There is one thing that I hope my girls ...
STOP. "My girls." Those words still sound so weird to me. They are so beautifully, magically, unbelievably weird. And fantastic.
ANYWAY.
I hope that some day my girls think back and remember these words that were written in this blog:
C-SECTIONS ARE THE WORST.
I don't mean that as a complaint; I mean that as blackmail. Someday when they are picking a nursing home where I will spend my golden years, I hope that they remember that getting cut open, gutted, having nearly 10 pounds ripped from your body, and then getting sewn back up is a level of misery that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. Drugs help, but they certainly don't make it OK.
Go with the nice nursing home, girls, because I'm about to detail exactly how much you owe me.
(Mila, you owe me a tiny bit more than Alexis does. I'm just sayin'.)
The same drugs that make a c-section almost tolerable apparently make my body SUPER unhappy. It was the sort of thing that I figured out back when Alexis was born, but I didn't know it was the drugs back then. I thought maybe human error was to blame for the nausea that hit me like a tornado in the moments before and following her birth. One of my most vivid memories of that night is puking into a burgundy bedpan while the husband sat at the foot of my bed eating M&Ms.
He was hungry. I vowed to never eat M&Ms again.
It occurred to me that I should mention the puking thing to the anesthesiologist before we got started this time around. He double-checked some things and vowed that he was prepared. We even had a signal I could use if I couldn't talk when it hit.
And I couldn't. Minutes before the cutting began, before the spinal had even set in, the nausea came flying into the room like Tarzan. I was toast. I made the signal, the anesthesiologist jumped like a jack-in-the-box, and things were quickly under control. I'm pretty sure I owe the guy a hug for moving as fast as he did.
But eventually Mila was a real, live, awesome thing that I can stare at for hours on end and we were back in my room. We were back in my room with the anesthesiologist still there, waiting to make sure the drugs did everything they were supposed to do. Tarzan came storming in again. That time my bestie with the drugs wasn't quite as quick and I had to wage war against the contents of my stomach.
I won. Barely.
That was the beginning of hours of battles against puke.
Some of the battles were relatively easy, others not so much. But when another soldier entered the battlefield, things got more complicated.
Alexis.
As soon as she was out of school, she was rushed to the hospital to meet her new sibling. There will be more on that later because it was The Best Ever, but once Alexis was in the room, the battles had to be fought more subtly.
Alexis was super worried about me. APPARENTLY seeing your mom all tubed up and immobile is a little bit upsetting when you're as empathetic as she is. I didn't want her to worry and I definitely didn't want to traumatize her, so I kept trying to play it cool.
Picture, if you will, a grown woman getting punched in the stomach by Tarzan (The King of the Nausea Jungle), fighting like hell to keep everything down, sweating like a pig because TARZAN PUNCHED HER AND OUCH, with her eyes darting to and fro hoping her kid wasn't seeing what was going on. Add on a layer of concerned people in the room asking, "Are you OK?" and wanting to scream DO NOT DRAW ATTENTION TO TARZAN'S VICTIM but unable to scream because puke. Just ... puke.
Over and over again.
But! There is a happy ending in this little story. After a few hours of Tarzan beating on me, I mentioned something about the Nausea Battles in a text to a friend. Within moments, I had a reply that said something to the effect of, "Me, too. Ask for this super magical happy drug."
And it was a super magical happy drug. It fixed everything.
Except for the whole "just got cut up and then puked for hours" thing. That part wasn't quite fixed.
So ... nursing home. You owe me a good one, girls.