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2004-10-15 - 4.45pm��previous entry��next entry
37 weeks - FULL TERM!! And noggin surgery! :)
I�m still here! And Arthur is still snug in my tummy :) I had my surgery and I�m soooo glad it�s over and done with! And I�m 37 weeks pregnant today � FULL TERM at last!!!! So I have lots to write today! :)
Thank you so much to everyone who prayed for me about my surgery and who left well-wishes in my guestbook! I really appreciate everyone�s support! Megan, I can�t believe I am interesting enough for someone waaay over in another continent to be talking to their husband about my noggin (!!) as they go to sleep at night! Hehe! It�s so sweet that you guys have been thinking of me, I am really touched :)
Well. God is so cool. He answered allll of my prayers about the surgery!! I slept really badly the night before but I didn�t feel tired out at all. We got to the hospital for 7.30am with no problems. I was the second person called in to change into one of those fetching hospital gowns and have a hospital tag put on my arm, etc, and then I was called in again to talk to my surgeon about the operation. Then I was the FIRST person operated on!! :) Yay! I went in at about 9am. I was pretty nervous but I just laid there on the operating table and watched the nurses setting everything up. Some of them asked me about when the baby was due, etc, which was nice to chat about. The surgeon was Top Nose Guy who I saw in the clinic last week, and he had two student doctors watching the surgery (different ones to last time). Everyone always looks so impressed when he pulls my nostril up to show them my noggin, hehe! I am good at growing prize-winning noggins, it seems. You know, like marrows. Which I don�t think they are called in the States, but I can�t think what you US folks call marrows so nevermind. Zucchinis? Eggplants? Or are those the same things?! This isn�t relevant is it?!
Anyway, yeah so everyone was impressed. I even felt proud! :) Hehe! It�s like one of those freak shows where you reveal the freaky thing and everyone sort of gasps and goes, �Ooooohhh!� But thank goodness they took it out. I hated the stupid thing!
The injection of the local anaesthetic didn�t even hurt, but I started to get reeeally nervous when Top Nose Guy started wiping blood away just after the injection!! I was really scared about bleeding. I had to lie pretty much flat which made it scarier for me. My back was raised a bit so I didn�t go all pregnantly lightheaded, but my head was leaned back so Top Nose Guy could see up my nose properly. I shut my eyes once I saw he was gonna attack me with a scalpel! Scalpels scare me silly, especially when they are coming at my face and they�re all sharp and urrgh. Scary. It didn�t hurt a bit though, and he removed most of the noggin straightaway. I was frantic about how much bleeding there might be, and I kept asking him if I was bleeding much. He used suction to sort most of it out but I could taste it so yeah I was scared. I tried to keep nice and calm as much as possible for Arthur, but I just couldn�t squash much of my anxiety, and poor Arthur really started acting crazy in there. In fact I would say that was probably the most uncomfortable and worrying part of the surgery, the way Arthur was acting. I have never felt him move like that, well, maybe it was similar that time I shook his rattle next to my belly and he went crazy for an hour!! But this was worse because he is so much bigger and stronger. He has run right out of room in there now, and all his movements are squirmy. He is pushed right up against my skin, all over his body, and when he even shifts his shoulders slightly my belly rolls. So he doesn�t have room any more for huge movements or kicks. But during the surgery after I got really anxious, he was going crazy. I had to reach down under all those green sheets and hold my belly, because it hurt and ached so much being shoved about like that. It sounds crazy but at the time I was beginning to be scared he might hurt me or even tear my belly open or something!! I know that�s ridiculous but honestly, he was pushing and twisting and writhing and kicking and punching that hard. He kicked harder than I knew he could, and I had no idea that was even possible because he really doesn�t have the room to kick! But he hurt my belly to do so. I got worried incase he was feeling distressed � I hate the though that he was distressed. I hope it was just a reaction to my adrenaline, causing him to just feel like he had a huuuuge burst of energy to work off or something. Actually the local anaesthetic had adrenaline in it too, so it would have been a double whammy, since it would have got into my blood stream a little.
