23 days

That's the magic number. Twenty-three days to go. It's a chlly, gray January day. It has snowed on and off all day. The gray weather matches the gray mood within these four walls, though thanks be to God that mood has brightened a bit as the days widdle down to zero.

I suppose I should give a little background of how I found myself confined to a hospital bed while my five children and husband are left to fend for themselves at home.

This is my 7th pregnancy and will be our family's 6th child. We're having a baby girl in no more than four weeks from now. Her name will be Philomena Anne as I have promised dear St. Philomena her namesake if she sees me successfully through this turbulent pregnancy. St. Anne is also my patron and has been a devoted friend in heaven for a long time now. From what I am told my little unborn Philomena is now 4 pounds 2 ounces at best estimation. I am 32 weeks pregnant with her. My journey to best rest with my little Philomena began 11 years ago...

My first child was born 11 years ago. I was 28 years old and my husband Kevin was 26. We were thrilled to learn of the pregnancy in May 1997. The thrill soon wore off when in June I was suddenly struck with hyperemisis gravidum from Greek hyper and emesis and Latin (how our Traditional Catholic hearts love to hear the latin!!!!) gravida; meaning " excessive vomiting of pregnant women." Not pretty. At the time I was working at a Radiology practice as an assistant. I worked in the "reading room" with 5 or 6 Radiologists. Think of the reading room as the "bat cave." It's dark all the time with the exception of the white lights that illuminate the x-ray films. I only saw daylight when I went into the kitchen for a break. I would hang all the films for them and call in patient diagnoses. So when severe morning sickness struck, I would sneak into the bat cave, thankful that the darkness would mask the green tint of my face. It wasn't a fun time having to throw up in the employee bathroom. By the end of July I was still vomiting and had lost 12 pounds which back in the day put me at around 100 pounds. The good old days....

By August and no relief in sight and missing many days of work, I returned to my OB and begged and pleaded that they DO something for me...anything...just please give me relief so that I can see something other than the inside of a toilet bowl. On the particular day that I went to the OB's office, my regular OB was out and the partner saw me. He said these words that I will never forget, "Well we can give you some antinausea medication to help relieve your symptoms." I didn't know whether to smack him or hug him. Why hadn't someone mentioned this little white-pilled wonder two months and 12 pounds ago????

From there things started looking slightly more cheery. By the end of October though I had a sharp pain in my belly. We went to the ER and found that besides the pain I was also regularly contracting. I was only 6 months pregnant at the time. No one could seem to tell us the nature of the pain so they sent us home. Later that evening, the pain became unbearable so my husband drove me back to the ER looking for some answers. My OB showed up this time (yes, the one who never thought to offer me the little magic pills!) and found the source of the pain - a degenerating fibroid. I forget now how big they said it was, but it was a decent size because they promptly put me on morphine. Being a non-drug user and having never taken a single drug in my life more powerful then Tylenol, I could see where a person could just go crazy off this stuff. They gave me some sort of pump that would give me measured dosages. I just remember that week as being 7 days filled with pushing that awesome red button!

The only thing that didn't go away was the contractions and since it was way too early to deliver our little girl, I was put on Brethine or Terbutaline to help ease the contractions. While this drug did work it also made me extremely jittery like having 17 cups of coffee a day. My magic number with my first pregnancy was 36 weeks. My OB told me that at 36 weeks I could stop taking the Brethine.

I took a leave of absence from my job at that point and played the waiting game. My daughter was due January 28, 1998, so on January 1st or so, I stopped taking the Brethine and went into labor shortly thereafter in the early morning hours of January 3rd. I was having regular, but not too painful contractions and went to labor and delivery around 8 am. At first I was naively thinking to myself that labor really wasn't all that bad until about an hour later I had a contraction that just about sent me crashing through the walls into the adjoining room, which personally, I think would have been more pleasant than the monumentous pain I was now experiencing. Okay, I admit it I am a big baby in the pain department. I have the mental strength of a warrior, but physical pain is a different story. Where was my morphine drip now?? I was given Pitocin, a drug to help "move labor along" sometime before noon and an epidural to help with the pain. I told my husband, who is notorious for being cranky when he does not eat to go to the cafeteria and get something to eat. Off he goes. Ten minutes later I am feeling this weird urge to push. I tell the nurses who met my announcement with much skeptisism. They poo-poo'd me for a bit and finallly consented to check me. Sure enough, I was fully dilated and ready to go. I frantically paged my husband a 911 and he sprinted out of the cafeteria to my bedside. After an hour of pushing and realizing what the St. Paul meant when he said these words from 1 Timothy 2:14-15, "And Adam was not seduced; but the woman being seduced, was in the transgression. Yet she shall be saved through childbearing; if she continue in faith, and love, and sanctification, with sobriety." Yep. That about sums it up. That was the hardest hour of my life and the best hour of "work" I had ever done.

