...my current Most Embarrassing Moment.
This is not exactly g-rated, but I don't know why I'm warning about that since I haven't paid attention to that in my posts up to this point.
Seriously though, this story is hard for me to begin.
Hmmm...
How about some backstory?
This past week, we've had over half the windows replaced in our house. Which means, I needed to touch up paint around the window frames. And, since the furniture was already pulled into the middle of the room, I thought I might as well paint the walls too. This week we also found the exact loft bed that I've wanted for our oldest on craigslist, so I started priming that in our tiny back yard. Half the bed, the largest assembled part, was still sitting in the entryway though. In that same entry area, we had a tall ladder and a short step stool crowding the space because a spider egg had hatched in a ceiling light fixture and all day it had been raining baby spiders. The ladders were left up so that we could get to them throughout the day as they snuck out of their hiding places. I've also started about 25 organization projects in preparation for moving my husband's office this weekend, making his old one into a family/play room, preparing our room and nursery for baby and making myself work stations (sewing, crafting, writing, etc.) throughout the house. On top of this, I was in the middle of sorting laundry and I hadn't cleaned up the dinner mess yet. So, basically, our house was messier than it has ever been, and I think this includes the time when we were moving in and unpacking.
imagine this with piles of laundry too!
To get a brief break from it all before getting the girls to bed and diving back into all the chaos and work for the evening, I decided I needed a shower. While in said shower, I noticed something bulging out of me. (That's the nicest way I can say it, sorry its vague and strange). Now, I hadn't had any real contractions and I hadn't noticed any breaking of the water, and since this thing didn't feel like baby, my first fear was that it may be the cord. Of course it was too late in the evening to just run over to a local doctor or call and actually get my own doctor. Boy, do I wish I had a midwife, even one that I know of that I could have called, but no, I do not know a one. I called the on-call doctor, or rather had my husband call while I investigated further. Before even describing what a cord would look like to me, she wanted me to lay down with my bum on a pillow and call the paramedics (which I never want or have ever wanted to have to do in our small town). Now, after my investigation and getting a description of what a cord would look like, I was pretty certain that what I felt was not the cord, really, it couldn't be the cord, but this on-call doctor wanted me taking no chances.
I hung up and waited for a minute to make sure the baby was still moving and she was. My husband called my parents to come over and watch the girls who were screaming bloody freaking-murder in their room. I was beyond embarrassed that my parents had to see my house in the state it was in. Ugh.
I was stalling for a minute, trying to decide what to do. The baby was moving. Now that I was laying down, I couldn't feel what I had felt before. I still wanted to be checked out, but I couldn't bring myself to call the paramedics.
A matter of seconds into my ruminating, my parents showed up (they were only a few blocks away at my brother's house at the time, as he'd just had surgery that morning). And, of course, the retired fire captain (my dear daddy, whom I love so dearly) had already called the paramedics and of course I could hear the rig pulling up out front. Lovely. Embarrassing nightmare.
Now I had a number of emergency personnel inside my disastrously messy house. And of course they are guys that I know since my dad worked with them for decades and both of my brothers now work with them. Thank God neither of them were on this call! (I still haven't talked to either of my brothers, but the younger one who was working must have heard something on a radio because he called my cell phone right as the medic came into my bedroom and set down a large orange box on the one square foot of floor space not covered in sorted piles of dirty laundry. I didn't take the call).
I was, yes, still in my robe that is fitting less and less fully around my very large belly. I mean, it had only been minutes since I had gotten out of the shower at this point.
The medic, listened for a heartbeat. I refused to ask if he heard one since I could see her moving in my belly and I didn't want him making me scared by saying that he couldn't find one.
I can't tell the back and forth of the conversation between my husband, dad, medic and I at this point very precisely, mostly because it was so uncomfortable that I can't remember everything said and I don't have any desire to search my memory to make it more clear and more humiliating.
Thank God and good sense nobody in that room suggested taking a look. (They wouldn't have made it.)
After a short time, though, I decided not to ride in the ambulance and to have my husband drive me to the hospital to get checked out.
It took us twenty minutes to drive to our hospital. They were waiting for me and checked me immediately confirming that it wasn't the cord and that our baby girl was doing fine. After a couple hours in a gurney outside of the OR where I had Noa, I was told that the tearing I had had with my sunnyside-up delivery had caused my wall to weaken and now my bladder was starting to come out of me and that's what I had felt.
In the end I am glad I was checked out, I am glad we didn't take the ambulance to an unfamiliar hospital and I am glad mostly that nothing serious was wrong.
We saw a great doctor at the hospital and the nurses were absolutely wonderful. The lights bothered me and I couldn't stop pointing out how mortified/embarrassed/humiliated I was over some of the things that had happened. There was talk of moving to New Zealand. And I knew and admitted that I was still blocking a lot of the embarrassment out and that it would hit me still harder later on. Its been two days since I've shown myself around town. I'm still terrified of running into that particular crew (medics, firemen, etc.) at the grocery store or on Main Street. BUT that doesn't mean I am ungrateful. Just hella embarrassed.
Currently (as in, this afternoon) I am struggling with feeling very old and broken. I think it has something to do with the searches I've done that have brought up things like bladder prolapse. I'm not 100% sure that this is what is going on since the doctor at the hospital didn't use those words, so I will have to ask my obgyn next week. Anyway, physically it is apparent that I am slowly falling apart, which I guess has been happening since my own birth, but each child I birth seems to accelerate the process and I am uncomfortable with it.
The cherry on top of the evening was a lovely migraine with visual aura (blindness for 20 minutes) that came on about 1am. Luckily, it was time to get in bed and the visual aura was distracting enough (from the overwhelming embarrassment I now felt) that I was able to fall asleep before the bad headache set in.
baby sister's still in there
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