If You REALLY Want My Thoughts Out Loud...

....then what a treat this post will be.

Mic check.

*click*

I've been radio silent for well over a year now. Kind of crazy when I used to keep up with this blog on such a regular basis. But wow. Pregnancy was tiring at first and then, well, 3.5 year olds are active and then all of a sudden, just like that you have two and then, hey crazy sets in. And the blog takes a back seat, because, that's life.

But tonight I feel the need to write. I'm going to try to work backwards on this blog, to play "catch up" if you will. To put my thoughts to paper, because that's what my therapist says is a good thing to do. Yeah, I said therapist (oh my!) - I'll get there.

So just to give a very brief (or not so brief) recap of where we are in life right now. Life is good. I've got two beautiful daughters that I'm so ridiculously grateful for and in love with and an awesome husband who has stood by me through a year that has turned out to be nothing how I pictured it would be. There are worse things going on in other families. Cancer, terminal illnesses, deep, deep levels of depression. I am thankful we don't have these problems, but we are dealing with our own issues after a traumatic experience shortly after Joss's birth.

To give a synopsis, Joss was born on Friday, January 31st. My pregnancy this go round was awesome compared to KT's. I felt great. The blood pressure was well contained. I didn't swell nearly as bad. I gained weight still (ugh), but I made it the full 38 weeks that my doctor and I had set from the start. Delivery is a surreal experience that, unless you've been through it, I can't possibly describe it to you. Mine have both been C-Sections, so while not ideal, the ambiance of an OR can put a bit of a damper on the "magic moment" but I am so happy for modern medicine, that that trumps all.  My doctor had her out within 15 minutes of the start. I got to see her beautiful face before they whisked her and Jeff out of the room. How cruel to be left all alone with a bunch of people you don't know while you just experienced a miracle. It's so bizarre and upsetting and just weird to be honest.

The next few days spent in the hospital were actually great. My hormones were so much better than when I had KT. No ones presence bothered me. Maybe because this go round we were in a MUCH larger room. Breast feeding was going so well. And then discharge day came. The doctor on rotation came by to check me out, said aside from a little pucker "which is common" on my wound, I look great. You're ready to go home. I desperately needed a shower and made my way into the room. When I got undressed I noticed fresh drops of blood on the floor. TMI, but blood after babies is not uncommon. But this blood was different. This blood was dripping off of me somewhere. I reached down to my wound and came back up with bloody hands. I called for Jeff said, "Somethings wrong. I'm bleeding." I went back to the bed as fast as possible and laid down and called the nurse.

From there, shit went crazy. That's the best way to describe it. The nurse came in and examined me and noticed clotting under my wound. Clotting. All this is being talked above me while I'm lying flat staring up at fluorescent lights. She calls the doctor who just discharged me and she comes in. She prods and pokes and apparently one of the q-tips she's using on me to poke with gets consumed by my wound. CONSUMED. Does that not make you want to puke just thinking about that? I kept staring at her furrowed brows. I will never, NEVER forget her expression. I said "do we need to do surgery again?" She said "yes." I said "when? In a bit." She said "No. Now."

My mind went absolutely bananas after that. I remember being prepped for emergency op, wheeled downstairs to the main OR, not the maternity level one and having to sign all this damn paperwork. I have no time frame on how long this took. All i know is that I was Thank you God able to kiss my children and tell my husband I loved him before I went in. Jeff was scared. I could tell. Do you know what it's like to look into the eyes of someone you love who is normally so calm and see fear? It's fucking frightening is what it is. And he was there, trying to calm me, telling me everything was okay. And before I could convince myself they had administered my "happy juice" and away i went into surgery.

Pause in writing for some tears. This is healthy. My therapist tells me so. I'm getting to that part, I promise.

Time doesn't matter. I think, i was told I was in there for 3-4 hours. I don't care how long. All I care about is that I woke up. With a very scratchy throat from the breathing tube and a very sudden urge to pee. I'm just stating facts and trying to find some humor in this. After my initial thoughts, all I could here was the damn monitors going off. They kept beeping. My blood pressure was a little nuts. Okay a lot nuts. Let's just say the bottom number was encroaching the 170's and the top number was into the 200's. And all they could tell me was "Calm down. Calm down, Katherine." Who the fuck is Katherine? Oh right, that's me. Learn my nickname you idiots so I can be more responsive. So this one nurse kept coming over and giving me more meds to bring my bp down. And I was in and out of consciousness but i kept hear them talking over me. And the post op is so depressing. SO fucking depressing. It's dark and cold. And there's me. And fucking beeping machines. And two women who probably couldn't wait to get home to watch their shows after this "woman stabilized." I don't care that I am not sympathetic to them. I don't care about that. All i care/cared about was that I wanted the beeping to stop, I wanted the ladies to stop telling me to calm down and I wanted to use the fucking bathroom.

