I am still here

I just wanted to check in and let everyone know that we are still alive and here. About 2 weeks ago I received a call from my mom telling me my grandmother was ill with the flue, after a few days the flue turned in a blocked intestines and a hospital stay with diagnosis that my grandmother had a stronger chance of dying then surviving. We immediately packed our bags and headed to Moncton via car to be with her. A day into our trip the diagnosis changed to a hernia pressing on her intestines causing a blockage and stopping her from being able to eat, this is operatable and after long deliberation she decided to go for the operation. (At her age there is only a 50% chance she would wake up from the anestestic let alone recover) it has now been a week and half we are in Moncton and she is looking like she is on the road to a great recovery. ( We are staying hopefull ) We were suppose to leave this morning however Moncton has been blanketed with an Easter snow storm, I guess we were ment to have one more visit with my grandmother before leaving.

Christophe's birth and my passage to motherhood

Tomorrow will mark Christophe's 1st Birthday. The other day, Christophe found his birth book from the midwives clinic, so I started looking at it and thought it would make an interesting post to mark this occasion.

These are the statistics from Christophe's birth:

Presentation: Vertex
Position: LOA
Complications: None
Medication given: Vancomycin
Induction: None
Augmentation: Artificial rupture of the membrane (breaking the water)
Method of delivery: Spontaneous
Placenta: Spontaneous delivery
Episiotomy: No
Laceration: 2nd degree
Delivery Anesthetics: No
Fetus gestational age: 37 weeks 6 days
Admitted to hospital: March 1/08 at 1:45am
Membranes ruptured: March 1/08 at 6:00am
Onset of Labour: March 1/08 at 9:30am
Complete cervical dilation: March 1/08 at 11:30am
Delivery of infant: March 1/08 at 1:05pm
Delivery of placenta: March 1/08 at 1:12pm
APGAR score at 1min & 5 min identical:
Heart rate:2
Respiration:2
Muscle tone:2
Reflex irritation:2
Skin color:1
Total:9
Resucitation: none
Sex: male
Weight: 7lb 15oz
Head: 35.5cm
Length: 51cm
Vitamin K: given
Erythromycin eye ointment: not given

The black eye

There are so many things I have been meaning to blog about but Christophe has been keeping me so busy...
The first one was the black eye.

Last week on tuesday the garbage can attacked me, I like saying that way because then I was not an idiot. I was on my way to the La Leche League Meeting and noticed that our bins were still at the curb so I parked the stroller and commenced to bring the bins back to the house when wham I slipped on ice and came falling down on my back with this massive bin on top of me the lid opened and hit me right in the eye. My glasses looked like pretzels. May I add that we requested the 2nd smallest bin but received one of the larger ones and are still awaiting for our new bin.

I have to say thank you to Tim and Val next door that took me in for a few hours and help with Christophe while I iced my head (see Geoff had agreed to go to this tech thing since I was going to be out that evening so I was solo). The lady at Envy eyware was also great she was able to rescue my glasses and this is a good thing because they are were not cheep.

Originally I was not going to go to the hospital because all was fine other then a few bruises but on the Thursday my vision started going blurry, so I sucked it up and went to the hospital again solo with Christophe, this time because Geoff had a job interview. Having a baby at the hospital actually makes time seem to go faster, Christophe makes for a fun distraction. We were there for about 2 hours. I got a cat-scan and Cristophe got to play with some nurses. The diagnosis was I had a mile concussion but I would be fine.

Today as I write this my black eye is gone but I still have a huge bruise left on my leg I hope it will be gone one day and my wrist is a bit sore.

What would your family do if your were hospitalised

After receiving an email from one of my fellow mommy friends informing me that another mom that attends of ours groups had been admitted to the hospital for a stroke it got me thinking.

Before going any further with this post I want to mention that the mom is doing fine and is in recovery with her family to her side.

What would I do if I were admitted to the hospital? Does Geoff know my wishes? Would he be strong enough to advocate for my right to breast-feed? Would he push and push with the nurses and doctors so Christophe could stay in my room overnight? I don't know and this is a discussion we will have tonight.

Does your spouse know what to do if the unthinkable happened? They say mommies are always there and never out of commission even when they are sick but at last we mommies are just humans also...

To all our fellow mommies that are battling with there health my thoughts are with you.

Trip to the ER

Every Wednesday morning we go to our Yoga class. It keeps me limber and Christophe get a kick out of seeing other babies. This week as we were just about to head out of the house I tripped on %^$ knows what with babes in arms. Somehow I managed to twist my body in a way to brake his fall however he still hit his head on the laundry basket. As soon as he hit his head he started screaming. My heart sunk I don't think I have ever been so worried and made after myself all at once. Since we were all packed to go I grabbed all his stuff and when to the ER at Toronto East General. Where he got check out and the doc said all was fine. We were asked to keep a close eye on him for a bit and look for sings of head injuries like, vomiting, excess sleepiness, excess crying ...

