I'll tell you about those things you wanted to know

I'll see how far I get down this list before I pass out. (I didn't sleep much last night then I got up at 5:30 to go to the gym, then work was kind of excruciating, despite the completion of the jigsaw, then home, cook, clean, parent, blah blah blah. It doesn't leave much in the tank. On the bright side, Wednesday is the day I treat myself to a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich with my coffee on the way to work, and eating it is always the high point of my week by quite some distance.)

pregnancy 

I was 38 when I got pregnant, in 2010, after several years of fertility treatment culminating in two years of IVF. In addition to dealing with the expense, the awful mess the surgeries and the drugs made of my body and my mind, and the recurrent terrible bleak distress associated with the unsuccessful cycle, I had to live with despising my fertility specialist with a burning hatred, for her patronage, her arrogance, her incapacity to form any kind of human connection with her patients.

The pregnancy itself, having been conceived in such an insane atmosphere of high intervention and specialist management, inevitably was conducted in the same terrified yet disconnected manner. I had an obstetrician in the neighbouring suburb to mine and she was the best person involved in my care. She wonderfully said to me, when another clinician had been annoying to me about being a vegetarian, A hundred million Indians can't be wrong. I also had a diabetes nurse - I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes at seven weeks - a fertility clinic nurse, an endocrinologist, and I saw the same ultrasound person seven times. At the last scan he informed me that the baby was so large he would get stuck halfway out. A darling friend who I will treasure forever stared when she heard this and said, Well, that will be awkward at parties. The twelve week tests were ambiguous and so, after some jagged, heartsick and grief-stricken consideration, I had an amniocentesis. In the interval between deciding to take the test and actually having it administered. I had panic attacks almost daily, often nightly. All this noted, I remember enjoying the late second / early third trimester, when I could feel the baby, I was well, and had got on top of managing my insulin levels. I also became pretty much insatiable sexually, not that I have ever had a low sex drive except in times when I've been physically ill, but it got utterly mental. I continued to work up to 34 weeks.

latrobe

Surviving the ordeal of conceiving a baby also destroyed my academic career. When I began this blog I was lecturing at level B on semester length contracts, then I took on a two-year appointment Level B'ing for La Trobe at its Mildura campus, where I flew each week to teach, as well as at the main campus. Then I had a string of two-year level B appointments at the main campus, maybe three of those? Then I lost my job in English but managed to get taken on as a level A in academic development, which I had gotten interested in through involvement in various faculty projects to improve the quality of teaching, and then I went for and got a promotion to C, and then I did that work for two more years before the university decided conclusively to dispense with my services and paid me out a rather large sum of money which I spent mostly on paying off IVF debts and travelling. But to backtrack: I could not do all the fertility stuff, not to mention actually be pregnant, deliver the baby and survive his infancy and go back to work, and also meet the publishing requirements the faculty retrospectively imposed on all staff in 2012 when there was a faculty restructure just before the university-wide one two years later. So I did lose my job in the English department, which I loved and was really good at, when my kid was about a year and a half old. I had been back from maternity leave for about a semester, I think. About six weeks before returning to work I had a calamitous nervous breakdown which I suppose we'll get to in due course. Meanwhile you should read this story about how fantastically well I disgraced myself on my first day back at work, if by some terrible omission you haven't read it already.

midwife

Didn't have one, except in the trivial sense that some were present in the operating theatre when Lenny was born. One of them placed a bottle of formula in my husband's hands to feed the baby with, while I was in the surgical recovery room.

diabetes

As I said, I had gestational diabetes while pregnant. I cannot eat much sugar now - it gives me a headache - and I don't wish to. The management of the diabetes was so excellent in so many ways but it did make me extremely anxious and I am sure that anxiety contributed in a profound way to the disastrous level of anxiety that came later, when I was largely alone with the baby, cut off from the life I had been living, and chronically sleep deprived.

breastfeed 

breastfed

breast

Despite the formula in the hospital, despite the low birthweight, I was determined to breastfeed. I myself was not breastfed as a baby. My nipples were damaged by the baby's mouth in the first days after birth and didn't heal for weeks. On being discharged from the maternity ward, the nurse checked my surgery wound, took my temperature etc, explained the pain medication I was going home with, unbuttoned my blouse and looked at my breasts and wrote on her discharge card, "Breasts: small." I took deep, deep offence at this, my god, it just seemed so unnecessary! What I didn't understand was that small breasts, as mine admittedly are, fill up with milk and get rock hard much faster than big ones, and the baby will need many small feeds as opposed to fewer larger ones in order to get enough milk. This has implications for what it is possible to do in terms of resuming the activities of normal life, which took many months in my case. First there was basic health to be regained. I got mastitis twice before week six. The first bout was coupled with an internal infection where my uterus had been cut. I went back to hospital in an ambulance. Lenny came too of course,  he was about two weeks old, I think. I wasn't done with antibiotics of one kind or another for about three months. I never really got used to getting my tits out in the presence of friends and family members and once or twice of work colleagues who I would by no stretch of the imagination think of as 'friends'. One humiliating occasion that sticks particularly in my mind I went to visit some friends and had to feed Leonard there instead of after leaving their house as I'd intended, and he took forever, like maybe an hour, and I just thought, we are all hating this. You can't see the breast when the baby is on it, but it's the sitting there for ages, for ages and ages, with your clothes all dishevelled while your friend makes weirder and weirder desperate small talk. And so I didn't go out a great deal and never very far from home. This was a pretty dumb move on my part because I retreated further and further into my own exhausted, lonely, solitary brain.

All that said, eventually I got pretty good at breastfeeding and got to like it, when it wasn't the only source of nutrition and the pressure was off, so to speak. I was disappointed that it didn't make my boobs permanently larger, but at least they didn't lose their shape. I didn't completely stop lactating until Lenny was nearly three. I'd finished feeding him almost a year before that. Bodies are freaky, man.


Alright that is definitely enough for today. So that leaves

brunswick

sold house

renting

east brunswick

2011

psychiatric