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13 Weeks Pregnant and All I Got Was This Bottle Of Percodan

So, I've lost the baby. Last night I miscarried my 13 week pregnancy.

Monday morning, after having some bleeding this weekend, I had an ultrasound that showed that there was no heartbeat and that the fetus had stopped developing at 8 weeks.

It's called a missed miscarriage.

My midwife recommended that I wait until the "products of conception" passed naturally but got me an appointment with a Gyn for this afternoon to go over my options (wait, take labour inducing drugs, d&c). But yesterday morning, I experienced the most horrific contractions I could have ever imagined.

I had 90 minutes of stabbing contractions that I could feel in my back and hips, as well as my poor battered uterus. The contractions came back around 5pm. I was just sitting down to dinner - my mother had made us dinner for my birthday - and the stupid contractions started up again.

At first I could just shift my weight to my hip and things would be fine. Then my step dad brought a pillow over for me to sit on. By the time I had blown out the candle on my cake, I was over on a reclining chair in the living room. When the cake was done - and my goodness, I have to tell you that I L O V E sugary birthday cake sooooo much - I asked Mum if I could take a soak in her tub.

SIDENOTE: if you are ever labouring with contractions, get the hell into a bathtub or jacuzzi because there is something about being in warm water that does wonders for contractions, and if you need to dilate to deliver a baby, I GUARANTEE that your labouring time will be cut in half! Water is a miracle worker for labour.

So, I soaked for a half hour or so and then went to sit on a big soft chair. By 8pm I was bawling and moaning. The contractions were unbearable.

I have given birth before. I have even given birth with absolutely no pain management medication. I have endured, under the power of my own will, contractions that made my toes curl. I have endured contractions that made my midwife's toes curl! But, yesterday's contractions, relentless contractions that never stopped, that felt like someone was stabbing me over and over again, these contractions made me understand why some women need medication.

Since the contractions were only getting worse, and the midwife had told me I should be getting into the hospital if I was unable to manage the pain, I insisted we drive back home (a 30 minute drive to downtown and the hospital), contact the midwife and think about going to the hospital.

Things I know now after driving across town in severe pain: the city must hire the shittiest contracters to resurface the roads because we drove over the shittiest roads ever last night. Potholes, cracks, ripples, uneven patches - I FELT EVERY SINGLE HORRIBLE BUMP. What the hell do we pay taxes for anyway!

Turning up to take a short cut that would have taken us directly home which is also a few blocks past our hospital, we get stopped at a rail crossing. While moaning frantically and pulling myself off the seat using the Oh Shit handle set in the ceiling, that train from hell advanced partway, stopped, backed up four cars, advanced five cars and then stopped. Five minutes of this, and being a two minute drive from the hospital, I finally snapped and started screaming, "GET OUT OF HERE! MOVE! TURN! HOSPITAL! NO MORE PAIN! GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL! JUST GO! THE PAIN!"

It was not one of my prettier moments and I am absolutely sure that my son is now scarred for life and will refuse to consider having children after watching his mother miscarry.

Of course, the moment we got the stupid 40' Sable turned around, the train was gone and the gate was lifting, but that's life, eh? I'm sure I'll laugh about it in a year or two when I can no longer remember what the pain of evil contractions feels like and I tempt fate by trying to breed again.Yeah, I'll laugh about it one day.

Arriving at the hospital, I hobbled down the hall to the triage and waiting room, where, in front of two dozen calm strangers, I stood, sorta, bent over, with my elbows on my knees and moaned and cried out loud. I stood there for five minutes before the triage nurse would take me and when I got sat down in front of her and gathered enough breath to answer her questions, she scolded me that I was making too much noise and I should "be quiet" as I was scaring my son.

BIG SIDENOTE: Some women vocalize their pain. If you ever come into contact with a woman in severe pain who is moaning loudly, DO NOT TELL HERE TO BE QUIET! Let me just reiterate that: DON'T BE THE ASSHOLE WHO TELLS A LABOURING WOMAN TO BE QUIET - CONTRACTIONS HURT MORE THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE, SO KEEP YOUR OPINIONS TO YOURSELF.

I then had to sit in the waiting room surrounded by calm people. I seriously doubt there was anything wrong with them. They were all so bored. I bet none of them could find anything on TV to watch, so they all walked into the Emergency ward for a little Tuesday night action. I had to take a bathroom break where I lost my guts for the third time that day - see just like real labour, all the way down to the bowel evacuation.

