My little girl is taking a lovely, long mid-morning nap as I write this.
What a wonderful sentence. Could there be a more wonderful sentence than this?
I certainly don’t think so.
Let me tell you how I came to be a mother. Not the birds and the bees stuff, no no, my mom reads this blog for crying out loud.
The *shudder* birth.
*Cue sound of men leaving*
It was a long pregnancy.
Probably no longer than any other but still the fact that we had been told that we would never conceive a baby naturally meant that every day of a healthy pregnancy counted in my mind as a miracle. And as a low-level pessimist I was loath to just sit back and enjoy the “glow” of pregnancy.
No, I had to go obsessing wildly into the night.
What if something goes wrong? Lots of stuff went wrong in pregnancy, loads of horrible things have happened to other people that my friends, family and acquaintance have told me about throughout the years.
These horror stories kept flooding back into my conscious mind as I recalled every vivid detail that the storyteller offered with the misty-eyed zeal of the sensationalist.
First it was the first trimester.
There is no way of skipping this trimester, that is the name of the trimester. Numba one. First. Begin here. Do not skip and collect any money or whatever.
If you have been trying to conceive for a while and have endured all the tracking, testing, pill-popping fun of it, you probably would also find out relatively early in the pregnancy that you are in fact pregnant.
This is inevitable as some of us spend months taking fifteen pregnancy tests a day, resulting in bankruptcy, depression and water intoxication. This last one sounds like fun but is way less interesting than say alcohol intoxication.
Having done it this way, I found out I was pregnant the very second the sperm penetrated the ova.
*Sound of more men scurrying uncomfortably from the room*
This meant I was obsessing obsessively for as much of the pregnancy as is conceivably obsessable.
You see, the first trimester is the time in pregnancy when most miscarriages happen, for whatever reason. Even for no reason at all. This scared the living shit out of me. Well not literally of course, I mean I kind of wish it did because the first trimester also brings with it the backhanded reminder of how much labour will suck by giving you crippling constipation.
And the nausea. Oh the nausea! I felt like I had been on the piss for weeks and suffering from a severe babelas, which I then aptly renamed “baba-las”.
On the plus side, I dropped two kilograms in this here lovely little trimester and felt pretty good apart from all the other stuff happening.
Eventually, this first and most dreaded of the trimesters passed and I entered the proverbial “honeymoon phase” of pregnancy. The second trimester.
In this trimester I was slightly less worried about something going wrong with the baby and massively more worried about money.
Having had a bit of a melt-down and resigning from my job in a fit of hormone-encouraged rage, I was now unemployed and living off of my savings, which were not great in numbers.
This is a difficult thing for someone like me:
• trust issues; check
• emotional about money; check
• thinks money equals your worth as a person especially as a woman; check
• thinks asking a man for money is total failure to succeed in life especially as a woman; check.
Add in hormonal insanity and Bob’s your uncle.
No really, as a result of all of us originally coming from Africa, Robert Mugabe is somehow all of our uncle, removed to the whatever’th degree, of course.
Where was I?
Oh yes, I was knocking being knocked up.
Well don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, I always say, hahaha, except cocaine…don’t try cocaine. Just knock it straight out of the gate. That stuff is way too powerful to be toyed with.
Where was I again…
Okay, okay, so finally one sunny day in the third and final trimester (the one where you are allowed to complain non-stop about your back/hips/head/pick-a-body part), I was lounging in bed feeling guilty about not bringing in any finances when I heard a strange cat in the yard, terrifying my kitties.
So I got up and opened the door for the dog to chase it off, as he relishes it so much.
He scarcely touched the ground as he flew out of the house in hot pursuit of the intruder but as he rounded the corner he suddenly started wailing like a banshee. I hurried after him to see what was the matter. Well I say hurried, which was in fact quite slow for a woman in the third trimester.
Three weeks before my due date, I would have made a sloth blur in comparison.
When I got to the dog, he was paralyzed from the waist down.
What the hell happened, you ask.
Was he bit by a snake?
I glanced around but didn’t see any snakes slithering about.
Was he shot, poisoned, stabbed, kicked, run over?
None of the above, it seemed.
