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2004-09-04 - 6.40pm��previous entry��next entry
31 weeks, 2 days - loads of stuff, and big drama!
Argh, sorry I haven�t updated till now. I have so much to write because we had another antenatal class, I hit the 31week mark, and there�s a big load of other stuff too that I need to write about, but I haven�t been able to update till today.
I was going to write more after the breastfeeding thingy from my last entry, because of getting another mean message (though I did appreciate the apology), but I just wanted to say thank you sooooooo much to everyone who has since signed my guestbook and sent me emails that were so so supportive and encouraging! I was quite overwhelmed to read them all when I saw them, and now I don�t feel I need to re-hash that stuff again because basically you girls have said it all for me :) And you�re people with bags more experience and objectiveness than me so that�s even better as a response! Thank you all so much. I can�t help it if I don�t have the experience yet to go with my feelings and ideas about breastfeeding, so I�m grateful for those of you who DO supporting me.
The second mean guestbook message upset me soooo much, and I didn�t respond right away (and then couldn�t � more on that in a bit) because I didn�t know what to do about it. I know I�m being pregnant and hormonal getting this upset over a guestbook message, and believe me I tried to tell myself that for a good hour or so after reading it, but it made me feel exactly like I used to when someone bullied me at school, and that feeling sucks. So I spent the whole evening crying and feeling miserable and hurt, not to mention stupid for letting it get to me so much and being so over-the-top about it! But I just couldn�t seem to help myself. I felt like a small child, really I did. Neil gave me lots of cuddles and he read my diary entries and the guestbook messages several times over, and then we talked about it for the rest of the evening because I couldn�t relax about it. I kept asking him if he thought I had come across judgemental (because I am NOT), or if I had been unclear, or if I had even said something wrong. He is really fair and objective, and for a while he was umming and erring saying that maybe he could see the other person�s point because I express my opinion strongly sometimes. But that doesn�t mean I�m being judgemental, and he didn�t think I had actually said anything wrong at all. He said what I thought, which is that someone had basically completely got the wrong end of the stick, misinterpreted what I had said, and been overly mean in attacking me over it. He said it was probably because the person in question felt threatened or had had personal issues that were still raw, about breastfeeding, so maybe my strong thoughts had touched a raw nerve there somewhere. But that�s not my fault either and I didn�t say anything wrong, nor should I need to feel bad or apolgise. So I felt better about it. I didn�t know what to say next in my diary though, so I didn�t update. I was so so relieved to read my guestbook messages the next day though (and more today!) because it seems that it was just that one person who thinks I wasn�t clear and had said something wrong or been judgemental. Phew. I was beginning to worry that I had been wrong! After we talked about it till I felt better, Neil made us a nice meal (he�s so sweet!) and we watched an episode of Fawlty Towers because that is one of the best things to unwind me if I�m unhappy and make me laugh :) So that was good.
The next day was Thursday. Man have Thursday and Friday been rough! I will tell you all about it now that I am able. Thursday was quite nice actually because we had our antenatal class in the evening. There are 14 couples, not 18 like I had thought before. It�s still such a big class! People still remembered me and Neil from last session as �the ones who are having a homebirth�, hehe! I like that. One of the pregnant ladies there is a midwife, she told us this session. I knew there was something different about her when I was chatting to her last time! She sought me out to talk about homebirths and to ask how my midwives were about it, whether it was easy to arrange and how the care would be in terms of attending midwives at the birth, etc. So yeah, I thought, �Hmmm�� and now I know why! :) She�s really nice, she must be a lovely midwife to have.
The class went well. My noggin was seriously bothering me because it was so big by then (it grows noticeably every 12 hours, seriously) that my nose was creating a noisy vacuum every time I needed to swallow (yuck) and also it�s just so distracting and uncomfy to have something that big stuck in your nose. Yuck yuck yuck. I was fed up that it was distracting me from the class but I still enjoyed the evening. Two hours does feel too long though. I am ready to go home after an hour and a half, and I am uncomfy sitting there after that. We watched a birth, where the lady was giving birth on all fours and it was designed for that first experience of seeing a birth, for all those squeamish dads out there! Hehe! Many of them chose to stand near the door so they could leave at any time they did not want to see it anymore. It was only four minutes long and the lady was soooo quiet in her labour, and you didn�t see a THING of the birth at all, because the camera was at the woman�s head-end and you only saw the baby as it was passed up to her. I got so emotional watching it. I always feel overwhelmed and weepy watching a birth, but in a lovely way :) It�s just so amazing.
