Wednesday, May 6, 2009

A Sore -----------

My husband has taken the week off. Well, not really off - he's lying in bed attempting to work in bed. He has a sore rear end. A hemorrhoid.

Ok, I do feel sorry for him. I'm sure it is very painful, yes. But there are moments that I think back to childbirth, episiotomies (my dictionary does not like that word - I didn't either!), and those wonderfully painful first days of nursing a baby. (Yeah, yeah, all of us nurses will tell you it is not supposed to hurt. If it hurts, you're doing something wrong. Yeah, I wanted to personally go and apologize to everyone I had said that to when I began with my first. It hurts! That part of my body was not used to being enthusiastically sucked on for hours a day - of course it hurt! Later, yes, later, it didn't, but those first few days - ouch!) So, I watch my husband and think that I am so glad that women have babies and not men. I doubt anyone would have more than one child if the men had them!

Other than that, the sun is finally feeling warm, my flowers are blooming, and I am feeling that odd combination of exhiliration that spring has finally arrived, horrible headaches and itchiness which confirms that spring has actually arrived, and am going stir-crazy because it has arrived, and I am stuck indoors again until the pollen goes away near the middle of June. Good time to buckle down and get some work done - in front of the window while I try to absorb sunlight and dream of outdoors.

3 comments:

Rebecca Conduff Aguirre said...

Yesterday Miguel said to me, "if we had another baby, maybe it would be a girl!" My reaction was less than enthusiastic...wonder why?! LOL! I asked him if he'd like to have a kidney stone while he was at it? ha!

Yeah, they told me that, too, about nursing...I spent hours the second night in the hospital trying to make it "not hurt" by readjusting poor baby's sucking patterns, poor guy didn't care for being pulled off. Come to find out, we were doing fine, it was just going to hurt no matter what...

Karis said...

Haven't experienced an episiotomy and I went the epidural route so I had an un-natural but very easy childbirth experience but the nursing thing... oh my! With my first child, the nurses told me the same thing -- that if I was doing it right, it wouldn't hurt. If it hurt and since they said that meant the mouth wasn't right, they wanted me to break the suction and have the baby re-latch but to me, that was even worse. It just took time to toughen up what had never needed to be toughened up before. :-)

The second time around, it seemed to go a little better or at least I was more relaxed and didn't worry about doing things "my way" even if the experts didn't agree if that worked best for me. But that was the time I would get horrible contractions when she would nurse. I can't remember how long that lasted, but it was at least two or three weeks -- and they were some pretty strong contractions.

Ellie said...

Hate to tell you the news, Karis, but those contractions get worse with every kid. By number four, I was doubled over with the strength of them. A heating pad helped a little, but ouch!

And I had enough with nurses who thought they knew what was best for me. After I had number three, one nurse kept coming in, scolding me because I would only nurse on one side per feeding and the other side next time. She insisted that I nurse both sides each feeding. I mean - this was my third baby and I had nursed the first two for a year each! I think I knew what I was doing! Finally, we dutifully wrote down on the chart what she wanted and happily nursed how we wanted. It made us all happy!