The Twinkies

Autolysis.

My uterus is busy undergoing autolysis, which basically means it is self-destructing. All the extra infrastructure that was built up during the pregnancy is getting consumed and passed out in the form of blood and tissue.

My life seems also to be undergoing autolysis. I used to have hobbies, interests, thoughts. Now I feed, change, burp and try to convince 2 people to sleep. The free time I have is used to sleep myself. Everything that made up my identity has been sucked away into the great maw that is motherhood. To make things worse, I don’t seem to be very good at this. The world is full of twin mothers who exclusivly breast fed their infants without help, apparently while also juggling fire, working full time and saving the world. Meanwhile, I can barely manage to feed each baby 40 – 50% breastmilk. I spend so little time holding J. that I don’t even think he knows I am his mother. I hate breastfeeding, I am in constant pain of one sort or another, the incision still hurts so much that sometimes I can barely walk and I have almost no appetite. We broke down and hired help that will start coming in next week, at which point my mother will go home.

And, we have an ant problem.

Sleep, sweet sleep, sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.

Sleep is better than sex. Sleep is better than food. Sleep is better than anything else in the entire world. If the U.S. did to prisoners of war (or “enemy combatants” to use the current wishy-washy nomenclature) what these babies are doing to me we would get a firmly worded letter of protest from Amnesty International.

Tuesday:

• pumped 7 cc of breastmilk a time
• both babies down at 3:45 Am

Wednesday:

• pumped 30 cc of breastmilk at a time
• can bend enough to put underwear on by myself

Thursday:

• pumped 60 cc of breastmilk at a time
• was able to calm both J. and F. by putting them to breast at the pediatricians
• had a good night
• both babies latched and nursed

Friday:

• pumping still going well
• another good night (at least as of when I’m typing this)

I would like to smack everyone who told me breastfeeding would be easy. Let’s throw in some basic throttling for all the miserable information out there about how if you DON’T breastfeed you might as well be abusing your baby.

Don’t get me wrong, we remain committed to making this work, but it is NOT “easy”.

Thus far:

1. J. and his bad latch have chewed me up something terrible. Before I left the hospital the nurse/lactation consultant told me we needed to treat my nipples as “open wounds” and prescribed a topical antibiotic to prevent infection.

2. Because of the massive doses of antibiotics I received, I (probably) started to develop thrush. I’m now on an oral antifungal.

3. The nursing supplementer system seems like a great idea until you are finger feeding two babies ’round the clock.

4. Telling a family with twins not to use bottles to avoid “nipple confusion” is downright cruel. When someone else can feed the babies, I can sleep. If I am dead from exhaustion I can’t even pump.

5. The hospital nurses were well intentioned, but over-worked and busy. Having many different women tell me many different things over our hospital stay didn’t really help.

6. Based on pumping, my volume of milk is going up daily. Tuesday I struggled to get out 7cc at a time. Today I sucked out 60.

7. That pump is loud.

So…things are getting better. But it remains very frustrating that we got such incomplete information ahead of time. The class we took was mostly useless and there is very little useful (as in, reasonable and not designed to invoke guilt if you stray from the approved path) information on how to do this with twins.

J. and F. were born on July 7, 2006.

J. was born at 6:30 PM.
6lbs 8oz
19 inches long

F. was born at 6:32 PM.
6lbs 13oz
20 inches long

Everyone is fine.

Proving that the best laid plans go awry, on Friday, July 7 we headed off to the hospital. I had been in “false” labor since 11PM Thursday and thus had not slept since a nap Thursday afternoon. It was my third bout of this false labor. Friday at about 11 AM I called B. and told him that I wasn’t sure if this was false or real, but it was bad enough that I wanted him home.

We labored at home for a while, and by 1 PM the contractions were coming right on top of one another and were vicious. I felt really dehydrated and was drinking huge amounts. B. called our wonderful doula, Deby, and told her we were ready for her to come and help us through this. She heard me on the phone and said “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

B. called my OB/midwife practice and somehow got the answering service which informed him that it was not business hours and to call back after 2. Yeah. He called again, as per Deby (I was in no place to tell him OB practices are never closed to women in labor) and got through. We were told to go to their office at the hospital to be monitored and they would see whether I was ready to check in to labor and delivery.

At the office my blood pressure was normal, temperature was normal, but the babies heart rates were very high and indicated distress. Additionally, after all that labor I was still only 1 1/2 cm. dilated. While in the examining room I threw up, and we were sent over to admissions.

By the time I was checked in and in an L&D room, my blood pressure had shot up and my temperature was 102.7 and the babies heart rates were still elevated. I continued to throw up. I continued to not dilate. I continued to drink, though now I was chewing on ice chips. I was hooked up to IV antibiotics and a fetal monitor and B. and Deby helped me with some pain control. It helped, but since most techniques I knew involved movement and/or hot water, and I was tethered to the bed, it didn’t help enough.

The OB came in and told me it looked like I had a chorioamniotic infection and she recommended immediate surgical birth. I agreed, and as it turned out it was a very good thing I did. My group B strep had colonized both placentas, despite no ruptures in the amniotic sacs. J. came out screaming lustily and had an apgar score of 9. F.’s was a 2. By 5 minutes, after she was given some oxygen, her score also went up to 9. Her white blood cell count was elevated and she was placed on IV antibiotics for 2 days as a precautionary measure.

After a picture perfect pregnancy, I got to be very high risk right at the end. Recovering from major abdominal surgery qualifies as miserable, but it sure beats the alternative. If we had delayed birth I would probably, at best, be sitting in a NICU right now with very ill babies.

I will try to post photos as soon as I can, but right now I am typing one handed while holding J. who refuses to settle down but conks out the moment I pick him up. It is the middle of the night and I have another pumping session to do. So…photos later.

NOTE: I asked my OB whether the infection had anything to do with the pregnancy being a twin pregnancy and she said no.

Still to come: high stress adventures in breastfeeding (or what to do when your nipples become open wounds) and the day of jaundice.