I didn’t know what the hell to do. My belly was so huge there was no way I could lift this Alsatian-size dog into my car.
I called Bull security, who first asked me annoying questions like was I a member. No, sir, I am an ADT subscriber but felt too bad to call them.
Of course I am a member, asshole, now get your butt over here and put my dog into my car.
Am I in any physical danger?
Yes, of having a coronary from irritation.
I sat on the ground next to my poor dog, still mewling softly and petted his big head. Bull took about five minutes to arrive but it felt like an eternity.
When the guy got out of his car and saw the state of me his eyes immediately softened and he asked me how far along I am to which I stuttered: “Three weeks”.
He looked amazed.
“Three weeks to go, I mean. Thirty seven weeks.”
And on that note promptly started crying, which he politely ignored and got on with wrestling my dog into the car.
As I backed out of my driveway I saw him still parked outside, idling his car, presumably waiting for me to safely leave the house and close the gate and what-not without getting hi-jacked or burgled or ramming my car into someone else’s car/house/child; as is the custom of my pregnant people.
Thank the good Lord for kind people in these circumstances.
At the vet I cried the whole time, without one second passing tearlessly.
The poor vet, another young guy, looked pretty uncomfortable. I was such a wreck.
I was wearing a long sundress, the first thing I found that fit my large heavily pregnant body. No makeup, hair unbrushed and crazy wild. I probably didn’t even smell very good as I hadn’t had time to brush my teeth or shower that morning when all hell broke loose.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to do an MRI if we are to make a certain diagnosis” he said.
“How much will this cost?” I brayed.
“Around R4000”
“Oh…care to warrant a guess?”
“I think it’s a slipped disc but I’ve never seen that in a large dog, only in dachshunds”
“Okay, then how do we fix it?”
“Well, in the case of a slipped disc, he will need surgery which will cost quite a bit. You’re looking at between 15 and 20 thousand”
*Drooling on myself whilst ugly-crying*
“I can see that you are very upset but I also want to suggest the possibility of euthanasia”
*Drooling on myself while crying even uglierer than a minute ago*
“Okay, I’m going to phone my husband and discuss this with him quickly before making a decision”
He left me to it so I phoned T with trembling fingers and the minute he picked up wailed loudly into the phone. I’m pretty sure he thought I was having the baby but I quickly explained the situation.
I had to run all this by him because I had no money to my name and if we were to do the MRI, he would have to fund it.
“Okay so R 4000 is a bit of money but I think let’s do the MRI and see what they say.”
I wanted to kiss him for not saying kill the dog right off the bat.
The vet called the specialists that do the MRI’s and they said to bring the dog.
After paying the vet consultation fee, and having him carry the dog to my car, off we went to the specialist vets. The specialist was actually a bit more knowledgeable and much less uncomfortable with my seeping face. Possibly because of being a woman and all.
Us girls grow up with cray-cray emotions and are usually quite happy to be in the presence of a sobbing woman. Sobbing men are a whole new ball game but other sobbing women – piece of cake.
“Okay, if I can make an informed guess; it’s either a spinal stroke embolism or a slipped disc. Most probably an embolism because of his size but we can’t know for sure unless we do the MRI which costs R7000”
“The other guy said R4000”
“Nope it’s R7000. We use Wilgers hospital’s MRI machine. But we don’t have to. I can see you are expecting a baby and I would understand if you don’t want to do the MRI, Lord knows I don’t have R7000 to spend on my dog right now and that’s just for the diagnosis. The problem is, if it is a slipped disc we need to operate asap and if we don’t he’ll just get worse and we’ll have to give him a mercy death”
That’s the phrase she used; "mercy death".
In the end after much deliberation and guilt, I decided against the MRI and to go ahead with treatment for an FCE (spinal stroke embolism) which is really no treatment whatsoever.
He stayed at the animal hospital for three days where some physiotherapist allegedly did things with him to help him walk again.
They also administered corticosteroids and vitamin E which supposedly helps nerve-regeneration.
I visited him every day and cried noisily every time.
He showed no improvement whatsoever and I was getting even more scared.
After three days my money was done and we went to go fetch our poor four-legged child from the hospital.
