postcards from cascadia

Hello, and welcome to my journal!

dstroy — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:21:39 GMT

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Because this journal is primarily about my family life, I have made it a password-protected, or "friends only", journal.

This makes me more comfortable knowing that the words and pictures that I post are reaching my intended audience without also being open to the random strangers out there, some percentage of whom I don't trust with information about my family. While I am open to meeting more people, I would like to know something about who is reading my journal in return.

This journal is used as a means to keep my family and friends up to date on what we have all been up to, and it describes the latest milestones and hurdles that our family deals with on a daily basis.

Felix born in February 2002
Sonia born in December 2004

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The Making of Beads

dstroy — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:35:51 GMT

You start with a metal rod called a mandril which is covered in chemicals that keep the glass from sticking.
It's a bit like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time - as you have to keep the mandril orangey hot but not too hot, while you get the tip of your glass rod hot enough to reach firey melting point.
So many things to keep in mind - if the mandril gets too cold (as I quickly learned) the chemicals can flake off and then the glass bead would be stuck permanently to the rod. At the same time, the glass can burn if too hot so you're watching the colors to keep it away from the base of the torch because the colors will change if they get too hot. If you warm the glass too quickly, the stuff shatters and spits glass off too - all away from you in the direction of the flame, but disconcerting nonetheless.

By the way, those protective glasses are just as much for protection as they are for being able to see.
I took most of the rest of these photos by pointing the camera lens into the glasses - without them most of what you saw was a big ball of orange flame.

Once the glass is hot enough, you bring it off the flame to touch it to the mandril, which you spin under the glass. The glass sticks, and then flows...

Eventually, if you're good, it turns into a disk-like spiral.

Now it's a question of rotating the mandril so that the glass flows and melts into a rounder shape.

Flame, spin, cool, spin...spin spin spin... lalalala

The glass wants to be round, so you spin and let gravity work for you.
Patience is hard. So is keeping your arms even and figuring out whether the bead is even yet.

The weirdest thing about working with glass is that you never really can see what your colors are until 5 hours later after the kiln is done doing it's thing.
This bead, for example, is made of blue glass. It's nicely rounding here - cool it too much and it'll crack. Cracking can be fixed by turning the whole thing into a molten ball again, but if you've got a bunch of design work done on it then that can change the whole way the bead turns out.
At this point, you have a basic bead. You can put it glowing red into the kiln where it'll bring the temperature down at the right pace, or you can choose to keep going.

Here's the kiln where the beads go when you're done.
There's a little door at the bottom there that resembles a mail slot and you put your lightly glowing bead on it's rod in through there.
The kiln's purpose is not, in fact, for melting in this case, but for cooling.
It makes sure the beads temperatures are taken down in a controlled fashion.

If you don't leave it in the kiln long enough, or you get impatient and try to peek too early, the glass will cool too quickly and this will happen.

The next thing lunesse showed me how to do was encasing a bead.
In this process, you start with your basic bead (here we've got our blue bead going) which is still hot from the last step, and you let it cool enough that it won't melt and flow but not so cool that it cracks.. so almost but not quite glowing.

This time, you take a transparent glass rod, here it's clear, and you touch to the bead and spin the mandril, covering it in the encasing color.
(Note the gorgeous violet color that the bead took on as it was cooling. Man, it's amazing how weird the colors are - as this too is not the color of the glass we used. Sometimes though, it would be wonderful to capture the color while it was hot for the actual bead!)

Spin spin spin. There's pretty much rarely a time you're not spinning the bead.

Encasing a bead makes a lens over the design underneath, which makes the colors pop out and adds shine.
It's also what makes glass beads appear to be floating in liquid.

Next, I asked her to show me how she does the crazy scrolly designs on the beads.
This step involves what's called "a stringer," which is a super skinny rod of glass that you can either buy premade or make yourself. She showed me how to make stringers too.
Because the stringer is so thin, you don't flame it directly the way you can a regular rod.

Essentially, you color on the bead.
It's not as easy as it sounds though. In fact, to be blunt, it's really fricka-fracka-frelling hard.
Contrary to instinct, you're not supposed to move the stinger. Once you touch the bead with the glass, you make the designs by moving the bead underneath. And you have to maintain the tension or you lose the thread, keeping it not too hot and not too cold, keeping the bead itself from getting too hot because if it starts to flow it'll melt into your scroll design, and if it gets too cool, it'll crack.
All this while trying to make your design go where you want it to go.
FUN! ...but really, really hard.

Damn she's good. She was complaining the whole time about how "uneven" blablablabla this scrollwork was... when I tried it my stringer went all over the place. It was fun, but woa...hard to control!

Then you flame it on there - some at least, is necessary to keep it from popping off.
But you can also choose to flame it down until it rounds out to be even with the bead surface.

I kept thinking Tolkien lines at this part.

Pop! Into the kiln we go.

