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James'
birth |
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My first view of James was as he slithered out from
between by legs (feeling rather like a particularly
slippery fish). I could see fairly quickly that he was a
boy, and he looked quite large. It was a while before
they weighed him, and although I now weigh myself in
kilograms, I was a little unsure how big 4.192kg really
was. 9lb 3.5 oz! Elated and releaved, the disappointment
was that, once the placenta had been delivered, Carole
the midwife announced I would need stitches. In the last
moments of pushing, at the end without TENS or Entonox, I
had talked myself through it by assuring myself that if I
put up with just a short period more of excutiating pain,
it would all soon be over. The pain of the stitches going
in after all that seemed unfair. It seemed even more
unfair when an hour or so later the second midwife,
Linda, was pulling at the stitches to see where the
sudden large amount of bleeding was coming from. Sharp
razor blades were the image that came to mind. |
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The
first feed |
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A couple of hours after the birth we decamped
upstairs to ward 8, and settled into our room. I tried
feeding James a few times, but he did not seem very
interested. I drank two jugs of water before I could go
to the toilet, such was the de-hydration of delivery room
and ward. I knew babies could manage without a feed for
24 hours after birth, but I was a little concerned about
his drinking. This did mean I had a good nights sleep, as
apart from a cry at around 11.30pm when we had another
failed attempt at feeding, we both slept through from
10pm to 6am. |
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Nappies,
and feeding |
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At 6am I had a much needed shower - the combination
of plastic sheets on the bed, my leaking nether regions
and the sudden onset of summer had left me soaked
through. James cried when I came back to our room, so I
checked his nappy again. I was glad someone had warned me
about meconium - his nappy looked as though it had been
used to wipe some axle grease off a car! Several paper
towels, tissues, baby wipes and wads of cotton wool
later, James had also demonstrated how high up a wall he
could shoot, so we knew his inners were functioning, and
he was in a clean nappy. A test of blood sugar showed
that despite his fast, James was still thriving, but his
redness suggested he was still hot and bothered. Shortly
after this, another midwife Debbie helped me to finally
get James feeding - clearly the relief of getting several
months on digestive products out gave him an appetite. He
has had several goes since then. Although its hard to
tell how much drink he's getting (one of the things that
puts people off breast feeding) the effect was amazing.
The purple herring I had given birth to had quickly
turned into a bright red lobster, and adhered to this
complexion through the night. As he fed, the effect was
miraculous, and by the time he fell asleep with my nipple
in his mouth he had become a much more delicate creamy
pink colour, not dissimilar from his mum. |
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Sore
nipples! |
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I was so pleased to get him drinking that I wasn't
very fussy about his technique. As a result I allowed him
to nipple feed rather than breast feed a little too much,
such that by the end I was a little sore. Now the
pressure to simply sustain him is off, we can spend more
time getting the technique right. |
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And
sore elsewhere |
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Down below, I am still very sore. Babies genitals
tend to be swollen for the first few days, because of the
hormones they are subject to. At the moment, we have a
matching set, James the size of a tennis ball, mine the
size of a football. Talking of football, I'd heard
somewhere that for a 'natural' induction one needed to
make love 11 times to have the equivalent level of
hormone as the prostoglandins used by a hospital. I'd
joked about needing a football team to achieve this.
Right now, I feel as though I did do it with an entire
football team - and that they left their boots on! |
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