It was very challenging having him home because he could not walk or even crawl to go outside and do his business. In fact, he wasn’t even aware that he had business that needed to be done.
We would constantly have to move him to clean up the pool of waste he would suddenly find himself in. He seemed extremely depressed and obviously didn’t understand what was happening to him. It broke my heart into pieces seeing him like that because he has always been such a lively, active animal with a huge lust for life.
The whole incident happened on Wednesday the first of November 2017.
On Monday the 6’th I went to the bathroom and discovered blood in my underwear.
*Sound of last man scarpering*
Upon phoning the gynaecologist my suspicions were confirmed that yes it was probably a “Bloody Show” and we should expect the baby to come in the next two days or so.
Quick side-note; the baby room was in shambles. I don’t mean just “not ready” or a “bit haphazard”. No, I mean full of raw cement and building materials and paint.
You see, my dear, dear husband and soon to be baby-daddy has weighed the previously perfectly fine room and found it lacking. So, he ripped up the wooden floor, tore down the curtains and the railings and yanked out the cupboard.
I started referring to him as Shiva the Destroyer and often tried communicating my extreme displeasure by jokingly asking him to rather behave like Vishnu the Maintainer but no can do.
This happens often to people. They think; how hard can DIY projects be? I’ll lay my own perfect cement floor, stain it beautifully, seal it impeccably and then our baby will have a beautiful floor and will grow up to be rich and powerful and happy.
It was chaos. Cement everywhere. My father in law, presumably heavily prodded and poked into helping by my Mother in law, came and helped as much as he could but really it felt like just utter three-stoogery to me.
So, having taken eight months to get any real work done and still not satisfied with the quality of the cement floor he and his father has poured, “Shiva” continued to destroy and destroy and destroy. Gone were my dreams of lazily getting the room ready and beautiful and lounging around in it, maybe hanging a fluffy heart here and there, folding little clothes, while stroking my growing belly.
I had gotten tired of hinting at the fact that I needed the room finished by dropping jokes about him rather embodying Vishnu the Maintainer and not so much Shiva the destroyer, but they were falling on deaf ears, alas.
Looking into his eyes as the news that we would be parents in about two days dawned on him was a sight to see.
First, awe, then raw panic.
We made a list of everything we still needed to do and buy and divided it up.
I still had all the self-beautifying treatments I had been planning to do in the last three weeks of pregnancy and hastily made appointments for the next day.
Then I rushed into the shops and spent mounds of money on baby stuff we still needed, like a pram.
Finally, the day was done and I spent the better part of an hour doing physio exercises with my dog and watching the sun go down.
Life was good. The next day I would have my hair and toe nails done and all will be well with the world once again.
I was super exhausted so I went to bed around eight o-clock that night.
Husband, who was still in a mad dash to try and finish the baby room in two days, only came to bed at around half past eleven, at which point my water promptly broke, soaking both of us, all three our cats and the bed.
“Are you sure it’s not pee?” he pleadingly asked me with red-rimmed eyes.
“I haven’t had this kind of bladder capacity in months, it’s definitely not pee” I replied.
“Oh fuck”
Yep, fuck indeed.
So, around midnight we found ourselves driving to Femina hospital. We went there because our medical aid only covered certain hospitals and they had such a good reputation.
All the way there my mind kept boggling at the wonder of this actually happening. Of course, I was also painfully aware that pain was coming. There could be no truly painless birth no matter what you did. And I was hell bent on having a natural delivery.
Once I was checked in and everything was signed and stamped and paid, the nurse gently checked my dilation and declared that in fact I was not dilated at all and that this could still take a while, I might as well send husband home to rest.
He did go home but not to sleep, to fix the baby’s room of course.
Vishnu has finally arrived and sent Shiva packing.
I lay around trying to sleep but too excited and starting to feel tiny fluttery cramps much like period pains. At some point I did manage to sleep some and morning came.
I was served a lovely breakfast, which I ate with gusto, thinking this will be the fuel I need to push my baby out like the woman of steel I am. Little did I know that my idea of how this birth will go was so way off I am now very grateful for not being able to see into the future because I would have promptly lost that delicious breakfast into the waste basket next to the bed.
To be continued…
Beautifull!!
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