Here she was showing me how to make a stringer for a bead I wanted to try. You take a glass rod, beat the end until it becomes a huge molten blob of lava, and then you pinch it with tweezers and PULL. Hopefully, you do it at an even pace and it ends up evenly spread out, and then you fire and pinch off the end.

This gets really fun when you can make crazy stringers too. Here she showed me how to take two glass rods, smush them together, and then spin and pull apart.

That leaves you with a candycane zebra-striped stringer that will allow you to make all sorts of crazy stuff.

And yet another method. Here, she took a glass rod and heated the end, then dabbed the blobby tip into a piece of silver leaf, which looks like ultra-fine aluminum foil.

Put that back into the fire of the torch and you can already see some of the chemical reactions starting around the edges where the foil meets the glass. This got pinched and turned into yet another stringer, and I got to use the crazy zebra-striped stringer and these stringers and make dots and melt it all to make some of the wackier beads towards the later afternoon.
Things got a little nutty toward the end there. hee.

There's work-in-progress for some of the zanier stuff in the afternoon. I can't remember which bead this was as the colors all look red/orange/black when hot... maybe green? with the black and white striped stringer and the silver-foil stuff....

And then it got encased in a layer of transparent glass and it's not as bumpy towards the end...

No idea which one this was. We'll have to wait until they're out of the kiln before we can see the results.

Here's how a hollow bead is made. You start with that disk...
Oh! Remember how I said that so much of this work is guessing about colors? That clear looking rod she's using - that's going to be a red bead.

And then you make a second one adjacent to it.

So you've got to do this perfectly straight, twice, at the same size and the same width. Holy hell. No wonder these are expensive.

Now you have to spin it AND push the tips towards each other, gently so as not to have the whole thing collapse into itself, evenly.... until eventually the tips touch...

Now you've got a single funky looking bead that you "just" (haha) have to spin regularly and evenly...

The trapped air inside the now-single bead starts to expand in the heat.

Magic!

Then I asked her to put scrolly designs on the red bead with black stringer.

haha - there's that flying-color-blind action going, as the barely cooling-red glass is now appearing black at this temperature, and the stringer she's working with is black too.. I didn't mean to make it that challenging for her!

And a once she's got the scribbles on there, she'll do a last pass through the fire before placing it in the kiln with all our other beads.

At 5 or so, I had finally finished my last wacky piece that is going to be a honkin' huge bead of pinks and greens and swirls and craziness ... and we decided to call it quits because we'd completely lost track of time (or at least I had) and had not eaten or drank anything the whole time we'd been in there. Looks like there's what - 9? 10? beads sitting in that kiln? That's not including the one that cracked and the one that I scraped the glass into the bead chemical on the rod which we threw out knowing that the glass would never come off the rod anyway.
We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how they turned out.

Edited to add:
I got the hollow bead she made here and made it into this pendant necklace

Sonia's birth story

dstroy — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 05:15:10 GMT

Wednesday night, the evening before my scheduled c-section, I went to bed "early" because my cold had really started worsening and I knew that it was going to be no picnic to deal with a bad stuffy nose, sneezing, tickles in my throat and general foggy head when I was also dealing with recovery from surgery. We did our usual bedtime routine with Felix, though I explained during story time that tomorrow was going to be different because I had to go to the hospital and the doctor was going to take the baby out of my tummy so he'd finally get to meet his sister. He understood, I think, that things were going to be strange and new over the next few days and I do think there was some anticipation there as well - as much as a 2 and a half year old could come up with for something unknown like this, anyway.

By now, Floyd was coming down with the same cold as well - so early bedtime was on the agenda for both of us. In the end though, neither of us got much sleep that night - I think Floyd got about 45 minutes, and I probably got less than half an hour the whole night. My cold had really gotten very bothersome, but there was very little that I could do to deal with the symptoms with all the restrictions I had. I couldn't take Sudafed or any other medicines that would have helped with the sinus pressure, and even the nasal spray that I'd heard was generally OK to use while pregnant, the advice nurse told me that she couldn't authorize my use of it the evening before surgery. Pretty much my only options were to drink a lot of hot tea - except that I wasn't allowed anything to eat or drink, not even water, after midnight! I spent a good half of the night trying to guess whether I could cheat and say that cough drops, at least, didn't qualify as food or drink.

I did, however, take 3 steam baths - especially since realizing that trying to do a steam bath over the sink with a huge pregnant belly turns out to be nearly impossible task. By morning, the two of us must have been quite a sight, I'm sure - though I consoled myself that many women spend 24 hours in hard labor before they end up finding out that they need a c-section so assuredly things could have been much worse.

At about 5:15 in the morning, my mother, Floyd and I all got into the car and left the house in the rainy dark. Our neighbor, Brian, was just leaving for work as well, and he was just about the only other person out on the road until we got onto the freeway. I suspect he guessed where we would be heading at that hour.
We left Felix, still asleep, at home with Bill and Jean, who planned to take him to school and then pick him up in the afternoon to come join us once they got news that all was going well.

