Hey everybody. Not that anybody cares, but my little girl was born on the stroke of midnight, on the 27th. That's 51 hours of labor. She was 20.5 inches long and 10.6 pounds. Also, I learned what "code blue" means. If you said respiratory arrest, you are correct. The good news is that our stay in the NICU was limited to only an hour and a half and there wasn't any brain damage from the lack of oxygen. While I was with her, my wife lost nearly 2 liters of blood while she was getting taken care of. That's right folks. I could have lost both my wife and my child on the same day. I'm happy to report that everybody is at home now, in a constant state of drowsiness. At about 3:30 in the morning the second day we're home, Mrs. James is calling for me from the nursery. Baby James has been having problems latching. She'll basically turn purple and scream whenever we'd try to get her to feed. Since she was fussing so much, she made the belly button stump start bleeding. My wife, seeing this, starts freaking out. Meanwhile, one of our dogs decides the only way he can help is to stress vomit everywhere. It took me an hour to clean up dog puke, settle down the baby and convince my wife that CPS wasn't going to take Baby James away. None of this was in the manual.
Wait, those bastards gave you a MANUAL? I was cheated. OK, I had WTEWYE, so it wasn't total ignorance. Meanwhile, congratulations to the James family. Good luck!
I do not want to have children and stories like the above just reinforce it more and more. I love how some parent tells you some horror story in the middle of their child creating a new one and look at me weird when I say I don't want children. I'm seriously considering a vasectomy for my 30th birthday next year.
Nothin' beats a good ol' universal key. In other news: Today at work: a lecture on changing the institutional culture and not using "certain words" and "certain jokes", from a man who once openly used "coffee bitch" as a form of address towards me. Featuring! A senior physician who joked about a cut on my face being the result of intimate partner violence.
This should be cross-stitched on a pillow and given to all new parents for Fucking Truth. Congrolences, Jimmy.
My son was born a month early. We had to spend another five days at the hospital due to complications (jaundice, which is to be expected from a pre-me). Went home, kid wasn't eating, a week later he was in the NICU for a week for jaundice and what was slang term a "grower and feeder." Sounds like some kind of fat porn but basically it's when they have dangerously low body weight, so they stick a tube down their nose and force feed them. Fun times. Within the next month we were in the hospital another five times (PTSD makes me freak the fuck out there because it's where I almost died with my brain tumor), and I had to save his life with the heimlich twice. Every book you've ever read will always be wrong, but getting CPR/1st aid certified helps A LOT. It gives you that extra level of comfort and allows you to stay calm when shit really hits the fan. Congrats, Jimmy. Changing diapers sucks.
Yeah, our daughter was early too. She was born at 26 weeks and spent two months in intensive care and ripped out her feeding tube so often she has a scar running into her nostril. Her first two years were a red nightmare: coming down with RSV twice nearly killed her and she caught the lovely H1N1 flu. There is no "magic of childbirth/parenthood" when you're in the NICU. If you're there long enough the worst thing imaginable eventually happens to a family, and it happen often. It's an absolutely horrific place to be, run by some very incredible people. I can't believe somebody so small could fight so hard. She was two pounds when she was born, and is the smallest kid in her grade. But healthy now. Steroids strengthened her lungs and she stopped getting sick all the time after the terrible two's. Sorry, that was a downer. Here's an otter: