The Passing Storm

I am a stubborn person. I know this. Maybe not the MOST stubborn, but that character trait is definitely one that is significant in my life.

I am pushy and bossy and really do believe that I am correct more often than I am incorrect.

All of these things have always been true.

And yet.

On Tuesday, I turn 27. Its been a lifetime since my last birthday. One year ago I was planning for the birth and preparing for life with my new (at this point totally healthy) baby. I was halfway through my birth/parenting class with Moses, and we were predicting everything from birth weight to personality.

Now, here I sit, 6:45 in the morning, lying on a hospital couch at Children’s listing to Mosee slowly wake up and playing with his rattles. I can’t acknowledge he’s awake yet, becuase like his father (and every man in the world) he takes his own sweet time deciding that anyone else can know he’s awake. How much longer will I be able to say I know everything there is to know about him?

He has a favorite blanket now. Of course he selected the single blanket from the bevy that we recieved that I have no idea where it came from. It has green satin around the edges…if it is from you, THANK YOU! he loves to rub it between his fingers and pull it over his head while he is falling asleep.

We are finished with major surgeries now. My humpty-dumpty boy is all put back together again. The shell-shocked joy that I feel is truly unexplainable. Everyone asks me if I am excited to not have the stoma anymore, but truthfully? Dealing with the physical challenges of Mosee’s disease no longer even make me blink. What is so joyous to me is not having any more surgeries looming over us like dark clouds pouring rain over the ocean: you can see them, you know that rain is wind swept and icy cold, and all you can do is wait for it to get to you in its own sweet time.

And now that rain has passed, and it feels like that sliver of gold that you can see on the horizon once the clouds come inland a bit; the storm is still around you, but you can see past it as well.

I don’t think I’m the same person I was when I had my last birthday. I know my life is different, but I suppose that goes without saying. What I mean is, I know I am still bossy and pushy and opinionated. But I have so many more important things to do and be in my life than those things that they all just seem a bit…silly, I guess.

My life is so blessed by Mosee, my entire, huge, Astoria-Portland-Jewell-San Francisco-Bellingham-Seattle-Federal Way-Spokane-Switzerland-New York family.

I woke up Tuesday morning with absolute faith that everyone is my life was going to be okay. It scares me a little bit having such certainty about something I have no control over and have no evidence for.

I just think that a community of people like those I have surrounding me cannot develop in any other way.

We are blessed in our lives by our struggles, successes, joys, and challenges, because how on earth can we ever hope to grow without experiencing all of these?

Thank you everyone. I don’t think I ever would have known how much I need and love all of you without the roller coaster of the last year.

I know its been months since I posted, maybe no one will read this. But I am still thankful and blessed and I know you are all there, wishing good things on me and Mosee like I am on you as well.

Happy Birthday, Me!

Things to Know about my son

So, due to a ridiculous string of computer/internet dramatics, blogging has been, in the last few months, not worth the technology issues involved. However, these have now been resolved, and along with them, I am resolved to be better about writing.

I am so thankful to everyone for there love, support, and concern for the baby. He is doing well, making progress every day, albeit slowly. For this post, however, I am determined to focus, not on his medical issues, but on the little man that makes up my son.

On that note, here are just a few of the ridculously amazing character traits that already make up my son’s personality.

He sleeps with one are flung across his eyes, and the other covering his ear. Not pulling, just cupped around it.

He doesn’t suck his thumbs or fists, but he LOVES to chew on his fists. Although, considering that he doesn’t have any teeth, I suppose gnawing is a more accurate term.

He wakes up smiling every day. He is his happiest first thing in the morning, and thinks that adults’ funny faces are the most hysterical things in the world.

He wrinkles his nose when something is really funny.

He has three dimples: one on each cheek, and one underneath the middle of his lower lip.

His eyes are getting  more brown every day, and where ever he looks, he looks like he has an opinion on what he is seeing.

He can almost roll over from his back to his stomach. Sometimes he gets stuck on his arm, which makes him mad, and makes me laugh.

He still has about ninety different names. He is Ramsey at my work, Moses to my mother and a few friends, Zeus when his father and I are talking about him (I dunno how it came about), Mosey-Wosey to my evil friends, Trey to a handful of others…poor child.

He and Ollie get along swimmingly, in that, they mostly ignore each other. Occaisonally, Ollie will sniff his head and lick his face and sleep curled up next to him, which they both seem fine with.

He still has feet and hands that are too big for his body, and LOOONG legs that he kicks froggy style. Kind of breast stroke kicking….a swimmer, perhaps?

He is fussy for approximately fifteen seconds before he falls asleep.

He will sleep wherever he is when he is tired.

He likes to be vertical, either watching the world or sacked out on my chest. Yes, he is already a boob man!

He ears are still furry.

He loves music, and is starting to sing along.

He only likes being in the car if we are driving faster than 55. This is concerning to me regarding his teenage years.

When something is exciting, his eyes get huge and his arms go crazy and he starts kicking and his mouth opens wide and he looks like Christmas lights on a newly decorated tree.

His arms are always moving, trying to reach for something, or just moving around. He could be a referee. He already has “TOUCHDOWN!” down solid.