We arrived at the hospital and on our way towards the elevators that head towards the maternity ward, two nurses getting into a service elevator spotted our group and asked if we were arriving for a scheduled c-section. When we told them yes, they told us they'd give us a lift using a short cut.

The nurses at the front desk greeted us and took us to a nice room way at the end of the hall, right next to one of the little "nourishment" rooms with all the free teas, coffees, juices, and assorted little snacks. The room is really nice - not as enormous as the one they had me in last time, but luxurious nonetheless. In addition to a fancy birthing bed, which splits in half in the center and can be used for normal labor, it has a little couch and a folded up bed for guests, a baby bassinet (in most cases, the baby never leaves the room from the mother from the moment of delivery, unless the mother wants to send it to the nursery to get some rest) and in general has the feel of a high-tech Red Lion Inn suite more than a small, sterile and impersonal hospital room. I actually remembered that the last time I was here, I had a surgical bed, not a labor bed, and recalled that they were slightly more comfortable. Since I wasn't going to be dealing with normal labor, I requested a surgical bed if one was available for my room instead, which they did, in fact, deliver for me.

I was nervous as hell by this time, Floyd seemed excited and perhaps a little nervous too, or at least protective of me, and my mom was just plain giddy and bouncy and generally high on anticipation.
The nurse came in and attached me to a baby monitor and calmly went through some routine paperwork and questions with me - none of the scary end-of-life stuff that had so freaked me out last time around was brought up, other than a cursory reference to who would make decisions should the "unlikely event" arise. Still, my memories of the last time I delivered were now coming flooding back to me.

A nurse explained that she needed to get me hooked up to an IV so that they could start getting me hydrated before the surgery, and while she prepared her needle for that, a second nurse came in with her own needles to draw some blood work. The IV gal plunged her needle into my right arm and then proceeded to dig for gold for a while before giving up on finding the vein in that arm. The blood work sample was much easier, but now another set of nurses came in to try to hook me up to the IV. This time, they selected a spot on the back of my left hand and tried a couple of times unsuccessfully to find a vein that wouldn't "blow out" on them. By this time, I was pretty worked up and unhappy - that first IV attempt in my right arm had hurt bad enough and now they were repeating the process over and over. At this point, it was fast approaching time for the scheduled surgery and the nurses all agreed that they didn't have time to mess with this, especially given how my veins kept collapsing, and needed to get me hydrated as quickly as possible, so they selected the biggest needle they had (an 18) and plunged it into the back of my right hand. I don't think I even knew that the needle was that big, though it certainly hurt a lot. When the nurse on shift a few days later was taking the thing out of my hand her eyes simply boggled when she saw the size of it, saying that she hadn't seen one that big used for this purpose in her 5 years of nursing at this hospital.

And if being stuck with a giant stick was painful, it was followed by the strong burning and ice-needle sensation of having cold cold IV fluids pumped into my arm. By this time I was crying, because it just hurt too much to "act brave" and the nurses kept telling me with much sympathy that this IV thing was so torturous that the spinal which I had been repeatedly saying I was so scared of will probably be a breeze after this. They had needed to get a large amount of fluids into me fast, and chose the largest pipe they had to finally do it. I was walking to the operating room less than 5 minutes after the whole ordeal.

And through all of this, I kept remembering how the last time I went through this with Felix, the IV was the least difficult part of everything I had gone through, so as you can imagine, by this time I was completely worked up.

Next, they had me walk over to the Operating Room and my mom and Floyd had to go sit in the hallway while they prepped me for the spinal. Floyd would be allowed to join me only after the spinal had been put in place and I was all ready for surgery. It was weird walking myself into the operating room - my doctor kept saying things like "you remember this from last time around" and I kept repeating that last time around I wasn't in any state to walk and things had been quite different!

My teeth were chattering horribly and I was feeling extremely cold and tense - my whole right arm stung. The anesthesiologists were telling me that this was mostly due to me having a massive adrenalin rush as well as a reaction to the IV. One nurse promised she'd place a warm pack on my arm which should help once they got me all settled.

And then, we stepped into the room. There were people everywhere - several nurses were lining up sharp instruments on a table, another was setting up a big elaborate machine at the head of the table, a couple more were by the sinks, and I think there were two over by the table where they clean the baby. Two anesthesiologists came up to me and helped me onto the table in the middle of the room. I was asked to sit on the table, with my feet over the edge, and the gal who had plunged in the giant IV needle now stood in front of me and held me by the shoulders. My teeth were still chattering
and I was totally obsessed with the fear that my shaking would cause me to move when they stuck the needle in my back - I had read in several places that moving during this part was the more dangerous thing during a spinal or epidural procedure. Everyone kept assuring me that the teeth chattering movement was "too minor" to cause problems.