All in all I injured myself more then him; bad bruise on the knee and it hurst when I go from sitting on the floor to standing and one of my wrist feels like it was bent in a way that is impossible. Not to mentioned I was an emotional wreck; if Christophe would be old enough to ask for a car I might of bough it cause I felt so bad about what happened.

Christophe: Part I

Well, it's been a long day, but I guess it's time to send out 'the word' to anyone who hasn't already heard:


So, i'll cut to the point: the name-guessing contest is over, and we have a son, Christophe Joseph Wiseman. Kim was the only one to guess the first name in advance. How we got here is a bit of a long story.

Friday was a slow day - after Thursday's surprise discovery of faint contractions, we weren't sure what to expect when we went to sleep. By morning, Pierrette couldn't feel much in the way of contractions, so we mostly spent the day resting. By afternoon, I'd given up on anything happening, so I got some work done for The FeedRoom.

Although there were some contractions in the evening, nothing with enough regularity to worry about, so we went to sleep around 10:00. At about 11:30, Pierrette woke up feeling worried, as if something were wrong. She woke me up to track fetal movements and contractions. The contractions were all over the map (as they often are in early labour, and had been during hte day), but we got almost no fetal movements despite three Lindor chocolates, a Hershey's kiss and a glass of tangerine juice.

Worried, we decided to place a call to the midwives. They weighed the options of coming over with the doppler to check on baby's heartbreat, and meeting us at the hospital to do another no-stress-test, and decided to go with the latter. The first strip on the no-stress-test was fine, but it only had a single heart acceleration, which is lower than they'd like to see, so they did another twenty-minute strip. Part-way through the second strip, the baby's heartbeat dropped to 70 and got erratic for two minutes. This was enough to get an IV and oxygen into Pierrette within thirty seconds, so I guess that was worrisome.

The midwives consulted with the OB on call, and she recommended we move into a labour room, and, after further discussion, recommended we break Pierrette's waters. Since Pierrette and I were both hoping for home-birth and a very low-intervention approach, this didn't sit exceptionally well, but after talking through the available options, the midwives admitted that with the past day or two, they weren't very comfortable with a home-birth, and basically suggested we should move into accepting that a hospital birth was best for baby's health at this point.

I'll pick up this thread in the next post -- I've got a sleeping baby nearby, so I guess it's time to get some sleep myself before the baby alarm goes off again. I'vestill got to cover water-breaking, active labour, and post-labour fun. Lots to tell. And for reasons that will become evident in the next posts, thanks a lot to those who were able to help us out today - Basil, Kim, Roy, Brenda, Lisa, not to mention the 'production team' midwives from Don Mills - East York and Deanna, our Doula.

Midwife visit - Jan 24

Baby is well his heart beat is between 130 and 140 very normal for this time. He is still head down and Debra (who was replacing our midwives will they are on vacation) says he is growing fine. This visit they took some blood to test my iron levels, she said if there is a problem with the results she will call me.

Other then that yesterday we had our hospital tour (just in case we need to go). As much as the birthing wing is great at Toronto East General, this reinforced why we are doing a home birth and have a midwife.

The first thing that made me say to Geoff 'I am happy I wont have to do that' was the triage room, a large room with lots of beds that you wait in until you are dilated enough; however this is only if you have an OBGYN: midwife patients are triaged at home.

The rooms were all nice for hospital suites but having my own bed afterward, my own kitchen if I am hungry (there is nothing open near the hospital late at night), somewhere for Geoff to sleep that is not a horribly small surface (he is a big guy after all). It was also so warm in there that I though I was going to pass out.

However as much as the delivery bed is very hospital like it would be neat to have a bed that can do all of those crazy adjustments to help push baby out.

Eventfull Day

Yesterday was a long day.

It started with me having to get to work for 7am to prep for a 9am meeting. See, on Friday I needed to leave work at 6pm and had a topsy-turvy day so some of my stuff did not get done. So, my plan was to come in on Sunday and get it done. When I showed up at work Sunday, the elevators were not working so I wasted an hour and a bit of my day.... I guess me being trapped out of the elevator is better then if I would have gotten in and the elevator jammed with me inside.

I had a pretty jam packed day on Monday with lots of work-related meetings. Around 2pm Geoff calls me while in the elevator so I only hear part of what he was saying but enough to hear that something was wrong. As I started getting that sinking feeling and panicking; baby started kicking he probably could tell there was something wrong. Geoff finally got to the bottom of the elevators which seemed like the longest 15 seconds ever. He was feeling dizzy and and a bit of a black out and was heading to the hospital. He succeeded to convince me that I did not need to meet him right away (I am still not sure how he did that) So I finished up as quickly as possible what I was doing and headed down to the hospital around 4pm. As I spent the day worrying baby did also - he has never been this active.

Once we got to the hospital to make a long story short, we waited forever then saw a nurse and doctor that said Geoff most likely overheated and was standing too long. I think that is there way of saying they don't know what caused it. Geoff is going to make an appointment with both our Homeopath and Doctor just to be safe.

So at this point we are told not to worry but it's hard not to wonder what was the underlying cause.