We talked about pain relief options but we�re covering that in much more detail on Tuesday. We also talked about the stages of labour in detail and what causes the pain, and also covered things to watch out for in late pregnancy that might be a signal that something is wrong. That was requested as a discussion topic last session, so we covered it this time.
Then we got home at around 10pm, ate a late dinner, and then I pottered around and Neil went to bed. I didn�t go to bed till about 12.30am, and I was just brushing my teeth before bed when my nose started bleeding. I just bent down to rinse my mouth over the sink, and I felt this flow start in my nose so I spat the water out and stood up again, and oh my word was my nose bleeding! I didn�t have chance to dry the water from my face so it was all mingling with that and running everywhere. I put my hand under my chin which filled with blood pretty quick and called Neil to wake up and help me as I couldn�t think what to do and I felt panicky all of a sudden. He got up and fetched me tissues and I was shaking and hyperventilating by then � urgh, I annoy myself so much with the panicky states I get myself into! It just happened before I knew it, and I tried really hard to calm down but my nose was just bleeding so much even with me pinching it properly. We decided we�d time it 10 minutes and if it was still going then we�d go to A&E (that�s Accident and Emergency (or ER) to the US readers!) like my doctor had suggested. Of course it was still spouting away after 10 minutes, so Neil helped me dress around my arm that was pinching my nose, and we grabbed a box of tissues and my maternity notes (always take your maternity notes with you!) and we went to the hospital. It was weird getting in the car to go somewhere because it was the middle of the night and I was scared out of my wits. I didn�t know what they would do to my nose or how it would stop bleeding with the huge noggin blocking the path to having normal treatments for a nosebleed. I should mention that the noggin was so big by then that it had almost grown down to the opening of my nostril. This thing is a monster. I hate it.
Well we got to the hospital and as soon as I said I was 31 weeks pregnant they saw me straight away (wow!) and put a very attractive wedge of bandages under my nose (tied over my head to keep it there) to soak up the blood, and they took my blood pressure and pulse (BP was 135/80, which is much higher than my norm, but you can kind of appreciate why! And pulse was 119! Yeah I was scared). They sent me out to wait at a cubicle in the major accident section (yikes!) and I sat on a bed for like 40 minutes and Neil sat on a plastic chair next to me, until a doctor came and took a look at my nose. I was scared to tilt my head back incase I swallowed blood, but she was so nice and understanding and didn�t make me tilt it too much. I explained about the polyp in there, but it was all so bloodied that she couldn�t see much. She got a surgical glove filled with crushed ice and I held it on my nose for another 10 minutes to see if that would stem the bleeding. When it didn�t, she got another doctor to look up my nose. I explained about the polyp again and he saw it and agreed that it did indeed look pretty big and seemed to fill my nose. He said they would try using a nasal tampon to stop the bleeding and if that didn�t work then they would try packing it, but that packing would potentially risk damage to the polyp. Great.
I kept saying, �But how will a nasal tampon fit in my nose if there�s a polyp filling the nostril?� and �Won�t it damage the polyp to shove something in there?!� and other nervous questions. It just did not seem like a good idea to me, but the doctors were insistent that was the right thing to do. They had no ENT on call at that hospital at night, so they thought for a while about transferring me by ambulance to a massive hospital further into London because there was an on-call ENT specialist there at night. But in the end they decided on the nasal tampon first. So the doctor shoved it up there, and ow ow ow did it hurt! Finally she could shove it no further so I then got left for an hour to wait for it to swell up and stop the bleeding properly. I was so tired by this point. I couldn�t lean back because of the blood going down my throat, so I�d been leaning forwards for like 3 hours and my back was KILLING me � my whole ribcage felt like it was on fire. I just leaned on my arms and somehow the time went by. Neil was wonderful the whole time, even though he was up missing sleep too. He was wonderful. I don�t know what I would have done without him there.
