The mushroom is obviously as exhausted as I am because he hardly makes a move or a sound. At one point he does wake up and gives something akin to a mewl and the nurse whacks him on my chest so he can have a little suckle and he promptly falls back to sleep! My wound is now hurting like a bitch and I press my little pain relief button and wait for the good stuff to do it's job. A midwife sees my discomfort and offers to take mushroom down to the desk for a few hours whilst I get some rest but I don't really want her to. I point out to her that it's pointless because I'm being woken every bloody hour anyway and she advises that it's perfectly fine and that I really do need to get some rest. I protest again but obviously I fall asleep or something because I don't remember anything after that!
The next morning I awake to a very sore abdomen. The best way I can describe it is like hitting the sit-ups/crunches way too hard the day before and feeling the after effects. It's not painful like a searing pain but more a very persistent ache. It sucks. I still resemble a bit of an octopus with tubes sticking out all over and am wondering when they'll be removed when my favourite midwife Helen enters (she was at my birth) and promptly advises that they've come to release me and put me in the shower, hooray!! Release me from the tubes that is, not the hospital... so not ready for that!!
Firstly, with the assistance of another wonderful midwife, (they're all wonderful at this point because they give me pain relief and help me have a shower!) they remove my epidural which looks like a weird piece of fishing line, bizarro! Then they remove the catheter... sting, and finally the cannula which has been annoying me since the night before.
Next step is to get me up and into the shower. I'm freaking out. Juffin helps get my toiletries out for the girls to wash me and we take some very wobbly steps to the bathroom where they strip me off and sit me in a chair. My drain is still in as they want the Doctor to review me before it comes out and I catch a regrettable look in the mirror on the way in and nearly recoil in horror! Good God! I'm hideous! I thank goodness that I packed my wonderful strawberry body wash and body lotion as there's nothing better than smelling like a strawberry. I feebly try to wash myself with the assistance of wonderful nursey and then ask her desperately to wash my hair as I can't reach the shampoo. She obliges willingly. The experience is amazeballs. I feel 5000 times better than I did 5 minutes ago. I'm a human being again, despite smelling like a giant strawberry, and whilst I feel like I've been thumped in the guts a gazillion times with a sledgehammer that shower was a very close second to the best shower I've ever had*.
Getting dressed is pretty funny. Helen is trying to dry me and put my knickers on which is pretty hard when you can barely stand up. We manage to find a maternity singlet, a skirt and a cardi to put on that all matches and get back into bed. I'm exhausted by the whole experience and it's taken 10 whole minutes. Helen and other wonderful midwife point out that I now have to take myself off to the toilet again which could prove challenging, so don't wait until you're busting! Noted. I can also now pick up the Mushroom and cuddle him whenever I want. Hooray!
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| Me & the Mushroom :-) |
*I have to disclose that the best shower I've ever had did not involve kinky sexpo business. The Juffin and I were camping in NZ for a week during summer one year and we were at Spirit's Bay for four days with no hot water. We had cold showers of course but cold showers in NZ are different to cold showers in Australia. The cold water coming out of the tap in NZ is actually frigid ice cold, like refrigerated water cold. So rather than become stinky beasts, we would wait until the middle of the day, then run around screaming and goose pimply in that needly freezing water for as long as it took to pass over your body with the soap once then rinse off... so like 2 seconds. Yes, I'm well aware that there are camping showers that you can hang from a tree and have a hot shower but we were travelling el cheapo povo style and did not have the equipment. Hell, our gas stove even packed it in on the second day. We were ROUGHING it! As we were staying in National Parks etc all the showers were like this so on day 4 or 5 we spied a caravan park in the middle of this awesome forest. We decided to check on their campsite prices and made the decision to pull in. That night I had the best shower of my life. Blissfully hot water, billowing clouds of steam, my hair finally got washed and didn't look like a hedgehog had died atop my skull. I was in there for close to 20 minutes. It was the best. The worst part of the whole experience was that we only had one toiletry bag so one of us had to wait whilst the other one had their shower... actually I think we just cracked the soap bar in half as we were both too mean to wait for each other!
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