekly shop that afternoon, I appeared to have forgotten to pick up a couple of things needed for dinner. On the menu was sausage mash and onion gravy, so The FH was sent out to buy some sausages, potatoes and onions. He set off with eldest child in tow, and returned 15 minutes later empty handed and looking slightly pissed off.
"Where's my cash card Fran? It's not in my wallet!" (he had discovered this at the checkout).
"Shit! I must have put it back in my purse" I said fumbling in my handbag, then my coat pocket, then the pushchair, then the sides of the sofa... only to return empty handed. "I can't find my purse!"
I checked my parent's car. which I had temporarily kidnapped to get me and bump from A to B, the interior light was as much use as a flagging firefly but after some swearing and kicking of car upholstery I decided I'd lost my purse. I re-entered the house tearful, frantic and irrational. How could I have lost my purse, with his cash card in, the weekend before I was to have a baby? How would we get money? How would we cope? How would we LIVE?
Inside the house, things had got worse. I found The FH holding an ashen Fearless and both of them, and the Leather Arm Chair (the one worthy of a second trip to Ikea), were all covered in Fearless's vomit.
In clearing up the sick we found my purse under the chair, but like the rest of the living room, it had not escaped the amazing range of the projectile vomit, but alas, the cash card still worked and The FH set off to retrieve the shopping from the kind supermarket cashier, who had stashed it behind her desk, hoping the dramas had not taken us into a shift change.
27 hours later...
Fearless slept soundly in my bed, after 12 hours of vomiting and diarrhoea, he was exhausted. Little O had been asleep an hour and for us adults there had not been a whisper of a takeaway, a snippet of a DVD or a sweet wrapper in sight... We had been far too busy cleaning up shit and spew to bother.
28 hours later Little O covered his bed with vomit, thus ensuring his bedroom and its contents were infused with the most pungent spewy aroma imaginable. Little O and a red bucket joined me in my bedroom and The FH had declared the boys' bedroom a no go area and pulled the spare mattress onto the landing and was going to sleep there as the smell alone could reduce a grown man to tears.
29 hours later and the red bucket was being well and truly made of use of as me and little O practised the technique of synchronised spewing.
30 hours later and I stepped over The FH's head for the 15th time as I made my way to the bathroom, trying to decide en route which end to stick down the loo first.
31 hours later and all 3 of us were elbowing each other out the way to reach the bog first and I actually lost the plot and became hysterical. As I sat on the loo, The FH groaning and griping on the landing floor and Little O booting the red bucket every time he wretched, I lost myself control somewhere between laughter and crying. The FH said he would have got up and given me a slap but he was too busy on concentrating on staying alive.
48 hours later and I found myself in the A and E.waiting room.
Now I wasn't there because of the bout of gastroenteritis. Even though it had been bloody awful and there had been points I thought I was on the brink of death. It had been the fact I was unable to get out of bed the all day and when I did I couldn't bear weight on my right leg, where I noticed a protruding vein , an unusual bruise and some swelling. A quick call to the midwife and I was told to go to A&E because I could have DVT.
That morning I had already called in my parents to look after Fearless, who by the way now was as bright as a button, my dad had come to collect him and retrieve his car, which by the way wouldn't start as it had a dead battery because someone had left the interior light on all night. (In my defence it's hard to tell whether it's on or off because as far as giving off light goes it's fucking useless). So we dropped older, almost recovered, child off there and headed to sample the delights of A & E on a Saturday evening.
I sat in A&E holding a cardboard tub and praying I wouldn't have to do the whole throwing-up-in-public whilst heavily pregnant and surrounded by half battered, pissed teenage no-marks and a range of very sick elderly patients. One of whom was an Alzheimer's sufferer and every minute repeated the same three sentences: 1)We haven't been here before 2) What are we waiting for? AND 3) I want to home. It took my last ounce of energy to kick the FH whenever he started to hum Michael Bublé's 'Home' into my ear.
When being "seen" by a doctor I started to have contractions, so I was quickly shipped off to Maternity, where the contractions stopped, and they decided I probably didn't have DVT but they discovered due to the stomach bug, my pulse, temperature and blood pressure were all sky high so I needed to be kept in overnight.
On the upside, being disgustingly ill and contagious I got my own room - en suite! And a TV ll to myself, no Beebies in sight, with some on-demand films too. So I finally got to lie down, wearing pyjamas (we'd taken the hospital bag so we were prepared), whilst watching Mamma Mia (well it was quite a poor choice of films), unfortunately there wasn't any calorific delights, but I had an IV drip to top up my fluids, so I guess my needs were being met!
And the moral of the story is... be careful what you wish for, because some twisted bastard might actually be listening!
No comments:
Post a Comment