My daughter, Jordana Mae was born at 1:18 pm at 6 pounds and 8 ounces. I spent the next 6 hours in isolation, alone in my hospital room. Jordana was born with a little respiratory distress. She was "caving" her chest as she was breathing so that kept her in the nursery to watch her. My husband never left her side, which is what I wanted, but the loneliness of those six hours in my room, recovering from birth, was probably all part of the saving process a woman goes through for the good of her own soul.

We went home in two days and she did great....for a bit. She wouldn't breastfeed because her sucking reflex wasn't as good as that of a baby born full term. I tried and even had a "lactation specialist" help me out. This specialist could have been a military sergeant or a prison guard or perhaps an interogator for the CIA. Yeah, it was that bad. At the end of each interrogation, I mean training session, I was in tears and my daughter was no closer to getting the appropriate nutrients a premature baby should have been getting. I was told to pump the breastmilk. I did what I was told because being a first time mother I believed that if I didn't provide my newborn with breast milk, well she might not ever be smart enough to be a nuclear physicist or an astronaut. If I *gasp* went to formula, she may not ever make it past the 5th grade! Yes, I am being sarcastic, but this was how bad it was.

So the pump arrived. It was this blue machine the size of a small safe. I will never, ever forget hooking this contraption up to me for the first time and turning the power on. I remember thinking that this thing would suck my entire body into the blue box much like what you see in the cartoons. So my day was pumping, feeding, changing diapers, pumping and feeding some more. Jordana began showing signs of colic at about four weeks. I was very perplexed because she was getting breastmilk which was suppose to be the last thing in the universe to give my child colic. The drill at night was something like this: She would wake to eat. I would feed her, put her back down to sleep, get the monster pump out and pump for 20-25 minutes, take the milk to the freezer and go back to sleep. By the time that was all done my daughter was awake again in less than two hours for another feeding and the process would start all over. She was getting crankier and crankier by the day. She wouldn't allow us to sit and feed her, we had to pace with her up and down the floors in constant motion to get her to finish her bottle.

Exhausted after two months of this, I finally broke down and bought some milk based formula. Her colic continued to get worse and now she started having ear infections. We still had to pace to feed her. So the pediatrician tells us to switch to soy. I switched to soy and it only made things worse because now she was colicky, not sleeping, and constipated. I will never forget her tiny little fists curled up as she ate. She would constantly curl up in a ball and turn red. Something was really wrong. By five to six months and extremely sleep deprived and exhausted and after the third ear infection, we took her back to the pediatrician. He didn't see anything wrong. He said maybe she needs tubes. Having had enough and having a great insurance plan at the time I made an appointment at the pediatric allergist. He did some scratch skin testing on her and we found her to have a slight allergy to milk. The allergist said even though her skin testing did show a glaring positive to milk and soy he advised that we try a hypoallergenic formula. It was like night and day. This little 6-month old baby was transformed practically overnight! She started sleeping better, though not through the night until she was 12 months old, but sleeping longer spans and she wasn't curling into a ball anymore. It was like a miracle.

I had my own struggles during those first six months or so. I had the blues like they say most mothers will get after the birth of their child. It's called postpartum depression, but all the books will tell you it will only last for a couple of weeks and then subside. It never subsided for me and I didn't make the connection that it truly was postpartum because I was so sleep deprived. I assumed my moods were so horrible because I wasn't getting any sleep. I clearly remember driving places and not knowing how I got there; what roads I took or even what time I left. I couldn't complete a single thought in my head to save my life. It was a mixture of stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation and postpartum depression that contributed to my sorry state in life at that time.

One day while at the grocery store I noticed some herbal supplements in the vitamin aisle. I found one that said it was good for helping treat depression. So I bought this bottle of St. John's Wort. It did seem to help and life was becoming a little more manageable for both my daughter and my husband and I. It would be three and a half years before our next little one would come along. I will tell her story tomorrow.

For now, I will sit here and try to be patient and look forward to my trips downstairs to the antenatal testing unit as my big "day out." I go twice a week. I liken it to my trips out to Barnes and Noble book store when I am home and our family is running like a well oiled machine. Every so often my husband will tell me to get out of the house and go somewhere to relieve some stress; I am guessing this is good for his own sanity as well as mine. The problem is going one floor down in the hospital in a wheelchair and not being able to read anything except these awful women's magazines is a bit different than going to my favorite book store, grabbing a hot cup of tea and heading for the history or psychology section of the bookstore, but it will have to do for now.