I kept hearing ICU tossed around. I kept thinking is that where I go next? Is this protocol? What the hell is going on? where's my family? where's my baby?

Some time later after my bp started going down to a more reasonable level, I was told I was going to the Progressive Care Unit. One step down from the ICU. I was wheeled into a shared room. Jeff came in first followed shortly after by my parents and KT. There were tears in my husbands eyes. Tears. I thought, holy shit, this was way more serious than I thought. What happened? He said, "did they tell you anything?" I said nothing. He said, "Your abdominal sutures failed. The stitching came unwound and that's what was causing your external wound not to heal. The doctor said if you would have gone home, you're intestines could have fallen out." ...... what? Can you repeat that? You mean I was THAT close to going home and potentially DYING? Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. Holy. Shit.

He said, "The doctor suspected as much, but she didn't want to freak you out since you were so anxiety ridden beforehand." I felt relief, then I felt betrayed. Then I thought, that was probably better that I didn't know. So the double stitched me and taped me up good and there confident everything is fine now. Well, yay fucking them. Cause I'm not.

When my parents came in, they were noticeably frazzled too. My Dad, just like Jeff, shed some tears. When the two strongest men in your life shed tears over you. Shit was serious. Do you know what I mean? These men never cry. And they cried over me. I'll never forget these images. Never.

Jeff told me Joss was being taken care of by the fantastic nurses in the Nursery and that I shouldn't worry. But I was indefinitely on the PCU floor while she was on the Labor & Delivery floor and not one of us could move to see each other. Do you know how heartbreaking that is? Being separated from your 3-day old baby for more than 24 hours? It's gut wrenching is what it is.

I'll spare you the details of my 24-hour life on the PCU floor, but the next day they let me get transferred back to Labor & Delivery and I was reunited with Joss. I cried. I cried hard. This is NOT how it was supposed to happen. What the hell went wrong?

The next 3 days at the hospital were filled with anxiety, a flurry of nurses, a lot of "i dont' know what happened"s and a nurse that said "she'd been doing this for 25 years and this is only the second time she'd seen something like this happen." That made me feel LOADS better.

Finally we were able to head home. It was Wednesday. God, it felt so good to see the sun. I had been inside that damn building since 5:30am the previous Friday. It felt so good to breath FRESH air. It felt so good to be leaving a place that, quite frankly, I never want to have to go back to. But this was only the beginning of the journey....

The first few nights we were home were filled with panic attacks. Multiple panic attacks. In my sleep. Now you tell me if you are scared to close your eyes if that happened to you. On top of this, I'm trying to feed a baby. Send my big girl off to school so we could focus on Joss during the day. It was maddening. It was insane. But things finally got better....for a few weeks anyway.

Jeff went back to work after 3 weeks. Then it was just me and Joss. Home alone to amuse each other. Joss was and still is a great baby. Just like KT. No excess crying, no colic, just a great baby. But I was so not as ready as I thought I was going to be and the shock of reverting back to newborn stage after we had a 3.5 year old was hard on me. I was... very overwhelmed. Had I not had some awesome friends and family and my awesome cousin who came to see me weekly, I'm quite certain I would have been admitted to the loony bin. Sarah, I love you. Thank you for keeping me sane and visiting me. You don't know how much that meant to me, particularly when I was struggling, probably more than you realized, and I think you could tell. ha!

Since being discharged from the hospital, I was keeping an eye on my blood pressure and noticed that the readings hadn't been spectacular.  By the sixth week, I was concerned. I took myself into my PCP who had handled my blood pressure before and he prescribed a new medicine. It looks like the medicine that I'd been using these past 5 years just wasn't working anymore. The night after my first dosage, I woke up to a heart rate of 152, I told Jeff to call my parents and take me to the ER. I honestly thought I was having a heart attack. In retrospect, I think it was another panic attack. I think the ER staff knew this. I think they see this OFTEN. But, this is all new to me, and I'd rather err on the side of caution, so pardon my crazy, but I have insurance for this reason!

More trips back to the doctor and different scripts. In talking with my doctor, he told me, I think you may be a little post partum. I said, I don't feel depressed. I feel happy. I love my kids. But I have major major anxiety. So he put me on, what he called, an "anti-anxiety" med. That thing, taken for 5 days, made me a lunatic. An absolute crazy person. I think I slept maybe 6 hours total over those 5 days. I was crying for no reason, my anxiety increased ten fold, it was nuts. So I went to a new doctor and she said, get off of that crap. So i did. And we adjusted the scripts again.

I returned to my PCP after the blood pressure meds started to kick in. I told him, I took myself off of your crazy meds. They sucked. He said, they shouldn't have done that. I said, well they did. And i'm not depressed. He said, I think you have PTSD. I said, I think you're right. He said do you want to try another med and I said, if there is a chance that I have to go through that hell again, no. He said, do you want to talk to someone, and I looked and Jeff and we both looked at the doctor and we said "YES". So that's when I started seeing my therapist.