Anyway they came back after an hour and took it out, and a) the bleeding appeared to have stopped, and b) I could breathe through that nostril, so I immediately got to wondering what on earth had happened to the polyp! They sent me home after there was no bleeding for another 10 minutes, and that was at about 4am, but wouldn�t you know it � the darn thing started bleeding again before we even got to our front door! It was a very slow flow though, and not heavy, so I figured it would dry up by itself soon enough. I looked in my nose with a torch and could see that the stupid nasal tampon had basically wrenched my noggin out of place and shoved it back further up my nose. Nice one, A&E docs. So of course it was severely tiddled off and bleeding from the fact that it had been wrenched from where it was growing. Tsk. Anyway I couldn�t go to bed with a bleeding nose, so I sat up and just dabbed any blood away as it appeared, and kept leaning forwards (ow my back), and Neil went to bed. I didn�t get any sleep at all because it bled ALL NIGHT long, it never stopped once. If it had been really flowing or heavy bleeding then I obviously would have gone back to the hospital, but I figured it was slow enough and morning would soon arrive, and then we�d phone the ENT dept at the hospital and try and see someone first thing since it was more of an emergency.
Neil phoned them at 9am and then � he is so lovely to me � he washed me and got me dressed. I was still bleeding and I just can�t explain how floppy and exhausted I felt. I couldn�t seem to do anything for myself. We went to the hospital around 9.30 but we had to wait 40 minutes or so before seeing someone. The weather has gone really hot and humid again which I hate, and it was making me feel very woozy to be so hot with everything else. The receptionist put the fan on and told me I should let her know if I felt faint or if I needed anything � she was really nice. All the other patients in the waiting room stared at me a lot. Then we got called in to see the most crappy ENT �specialist� ever, who first of all could not see anything in my nose, then said there was no way it could be a polyp because a) polyps don�t grow very fast (um, WRONG!) and b) they don�t bleed (uh, wrong again!), and declared it to be a slightly dilated vein. Yeah right. He said it looked red so it was a vein. I said it�s normally cream-coloured, and the redness was um (hello?!!) due to the blood all over it. So he went and fetched the consultant ENT person, who tweezed and poked my nose so much that it reeeeally hurt, despite the anaesthetic spray he�d put in first, and declared it to be a bleeding polyp, hahahaha!! When he removed the scary long metal poking device my nose absolutely poured with blood and I came over all woozy and lightheaded, so they made me LIE DOWN (with a bleeding nose?!!) and went to arrange immediate transfer to the bigger London hospital with the ENT specialists who might possibly be able to surgically remove it for me that very day! Neil brought the car to the door and I was wheeled past the goggling waiting room with a huge bloodied gauze pad on my nose, to get in the car. Man I was glad I had taken my glasses off so I couldn�t see everybody staring!
Sorry this is so long, but so much happened and I wanted to write it all. Okay then we drove to the big hospital which took about 30 minutes, and we waited over an hour in the extremely hot and humid (and crowded) non-air conditioned A&E waiting area with no fans or circulating air. That was just so much fun. I had not eaten at all because I didn�t know if I would have surgery later, and I felt really unwell. Eventually other patients started to stand up for me, bless them! An old guy came over and said I should be put somewhere cooler to wait because I was bleeding and pregnant! But they said they had nowhere cooler because all the places with fans were crowded out. Great. Then a lady came over and gave her advice on how to stop a nosebleed. It was too fiddly to start telling her (with everybody listening) that I had a big old stupid noggin in there and that it wasn�t a normal nosebleed, so I went to the toilet like she suggested and wetted a rough paper hand towel and pinched that over my nose. Obviously it didn�t stop the bleeding, but it gave us a little peace to just sit and cope with the heat. I really liked that people were so anxious to help me though, it was so nice.