Anyway, my poor boy. He was a little better after the surgery was over with, but he was unusually active all of yesterday. I expected him to calm down a lot by the afternoon or evening, but he was absolutely thrashing about in there all day. He even kept me awake for a couple of hours last night in bed. But he seems calmer today. He kept up some very very active movements almost constantly for over 3 hours yesterday afternoon. I didn�t know babies were meant to have that much sustained activity in the womb at this stage? I keep reading how they are sleeping 18 hours out of 24 and their active patches aren�t hours long, etc. But he was kind of acting unusual yesterday. I got worried incase he wasn�t okay, but Neil said he was sure to be fine, and it was probably just the ordeal of the surgery. When we got home I spent 20 minutes rubbing my belly all slowly and calmly, and talking to him in the most soothing tone I could make, telling him he is a good boy and everything is okay, and he could relax now, etc. I hated to think of him feeling anxious or stressed in any way. I hope he didn�t. He did wake me up this morning with some very heavy-duty stretches and thumps in there! But then he got hiccups and for the first time, those seemed to calm him down. By the time he�d stopped hiccupping he was all peaceful again.
He breathes such a lot these days. I keep saying that, but he really does. Sometimes he breathes exactly in a rhythm that he might use when he�s actually breathing air. He is very rhythmic with his breathing now, but he does try out a lot of different rhythms. Sometimes he breathes like he is panting very fast, just for a moment. This morning when he got hiccups he was trying to breathe in between them. His hiccups are so violent and enormous these days! Poor little love! This morning he tried all sorts of different rhythms between hiccups, almost as though he was trying to figure out a breathing pattern that might stop the hiccups happening. His little back would go: HIC!!� up-down� up-down� up-down� HIC!!... updownupdownupdownupdown� HIC!!... up� down� up� down� HIC!! etc. Poor boy! I think he is going to be one seriously hiccupy baby when he�s here!
Yes, but back to the surgery! So Arthur went crazy and that was a worry, but they joked that there was an obstetrician in the next theatre so not to worry! The local wore off kind of quickly, and then he finished the surgery off by using that big-mama cautery device thingy � the type that really burns rather then using just chemicals! Anyway yeah he used that on my noggin-stalk and yow, I yelled, and he gave me another injection of the local anaesthetic, which REALLY hurt (odd since the original one didn�t), and leaked a ton of anaesthetic fluid down my throat. This turned my whole throat numb almost instantly, and then I really panicked because I couldn�t swallow at all � and you know when you�re nervous you seem to need to swallow like every other second? Well I couldn�t swallow, even if I tried to force my muscles as hard as I could, and so I got super scared that I would start gagging, etc. Urgh. But I didn�t gag. Arthur went even more berserk and I got more worried about him. And Top Nose Guy cauterised my nose 3 more times � the first time was okay, and the other two hurt so bad that I nearly leapt right off the table, and since I was ow-ing loud enough and the eye on that side was streaming, he kindly decided not to do any more! He said he got it all out, and they are sending it to the path lab just to be sure it�s not anything worrisome. But he said he sure it�s a pyogenic granuloma, like he thought. Anyway then I got taken to the recovery area where my nose bled a little and I sat there pathetically with a piece of gauze under my nose. I felt all scared and insecure till about 10 minutes later when another girl (not pregnant) came through wearing a hospital gown and dabbing at her nose with a piece of gauze! She asked if I had had the same operation and it turned out that I had. She was worried about the fact that she swallowed some of the anaesthetic and she couldn�t swallow, and that was the moment when I started to feel better because I was reassuring her and telling her that happened to me too, and the feeling was coming back already so she shouldn�t worry about it. Reassuring someone else made me feel loads better, and after that I got changed into my clothes and had a cup of water and they discharged me :)
I am just sooooo relieved that the horrid noggin is gone, gone, GONE!!!! Yaaaaaay!! I could breathe through my nose immediately, although I was nervous to at first. It bled a little for a couple of hours, and it was pretty painful for the rest of yesterday but I took paracetamol and that helped. It�s a bit sore today but nothing I need painkillers for. Yesterday afternoon I went to bed and slept for 4 hours straight!!!! Neil said he was going to wake me earlier but I was breathing soooo deeply through my nose with my mouth closed and he couldn�t bear to wake me, since it has been so long since I could do that! :) It�s so nice to breathe clearly. I still have some stuff in there that will, um, come out (how nice!) but other than that it�s all done and dusted!! Now I can put it behind me and get on with having a baby!
Which by the way could be any time from today!!!! Today I am 37 weeks pregnant and all my online updates are saying, �Congratulations, you have reached full-term!!!� which is lovely to see! Arthur is finished developing and growing, and is now ready for outside life any time he chooses to come out! I hope I won�t have to wait 4 or 5 more weeks. Everyone who looks at my belly says they seriously doubt that I�ll even have 3 more weeks to wait, since he�s so low. But I don�t know� he�s been this low all along, so that doesn�t really apply to me surely? I think he is engaging quite nicely now though. I noticed last night and the night before when I lay down in bed and raised my knees sort of at 90 degrees to my torso, that I could really feel his head. It felt like a sort of �bulging� pressure, like it was lower than my bones when I raised my knees like that. The feeling makes me slightly scared and excited at the same time! He has felt quite low in my groin today as well. I don�t have that feeling that he�s about to fall out of me or anything, but there is a definite low bulge pressing me down there now. A heavy solid bulge at that! Also, any time I feel like I need to move my bowels, the pressure from his head can feel almost unbearable against my poor bowel! So I guess he is getting lower and lower. I will never really know if he�s actually �engaged� though. He�s been so low all along and his descent seems so gradual, that I think I would need the midwife to tell me he is engaged before I really know that he is. I think these bulgy pressure feelings are a good indication though, but he might not quite be engaged yet all the same. Anyway, he�s a low boy :)
Arthur�s 37 week stats indicate that on average, he would weigh 6lbs 4oz right now (wow!) and be 19.3 inches long. My guesstimate all along has been that his birth weight (around my due date) would be 7lbs 3oz (Neil thinks 7lbs 6oz), and his length 19.5 inches. So I guess if he�s following the average he�s almost there! I can�t wait for him to be here! I can�t wait to see what he looks like. Neil got our baby photos down from the loft, and we compared a photo of me at one day old, to a photo of Neil looking about a week or so old. We look so similar, but we have completely different noses, even as newborns. So that should make it easy to see if Arthur has my nose or Neil�s, when we see him for the first time. I heard that all newborns look alike, but Neil and I definitely looked different in the nose department! I keep trying to remember Arthur�s nose from the 22 week scan. We got a couple of good scan pictures, but the clearest images of his little nose were the moving images as the sonographer was trying to see his top lip, and he had his hands over his face, so we got to look at his face (or parts of it!) for quite a while till he moved his arms enough for the lip to be seen. I remember his little nose looked just soooo perfect, and like a little triangle from underneath. I can�t tell from that if he has Neil�s nose or mine though. The scan pictures we brought home make his nose look quite buttony, and mine was very buttony as a newborn, but Neil�s was much less so. So maybe it�s my nose? I don�t know. Neil would be thrilled if Arthur has my nose, as his own has quite an angled bony ridge and he hates it. Mine is still kind of buttony and straight, so he hopes Arthur has my little nose :)
Today I woke up early (thanks to my sweet little boy!) and got too hungry to stay in bed, and then when I was slicing the bread for my toast, I got that huge surge of squeally excitement again! That always seems to come with a ton of energy, so I acted on it and got lots done today. I made my last EVER shopping trip into town � well, I am determined I am not going back in there till long after Arthur is born now! It�s so crowded and busy and exhausting. I made a list of all the things we still need to buy, and I did a mega shop! I had to spend a lot of money on the credit card :( But I got a lot of essential things! I bought a bedguard at last! I bought 3 lots of camera batteries, lip balm, Christmas presents for my parents, part of my mum�s birthday present for January (!!), pillow protectors, printer ink (we ran out and I need some for printing the birth announcements) and more painkillers. And then I got fitted for nursing bras!!! Yay!! That was a biggie on my list. The lady who did my fitting was really good. The breast feeding counsellor recommended her so I went looking for her � although the bras there aren�t the cheapest. They are mostly Emma Jane bras which aren�t that cheap but the breast feeding counsellor said they are excellent bras. She also said absolutely do NOT under any circumstances buy Mothercare nursing bras! They are apparently not sufficient in the support dept, and also don�t have wide enough shoulder straps so can hurt the muscles there. Crappy Mothercare. Anyway but it does mean a good nursing bra will be much more expensive therefore. Oh the other ones she said were excellent are the NCT Mava bras. But this store just sold Emma Jane and Elle Macpherson ones. She fitted me for both. I nearly fell on the floor right there and then when she told me I would need an F cup for nursing!!!!! I mean, F?!?!!?!!! Remember I started out as a non-pregnant B!!!!! Yikes. But anyway, she brought me an F to try on and yeah it was really comfy and supportive and there was room for when my milk comes in. The Elle Macpherson one was comfy too (I only need an E in that one!), so I figured I should buy one of each. I just know I am not going to be organised enough to get by with just two nursing bras � I will never do laundry often enough to have clean bras every day! But they are so expensive. Those two bras cost me �50 � FIFTY QUID!!!! For two bras!!! But I really need good nursing bras. Hmmm. So I am keeping my eyes peeled for second hand versions of the same bras online now that I know my size in those particular bras. Otherwise I am stuck with two good nursing bras, and I know that is not going to be enough. But oh well. We�ll see.
