Waiting

Soooo.  Classes start again on Monday.  Is weird.  The last three weeks have evaporated into thin air.  Kind of nice, because that's three weeks of bad allergy time I haven't even noticed, let alone suffered through.  But I was also really looking forward to this summer, and I've been wanting to spend more time in the sun (sort of counterproductive being allergy season, though) to see if the effect is cumulative (does spending more time in the sun over the sunny months extend happy feelings into depression months?  Let us find out!).  Alas, we have hit autumnal sunshine patterns already, so the emotional effect isn't quite the same.  (Jeremelon looks at me strange every time I mention this.  Yes, summer doesn't technically start until the end of June, and no, autumn doesn't show up until October.  But those are middle dates.  Summer, as far as sunlight patterns go, starts in May, at least in Colorado.  Fall starts in August.  It has to do with angles and lengths and shadows and stuff like that.  I have no technical knowledge of it, but I can feel it.  The weather can be sweat-inducing, and I'll still sit in the middle of it and say, "Gosh, autumn is on its way!"  Trust me. It's just about here already.)  Rather than sitting around saying, "Woohoo!  Sunshine!  Summer!  Yaaay!" I sit around and think, "Ah, I can't wait for the drizzle."  Obviously conferred energy levels are not the same. :P

Anyway.  Classes start again, I've missed out on summer (I fully believe that without pre-eclampsia, I'd have been fine.  No one will convince me otherwise, dang nabbit!), the break I had between summer and fall semesters flew by in a haze of exhaustion and baby cries, and suddenly rather than having breathing room I find myself at the beginning of another four-month haul.  Befuddling, to say the least.  Somewhat depressed about it, actually, since I won't be graduating in December and I therefore must push back all of my good intentions.  I should be happy for the breathing room, but yeah.  Not so much.

What I AM happy for, however, is the 30 pounds that have been kicked off my body.  Three weeks, thirty pounds.  I'm cool with that. 8)  That is officially all my third trimester weight.  I have 20 left to get back to where I was before getting pregnant.  Will it get blasted away, too?  I don't know.  I'm holding steady right now, but as much as the baby is eating and as little as I am, I have to figure it'll get thrown away before too long.  (I REALLY hope this is a growth spurt.  Having to feed him every hour for fifteen minutes is *exhausting.*)  I am also thrilled that either the fluids or the antibiotics or both together appear to have FINALLY destroyed the permanent sinus infection in my left frontal sinus.  I can breathe through the left side of my nose!  I don't even remember the last time that was possible.  The right side is a little stuffy, but that might be allergies.  Unfortunately, it was a HUGE infection.  I think it's still draining, which is absolutely disgusting.  It changes the way everything tastes and gives me a nasty feeling in my mouth all day every day.  Yuck.  It also changes the way food tastes because I have full use of my nose again.  Stuff smells bad/weird, too, that shouldn't, simply because I'm not used to it.  I'm hoping it will even out again soon.  Likewise my vision.  All the swelling caused my eyesight to shift a whole heck ton so I wasn't really able to see anything at all with clarity.  I had to stop driving on highways toward the end because my depth perception got so bad.  Now, because they had eight months to work into that state and left it again in, oh, 48 hours, seeing is tricky.  Everything in the car seemed uber close when I was driving.  I have to take my glasses off to look at things relatively close to my face.  And staring at the baby while I feed him is making the effect worse because I'm not juxtaposing it with any distance work.  This means I have shoddy balance, get dizzy whenever I turn in place, and have a moment of vertigo if I look from the computer screen to anything else too quickly.  It amuses me, and at least I can see properly up close again!

Oh, and did I mention in my last posts that the nurses verified that I have a kick butt pain tolerance?  I didn't even consider that I needed drugs until my contractions were about 3/4 of the way up the chart.  The nurses kept telling me it was okay if I needed them, but I didn't.  Then in the hospital they said it again because I never wanted Percocet.  And I got it from my OB today when I mentioned I'd been given Percocet to take home, but hadn't used any of it.  She gave me a look that said, "Buh?"  I think that might be because my whole lower abdomen/pelvic area is numb on the outside.  The only time my incision hurts is if I forget to take my ibuprofen and go without for three hours, or if my clothes slide down and sit on it.  So yeah.  To everyone who ever commented, snidely or otherwise, on my "low pain threshold," take that. :P

And now that the baby has distracted me for over an hour, I think I shall finish here. :)

