Holy Cow - Babies Galore!

I have been so crazy busy lately! Let me update you first on my husband's status...

I brought him home (yep, he's still surviving on that 5%!) after 8 days in the hospital. He and I were both getting a little stir crazy. It was finally decided that he didn't meet the requirements for the three lead pacemaker. Both the nephrologist and the internal med doc said "He needs a heart". Well, thanks for that newsflash :P The cardiologist who really wanted the pacemaker pretty much bowed out once it was decided that the pacemaker wasn't gonna help. The 'winning' cardiologist ended up discharging him home after putting him on a new beta-blocker (sotolol - go ahead look it up.....it'll scare the crap out of ya). He had been having lots of PVCs and had 2-3 runs of V-tach (non-sustained). He didn't have any awareness of the V-tach episodes as they weren't fast enought to trigger his AICD nor did they last more than 24 seconds. Nice. As if anxiety levels weren't slightly elevated already. He was to follow up the following week and the transplant route is now under way. We got an information packet from the transplant program and the newest leg of the adventure begins. Currently waiting on insurance authorization to proceed with scheduling the appointment for the consult. He's been in much better spirits since coming home. No coughing and down about 34 pounds total. I'm still not used to his new look - skinny :p

I have been on call a lot due to another midwife being out of town. I have caught so many babies in such a short time that some of the labors and births have blended together a little :( I was on call for my weekend and broke my previous record of 7 babies in a weekend! I got about 3 hours of sleep in a 41 hour period of time...and not all in a row! Everyone that came in wanted to have natural childbirth. I was so exhausted that I started hoping women would get epidurals so I could sleep. But then of course, I felt guilty for thinking that. But it was really the sleep-deprivation speaking. If I recall correctly, I had something like 4 epidurals, 1 IV pain med labor, and 4 natural childbirths.

Two of the women were ladies I had seen a lot of in the office so it was extra special to get to catch their babies. One lady had a history of vacuum assisted birth with her first child and very much wanted to avoid it this time. She did! But it was getting to be a close call. In fact I had called the doc on call to come in to stand by vacuum. In the meantime, she got riled up and pushed her baby out about the time he arrived. I was very happy for her...and the baby was almost half a pound bigger than her first! I don't know if she just reached a point where she had a psychological block and couldn't get past it initially or what.

The other lady was having her first baby and had a beautiful natural childbirth - one of those ones where everything goes smoothly and damn near perfectly. Love it!

I've had some more births since that weekend...lots of fun and interesting births but can't remember much right now :p I think I have a touch of stress, busyness, and maybe some fibro fog going on :p I need to try and blog more often before i forget details I guess. We'll see what I can do.