I have wrapped the Christmas presents today too!! And then I phoned the hospital to order a TENS machine, and they are sending it out first class today!! Yay! So that�s sorted. It did cost money though, and I had to fill the very empty car with petrol, so all in all I have spent a lot today. Urgh. I still need to buy a tray, 100 stamps (!!), and more disposable knickers. I looked in Mothercare and Superdrug but they only had size medium, and I want laaarrrge for comfort!
Today I was going to work on the two bedrooms, getting the floors and surfaces clear for the cleaner to dust and vacuum on Sunday. I also wanted to finish sewing those half-made nappies and wraps. And I realised I need to make a cover for the changing mat. I purposely bought a cheap white plastic changing mat because I wanted to make a soft fabric cover (or two) to put on it. That way it would be comfier for Arthur and I could throw them in the wash when they got soiled. And putting your naked butt on tacky cold plastic can�t be any fun. So I need to pick some nice fabric and make a couple of changing mat covers. And um. There�s sooo much to do!!! Sometimes it panics me a little. But actually we are getting so much done now that the list is over 2/3 crossed off, so I should relax a little! I know I am nesting now though. This morning when I arrived back from shopping, completely exhausted and carrying a ton of shopping bags, what did I do? Did I thankfully fall through the front door as soon as I could raise the key to the lock and let myself in? Nope. I leaned over the flower bed, shopping bags and all, and pulled up a dozen enormous weeds that were just bugging me silly. It wasn�t something I could bear to pass by � I just HAD to pull those weeds!! Was it important? No. So I guess weird things are just bugging me and that makes me think maybe I am nesting a bit now!
But yeah I am too tired from shopping to do the bedrooms and the sewing now, so hopefully Neil and I can tackle those tomorrow (Saturday). I want to go to church on Sunday, despite the huge outbreaks of colds and flu there � my church always seems to be the most awfully germy place I can find every single winter!! Why is that?!! Maybe it�s because it�s made up about 90% of families with young children, and students? But yeah, it�s a really germy church come the autumn/winter! I hope I don�t catch anything, but I long to be there and see my church family and praise God and sing.
Ooooh oooh, the ladies at the church are going to throw me a BABY SHOWER!!!!! I am so excited!!! I only know because two different women had the idea and one of them asked me outright if I would like a baby shower, so I said um, yes, that would be lovely, thank you! And then she fixed a date with me (Friday 22nd Oct), and when Neil got home I said, �I�m getting a BABY SHOWER!!!� all excited, you know, and he said, �What!!� It turns out that another lady was already planning a surprise baby shower which would have been even nicer (I love nice surprises!), and Neil knew about it, so yeah, the secret came out. But he phoned both the ladies and told them to communicate about it, because he was really gutted that my surprise had been spoiled. So sweet :) So I guess it will be next Friday, but it�s all hush-hush now so I don�t think I�ll be finding out any more till it happens. I am so excited though! I love being the party girl! :)
Hmmm, I�m sure there was something else I was going to say�. But as ever, my back and ribs are hurting, which tells me it�s time I left the computer for now and had a rest or something, so I will finish for now. Ohhh yes, there was something else! The day of my midwife appointment I spent the whole morning writing out my birth plan, and then I went over it with Neil and when the midwife came, she read it through and said it was a lovely birth plan!!! Yay! I was so nervous that she would pick on several points and say I couldn�t have this or that. I don�t know why, I was just nervous about that. The only point she picked up on was that they don�t have an underwater sonicaid for monitoring Arthur�s heartbeat. So when I am in the birthing pool they will have me stand up occasionally to listen to his heartrate. Hopefully not too often though! Oooh I must order the birth pool!!! So much to do, so little time all of a sudden� I want to write a copy of my birth plan here in my diary for anyone to see, but it�s long winded (which I�m sure you�re all shocked at, hehe!) and my back aches so I will make a separate entry for that another time. But I�ll update again soon! :) Any time you�re ready little Arthur! Wheeee!!
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