Complications

Had I just had a c section, I think the effects would have worn off and I'd have been a much happier Hollyberry.  Unfortunately, the second night after Oliberrykin was "born," I woke up absolutely freezing.  I was shivering like mad, which caused significant pain to my broken muscles and incision.  I couldn't get warm.  When the nurse checked me, I had a fever of 101.  Once the shivers went away, I got freakishly hot and sweated through everything.  When she checked me again, it was 102.  I was put back on an iv of fluids and two kinds of antibiotics, and my stay was extended by two days.  I spent the next two days falling between shivers and sweats.  The time I should have been taking to walk the halls and work out the stiffness and kinks and promote healing, I instead spent trying not to cry as I huddled in my very uncomfy hospital bed.  Because I have medical anxiety/panic attacks, the fever and lack of doctor-patient communication made me totally freaked out about dying or at least never going home or never getting well.  I needed to keep a temp of less than 100.4 for twenty-four hours, and I couldn't do it.  They forbade me visitors so I could sleep.  I kept sending the baby back to the nursery so I didn't have to worry about him, and then felt guilty about it, significantly hindering our bonding ability.  Basically, I spent that weekend in an overly emotional state of barely keeping it together.  I hated the Jeremelon, just a little, for being a man and not having to deal with any of it, and also for not really understanding it.  And for being able to cuddle the baby and spend time with him and bond when I couldn't.

Anyway, they determined I had an infection in either my uterus or my bladder, but most likely my uterus.  They put a quick catheter in to collect some urine...or rather, it should have been quick.  It took two nurses four tries - FOUR! - to get it in.  Not pleasant.  Although by that time I was so sore from my 12-hour medicine wearing off to be replaced by ibuprofen that I would happily have left it in so I wouldn't have to hoist myself up to go to the bathroom every 45 minutes (because again, gobs of fluids from iv).  That made it all worse, the inability to use my stomach muscles.  By the second day, my arms were so exhausted and overused from doing most of my stomach's work that I could barely use them.  I certainly couldn't heft myself into a sitting position with them alone anymore.  Getting into and out of bed became massively painful as I got more feeling in my abdomen.  So I was sore, exhausted, overwrought, jealous, guilty, and just wanting to go home.  I wan spasming ted to eat, but every time I did so my stomach spasmed.  Eventually they determined it was stomach acid and gave me Nexium, but it took a day and a half of not being able to eat without a stomach ache.  I didn't hurt much if I didn't move, which seemed to baffle the nurses.  They kept trying to get me to take my Percocet, which I continually declined.  I took one at the beginning and it didn't do much.  Then I took two together when the operation medicine started wearing off, and I had my usual "what did you just put in me?!?!" response of heart palpitations, dizziness, and an inability to calm my system down.  After that I didn't really see a point.  Instead, I had a couple Tylenol to keep the fever from spiking...and then worried that the Tylenol was what was keeping my temp down (because, well, it was!  Every time I didn't take it, my temp spiked) and I was going to go home and keep getting a fever (which, incidentally, I did).

Dealing with all of that meant I couldn't take care of my baby, which made me feel like a failure before I had a chance to try.  When they started my antibiotic iv, I was so swollen from all the earlier fluids the nurses in maternity couldn't find any veins.  So they called in the flight team.  Yep.  I had an iv put in by the guys who man Flight For Life.  Embarrassing.  Then, when it looked like I was getting better the nurses wanted to cap it so I could do things like take a shower (which I hadn't been able to do in three days), but the specific piece the guys had used didn't come equipped with capping capabilities, so no luck for me.  They had to keep pumping me with fluids because they couldn't just let the line sit there dry.  So I kept having to go to the bathroom constantly and take my pole with me (which, while standing up, I wasn't quite strong enough to pull over the lip between bathroom and room floor by myself, and especially not if I was having to hold open the door for myself).  While trying to nurse the baby (a soul-deep frustrating thing as it was), he used his super-powered legs to kick the iv, causing it to bleed outside the vein.  So they had to give me ANOTHER one to finish up the antibiotics.  This one they put in my wrist, so for the last day I was in the hospital, I couldn't do ANYTHING for myself.  I was finally feeling stronger and doing more, and suddenly I couldn't even feed myself (because, don'tcha know, it had to go in my right wrist, and I'm right-handed).  My discharge from the hospital happened over the course of three days with at least three different nurses, so that by the time I was supposed to be discharged, paperwork was wrong, I was confused, and nobody had bothered to ask us if we had any questions about taking care of the baby.  In fact, nobody bothered to ask us if we knew the slightest bit of what we were doing with the baby EVER.  Because I had a different nurse every 12-hour shift, I guess they all assumed someone else had asked.  At least most of them were nice.

