Faith Jablonski

After sorting things out with my sister, letting Mathias’ therapist know I’d be leaving early, spending way too much time attempting to get together that pampers post (thank you all, by the way) and trying not to panic – By 3:30, I was at the point where I started to feel the pain come in heavy waves and told my nurse either I needed more pain medication or my midwife Anna needed to check me. Lucas said at this point that Thea’s head was where Mathias’ was after I had already been pushing for hours. When I wrote this birth story out, a week after Thea was born, I was honestly still reeling from the shock of it all: the unexpected induction, the absurdity of giving birth during a pandemic, the panic attack, going home less than 48 hours from when I walked into the hospital to get induced and finally the adjustment that comes with adding a new baby to the family.

In January when I finally was back on my feet (literally) I wanted a space that would take minimal help from Lucas to work on (aka, no heavy duty tools were needed) and since her space basically just needed decor, it was a perfect fit! I know that a lot of nurseries and toddler rooms these days have neutral rugs but personally I feel like children’s bedrooms should be reflective of their personalities and Liv actually picked this one of the four choices I gave her! Based on that experience, we decided to overestimate how big the wall was just in case, which meant we did have to cut nearly 1/3rd off of the fourth panel to make it fit. Lucas and I had it done in a little over 30 minutes, and honestly it only took that long because we had to figure out what to do with the door molding that was touching the wall and cutting the fourth piece/ getting it behind the radiator.

Going into this new year and new decade should feel exciting, but part of me feels some grief for the end of the last decade and the start of this one. This will be a decade of scans every 6 months, of wondering if my cancer is going to come back – that I haven’t thought about my cancer; it doesn’t help that nearly four months out of my surgeries I am still not “back to normal. When I was stuck in bed or in my wheelchair it was a good way for me to occupy my time, but now, as it’s been some time without family staying in my house to help me, it’s becoming an extra thing on my to-do list.

This time I saw an actual anesthesia team – who informed me that I didn’t need to dump any of my milk (contrary to what the resident of my previous team had told me). They explained that they were going to put a catheter in my leg and it would administer local anesthesia to my leg to keep it numbed in addition to the general anesthesia I’d receive before going into surgery. The one drug that I had been on since my first surgery had been removed from my chart in the middle of the night, hours after a second intense surgery. I could take up to 15mg per dose, every 4 hours…which is what my previous team had told me I could take in 12 hours if I wanted to nurse.