Then someone started rubbing my back with something cold to prep the area where the needle was to go in. I had been told something about how "if you feel the needle go left let me know and I'll move it more to the right and vice versa" but I didn't understand what she meant by that - and now I started being nervous that there was something I was supposed to do that I might mess up on. The gal in front of me told me that first they were going to numb the area and then I would need to lean forward into her, slump down and relax my shoulders, and then arch my back like a cat into the needle. I felt something of a pin prick in my spine and started yelling over my fear: it's going left it's going left!!! because I felt something like a hot spreading liquid sensation pointing into and leftwards from the point where the needle went in...and I heard someone say it was fine. A few seconds later, it felt like another prick (though honestly I have no idea at all exactly what was going on) and this time the warm sensation moved right. Again I called out that it was "going right" and they told me everything was fine and now I needed to arch into the needle. I was so frightened at this point that fear was my biggest problem. I just kept anticipating the "worse" parts that surely would follow.

It hurt a little when the needle went in - like a bee sting, but nothing at all like the IV and the pain didn't last anywhere near as long either. It was hard to follow instructions to move into the needle because that's just so counterintuitive to your body to push into something that hurts a little. I kept repeating "hold on to me tighter - I'm afraid I will fall off the table" and the woman in front of me kept assuring me she had a good hold on me. Someone told me my feet would start feeling warm and I continued in my panic mode: "I can only feel the warmth in one foot! Oh wait...now I feel it in another one! But wait! I still feel everything!!" They all assured me everything I was feeling was normal...and I was still waiting for the big bad spinal pain that I had heard so much about.
"You mean....that's it?!!!" I asked in disbelief, when I realized we were past the needlework.

They told me to lay on the table while I still could and I did - my feet and lower half started feeling tingly and warm like dead weights - a very odd sensation because it didn't hurt but it wasn't exactly numb either. I could still feel everything when they touched me but it was as though the edge was taken off. Every now and again I'd worry that I could still feel everything because there would be pockets that felt numbish and others that felt completely normal, but they assured me once again that it took about 8 minutes for it all to take effect.

One nurse asked if I would remember to keep my arms on the arm-rests, which stuck out at 90 degree angles from the table, and I told her I wasn't sure and asked her to please tie my arm to the arm rest at least enough to remind me. She tied it loosely, so I wasn't really constrained, (the bandage would tear anyway if I really pulled, but the point was to remind without truly strapping me down) - given how panicky I was feeling about the whole thing I found this very comforting. She left my other arm alone, because I was holding a tissue for my nose and also she had placed a warm pack across the arm and IV.

She started to test the effects of the spinal. This is where things went from scary to just plain weird and surreal. I could still feel it whenever my lower body was touched... evidently the one thing I didn't feel was pain. So she'd rub a cold wet tissue on my shoulder and ask, "you feel the cold?", which I did...then she'd rub it on my belly and I could feel that she was rubbing on me, but it wasn't cold at all. She'd continue to do this to test how high up the threshold had gotten. Then, she repeated the test with a sharp edged wooden stick. I felt the sharpness on my shoulder, but while I felt that she touched me with it on my belly I couldn't feel any of the "edge" sensations at all.

They had warned me that it starts to move up to the chest and that hopefully it would stop at the lower end of my chest so it becomes noticeable but not difficult - yet being warned and feeling it were still two separate events for me and it was just a really bizarre. Occasionally, I'd worry that with my cold stuffing up my nose I'd be hyperventilating from this concern of added breathing difficulty, but the nurses were really good about reminding me to take it easy and doing what they could to keep me comfortable.

At this point, the spinal appeared to be working, and a second doctor came into my view and introduced herself as the working partner with Doctor Lewis. At about this time, they brought in Floyd as well. I later learned that the entire spinal process had taken about 25 minutes, and that both Floyd and my mother had been very nervously and quietly awaiting news down the hall during that time. My mother later said that for her it was a terribly long 25 minutes.

Floyd came in and sat somewhere back by my head and I had just been saying that I didn't want to see them cutting me open when a giant sheet was pulled up to cover my view of what was going on beneath my chest. At this point, there was no pain and it was mostly just a really bizarre sensation to feel them moving stuff around, poking and prodding, pushing and pulling, as they worked their way through the layers, without my feeling them actually cutting anything. It started to feel especially weird when I started feeling what felt like my organs being pushed around...and the nurses would assure me that they had to push some layers apart so yes, for example, it was probably something bumping up against my lungs as they worked their way into the uterus that I was feeling. Floyd kept a firm grip on my hand and was asking me "Are you OK?" and all I could tell him was just that it was...well...really weird.

And then I felt the doctors fingers digging around in places where you just really don't ever expect to feel fingers touching. No pain at all, but man that was bizarre. I felt some tugging and pressure as they wrapped their fingers around the baby, and then they told me to breathe out because they were going to pull her out. *insert twilight zone music here*
"There's the head crowning!" called out Doctor Lewis, and I saw Floyd peek over the sheet with curiosity.

And then I breathed out heavily and felt an enormous tugging sensation, like all of a sudden I was a giant latex glove with a small slit cut in one end, and something big was being tugged out and slurped through the little hole. I was still trying to decide whether this sensation was one that was going to make me revert to feeling fear again when I heard the SCHLOOP of the baby as she spilled out, followed within a second by a newborn baby wailing.