Oh, and we found out as we were leaving that we had a weird room.  The door was extra heavy compared to all the others, and unlike the rest of the rooms it couldn't be left open.  My shower also had a curtain, which apparently no one else's did.  I also kept finding out things that they should have told me originally, like that my incision area could be numb for up to a year.  That the dressings over my staples needed to be washed off, and therefore I needed to take a shower.  That I needed to walk in order to get better faster (would have been nice to know in the beginning, so that I would then not have needed an incentive spirometer to keep my lungs open and not contracting pneumonia from being in bed so long).  I also had massive trapped-air pain throughout my abdomen and back, and the nurse didn't offer any useful info at all.  Instead, I found out the next day that she'd put in an order for a hot pad but the whole hospital was out.  Nice.

So yeah.  I would much have preferred a natural, normal birth to a c section.  I now have all kinds of hospital-related depression and anxiety to deal with on top of being a new mommy.  Ugh.

Berrykin's Birth, Part 2

I didn't want to have a c section.  It had never even remotely occurred to me I'd need one.  My mother gave birth five times without complication.  Her mother before her gave birth twice, in her *40s* in the '50s without a problem.  With the exception of the sudden pre-eclampsia (which has no known cause and seemingly randomly affects first-time moms and older moms most), I hadn't had any complications.  I'd been feeling my pelvis expand since six weeks after conception.  I knew how to relax and, even if I hadn't gotten to researching it yet, knew good techniques for giving birth.  I had no reason to think I'd have to have a cesarean.  More than that, I *wanted* a good, natural birth.  I wanted to experience the pain and the intensity, I was rather desperate for the experience of pushing out my baby.  It was deeply important to me in ways I didn't even catch a glimmer of until the chance was taken away.

I cried.  And cried some more.  And then panicked.  I still had that whole "death in childbirth" issue, after all, and though I'd managed to quell it in favor of a good birthing experience, a c section was a whole different game.  I made Jeremelon promise not to miss me too much if things went badly, that he'd take care of the Berrykin no matter what, and ran through how much I love him.  So that was my mindset when they took me into the OR.  I was angry, panicky, scared, and depressed for not being able to do what I'm supposed to be designed to do.

The c section was hands down the worst experience of my life.  I don't have many instances with which to compare it, but holy carp.  They wheeled me in, introduced me to the surgical team, and had me half lift myself onto the operating table (extremely difficult now that I'd been using just my arms to roll myself carefully over all day long).  Then they tied my legs down so I wouldn't fall off, since the table was barely as wide as I was.  The room was cold and way too bright.  They gave me pain meds to further numb me through the epidural line, and it made me shiver uncontrollably and unable to keep my eyes open.  They put up a tarp to separate me from the surgery, a whole hand length in front of my face (good thing I'm not claustrophobic!).  They made me lie with my arms splayed to the sides like an airplane, and even called "airplane right/left" a couple of times to indicate the need to tilt the table.  Then they fetched the Jeremelon, who spent the first half of the surgery sitting to the left of my head holding my hand.  He was terrified for me; I could hear it in his voice.  I wasn't moving (they told me not to move, after all, which was incredibly difficult while shivering uncontrollably), had my eyes closed, and wasn't making any noise, so he was understandably concerned.  I didn't feel anything until they got to the point where they have to spread...stuff...apart.  I could feel something like a car jack being squashed into place, and then the pain started.  You're not supposed to feel pain, just pressure and some "strange" sensations.  It hurt.  Kind of like having someone lean all their weight on a giant bruise I didn't know I had, and then grinding around a little.  Then came the tugging.  I have no idea what they were doing, nor do I have any desire to now.  I just know it felt like they were yanking my organs and muscle tissue around with all their might.  About halfway through, I thought, "Where is my baby?  Surely with all that shoving around, they have to have gotten to him by NOW!"  But no.  What seemed an eternity later, the anesthesiologist (who was sitting behind my head on my right side) commented on how beautiful my baby was.  I was scared I couldn't hear crying; how could there be a baby and no crying?  Especially when it seemed long minutes were ticking on.  Then, finally, a baby yell!

I managed to open my eyes long enough to see him, all pale and gooey, spread-eagled and screaming, as they showed him to Jeremelon and passed him into the incubator.  Was all of about four seconds.  I tried to focus on his crying to ignore the rest of the surgery, but it didn't work.  More tugging, more bruise-pressing.  Jeremelon had a crisis of decision when they told him to go with the baby because he obviously wanted to stay with me, but he went.  I managed to nod in agreement that he should.  They said it should just feel a little odd.  Then, after a lot of whimpering on my part, they said there would only be two more like that.  After six more, the anesthesiologist told me she was giving me something to make me sleepy, and blissfully, it did.  I wasn't fully unconscious, but I drifted.  I didn't feel anything until they lifted me bodily off the operating table and onto a gurney.  Then they wheeled me to the OR recovery room and promised me my husband and my baby, but they weren't immediately there.  The nurse in recovery was AWFUL.  She sat at the desk with her back to me the entire hour I was in there except for about two minutes it took to check my vitals.  One of her coworkers came in later and they gossiped about how many babies they had delivered. (I think there were seven, including mine, in five hours.  Oh, I forgot to mention that in the last post.  While lying there in the delivery room wishing with all my might to progress so I could have my baby safe and snug, the nurses came in twice apologizing for how long they'd been gone, but the other woman they were assigned to had delivered.  I'd been there a lot longer than either of them had, and it was tremendously frustrating and disheartening to hear.)  I was not happy with her, but then Jeremy brought me my baby.  I finally got to hold him, though I was way too groggy from the meds to process anything.

After my hour in recovery, they wheeled me over to my own private postpartum room where I was expecting my family waiting to say hello.  Except it was a whole lot later than I realized, and even though my WHOLE family was amazingly there at once, only my mom remained.  That made me cry later, because I was really looking forward to seeing everyone and getting to share in the moment.  At least my mom had stayed, even though she left after about five minutes.  I needed something to focus on so I wasn't sobbing all over myself, so I took advantage of the wireless access.  I really wanted to announce the baby's arrival to make it more real, as I had absolutely no connection to the experience at all.  Which meant we had to decide on a name since we hadn't yet.  My Oliberrykin was born 7/29 at 9:43pm after I was in the hospital since 1pm the day before.  He weighed 5lbs and 15oz, though he lost five oz at the hospital and one more after bringing him home.  He measured 19.5 inches long at the hospital and, thanks to his wigglypants-ness, something like 18.3 at his two-week check-up.

Oliberrykin was perfect, except for a drop in blood sugar that may have indicated I'd developed gestational diabetes since my 20-week check.  He's still a skinny baby with long limbs, and everything but length measured in the 25th-ish percentile, just like the ultrasound showed.  He came out with *bright* red lips and a very big conehead from all the pressure that wasn't moving him down.  The doctor said I have a flat pelvis (apparently there are five types, and flat isn't wrong, just different), and that it didn't necessarily cause the problem.  It could simply have been that Oliberrykin and I didn't work well together.  I'm blaming it on a combination of a possible problem with my hips (did I mention that here early on?  It supposedly can cause the baby's head to wedge into the pelvis because the hip joint is out of whack) and my body being nowhere near ready to have him.  He was only at 38 weeks, 3 days, and that's by arbitrary date.  Knowing exactly when he was conceived, he was actually 37 weeks, 6 days, which for him I think makes a difference.

I was so upset by the whole experience that I'm not sure I'll be up to having more kids, even though we had decided on two with an option for four.  We're still having some bonding issues because of my emotional disconnect with the process and our lack of togetherness thereafter.  I wasn't encouraged to breastfeed until well into the next day and didn't have ANY skin-to-skin time for almost two days.  Then, because I got sick, I stopped trying to nurse him, couldn't hold him without damage to my iv, and didn't have the oomph for it even if I tried.  So we basically had no real bonding time for a week.  I even have a problem saying he was "born" because I don't feel like he was.  Instead, he was removed from me at 9:43, entered the world, made his appearance.  But not "born."  I HATE feeling that way.  But that's another post!

I have a beautiful Oliberrykin.  I can't wait until he starts really smiling and making noises on purpose.