Then a nurse called us through and took my details and said she would bleep the ENT specialist, and we had to go back and wait for a long time more. Then the ENT doctor arrived and called us through, and he was really nice. He didn�t seem to think much of the ENT dept at the other hospital! He said he would flush and clean my nose and take a look, so that was kind of horrible, but oh well. He used suction which seemed a marvelously modern technology compared with the other hospital, who had handed me a piece of gauze and asked me to give my nose a good hard blow to clear out the clots so they could look in there! The doctor could see my noggin and said it was a pyogenic granuloma, to which I nodded in agreement and he asked how I knew, so I told him I looked online, and he seemed impressed that I�d found it out online! He said they would not remove it surgically if they could help it since I was pregnant, so he said he would try to reduce its size by cauterizing it (ie burning it to smithereens). He swabbed it with anaesthetic stuff, and then gave it 10 minutes to �work� (inverted commas there for a reason!), and then came back and used sticks with chemical cauterizing agents on to burn the noggin up. Silver nitrate or something, I can�t remember. Anyway, to cut a long story short: Ow. And ow. And oh I forgot an important part� Ow. It was so painful that I couldn�t take it for long before he had to stop again, and my eyes just streamed from the pain and yeah it was awful. After 3 sticks he flushed my nose with stuff to neutralize the chemical in there, and sent us for a walk to let me recover while he tweezed a small object out of a little boy�s ear! When we came back he started again, but after a while he started saying WOW that is a big polyp and things like that! He said it was more impressive than he�d first thought, and because cauterizing it was proving so painful he thought perhaps I would need surgery to remove it, since it was so big. He went away to ask other members of the team and he also spoke to the obstetric team, and when he came back he said he would give me antibacterial cream to put in there incase the polyp was an underlying infection issue, and I have to go back to the big hospital on Wednesday to the ENT clinic to be reviewed. If it is still bothering me, or if it has grown again, or has been bleeding, then they will admit me on Thursday morning and remove it under general anaesthetic. He said it was possible to remove it under local anaesthetic, but any risks with that would be similar to a general apparently, and he told the team that I would not cope well with a local because I had found the cauterizing so traumatic and painful. He said I should give serious thought to an epidural when I give birth! I hope he�s wrong about that, because I really want to give birth naturally at home.
Anyway he said the obstetric team have okayed a general anaesthetic for a third trimester gestation, and there is a tiny risk that the surgery could bring on pre-term labour (yikes!) so I will be kept overnight afterwards for observation, and the obstetric team will be kept aware during my surgery. It shouldn�t last long though. I am dreading it. Dreading it. It scares me silly. And I hate staying in hospital. And this isn�t even a local one. And I have done months of clinical placements at this hospital and definitely decided I do not like it at all, and the wards don�t have a nice feel to them. I actually did a whole huge placement on labour ward and postnatal ward, so it would be too too weird to end up giving birth to Arthur there and having him stay in their neonatal unit while he�s tiny, and have to travel back and forth into London to see him before he�s allowed home. I just want this noggin to bugger off and to get back on with my pregnancy and expect my little baby as normal without any complications. Please?
I am hoping and praying that the cream somehow miraculously makes the noggin go away so I don�t even need surgery. If it remains and they decide it�s not bothersome enough to remove it, then that isn�t ideal either, because so long as it�s in my nose, there is a significant risk of a heavy nosebleed during labour, especially once I start pushing. Which obviously would be bad news! Please pray for me and Arthur and my stupid noggin. Well, not FOR the noggin (Dear Lord, please bless Alice�s noggin!) but rather that it will go away (Dear Lord, please make Alice�s noggin shrivel up and die die die!!). I would appreciate it so much :)
Okay so that is my big drama story. We came home and then I had 3 hours of serious pain in my nose as the anaesthetic stuff wore off and the cauterized bits shouted OW at the top of their voices. I ate some food because I hadn�t eaten all day, but I was so nervous because I had ingested sooo much blood, chemicals, general goo and antibacterial cream, and I was worried it would make me throw up in the end. Before we left the hospital the ENT guy did the first application of my cream. It�s the same as the stuff I was using before, only then I was following the instructions on the box and putting a match-head sized bit of cream on my finger tip and applying that to the noggin. Well this time the doctor filled a syringe with the cream, inserted it into my nostril and squeezed!!! He filled my whooole nose up so that it ran out back and front (nice!) and said that I should be trying to get that much cream in my nose when I apply it, so that the polyp is as covered with it as possible. So that was just yumsome during the evening as it cleared.
After the pain wore off I looked in the mirror and found that I have a really black nose and there are streams of brown staining all down over my lips and chin from my nose, which is staining from the silver nitrate and will take a couple of days to fade. I look just soooo radiant and lurvely right now :) Boy am I glad it�s not a belly pic week, hehe!