I had been so wrapped up with my fears and anticipations about the actual act of delivering this baby that I hadn't even had time to sort out my feelings about actually getting to meet my baby for the first time - hearing that baby cry as the doctor announced "It's a girl!" parted the clouds of haze for me and I was suddenly completely overwhelmed with joy and started bawling - all my other worries completely dropped at my sides. I heard the baby get passed from the doctor who had been sitting at my lower right to a nurse. They walked the baby across to my left side so that I could see her and told me they were going to wash her up so that I could hold her - I had earlier requested that they hold off from giving her the vitamin jelly in her eyes for a bit so that I could see her properly first.

Through my tears of joy, I could see a beautiful squirming little pink girl - her skin completely covered in white vernix caseosa which looked like she was covered in a creamy body-lotion. Two nurses placed her on a little changing table right in my line of sight and when I recovered enough to speak I said out loud to Floyd "Look honey! She has a butt! And pudgy little cheekies!!" (Felix has been so tiny there was no baby fat on him at all when he was born)
And she was a feisty one too! She had her hands shoved into her mouth even as they carried her over to the washing table. The nurses were trying to get her diaper on so that they could hand her to me but she was wiggling and squirming so much they had a hard time doing so. We're probably in for it with her, because one of the nurses giggled as they fought with her, "My goodness she's a strong one!"

Meanwhile, the doctors continued to work on me, moving more stuff around, removing placenta and cleaning out my insides and then they started the process of stitching me back up. The nurses brought me my little bundle and laid her on the table right by my head so that Floyd and I could admire her.

The stitching up part, to me, seemed to take the longest - I was trying very hard not to think about what they were doing as they tugged and pulled and pushed my guts around, trying to focus instead on the baby in front of me. My blood pressure was going up and down during this process and the anesthesiologist fiddled with buttons and levers to compensate for the shifting balances. Whenever my blood pressure dropped, I'd start to feel tired and out of it, as though I was going to pass out, which in turn made me start thinking too much about breathing properly and put me in line for hyperventilating. Whenever this started to happen, Floyd would squeeze my hand and I'd look over to look at Sonia to try to keep my mind off of what was going on behind the curtain.
The doctors were having a conversation about some sort of pants - though I didn't catch the details. I could see the actual surgery reflected in the edges of the overhead lamp, and the most surreal moment of all was when they started to put the staples in, and I realized that it really did sound like an office stapler when they punched those things in.

And after what seemed like ages, they finally announced that they were done. The sheet was pulled down and the nurses lifted me over to the stretcher. Another surreal moment realizing how totally helpless I was in terms of feeling or moving my lower body, and a brief moment wondering if the feeling would ever return, and then they placed Sonia by my side and Floyd walked with me back from the operating room. My mom joined us in the hallway and we all came back to the room together.

This photograph was taken as they wheeled me out of the OR.

During the surgery, one of the nurses had gone out to tell my mother when the baby was born, and she then called Bill and Jean with the news. Bill was assigned the task of telling the world via my journal. Floyd phoned home after we were all wheeled out to give a more detailed report, and a few hours later Bill and Jean brought Felix to the hospital to meet his new sister for the first time. Felix's sweet reactions and curiosity towards Sonia were again so very touching and wonderful. I will always have beautiful memories of the family coming together like this.

The next couple of days were much easier than anything I went through last time. There was a lot less bleeding than I remembered - evidently the magnesium they had pumped into my system to prevent seizures also causes a lot of side effects, heavy bleeding and terrible pain when they massage your uterus muscles to cause contractions being some of them. While I wouldn't say that everything was a piece of cake, it certainly didn't even approach the levels of discomfort I experienced last time around. And in the end, the nurses ended up actually being right, something which I thought they were just saying to calm me down, that indeed, the most difficult part of this experience was going to be the IV. I hurt a little, but the itching resulting from some pain-killer in the spinal wearing off was probably the biggest irritant. But seeing Sonia so quickly during this ordeal, and having her in my arms - I can suddenly understand how anyone could say childbirth can be an incredibly wonderful experience. There was no trauma at all, other than possibly working through some of the trauma my last experience had left in me, and she's so unbelievably beautiful, so perfect.. and the day they discharged me from the hospital, wheeling me out with my new baby in my arms... what a fantastically triumphant moment that was - we were finally going home.

Links:

Photo slideshow of our homecoming with Sonia.

Felix's birth story

What a long strange trip it's been...

dstroy — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 23:08:58 GMT

OK. I finally have a little time to start writing down what has happened this past week with me.

Here is the story of how Felix was born.

Tuesday, Feb 26, I was feeling pretty darned crappy. I hadn't been feeling very well most of the week before either...though none of the symptoms were anything that anyone could read as anything not to be expected as "typical" for the last month of pregnancy. I think the biggest problem was that no one else I talked to had all the symptoms at once...and the sum of the individual aches and pains seemed to just add up to more than all the individual ones. Most folks were telling me everything was fine and to be expected. Floyd was trying to get me to go get myself a massage to feel better, my mom even told me that maybe what I needed was to go get my hair done or see a beautician or do something to make myself not feel "so pregnant".

