Moving on...
So this is the second installment, and it's not the middle of the night so maybe it'll make more sense. I left off at the Uh-Oh that changed my world. Remember, my first child had been a breeze, slept through the night early on, good eater, easy baby. My second child, not so much. We took him home at 3 days old, with very little idea how to feed him, but he couldn't get enough suction to latch on to breastfeed so that was a no go. They gave us these horrible nipple like things that had a tube at the end designed to feed extremely premature infants that can't handle the suck/swallow/breathe issue. They call them a "ross nipple". I have no idea how they work for preemie babies...but MY baby? HELL NO.
He refused to eat. By the time he was 5 days old he had gone from being his birth weight of 6 pounds 7 ounces to 5 pounds 10 ounces. He was starving. Thankfully we had his first of many visits to Children's Hospital. I remember the case nurse well. Her name was Noreen. She took one look at him, said "well, he's hungry!" and walked over to a cabinet, pulled out a regular preemie nipple which is just softer rubber, and cut an x in the end. She twisted it onto a pre-made bottle of formula and handed it to me. He ate the whole thing in 10 minutes, the most he'd eaten in his whole little life.
Then came the next stage in my motherhood evolution. Now that he was eating regularly, he was also spitting up regularly. Another thing I'd had very little experience with, as my oldest was breastfed and rarely spit up. He would lose almost as much as he ate and it became this horrible cycle. Eat, spit up, cry, eat again and so on. He was eating so fast that he was getting too much air and as it turned out, the kid was lactose intolerant as well.
Soy formula smells horrible and didn't help him much really, but he soon got to be old enough for regular milk with some lactaid drops in it. He was a scrawny little thing when he was very little, but he's since outgrown that. After the difficult first few years with him, I decided I was done. No more kids for me, two was enough. When he was 3 years old, I started bleeding heavily, my monthly cycles going crazy. I was working 50 hours or more a week, and my body was revolting. My fertility was in jeopardy and I ended up having an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit and a fibroid that although was small, would need to be removed.
In November of 1999 I had a Thermachoice endometrial ablation and a hysteroscopy to remove the fibroid and cyst. It should have been the complete end of my fertility. Period. I should never have gotten pregnant again according to the Doctor and the research I did. Fast forward a few years and I moved back across country from Ohio to California. We were having hard times, financially, emotionally, everything was just out of whack. We were living in a tiny little apartment with not even enough room to breathe. It was not fun. I had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and had been in near constant pain for almost a year.
They'd also found some bone spurs on a vertebrae in my neck and I'd been getting steroid shots. I had no idea I needed to worry about preventing a pregnancy too. In September of 2002 my extremely regular period did not come. I got a test, I peed on it and there were 2 lines. I was in shock. Complete and utter shock. I have no other way to describe it. At 6 weeks I had some spotting. I went to the emergency room and had an ultrasound done. The found the baby with a heartbeat. I had follow up blood work the next day and everything seemed ok. I went about my life expecting to welcome a new baby into my family. I had very little morning sickness after that spotting and I thought I was just lucky. My breasts weren't very tender, and I thought that my lack of symptoms was a godsend because I was dealing with my older kids.
At 11 weeks, I started bleeding. Not spotting, bleeding. I went back to the emergency room and when they did the scan I knew something was wrong. The tech didn't talk. No friendly banter, no chit chat, just all business. When the Doctor came in I knew something was terribly wrong. She told us that the embryo had passed away shortly after the last scan. I had what was called a "missed miscarriage". They gave me some meds to help the progression so I would pass the products of conception but it didn't happen. The bleeding stopped as quick as it started.
I ended up having a D&C done a week later and with a heavy heart I moved on and went back to my little family that I was no longer sure was complete. That was then, and this is now though and I'm going to have to break in the story again.
He refused to eat. By the time he was 5 days old he had gone from being his birth weight of 6 pounds 7 ounces to 5 pounds 10 ounces. He was starving. Thankfully we had his first of many visits to Children's Hospital. I remember the case nurse well. Her name was Noreen. She took one look at him, said "well, he's hungry!" and walked over to a cabinet, pulled out a regular preemie nipple which is just softer rubber, and cut an x in the end. She twisted it onto a pre-made bottle of formula and handed it to me. He ate the whole thing in 10 minutes, the most he'd eaten in his whole little life.
Then came the next stage in my motherhood evolution. Now that he was eating regularly, he was also spitting up regularly. Another thing I'd had very little experience with, as my oldest was breastfed and rarely spit up. He would lose almost as much as he ate and it became this horrible cycle. Eat, spit up, cry, eat again and so on. He was eating so fast that he was getting too much air and as it turned out, the kid was lactose intolerant as well.
Soy formula smells horrible and didn't help him much really, but he soon got to be old enough for regular milk with some lactaid drops in it. He was a scrawny little thing when he was very little, but he's since outgrown that. After the difficult first few years with him, I decided I was done. No more kids for me, two was enough. When he was 3 years old, I started bleeding heavily, my monthly cycles going crazy. I was working 50 hours or more a week, and my body was revolting. My fertility was in jeopardy and I ended up having an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit and a fibroid that although was small, would need to be removed.
In November of 1999 I had a Thermachoice endometrial ablation and a hysteroscopy to remove the fibroid and cyst. It should have been the complete end of my fertility. Period. I should never have gotten pregnant again according to the Doctor and the research I did. Fast forward a few years and I moved back across country from Ohio to California. We were having hard times, financially, emotionally, everything was just out of whack. We were living in a tiny little apartment with not even enough room to breathe. It was not fun. I had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and had been in near constant pain for almost a year.
They'd also found some bone spurs on a vertebrae in my neck and I'd been getting steroid shots. I had no idea I needed to worry about preventing a pregnancy too. In September of 2002 my extremely regular period did not come. I got a test, I peed on it and there were 2 lines. I was in shock. Complete and utter shock. I have no other way to describe it. At 6 weeks I had some spotting. I went to the emergency room and had an ultrasound done. The found the baby with a heartbeat. I had follow up blood work the next day and everything seemed ok. I went about my life expecting to welcome a new baby into my family. I had very little morning sickness after that spotting and I thought I was just lucky. My breasts weren't very tender, and I thought that my lack of symptoms was a godsend because I was dealing with my older kids.
At 11 weeks, I started bleeding. Not spotting, bleeding. I went back to the emergency room and when they did the scan I knew something was wrong. The tech didn't talk. No friendly banter, no chit chat, just all business. When the Doctor came in I knew something was terribly wrong. She told us that the embryo had passed away shortly after the last scan. I had what was called a "missed miscarriage". They gave me some meds to help the progression so I would pass the products of conception but it didn't happen. The bleeding stopped as quick as it started.
I ended up having a D&C done a week later and with a heavy heart I moved on and went back to my little family that I was no longer sure was complete. That was then, and this is now though and I'm going to have to break in the story again.
Happy Boxing Day ;)
J
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