My Son's Birth

Let's forget about how sick I was and my diagnosis for this post and concentrate on the very happy arrival of my son.

In one of my last posts before I went in the hospital, I told you I had professional maternity photo's done. I really loved being pregnant and wanted to capture how I felt in case I was never able to do it again. I loved the results and I think you can see in the two I am about to post, how very happy we were.

Just looking at these pictures makes me long for the days before I got the bad news. I want to enjoy my son's first year first, but then I want so badly to get pregnant again. I don't want my little boy to be an only child. Who knows if we can do it again.

Anyway....

Because of the brain tumour, the c-section (with spinal) was scheduled for Thursday morning. I was very ill and could not get out of bed. Therefore I was wheeled down to the delivery room in my hospital bed. The worse part of the whole delivery was getting the freezing for the spinal. Once the spinal was in I felt nothing. Well... that's not true, once they cut me open and were ready to take him out, I was told I would feel pressure in my diaphragm. It felt like I couldn't breathe but it only lasted a minute and then he was out. My perfect little prince. He was gorgeous (of course he was cleaned before I saw him). He weighed 5 lbs 12 oz and measured only 18 inches long. Here is a picture of Rick and I and our son, under the c-section tent while I am being stitched up.

Miraculously, the minute my little man was born I felt a tonne better. In fact after his birth, both my headache and my vomiting disappeared. I still couldn't write and I had bad balance but I was not physically ill anymore. Apparently this was due to the immediate drop in progesterone.

A little later in the recovery room, Rick was holding him when all of a sudden he asked the nurse if babies are born with the instinct to suck (he was sucking on Rick's neck). The nurse asked if I wanted to breast feed and of course I said yes. He was very good at it. He had a great latch and a strong suck. He was born at 8:30 am and 3:00 am that following night my milk came in. There was so much I had to pump a little before he could latch again. From then on our breast feeding was so easy. I had plenty of milk (in fact I pumped enough in those 10 days, while I was feeding him too, that he had breast milk the week I was in the hospital). Here is a picture of us in the hospital nursing.

I have no idea if it would have continued to be this easy. For 10 days I had total bliss. Well.. one night I had spaghetti sauce and the poor little dude screamed his head off for about 2 hours.. but I vowed never to eat spaghetti sauce again. But we had no latch problems, and I didn't get sore nipples. In fact he left the hospital 5 lbs 7 ozs and 2 days later was already 5 lbs 9 oz. And a week later 6.5.

Here is a picture of the little guy the day we got home from the hospital, you can really see how tiny he was.

Sadly however while I was in the hospital for my neurosurgery my milk dried up. I had rented an electric pump and had grand ideas about pumping and dumping during my hospital stay. My surgery was scheduled for 12:30 pm but I had to arrive and have a cat scan (with contrast dye) at 8:30. The surgery itself was 5 hours and then I spent 3 hours in the recovery room. My first opportunity to pump since I left home that day was 8:30 that night ( a full 12 hours). However, I was not capable of pumping by myself and I was in a step down ward (one step lower than ICU, where there are 4 patients and 1 nurse). Not only did I keep drifting in and out of sleep, but the other 3 patients were in much worse shape than me and the poor nurse had no chance to help me until 2:30 am. I did pump at that point and it completely and utterly drained me. I went to sleep and slept until 10:00 the next morning. Then I had to go for another MRI and then got moved to a private room. At this point pumping became much harder. I was on the neurosurgery floor and the nurses were run ragged (and not used to dealing with pregnancy or maternal issues). It was almost impossible to get their help with pumping. Besides that, I had decided not to bring my little man to the hospital for a visit because I was worried about germs, so I didn't want to wear myself out and prolong my hospital stay. Besides I really found pumping very draining at that point. After a 15 minute pump I would sleep for 3-4 hours. I generally only pumped about 2-3 times a day. By Friday when I could use the milk again, there was none left. I was disappointed at the time but rationalized saying that with all the medication I had been on and the 2 contrast dyes, the formula was probably better for him anyway. Of course I had been assured by the doctors that it would all be out of my system by now.

Now however, the loss of breastfeeding is my biggest regret and I can't help wondering if I could have done more to ensure I didn't lose it. If I knew then how I would feel now, could I have made myself pump more. I guess I will never know.