The most socially awkward thing I’ve ever done. So awkward I’m not going to * anything.
Have a baby in 2020.
But first, please enjoy the preceding few weeks’ hilarity in my meme and photo folder.
It was really awkward. Not least because of how it happened. One-time-only bad decision making, if you know what I mean, after a few glasses of Irish-cream-what-what from Aldi. I mean, can we be more classy? I’m thoroughly embarrassed as I type this and remember myself saying something like: “it’s the end of the world, who cares anyway?” (April ’20). In any case, one fine day sitting at the computer, the nausea hit me from my toes up. My first thought was, no. Just no. No way. And then himself got sent straight to the pharmacy.
Back to the awkwardness. For a while, it just looked like the Covid Stone. Then it started looking like a real baby. I was stuck at home, as we all were. Going literally nowhere except to hospital appointments by myself. Time went on and it was just too late to say anything on all the work video calls. I mean, what do you do? Stand up and show off your belly in an ‘accidental’ side shot? Yawn and stretch? Or do you interrupt proceedings with an “excuse me I have some news?” While debating these various different and equally awkward scenarios, so much time passed that it was nearly time to have the actual baby. And then he arrived early. So then the message had to very quickly turn into “hey, I’m off here now for a bit of personal time, but not for too long. No, I don’t have Covid. BRB”-type messages. AFK for a few days.
I had my baby on the 29 November, by section, in CUMH. It was a Sunday night – change of shift time. It was really scary and very unpleasant, with Graeme (my husband) waiting outside in the car park for hours and nobody knowing what was going on. I was admitted to the Emergency and was in for about five hours, in labour, on a narrow bed, not able to reach my phone. By the time I got somebody to pass it to me, I was pretty much being dressed for theatre. We thought I’d go in, be calmed down, and sent away again. Not that simple. Graeme was allowed in basically as they were cutting me open – after they had to repeat the spinal block that didn’t work the first time. Just a really unpleasant evening. He had to leave when they wheeled me out of recovery. He hadn’t been able to attend a single doctor’s appointment with me.
Ruairí came out shouting the odds though and was pretty okay. This was the biggest relief for me at that moment. We had a difficult pregnancy, him and I. Besides it being incredibly awkward, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. From start to end, the ball was dropped by the doctors and midwives involved in that regard. If not for our GP and the village pharmacy, I don’t know if we would have come out okay. That, and all the delicious healthy snacks Graeme made. Endless snacking. Snacking till the food is up your throat with the nausea.
To this day, I’m waiting for the South Infirmary to phone me back to get my sugar readings from about 6 months ago. And yes, assholes, I left multiple messages on your various answering machines. Can you tell I got sick and tired of injecting myself with insulin? I have the biggest respect for anybody who lives with diabetes. I did a needle count one day, rough estimation: I had to prick my finger seven times a day in order to test sugars and inject insulin twice a day. I will be avoiding the follow-up fasting glucose test for a while, possibly until the trauma subsides.
When I went into labour, they gave me medication for high blood pressure, as that was playing up too. They explained at the time, but, honestly, I wasn’t listening to anything or seeing very much. I met so many people there that Graeme remembers; don’t ask me who they are though! That medication did something, and Ruairí’s sugars crashed at 48 hours. He landed up in the neonatal unit with a sugar level of 1.9. This was at 10pm at night.
After I had been told that afternoon that he had a murmur in his heart, I had to tell Graeme in a text message. I couldn’t voice note or call because the other children were listening in. Then I had to message, from the deserted basement passage of CUMH in the middle of the night, while our baby was being revived. He got through that. The murmur disappeared. And then he was jaundiced. So jaundiced he went back into the neonatal unit for a few days and sessions under the lamps. We had been able to take him home for one night only at that point. I had to go back to the emergency for very high blood pressure. Sitting, alone, again, on a tiny bed, my milk came in leaking all over. I pumped. He drank. We got through it. He was allowed home when he was one week old.
I don’t think anything gets more awkward than this experience.
All that trauma with nowhere for it to go, in the middle of all the trauma of our lives every day these days. At times, the awkwardness is really funny. But, at other times, I cry.
When we need the hugs and the chat the most, they’re not there anymore. We need to fix this. Be kind to the people around you. Ask how they’re doing. Make space for people to tell their stories. We’re all going through something, and we need each other. Let’s take turns having a bad day and allowing ourselves and others to have a bad day. We’re nearly there. Let’s not leave anybody behind.
As my niece says, he is our tinnnnyyyyy piece of cheese.
Then a series of bags and containers that have to be assembled very carefully in a specific order, Russian doll-like, when you do the actual test. Weird, I thought I’d already started, and then I notice in the book of instructions – that was in the bag – that I shouldn’t open the bag without washing my hands for 20 seconds, and that I should also clean all the surfaces before I get them out, but I haven’t finished the box; but then I shouldn’t have started, because I’ve got to clean everything first. How the fuck am I meant to know that, as, to read it, I’ve had to open the bag? So now I clean everything because it’s wrong. Could have Covid on it. So I go back and I wipe everything and I think I’d better finish the box, or maybe not? Maybe I should unfold and start all over again, in case I’ve missed something in the instructions? When I do read the instructions, I say “thank goodness I didn’t just see the big cotton bug and stick it up my nose and throat,” and then it tells me to do that anyway, but it must be an hour before the collection at our priority letter box, and we mustn’t touch anything with the cotton bud apart from two and half centimeters up my nose and the back of my throat. By this time I’m feeling so much better: I mean I’ve made the box, laid everything out and I’ve cleaned everything three time,s and I’ve learnt a lot about my area and where our priority post boxes aren’t, probably super spreading all the while. So then I find the link to the you tube video – which is handily in the booklet – so much easier to click on a link in paper instruction booklet – or rather it isn’t – but I manage to type it and link to Ali, the nice man who explains everything handily and simpl,y including which things might not be in the kit they’ve sent me. He says he know it’s a bit fiddly and frustrating but not too much he hopes, as I guess I could be feverish and confused at this point. He then reminds me to wash my hands for twenty seconds exactly. I nearly scald myself with the tap, but guess that’ll kill Covid as well. He also shows me how to stick a cotton bud in my throat and up my nose without touching anything else with the fabric. This all needs to go into the tube with liquid, and I must snap off the handle and close the tube without contaminating the contents. At this point I have a headache and have discovered how to stimulate a gagging reflex from the back of my throat without touching anything else. But have I rubbed my tonsils, and who knew they weren’t the dangly bits, for fecks sake? Also, this is where it goes into a second tube- that I don’t have – and into two bags: one labelled bio hazard and the other with a pinch seal. All in a specific order, which is then all packaged in my handcrafted origami box, which has a special seal sticker that is in the bag in the box. Bollocks; still, it’s all part of a test, so I backtrack and seal the box thankfully with all the contents. I’m now running late for the priority collection, so in my feverish and somewhat confused state I, masked to the eyeball, stagger to the priority post box, narrowly evading non-socially-distancing pedestrians who ring the post box.