But Tuesday I had hit my limit. At about 10:30 am, I gave up and called the doctor's office because I had been throwing up, not holding down food for almost a week, and the only times I seemed to get any relief was when I had taken Tylenol and floated in a warm pool. I wasn't sure how much Tylenol I could take, and was worried because my pee (and my bile from throwing up) had started to have an orange tint. They say your pee is supposed to be lemonade color...so I thought either I was just throwing up more than I could re-hydrate myself, or perhaps the colored TUMS or maybe even the Tylenol was somehow affecting the color. The contractions I had been feeling off and on were still happening, but not at all painful and at nothing that could be considered a worrisome rate: they were very inconsistent, some 45 minutes apart, others 20 minutes, then a break for an hour... etc. Plus they didn't in themselves really hurt much, it just felt like my stomach was getting tight. The one thing I wasn't at all worried about was little Felix. He had been spunky and kicky as usual.
The nurse asked me some immediate questions: headaches, blurred vision, spots in front of my eyes, that would have caused concern...but I wasn't experiencing any of these. She told me that a doctor would call me back - when I asked how long (I was really desperate for immediate comfort) she said by around lunch time.

I spent the next few hours on the couch waiting by the phone. At one point my mom called and I told her I wanted to keep the phone line clear, so we instant messaged a bit. It was the first time my mom had tried using the instant messenger with me, so I was trying hard to type out full sentences which was really hard to do considering how I felt... I told her how crappy I was feeling and so on, and then I suddenly had to go throw up. Unfortunately, I hit my laptop on the way, and my keyboard was all messed up afterwards for the next few hours, so I had to shut down and just sit by the phone and wait after that. I hadn't even had time to make another post about how crappy my day was continuing.

I woke up at 2 pm realizing I had been laying on the couch groaning for the last hour and got flustered and teary and called the doctor's office back. The nurse who answered said she was surprised someone told me my doctor was going to call me back because my doctor wasn't even in town. I started to get all hysterical on the phone and she told me to go ahead and come in right away so they could do a urinalysis on me.

I called Floyd to let him know I was going in, and took the car and drove myself to the doctor's office. When I got there, the parking lot was as usual during the week, very full. I ended up across the parking lot on a floor above the main walkway to the offices, only to get to the elevator to find it out of service. I was so exhausted and unhappy, and went down the stairs. A woman saw me in the stairway and asked if I was OK, and I told her yeah, that it was just bad timing for the elevator to be broken.

When I got to the office they told me that since I had a normally scheduled appointment with my doctor (Dr. Suzanne Slayton-Milam) the next morning, that they would just do the whole exam today instead. I would be seeing some other doctor (Dr. Ralph Lewis) instead, and now Floyd wasn't here with me for it. I called Floyd on my cell and was pretty upset, because this appointment was going to be when the weekly meetings started and she was going to do a full physical on me..and I wasn't sure how I felt about having a stranger start with this on me, especially without Floyd there to support me. But there wasn't going to be time to get Floyd to come join me. They called me in to see Dr. Lewis, and a nurse took my blood pressure. I was all semi hysterical and crying about how bad I felt and about the stupid elevator and the nurse told me that my blood pressure was a bit high. My urine sample was nothing new...again with the trace amounts of protein in it, but nothing particularly threatening or unusual for late pregnancy. She wanted me to calm down a bit since I was so tired and exhaustion and crankiness could easily have caused those readings. She had me lay down a bit and went to get the doc and they would take my blood pressure again in a bit. A while later the doc came in and I was a bit more calm. Dr. Lewis turned out to be a very no-nonsense kind of guy. I wanted to start at the beginning of when all my real troubles seemed to start, so I started with the Tuesday before, explaining about how I had called and found out I could take Tylenol and so forth. He sort of snapped at me, saying..."this was a week ago!" and then was very short with me (not in a nasty way, just in a "let's get to the point" sort of way).. He took my blood pressure again and it was still a teeny bit elevated, and then he started poking and prodding my back to see if I hurt in certain places. I didn't, but he told me he wanted me to go to the hospital across the street right away anyways, and check myself into the maternity ward to get an IV hooked up because I was a bit dehydrated, and he wanted a blood test done on me. He told me he would come meet me there afterwards.

So far, it still didn't sound particularly bad, and I was frankly relieved that someone was going to do something to make me feel better soon. Plus it meant Floyd would have time to get there in time for the rest of the normal appointment. I called Floyd on my cell again on the way over and he said he'd hop the bus and join me.