He's fucking awesome. I can't describe him any other way. He used to suffer from severe anxiety so he loves working with patients like me. He said, on my first visit that people who suffer from anxiety are control freaks (duh! if you know me, you KNOW this) but we are highly responsible, and typically overachievers. I was like, you had me at "control freak".  I think I was close to 8 weeks post delivery when I started to see him. He said, have you been exercising. I said, I'm scared to. What if the stitches fail again. He said did your doc clear you? I said, yes. He said, start moving. Sweat is good. Sweat is really good. But I was hesitant at first because.... I lost all trust in doctors. Not my therapist, but my OB. What if I'm NOT good to exercise? What if these sutures come out again? Look. I know what you're thinking. It had been 2 months. But in my mind, everything was still fresh. Still so fresh. But I trusted him. I said, It's this way or remain crazy. I didn't want to be crazy. I REALLY REALLY REALLY didn't want to be fucking crazy. So I started walking, and I felt okay. Then I started jogging, and I felt better. Then I started pushing myself until I had a nasty sweat going on. And I felt fucking great. Are you kidding me? Sweating can make you feel this good? It's amazing, really. I understand exercise and it's worth for weight loss maintenance. And I'd heard people talk about exercise in dealing with mental issues, but unless you're living it. You don't understand. You don't get it.

For me? I get the tingles. Apparently my nervous system is in constant anticipation of some event. He calls it something fancy I can't remember. But he said the best way to describe it to someone who doesn't suffer from anxiety is to think of someone throwing a basket of snakes on you. That feeling right when you know it's coming. That PANIC. That's what I experience on a regular basis. It's tingly. Exercise takes the tingles away. I have some meds too. This is working for me right now. This is working really well for me right now. I think back to where I was when Joss was 8/9 weeks old. And while I was able to love on my new daughter, I was just a hot mess. I've come so far. And I've improved so much. I would say that the PTSD of the surgery is almost not an issue anymore. Most of my anxiety is just finding the balance. I am learning to let go of stuff I can't control - the when, the where, the how - of every day life and try to roll with it. I've changed a lot since January. I think it's been a positive change. I've experienced my own little personal hell these past few months. She's only 7 months old (this Sunday) and I feel like it has literally been years.

I've always felt like my outlook on life has been good, but it's even better having gone through all of this. I'm exploring myself spiritually, I'm learning to care for my body (i feel like i'm the most in sync i've ever been with it in my life), I'm enjoying my kids and soaking in all the first for Joss. Because for me, this is my last baby. I'm not doing this again. It was always "two and through" for us. Not because we don't like kids, but because that's what we wanted from the start. Come 2 boys, 1 of each or, lucky us, 2 beautiful girls.

Every time work gets a bit stressful, or my day gets overwhelming, or there is a baby crying and a 4.5 year old yelling "Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom"...the tingles come in. But I know how to cope with them now. They are less and less frequent. And I hope one day they will be non-existent., but they have been a blessing of sorts.

I workout nearly every day now. I'm watching what goes in my body, and consciously thinking about what affects it. I'm not a crazy vegetarian, hell, I'm not even into the low carb thing. I'm just not filling myself with every whim anymore. I go to yoga once a week with another girlfriend for some destressing before my week. It's a good routine right now. I've even learned how to do a little meditation - again, don't think hippy - just some quiet time with myself. Just 5-10 minutes to slow down for a second. It's awesome.

A lot of what has come out of this experience is anger. That somewhat surprised me, but when I think back about the experience, I get very angry. Angry at the doctor. Angry at the fact that "why me?". Angry that I felt robbed of a normal experience. Angry that I trusted so many people and I almost didn't make it.  So when the anger is too much and the exercise can only do so much. I put on my padded gloves, go out to my garage and beat the shit out of a punching bag. Therapist prescribed. Talk about wow. It feels fucking awesome to beat the shit out of something. At first I pictured my OB, but I see her less and less frequently in my mind. Now I just get it all out. All the emotions. And I feel loads better. Guys, seriously. Try it. Best therapy ever (and it burns calories to boot!).

We're not 100% yet, but we are doing really good. The older Joss gets the better it's getting and going to get. My therapist tells me that I am in the middle of the most stressful time of anyone's life right now. Two young kids, working mom, ambitious and dealing with this all at the same time. But he tells me it's okay. I'm not crazy (see everyone, I'm not!!) and that things are going to be okay and will be okay. No one has died from anxiety. It's all about working to prevent/minimize it.  And it makes me feel better....

....and if you don't think I'm not going to talk to him about tonight's writing therapy, then maybe you're the crazy one!

I'd apologize for the language in this post, but it makes me feel better to cuss. So, you see, I can't feel sorry for that :)