Berrykin's Birth, Part 1

I'm going to try to get this all down.  It'll take several instances, I'm sure, so bear with me. :)

I think I left the story the day before the ball started rolling, with me on bed rest and having to do a urine catch.  (Just have to mention, keeping a jug of urine in one's fridge is...icky.)  My cousin, having been out of the hospital for a leg infection for very few days at that point, awesomely brought me cheese wantons from our favorite Chinese restaurant all the way out in my childhood neighborhood.  It perked me right up. Really, I wasn't feeling too upset at all because no matter what happened, I would have a baby within ten days.  Yay!

We got over to labor and delivery a little after 1pm the next day, and even though I'd been scheduled and everything, nobody knew what I was doing there.  It was not an auspicious way to begin, but again, still giddy at the thought of meeting my Berrykin soon.  We plopped down in triage to let the machine monitor my blood pressure while we awaited the results of the urine catch (which, incidentally, took FOREVER because my nurse took a long time to come back and didn't even take the jug for something close to 45 minutes).  We again watched NCIS while I grew more and more sad that various women kept coming in with actual labor and getting carted off to their own delivery rooms.  Sigh.

Finally, the doctor (or was it the nurse?  Too many medical professionals in my brain...) came back and told me that my numbers were high so I did, in fact, have mild pre-eclampsia.  That meant we were having a baby!  It took a minute or two to soak in for me, and then Jeremelon wouldn't accept it.  I had to tell him three or four times, "We're having a baby today," before he actually heard what I was saying.  The nurses wheeled me into MY own delivery room where they proceeded to hook me up to another auto-bp machine (I loathe those so much now!) and put in an iv line for future use.  I was given a quick cervix check where they discovered I was half a fingertip dilated in front, and they couldn't even feel the back of the cervix.  Yay.  So they would assist with a pill stuck *behind* my cervix that remained there for 12 hours, after which time they'd start the pitocin to bring on contractions.  The pill went in (OH MY GOSH.  Apparently I have an inordinately long birth canal.  The nurse who put it in couldn't get it where it needed to go, and had to settle for "next to."  And it HURT.  In fact, anything to do with my cervix hurt about ten times worse than any other part of labor.  This didn't help them, of course, because it made me tense 100%.  **OWW.**) and a little while later I started having mild contractions.  They told me to sleep and not worry about anything.  Ever tried sleeping with a blood pressure cuff cutting off arm circulation every 15 minutes to half an hour?  Yeah.  Not easy.  I managed a few hours, which I counted as stellar (I rarely sleep much in unfamiliar places, and when compared to the no sleep at all I was expecting, it was a lot) and Jeremelon counted as next to nothing.

Somewhere around 5am the next morning, I was at about 1 cm dilated and 85 - 90% effaced (I can't remember the specifics anymore, but it was "mostly").  They covered my iv and let me take a quick shower, which I now wish I'd taken the time to enjoy a little more.  Then they started me on pitocin, iv fluids, and strapped cuffs around my legs to keep circulation moving (in addition to the fetal and contraction monitors I already had).  This made going to the bathroom for the next several hours a HUGE pain.  But I didn't care.  I was going to have a baby soon!  Contractions started getting bigger.  Jeremelon and I watched television while I tried to sleep more and we waited for my body to take its cue.

And that's where things get both hairy and hazy.  Everything sort of jumbles together.  Berrykin didn't take well to the pitocin.  Every time I had a contraction, baby's heart rate dropped.  Because of the sequence of the two, it meant the baby was being stressed out in an abnormal way, like not getting enough oxygen.  I probably stressed my body out more by watching the monitor, waiting for those little dips.  The contractions themselves weren't that bad.  They didn't get even moderately intense until they passed the middle marker on the ticker tape, and I could still handle them without too much effort.  However, because of Berrykin's readings, the nurses kept dropping/turning off the pitocin, meaning the contractions didn't get a chance to do everything they needed to do.  Time passed, people visited.  Some of the nurses weren't all that concerned with my physical privacy, which didn't exactly make me happy.  Don't know who saw what, and I'm happy in my ignorance.

