Like a virgin

In the most fundamental of ways, this is all old hat — not late pregnancy, but a C-section followed by bringing home a baby.  I know, very roughly, what those things are like, and could imagine I have an idea of what to expect.  You know, if I were delusional.  And complacent.  And possessed of muuuch better drugs than I currently take.  (I cannot say much for the hallucinogenic properties of insulin, heparin, or baby aspirin, although I do think I perceive the mildest of buzzes from the three dozen Tums I just crushed and sprinkled on my Kashi GoLean Crunch.  I have it on good authority, which is to say the picture on the bottle, that they are every bit as healthful as fruit.)

But the fact is I don't really know what I'm in for in either arena, delivery or product thereof.  I come to this as an amateur.

My C-section with Charlie came about because I was so sick.  While I was healing from the incision, my body was still working pretty hard to normalize my blood pressure, to ward off seizures, to restore order after my liver's unsuccessful breakout attempt, and to replenish all those platelets I'd heedlessly discarded, thinking I wouldn't need them.  So on the one hand, this time will be better; I'm healthy going in.  But one of the very, very few advantages of having a baby in the NICU — round-the-clock child care during the immediate postpartum period — meant that I got enough rest during my convalescence.  I don't expect that to be the case this time.  (Did I just use "advantages" and "NICU" in the same sentence?  And did I just boldly say, in front of God and everybody, using my outside voice, that I expect a healthy baby?  Wait, maybe those Tums work better than I'd thought.)

And every time I tell myself that the pain postpartum was minimal, I have to remember that I don't actually know how heavily medicated I truly was.  I know that after I left the hospital, I took only a single Percocet and felt fatigued but otherwise fine.  But before that?  I'm sure I was given something, and perhaps everything, for pain during the five days I spent in the hospital.  I have no idea, therefore, how much anything hurt.

Five days in the hospital, by the way, left me as enervated as a kitten.  A kitten who'd just had HELLP.  Whether it was the prolonged rest, the illness, or the surgery itself that left me so wrung out, I remember being tired.  But I also think the knowledge that I needed to be up and around galvanized me into action, and probably gave me more energy than I'd have otherwise had.  After all, if I didn't shower and dress every day to go to the NICU and stare really hard at Charlie's isolette, what was there, really, to keep him alive?  CPAP?  TPN?  Caffeine?  Lasix?  Broad-spectrum antibiotics?  Doctors?  Hmph, what do they know?

So I don't feel I can draw any sort of inferences about what it's like to recover from a C-section performed under controlled conditions.  I don't think anything I've experienced is relevant.  And that was just the delivery and its immediate aftermath.  There's also the fact that while I have indeed cared for a newborn, the circumstances this time will be wildly different.

Charlie started off easy.  Unlike most newborns, many preemies come home having become habituated to a schedule.  By the time he was 36 weeks' gestation, Charlie's needs erupted, like Old Faithful, on a solidly reliable timetable.  And Paul and I had nothing to do but tend to those needs, working in shifts so that each of us got roughly enough rest.

But then things got tougher.  Reflux, colic, Charie's mulish refusal to sleep when I would have found it most convenient — mostly normal newborn stuff in origin, but exacerbated by his prematurity.  It is not, I think, inaccurate to say that he was in many ways harder than your average newborn.  It is also fair to say that we were a little too aware of that, a little too absorbed, our garden variety new-parent neuroses magnified by the trauma of what we'd gone through.  I like to sum it up by saying, We were crazy, and Charlie was hard.  Both things equally true.

I want to think this will be different, but it's impossible to predict.  We do have a baby under our belts, and everyone says it's easier with the second.  (By "everyone" I mean the neighbor who collared me at the farmer's market last week specifically to ask me if I was having this baby "naturally."  "Do you mean do I intend to push it out through my newly distended vagina?" I wanted to ask in a loud voice with a polite blink.  But I chickened out, and instead only smiled sickly while fantasizing about battering her senseless with the giant zucchini that was closest to hand.  And thought about just how not natural every aspect of this reproductive endeavor has been.  Why, I'm practically birthing a Lunchable here.)

But it is exactly that baby under our belts — Charlie, who decided this morning that he was a washing machine, and could be persuaded to drink his milk only when I assured him it was fabric softener — that concerns me.  I don't worry about shortchanging a baby, because while a newborn's physical needs may be more immediate, his emotional needs are simple and easily satisfied.  A three-and-a-half-year-old is a different matter.  The baby may be easier than Charlie was, but Charlie will be harder.  More fragile and surely more needy.

I do not want him to get lost in the new baby shuffle.  What I imagine is not significantly decreasing our attention to Charlie, but significantly decreasing the absorption we might invest in the baby were he our first — perhaps to the benefit of us all.  And not spending the whole first year staring really hard at the baby you didn't think you'd get will be, like most of the rest of this for me, an entirely new experience.