Finally they ushered me into a room and made me strip and lie under a very thin blanket and roll around in pain for an hour before someone came in to find out what was going on. And here is my reason for why Conservatives suck ass in Ontario: Over the course of three hours, various personnel, residents and nurses but never a doctor, came in and took my history (and then disappeared), confirmed my history(and then disappeared), put in an IV of fluids(and disappeared) and then hook in some morphine and gravol to the IV drip. I might have fallen into a coma and noone would have known because it was nearly two hours and three panic buttons and tired hubby wandering around looking for staff before someone came in and discovered that the morphine didn't have any effect.

If those damned Conservatives hadn't systematically dismantled our health care system, I might have been able to receive medication in a reasonable amount of time AND been monitored to 1) make sure it was working, and 2) make sure I didn't have an adverse reaction to it.

And, again, I was told to be quiet.

Nurse: "All that crying and moaning is just making the pain worse." (don't these people have to take a course on bedside manner? I'm thinking perhaps the only class they went to was the one where they taught everyone "if you want to calm scared people in pain who are getting hysterical, yell at them!)
Me: "Have you ever had a fucking miscarriage?"
Nurse: "There's no reason to use that language."
Me: "Then don't try to tell me how to manage my pain!"

NOTE: I was having non-stop sharp contractions so I wasn't using my polite voice. and, besides, have I mentioned how you shouldn't telling a woman having contractions not to make noise? Also, my mum had picked Kieran up and offered to keep him not only overnight but all the next day too! Woohoo!

The nurse returned twenty minutes later and shot me up in the butt with more morphine and added some fentanyl to my IV drip. After that, things were good, though I still had to wait another two hours before the doctor came in with a scrip for Percodan and let me go home.

Of course, the whole time I was lying on the very flat, very narrow gurney in my hospital gown, I was bleeding freely. It took about ten minutes to get cleaned up and by then I had to pee badly. I had to pee so badly, I started to spontaneously pee on the floor and didn't even feel it. In fact, I had to pee so damned badly that the only sensation that made it through the morphine/fentanyl cocktail was my bladder spasming. So, I trotted down the hall and into a bathroom to relieve myself.

As I peed, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my cervix and then felt a large soft mass come out of me. A second, smaller mass came out of me a second later and then, as if by miracle, all sensation coming from my uterus stopped. I felt a little like I did after giving birth: tired out, like my vagina had been taken and pulled inside out and stretched over a garbage pail and somebody had used my uterus as a speed bag for boxing practice.

The Percodan did a nice job of freeing me of that punched out feeling.

Since Sean went to work this morning and Kieran was at my mum's, I had the day free, all by myself to rest. Such a rare occasion! What did I do? I swept and mopped the kitchen. I'm such a mom.

Since this is a mommy blog...

I suppose I should talk about Kieran a little, since he is the reason I'm a mom and this is called momcast.

Kieran and I weaned almost two weeks ago. We had been down to a single session of nursing for a very long time. He was only latching on at bedtime and usually fell asleep within a couple of minutes.

I originally wanted to let him wean himself, but since I'm pregnant and experiencing sore breasts without someone using them for bedtime snack, I gently encouraged weaning so that I could have a few months free before going back to fulltime nursing.

As a result of the change in routine, it now takes Kieran longer to settle enough to fall asleep. Where before I could lie down with him at 8:30/9:00, he is now running around till he exhausts himself around 10:00/10:30. As a result, he's very tired in the morning when we have to get up at 6:45 to get ready for daycare.

Normally he falls asleep on me, I put him into his own bed and he comes running, whining, to my bed after midnight. We take him into bed, we being me and Sean the hubby, and he falls immediately asleep. During his sleep he moves around and eventually shoves his feet into Sean's back, making sleeping on the couch a much more comfortable option for Sean.

Last night Kieran was particularly fussy and he went straight into our bed where he sqirmed and whinged and whined for hours. At one point Sean got up to go the couch, but I didn't want him chased out of bed by a toddler, so I made him stay.

At some point Kieran ended up with his head at the foot of the bed and he kept inching forward in his sleep until there was no longer any bed left. He ended up on the floor with a thud and Sean and I jerked awake. The poor baby was crying half asleep, startled and hurt.

Soon after, Sean headed to the couch, Kieran spread out and finally fell into a deep and calm sleep.

Thank goodness it is Saturday tomorrow so that we can all sleep in.

Gals who rock...