I got to the hospital and checked myself in. They got me a nice small room and laid me down and hooked up a monitor to me. Baby was doing just great and I was having contractions but not at any rate that was really unusual or worrisome. I was being a complete sissy about the needle for the blood test and when it came time to hook up the IV I was really getting ornery. (This is now extremely funny to me considering what later developed)
I asked about needle size for the IV, and the nurse explained that there are really 2 different sized needles they could use. I told her I wanted the smaller one, and she said that for re-hydration that would be fine, but that in the worst case scenario, the blood tests would come back with something bad and they might have to induce labor, which would mean they'd need to start another IV with a bigger needle for that. But, we told each other, that's not going to happen...it's extremely unlikely...so she agreed to just use the smaller needle. Still, even the smaller needle was freaking me out - I had never been hospitalized for anything before. I started to cry saying I wished Floyd was there, and just after I said that he came in.

Shortly after that, things started to get really hairy, really fast.

Doctor came in and told us that my blood test results showed some really serious things.
Number one: I had a very serious form of disease commonly called toxemia, or preeclampsia, except that the more common version of toxemia affects the kidneys and can eventually lead to a complete kidney shut down. What I had was an extremely rare form of the disease called HELLP syndrome which was bordering on critical. In addition to worries of my kidneys shutting down, HELLP syndrome also messes with the liver.
To make matters worse, my last platelet count had been up at a nice healthy 365(k). They were now down to 55. The doc then told us, no one knows what causes the disease, and the only way to cure the disease is to get the baby out. He was saying that with my platelet count so low, he wanted it done that night because I was in very serious condition. He ordered a second blood test right away to verify the platelet count. While we waited for those results, he then explained what needed to happen.

The HELLP was bad enough that they were extremely worried that I was going to start having seizures, so they needed to pump me full of magnesium to keep those seizures from coming on.
Because the platelet count is what causes your blood to clot..and the number was very very bad, doc said they didn't have time to induce labor because that would take too long so it was going to have to be a C-section. In addition, the platelet count was so low that there was considerable risk if they were to try to do a normal epidural or spinal C-section because it could cause bleeding into the spinal chord, so it was going to have to be done under emergency general anaesthesia.

I started to panic...I could feel the urgency in the voices and actions of the doctor and nurses around me, and Floyd was asking if we could at least call my regular doctor to hear it from her too. My baby wasn't due till April 2... I was in the 35th week, 35 days away from the due date, and we had luckily learned enough about general C-sections to know that it was now done only under extreme circumstances, and it was one where they sent the husband out of the room to wait in the lobby while they did all this scary stuff. But my doctor, it turned out, was in Texas, where her husband was apparently getting treatment for stage 3 Hodgkins disease... but they all assured us that she would have told us the same thing. I wanted to call my mom, I was absolutely terrified. My mom was supposed to fly to Brussels, Belgium the next morning for a NATO science for peace panel meeting and my dad was already on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic going to Geneva for an unrelated business trip. Had this happened only a few hours later we wouldn't have had any way of contacting my family at all for a solid week.
I called my mom and was freaking out, crying and scared. Floyd was terrified as well. My mom with her medical background understood enough of the technical jargon they were telling us to know that matters were very serious though she had never heard of HELLP syndrome before and we still didn't know exactly what it was, other than it was very serious and that if they didn't treat me right away, they were worried they could lose me.
We told her we'd call her back when we got more details, and shortly afterwards everyone came running in to tell me that now my platelets had dropped further down to 50.

We need to have you on the operating table within a half hour they told me. They were already pumping me with magnesium, getting blood matches brought up and special IVs ready for transfusions should I need them during the operation.
All sorts of needles started getting poked into me and all I could think of was that I still had an appointment to sign my new life insurance policy papers on Wednesday morning and wasn't leaving Floyd prepared if I were to die.

Floyd called my mom as they were preparing to wheel me away, and I hugged and kissed him and we cried as they took me out of the room.

The nurse that had been with me from the start, Loreena, was holding my hand and soothing me as they prepared me for the operation. Because the general anaesthetic could not be handled by the baby, they couldn't ease me into it the way most patients are made to "fall into sleep" because they had to have me out and take the baby out right way before anything could reach him. The anesthesiologist told me they were going to drape a curtain in front of me and I saw a paper tent thing block my view of what was going on below my chest. I could feel something heavy like a rubber mat getting roughly laid out on my belly along with various medical tools and could sense all the urgency and speed with which everyone was moving. Then the anesthesiologist told me that I was going to feel a light pressure on my throat which was his finger, and that I would then fall asleep.
I felt him pressing on my esophagus and then he said Now, take a deep breath, and suddenly it was like my lungs had been stopped. I was still awake, I could see and hear what was going on though I couldn't move, but I totally couldn't breathe. I tried to take that deep breath but nothing would happen and I thought my god, I'm dead, and they just haven't figured it out yet. and then everything went away.

The next few hours are hazy at best. Floyd said that the doctors came out and told him that the baby was born at 8:52 pm. He was 4 pounds, 13 ounces, but spunky and active and apparently doing pretty well. Still, because he was so early, they had him in the Level 2 nursery for observation.
Floyd was told the baby and mom were doing ok, and that he could go see the baby. He said that it was extremely surreal and frightening looking at this baby and not knowing how I was doing.

