I Have a Good Excuse!

I have a good excuse for not posting more often. I am still in the hospital. We were due to go home on Tuesday, but a couple of hours before we were to leave an abscess in my C-section wound broke open, and I have been pretty sick since. I'll spare the gory details for now, but it is a large abscess and the treatment for it involves twice a day wound treatments that are very painful. They did a CT scan yesterday to make sure it hadn't gone below the fascia and infected my organs, and so far so good on that front. But I am in quite a bit of pain, and they tell me it could be weeks before I am healed from this. In the meantime, we are struggling to take care of the baby (luckily, we got a pretty good baby!) and get me healed, and the whole family remains stuck in this awful hospital (I'll share more about my hospital experience once I am free of here). If I continue to heal and nothing new goes wrong, we will be allowed to leave Monday, just shy of two weeks since we checked in. Once we are home, a nurse will have to come to our house twice a day to continue the wound treatments. If I have not healed significantly by next Friday (a week from today, and also my birthday, coincidentally), my doctor said she will have to operate again to close it up.


The baby is doing well, though. She is breastfeeding like a champ (my milk has come in to the point where she frequently chokes and milk sometimes comes out of her nose! Poor baby!) and has already regained her birth weight, which they tell us usually takes two weeks. She is smiley and lovable, and most of the time she only screams if she is hungry. She had jaundice, but has been doing better since Tuesday. We are sleep deprived like any new parents, and its very hard to establish any routines while stuck in the hospital. People come and go from our room with no regard for a sleeping baby, and the rules about visitors are lax and downright bizarre compared to home (for example, as I write this, it is 40 minutes after visiting hours have ended, and there are approximately ten people in the room next door, all of whom have either a beer or a glass of wine in their hands. I know because they leave the door open so they can share the party with the whole hall.) G is a diaper changing champion at this point, though he calls himself "daddy baddy" because he gets all the jobs that make her mad, like diaper changing and baths. But until breastfeeding is solidly established and I can start pumping for bottle feedings at night, he can't exactly feed her. I am doing my job as milk factory, and I guess its going well, she seems happy. We can't wait to get her home and get routines established, but of course it will be difficult for as long as I am having trouble walking around and being mobile. Hopefully my wounds will heal sufficiently before G has to go back to work.

It is very hard to find the time to get online, so pardon the infrequent updates. I thank all of you who have sent emails, but apologize for not having had the opportunity to read them yet. At some point I will go through them all and respond, but right now I use most of my limited internet time to talk to my family, who are having a very hard time with this whole situation. I appreciate all of the get well wishes and congrats that we have received!