One other thing? He makes me a better person and I cannot believe how lucky I am to be able to call such an amazing person my son.

Ok, that was two things, but I think you can forgive me.

May 29, 2010

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The long road

Well, as Week Six at Seattle Children’s Hospital draws to a close, I thought I should take a moment to extole my hospital knowledge upon my willing readers.

How to Survive Living in a Hospital Version1.0

1 Make friends with the Nurses. You will see them more than anyone else, they have normal lives they will tell you about, and they are in more direct charge of you or your child’s care than anyone else, including the doctors.

2. Start thinking in hospital time: Days blur together, the night routine is identical to the day routine, and if you try to keep track of real world time, you quickly begin to feel as if you live in an alternate reality. Better to just adapt as quicklly as possible to the flow of the mini-world that a hospital in. And if you tend to think its Wednesday when it is really Sunday? And you don’t know where the last four days went? Chalk it up to cosmic variance between the real world and your world, and move quietly throughout your day. Or is it night?

3. Move In. Bring on the Baby Clothes! Bouncy chair? Step on down! Sling? Will be your best friend, it should be the first thing you bring down. When you try and pretend to have a little bit of normalcy, it makes the tubes, wires, and fact that you are, in fact, living in a hospital, seem normal as well.

4. Plan on Never Leaving. This way,you don’t get disappointed if dates get changed, and it is a surprise the day you walk out the door. Much mental anguish can be spared this way.

This experience has certainly been an excercise in patience for me. As the days and weeks pass, I find myself ebbing and flowing on the tides of impatience. Some times I just can’t wrap my mind around how, for a baby who is drastically healthier than the majority of the patients here, we have been here longer than nearly all of them. And then I remember that you can’t force healing. It must come at the pace of the tissue affected. Furthermore, if you do try to force healing more quickly than said tissue is ready for, invaribly you will backslide, and end up with a longer recovery than you originally anticipated.

Ramsey is the light in my world, inspite of where we are gettting to know each other. He is more alert every day, and has started smiling and grinning, which is, hands down, the best thing to wake up to in the entire world.

As he lies in my arms sleeping while I write this, I am reminded of two things: 1.  No matter where life begins, and where it takes you, if you look hard enough you will find that you are usually right where you need to be to handle your lfe.

and

2. Even when living in a hospital, babies need baths.

the pertinent bits

http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/children/parents/special/birth/906.html

The Other Shoe, as it were

Ah, that darn other shoe hath fallen.

Before I explain my recent crash course in how much of parenting you CAN’T plan, let me briefly list the positives:

1. It’s not THAT bad. Three weeks at the hospital with a (slightly) broken child SUCKS. But by the end, we will be going home and not have to deal with doctors and hospitals again. Except in the more normal “well-baby” capacity.
2. My son is a tough little trooper. X-ray? Not a peep out of him. Ultrasound? Slept through it. Enema? Happy with a pacifier. Catheter? No problem. He has been spending his days lounging in a (much to large for him) hospital crib, wearing a (very pathetic for its shear smallness) blue hospital gown. He is adaptable and amazing and handling everything much better than I think I would.
3. He is also a rockstar sleeper. Up for an hour and a half every night, sleeps like a rock through the rest of it. How lucky of a new mama am I? Just don’t wake him up if he is not ready to be woken. He turns into a he-man world-hater—just like his father. Takes him a solid half hour to return to my charming son. Its like he wants to make sure that everyone knows that he did not choose how he woke up—and he is not happy about it.
4. Moses is here. I can’t tell you all how much easier this all is because I’m not here alone. All of the visitors have been amazing, and I don’t know where I would be without all of the support, but just having Moses here and helping and being here to help the baby and keep me company and tell me its going to be okay has made an icky situation significantly less icky.
5. Seattle Children’s Hospital is amazing. The staff at every level is friendly, professional, and patient to the nth degree in answering questions and letting parents go to every test (except actual surgery). I cannot begin to explain how reassuring it is to know that Ramsey isn’t the smallest patient and isn’t the sickest patient. Even though he might be the cutest patient. Even though everything is a very big deal for US, we are routine for the staff here. And being normal is a good feeling to have when your baby is stuck in a hospital.

 

Briefly, here’s what’s wrong. I could write a (very long) narrative of the last week and the plan for the next two, but frankly? It would be boring to write, and hence probably boring to read.