Anyway, we had a massive scare at one point when the baby's heart rate dropped from 150s to 80 for a good few minutes.  The nurse rushed in, the doctor was paged a 911, and pitocin was dead stopped.  Apparently babies can only survive for about 5 minutes with impaired oxygen without suffering major brain damage, so the doctor came at a run.  Thankfully by the time she got there, Berrykin's heart rate had come back up again.  It scared the beejeebers out of me, and I don't think anyone else in the room had any clue what I was babbling about when I watched the count drop off.  My poor baby. :(

Eventually, as the contractions neared the top of the chart, the nurses asked me if I wanted an epidural.  I told them to go ahead, since it was supposed to be good for blood pressure, and that was, after all, why we were having the baby early.  So they put a catheter in.  I loved the catheter!  Getting up to visit the facilities had become a monumental chore, not because of the contractions but because of all the gadgets and doohickies I had to unhook and cart along with me.  Add to that the massive amounts of fluids they were pumping me full of, and I was dealing with a huge move every 45 minutes or so.  With the catheter, I could rest.  Whew!  The epidural itself wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  A lot of pressure, a weird sensation, and a lot of painless thumps.  Weird.  It took everything away.  They said the dosage would keep me feeling the pressure of the contractions without the pain, but they were wrong.  My body said, "Whoa, dude.  Drugs!"  And promptly fell asleep.  The only couple of contractions I felt at all after that point were the two that went off the chart, and they weren't even moderate menstrual cramps in size.  I could still feel my feet and move them, but my legs were gone.  And I itched.  A lot.  Which is normal, I guess, but it drove me nuts.

Somewhere around this point I started getting incredibly thirsty.  After they started the pitocin I couldn't have more than ice chips and popsicles.  They started the pitocin somewhere around 6am.  The epidural went in about ten hours later.  I wanted nothing so much as a nice glass of water!

For the life of me, I can't remember if the epidural came first, or the extra monitors.  Nope, it was the monitors, because I could still walk for a while and worried about yanking all the wires out when I went to the bathroom.  So!  Prior to the epidural and after baby's heart rate scare, the doctor wanted to get a better idea of what was happening between baby and contractions, so she ordered internal monitoring.  For that, they had to break my water.  This upset me a little, because I know enough about birth to know that there's limited time between losing the amniotic fluid and actually giving birth.  There are bonuses a wet birth gives as well as complications to a dry birth.  It was relatively early on in the amount of time they initially quoted, so I was concerned.  Not as concerned as I was about Berrykin's state, though, so I didn't say anything or object or ask for more time.  They broke the water, attached a sensor to the baby's head (took FOREVER because Berrykin kept squirming higher into the uterus - sort of counterproductive if you ask me) to get exact readings of heart beat and one to the uterus to accurately gauge contractions.

By the time the epidural kicked in, I had more than half a dozen medical interventions pumping into or drawing from my body.  I could do little more than lay there in one spot, and got to shift sides every two hours or so - most of which I had to do myself with only my pathetic arm strength post-epidural.  At about 7pm everything had evened out, they upped the pitocin again, and baby's heart rate dipped at the beginning of contractions to show they were attempting to push baby down.  Except when they checked me, baby had only moved an inch into my pelvis, meaning there were two more to go before the head was even with the pubic bone, let alone moving through it.  I was finally at 5 cm, basically fully effaced, and the contractions were huge.  The doctor gave me an hour to make more progress.  When that hour was up, I hadn't made ANY.  Baby hadn't moved, I hadn't dilated more.  We were stalled.  Both baby and I had been under a lot of stress to get there, and the doctor was worried about the baby.  We got the c section talk.  She'd prepped us earlier, just in case, but this was the biggie.  The "here we are, and we could wait another hour but we don't want to stress the baby out more" talk.  She was worried I wouldn't have the energy to push when the time finally came because I hadn't slept any more, hadn't eaten in about 24 hours, and was bumping up against that time when the water breaking bonus starts wearing off.  Contractions still weren't regulating themselves, though they were doing a smashing job at what they were designed to do.  And then my temp jumped up to 100.6, indicating the presence of an infection, (that major complication arising from breaking the water early).  This meant I needed to deliver ASAP.  Hurray.  So we decided to go ahead with the c section.  (I have to say, a huge part of my impetus to doing so was the desire for water.  I didn't know how I'd last another twelve hours or more without being able to drink something.  Most of it was concern for the baby, of course, but thirst is a powerful pusher.)

Cue first sobfest.

Comments

I have a LOT to type up, but it will take a very long time.  Until then, I wanted to see if people can post or not.  At the bottom of each entry, there should be a link that says "0 seeds."  This is the link to comment.  If this link does not actually show up when you're reading, please let me know on Facebook.  All of my settings are to comments on, so maybe I should have mentioned that "seeds" are what people leave behind in the Berry Patch for others to enjoy (aka, comments)?  Sorry about any confusion!