I am getting sooooo sick of Adam Curry of The Daily Source Code going on and on about The Lascivious Biddies. The band, while fun to listen to, just aren't serious contenders when it comes to BANDS THAT COULD BE BIG. They are a kitsch act.

How about a couple of gals who ARE contenders?

Carolyn Mark - Check out the CMT page for her latest record The Pros and Cons of Collaboration where you can listen to samples from the record.

Neko Case - Checkout the Billions Corporations pagefor Neko which features a song from her flat out amazing record The Tigers Have Spoken which features one of my major crush bands, The Sadies.

Oh Susanna - Check out the listening (and watching) page at Oh Susanna's website and you can listen to singles and watch videos from all of her albums.

Now, these women work hard, write untouchably great music and tour their asses off. They are the sorts of musicians who, given enough exposure, could become household names. They put the Lascivious Biddies, who I'm sure are nice gals, to shame.

Adam, the one-man overhype machine, once fantasized that the Biddies would be nominated for Grammies, and all because of him, but he's got his head up his arse and knows nothing about music if he seriously believes that. For all the hype the Biddies are getting, they'll never be able to break through the ho-down chanteuse thing they have going on. They'll always be a lounge act.

The three women mentioned above actually have a shot at winning industry awards. But, more than that, they create impeccable, infectious music.

It's coming...

It looks like I have found an economical solution to my hosting problem. Liberated Syndication! They are a new company catering directly to the podcasting community. They offer a graduated hosting solution that starts off at $5 a month and goes up from there depending on your storage needs.

The big highlight: unlimited bandwidth! (Well, probably within reason. I mean, if you start needing terabytes of bandwith every week, they'll probably need you to step up with your cheque book, but that's just my common sense and not based on anything I've heard from LibSyn.)

So, you can start off at the lowest level and if three months later you have a huge archive, you just bump up to the next level! And you pay on a month to month basis through Paypal, so us hippies who are anti-credit can get in on the game!

I'm so happy!

And, btw...

Woohoo on my second comment! I feel famous! haha! I am drunk with power!

OK, I realise this means that two people other than my husband have looked at this blog. It's a start, though. World domination next. Me and Dawn Micelli taking over the world and Amy Gahran getting proud on us.

Poor little hippie me :(

So, I went to see a nutritionist last night as a way of heading off any gestational diabetes testing later in my pregnancy. (Yes, I am fat and I consume too much sugar, but I am not diabetic, even temporarily and there is no fucking way I'm drinking a pint of sludge and letting them take blood out of me to confirm that yes, just like every pregnant woman in the universe, I process my sugars slower than non-pregnant women - are you picking up on the fact that I am against the over-medicalization of birth and, in particular, against the kind of tests which don't actually tell you anything important but are really designed to cover some doctor's ass and make the pregnant woman worry and jump through nutritional hoops?)

OK, phew, back to my original rant...

The appointment was at 5:30pm. I spent 2 hours on buses, 3/4 of that time with a 22mo in a buggy and he was not happy to be cooped up that long. Upon getting off the bus, we had to walk the equivalent of 6 blocks into an industrial area, with sidewalks either unplowed (so we would walk partways on the road, with huge trucks rushing around us) or with huge upheaved chunks of sidwalk from where the trucks were driving in and out of their lots.

Now, who in their right mind puts a health facility, one my employer's contract as a provider of nutrional guidance, on the edge of a very large town in the industrial sector? The dietician explained that the company used to sell oxygen and so couldn't be near a residential or retail area.

I might be inclined to move the facility to one that was more convenient for the clients now that they no longer sell explosive substances, but then, that's just me.

Walking along an area like that affords lots of time for checking out the environs. And, there are a lot of weird retail businesses that choose to hole up in industrial areas. The golf store sorta made sense, as did the Vachon (they make twinkie-like desserts like Joe Louis, Flakies, etc.) outlet and the huge Bakery.

The one business that didn't seem to belong was Inurtia (yes, that's right, a play on the word Inertia). The first strange thing about this business is the use of a word with negative connotations. Inertia means, according to dictionary.com, means "Resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change: Latin, idleness, from iners, ". Wanna guess what kind of business this was?

It was a dance studio! A DANCE STUDIO NAMED AFTER A WORD TAKEN FROM THE LATIN FOR IDLENESS! Are these people stupid? Honestly! Would you send your sons and daughters to this studio, never mind the fact that you'd have to drive for a bloody hour to get there.

Let me just say that I muttered a lot walking to my appointment.