I had a much better night, which I�m so relieved about! I woke most hours on the hour, but I slept from about 10.30pm through to about 10am. I was up from 3 till 4 because I woke feeling sick and had a huge panic, but I was okay and didn�t throw up or anything. I guess I really needed that sleep since I didn�t sleep at all the night before, and the whole thing since the nosebleed started has really drained me. So I�m glad I slept well. Today I have had a nap for a couple of hours because I had only been up 2 hours when I started to feel so tired that the room was reeling and I felt weak and heavy, so I went back to bed and slept some more. I am trying to eat really well today as well, to make up a bit on yesterday�s eating. I am taking my vitamins too. Applying the cream hasn�t been so bad as I thought so that�s good. I have to apply it three times a day so there�s always cream in my nose. Yeurgh.
I am constantly feeling scared that it will start bleeding again, but I am being really careful with my nose, and not bending down or blowing my nose or making sudden moves even. It is sore and irritated today which I guess is normal after someone burning it with chemicals the day before! Poor nose.
And that is the end of the long-winded nose drama. I just have to wait till Wednesday to see what happens, and hope it doesn�t bleed.
So, I am now 31 weeks pregnant!!! Arthur is wonderful as always. He kicked me a lot all through the night I was up and all through the horridness of things yesterday, and I�m so grateful because that gave me one big thing I didn�t have to worry about. If he had been quiet on top of everything else I would have been really worried about if he was okay. But he was wiggly and kicky and adorable :) He had hiccups SIX times the day before yesterday!! Wow! Today he has had them twice so far. He is the sweetest boy. Ever. He took a nap this afternoon and must have been really zonked out because he didn�t move at all for 3 hours, and then all of a sudden I felt his fingers (more on that in a moment!) wiggle around my bikini line, and then there was a momentary pause and then he did a huge stretch so that his head bulged right out in front of my left hip and his feet stuck right out of my right side, bless him! Then he wiggled for England and promptly got the hiccups. It was so sweet that we could tell so obviously that he was waking up and stretching after a big sleep, we got so mushy and Neil kissed my tummy about 50 thousand times. We love Arthur soooo much.
I can feel his fingers!!! This is a new thing for me this week, or else I just haven�t been noticing it before. He is always in the same position at the moment � he lies oblique (diagonally with his head down) and his hands are down by my bikini line usually. I have started to feel them a lot more, especially now I know they are in that place. Of course he moves them around all over the place and I get punches all over the left lower side, but he often gives me flicking sensations which feel exactly like tiny fingers being flicked open against my body. Sometimes I can feel how many fingers are flicking me too. Often he�ll seem to open his hand and I�ll feel 3 little flicks one after the other, but so fast that they are almost flicking me at the same second. They are far too spidery and tiny to be anything else on his body other than fingers. It�s so cute to feel! He doesn�t just flick me with them either. I can sometimes feel little fiddly spidery objects wriggling against my body there, like when you wiggle your fingers as if you are exaggerating playing the piano or something. Sometimes they will do a quick wiggle like that and then stop again. I love feeling him this clearly. It makes me so impatient to have him in my arms though!
Arthur is now 16.18 inches (41cm) long from head to heel, and he weighs roughly 3lbs 5oz! He is getting so big! He�s still way too tiny to be here yet though, so I hope everything does go well next week and that he won�t be born early or anything.
Well I can�t remember if there were other things I wanted to say, but there probably were because I haven�t really talked much about pregnancy things. But this entry is so long now and my ribs ache, so I think I will stop. Oh but today I got his brand new bedding for his Moses basket in the post from Babies R Increasingly Less Useless, so now he has some lovely cream fitted sheets, cream flannelette flat sheets, a cream cotton cellular blanket and a cream fleece blanket to go with the Moses basket he has waiting for him! I can�t wait to start washing his bedding and clothes and nappies ready for him, because it�s nearly time (yay!), but I am trying to hold off a while longer because maybe it�s still a bit early for washing his things? I don�t want them to sit around gathering dust before he gets here, so I�ll wait a couple more weeks maybe.
Anyway that is all for today. Sorry it�s so long. And thank you again for the lovely messages! I�ll update again soon! :)
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