1. My son is perfect on the outside, slightly broken on the inside…but fixable. Last week he had surgery on his intestine to remove a gastric band that had grown across his duradenal (the part of the gastro-intenstinal tract (GI Tract) that connects the stomach to the intestine) angling from his lower right hip up underneath his left rib-cage. This band was constricting his intestine and not allowing food to move out of his stomach and into his intestine. The result? My baby vomiting all of those pretty pretty yellows and greens I was extolling the virtues of during my last post.
2. Of course nothing is ever simple…during the course of the first surgery, Dr. Goldin (the surgeon…also has strawberry blond “golden” hair, which never fails to amuse me) did a biopsy to rule out Hirschbrung’s Disease, which came back positive but is not as ominous as it sounds. I know. It’s always the German’s with ridiculous names that discover things. For a full, detailed description of the disease, feel free to Google it. You are already online, after all.
3. The nitty gritty on Hirschbrung’s. (This has to do with digestion, the colon, and, in a word, POOP. Feel free to skip this part if you are not interested in knowing everything that my son’s colon can and can’t do).
   1. A brief anatomy lesson: The colon remains contracted until the ganglial nerves (how smart do I sound?) tell it to relax so that waste (poop) can pass through.
   2. In people with Hirschbrung’s…part of the colon does not have these nerves, hence it stays contracted, and waste can’t get out.
   3. Solution? Cut out the part of the colon that doesn’t work, reattach the part that does to my little man’s little bum. Problem Solved!
4. The Plan of Attack. We (and by we I mean Ramsey) is scheduled for surgery on Thursday to fix his innards so that they are as beautiful and perfect as his outsides. After that, we have to wait for his intestines to heal from surgery (3-6 days), then re-teach his GI Tract how to digest, since it has never actually worked properly. After he is eating normally, and gained back the weight he lost, we get to come home. Timeline? I would love to be home by Mother’s Day (May 9), but it will probably be sometime later that week. We will be here as long as we need to be, so I am trying not to get impatient.

 

Tired of reading yet? I don’t blame you if you are, but here are a few more miscellaneous details if you find reading about baby colons fascinating and need more:

We came to the hospital last Monday because I was concerned about Ramsey’s throwing up. He was puking an hour and a half after eating every time he ate, and it didn’t seem like normal baby spit-up to me. Yay for a mother’s instincts, because he had lost over a pound, and needed an IV to help with his dehydration.

Postpartum crying? Not fun. Particularly when you have to send your baby to surgery. The tears won’t stop, even when you don’t feel like you should be crying anymore!

A word to the wise? If you see a wreck of a woman wandering the hospital crying, DO NOT ask if she is okay. CLEARLY, she is not. Just keep walking. There is nothing you can do. Drawing attention to her does not help.

I have been fine ever since he got out of that first surgery. I hit survival mode swinging, and, although I am tired of pumping breastmilk instead of nursing, I am riding out maternity leave at the hospital like a champ. I still spend my days holding Ramsey, changing diapers, etc. There are just slightly more medical professionals around than I had anticipated. And the location is altered, since we are not at home.

The bottom line? This is not exactly what I expected maternity leave to look like, but after we leave the hospital, Ramsey is going to make a full recovery with no long-term effects—he may not even have a scar, because he is so little his body may just absorb the scar tissue. He won’t remember any of this, although I am lord it over him throughout his teenage years.

The sign from the end of his bed that says, “Nothing Per Rectum” is being saved for his baby book.

Where is the other shoe?

And when is it going to fall?

Well, I am a week into parenting, and I have the following question:

1) How does someone who eats nothing but breast milk create such an array of colors of spit up?

I must say, as every new parent does, but is TRUE for me:

I have the best child.

I know that all newborns look like Winston Churchill, all wrinkly and androgynous, but mine is pretty handsome. Everyone says so. Which means that either:

a) Everyone is scared that I might have postpartum depression (I don’t) and so are telling me what they think I want to hear so as not to set me off on a hormonal rant ( haven’t had one yet)

or

b) He is actually a handsome newborn.

I am choosing to go with option B.

At least he doesn’t have a conehead!

For your reading pleasure, a list of my son’s amazing week one accomplishments.

1) Eyebrow raising: I know that he doesn’t actually HAVE eyebrows yet, but once they darken up, let me tell you: he is going to be a master at raising them skeptically.

2) Screaming as I clean the junk off his junk. He is not so interested in being wiped like a baby. Independent already, just like his mama

3) Stuffing BOTH fists into his mouth: AT THE SAME TIME!!! I challenge you to do it…guarantee that he is better at it than you!

4) Fist making: yeah he’s a Future boxer. He practices everytime he wakes up (ie “Right hook left jab uppercut!”)

5) Cleanly spit-up: At five days old, he had already mastered the fine art of spitting up all over: Me, my bed, my pillows, his blanket, my sheets, my shirt, my pants, and possibly a bit on Ollie’s ear, without getting more that a small spot of spit up on his own clothing. I hope this doesn’t mean that he is going to be OCD about cleanliness.

6) Dog Whisperer: I know that some people were worried about how Ollie would react to the baby. I brought Ollie home from Sudden Valley on Tuesday. The GREAT DRAMATIC INTRODUCTION? Ollie sniffed his ear twice, licked his head, and went to eat his dog food.

As I didn’t want him either overly interested or seeing the baby as a threat, this was the best reaction I could have hoped for.

Thus far, motherhood has not been as trying as I had anticipated. He is not a “screamy” baby–meaning, he has yet to cry when there wasn’t something specific that he needed (changing, feeding, entertainment, etc.). In addition, he only wakes up once or twice a night (well, I wake him up once). He is a bit of a night owl, because after I feed him around three, he usually (can you have a “usually” after six nights of life?) stays awake and alert for an hour or two. But not crying–just looking around, playing with his mouth, and in general making me adore him.