Apparently, the few platelets I had were said to be extremely "functional" and I didn't bleed as much as they had expected, nor did I end up requiring the blood transfusions.
I know they told me that the baby was doing OK but I don't think that the fact that there was a baby involved in all of this really registered until quite a few hours later since I was still dealing with shock. At about 4 am I started to feel extremely weird. They were pumping me with magnesium and morphine, and I started to feel like I was losing touch with my lower body. I was trying to tell them I didn't feel right but I don't think anyone registered how not right it was until the doctor came in. The doctor realized I had no reflexes whatsoever in my legs, and I couldn't get my brain to send my legs or feet signals.. I could feel that they were touching my legs, but I couldn't remember how to tell my toes to move anymore. I was also suddenly not sure I remembered how to breathe anymore, and the nurses started doing breathing exercises like the ones they taught us in child birthing class, except not to control contractions but rather to give me something concrete to pay attention to in order to keep me breathing normally. My vision went completely double, and I was hallucinating like crazy.
I had apparently overdosed on Magnesium now, and so there was a second wave of extreme scariness while they tried to restabilize me again. They had to completely cut off the magnesium and it wasn't till late afternoon, maybe around 4 or 5 pm, that they could re-start the magnesium dosage at a halved rate again. All of Wednesday is now extremely hazy to me. I remember only small snippets, like the nurse Loreena crying at my bedside and holding my hand telling me how much I had scared everyone, and my doctor saying that they only gets a case like mine about once every 10 years or so. I remember some hallucinations, weird visions like a monkey made of slices of banana, and telling the nurses that I thought they were naked while they were doing a blood test on me, and something about melting trees and another one where I was in a large room filled with ladies boots.
I know that around 11:30 am, I remembered that there was a baby somewhere and asked about it. Floyd went to the nursery for me and brought me some Polaroids so I could see what the boy looked like, but it was really hard to connect myself to these pictures.

Things didn't start looking more like a labor and feeling less like an auto-accident or something like that, until shortly before my mom arrived. She had canceled her trip to Belgium and managed to catch the first flight she could get to Portland to be with me instead...arriving around 7pm. Shortly after she got here, Floyd went home really quick to grab some stuff and feed the cat and when he came back, they had just brought me the baby for a short half hour so that I could at least see him with my own eyes and touch him. It was almost 24 hours after the baby had been born.

It was the most magical experience I had ever had. Shortly before they had brought me the baby the nurses were telling me that they were going to have to take the catheter out the next day sometime. I had started to completely panic because I hadn't even been able to roll over in bed without help and couldn't even imagine having to get up to go to the bathroom. When they brought the baby in and I held him in my arms, he immediately latched onto my breast and started to suck. The nurses were simply astounded. Apparently, most babies at 35 weeks haven't got the cognitive development far enough to learn how to breastfeed, and this little guy was doing so well, normal full term babies could have been taking a few pointers from him. Floyd took some pictures like this one at that first meeting. I was so high off hormones and adrenalin that after they took the baby back I was able to, with some help, actually sit up, and then even stand.

The next day I was able to get up and sit in a wheelchair and be wheeled to the nursery, and by Friday I was doing so well, I was skipping the wheelchair altogether, for some of my trips.
One of the nurses who had been there on Wednesday morning when things were still extremely hairy saw me on Saturday and told me she almost didn't even recognize me.

By Sunday afternoon, the docs felt good enough about my progress to discharge me from the hospital. Felix was to stay in the Level 2 nursery for a bit longer. They had him on antibiotics, just in case, and were monitoring his breathing. He had had some minor de-oxidization stats that were normal for a kiddo this early, but they wanted to be ultra paranoid with him. That was fine with me, since paranoia probably saved my life.
We got a room in the nurses dorms in the hospital so that I would have a place to nap between feedings. His feedings were every 3 hours and by the time one was done and I got home I would have had about 20 minutes at home before I would have had to turn around and go back.
Felix was allowed to come home with us on Tuesday.

All in all, the experience was extremely unreal. It was terrifying and traumatic, and absolutely nothing like what you'd expect a labor experience to be like. I gained an incredible new perspective on all parents who'd gone through childbirth, because regardless of all the literature and videos and classes and anecdotes, there was simply nothing in the universe that could really compare to the actual experience having a baby and how much change that brings on. I think for most, the experience is quite different, with a gradual build up as the woman is preparing for the labor and then there's the labor and then theres the realizing that the baby is finally here, whereas I missed all that buildup time. Plus I faced a completely different kind of crisis at the same time so I'm sure that it was not your usual birthing story...

I'm so incredibly relieved now that we have this beautiful and healthy baby boy to look at and hold in our arms. It almost feels like Tuesday and most of Wednesday I was undergoing a life-changing crisis that had to do with facing mortality, and then, on Wednesday night, sitting there holding this perfect, incredibly adorable sweetie, I had a baby.

Links:

Felix's Baby Pictures and Videos

HELLP Experiences