Lucille Marian
October 8, 2007
6:27 am
7 lbs, 19 inches

Not a great shot, I know. All babies look like this, red, squishy and swaddled. I could have stolen it off of Flickr, right? But it is not just any baby -- that is my baby. Baby Lulu.
So we all know the story. That I was due October 26th, but was circus freak big, so they were inducing me on the 15th. Well, she came on the 8th. I am about 90% sure that we had our due date right because I was tracking these things. I also drank loads of free wine that night and looked like this.
So, on Sunday night we were having a nice dinner with friends and family when I started contracting. "No big deal," I thought. I took breaks between steak, potato, grilled portobellos and chocolate mousse to manage them. Given that this little dinner party was at our house, I didn't feel right making a big deal out of what I thought were just really big Braxton-Hicks. (Have I been in Virgina too long? Is that a Southern thing? "Don't want to upset the guests by giving birth during dinner! Lordy what a perfect way to ruin a nice party!")
I started timing them. It's crazy! It's just like WebMD says! The minute that microwave clock turned, bam! Contraction! 7:00. 7:10. 7:20. 7:30. I called my doctor and they said to go in and so we did, but not before I had a nice piece of angle food cake. (Hey, labor makes you hungry. Little did I know that I would have to suffer alone for another 5 hours in Labor and Delivery because I had a) sent my husband home, "This will pass, you go home and sleep." and b) couldn't be scheduled for anything because of my full stomach.
By 5am I called Sand back who felt properly guilty for being at home while I was there gritting my teeth watching Donal Trump Foreclosure infomercials, and told him he better get back to the hospital. I'm still not sure which is more painful, the contractions or the 3am programming but the TV went to 100 and had to be clicked through ONE WAY before you could start over. I was getting a blister.
So in I went for a C-section. I considered VBAC, but only for about 5 minutes as there was no telling how much longer my labor would go on for before the rest of my body caught up. Everything was great and fine, but I will say my epidural sucked. I was in a bad position, tense, and contracting. It was really, effing painful. I tell you all this because two days later, my head started to hurt. And then I couldn't move my neck. I had an "epidural headache" which meant that there was a slow leak in the fluid surrounding my spinal column and it was affecting my brain. Read about it here. Go on. I'll wait.
Epidural headache
So, the cure for this unpleasantness? (And by unpleasantness I mean, "ohmyfuckinggod remove my head right now and just throw it away.") ANOTHER epidural. Basically, they take blood from your arm and shoot it into the same hole in your back to block the leak. This is called a "blood patch." The first one didn't take, ("Yes! The head and neck ache came back!) so I had to have ANOTHER. I was in the hospital for five days. It has been a week and the pain in my back is still so great that I am useless with out consistent doses of major narcotics.
I hear squeaking, so I'll need to finish this later. The good news is that I have a beautiful little girl. And some sweet, sweet drugs.