The countdown begins...

Happy Valentine's Day! :)

it's T-4 days to go for the arrival of the blue pea. I'm anxious, nervous, worried, excited, happy... as you can imagine - all sorts of feelings are going through my head at the moment - and undoubtedly, D's head too. The nursery is all prepared, we've got a Baby Beginnings book to record everything about the pregnancy and the pending birth (and the following months), I've had the car cleaned and vacuumed at the car wash (well worth the £12!), our cleaners came this afternoon to clean the house and all in all, everything seems to be happening that should be happening! But... I'm still worried.

Worried about the operation, about the baby when he comes out (will he be perfect, cute, crying, hungry, colour of his eyes?!), about the sewing up and the scar, about breastfeeding, about walking after the operation (and the subsequent bleeds and nasty things which they don't tell you about until it's too late!), about coming home and managing with the baby....and well...everything else really! Worried about doing the chores around the house even! Worried about whether we have enough baby gear (from nappies, to baby grows!)...

People have always called me a worrywart - I guess this is the epitome of it eh?

We had a pre-clerking session at QEQM hospital yesterday (13th Feb) which is a session one has with a midwife who will take about 5 ml of blood to check for iron levels and where she also explains and discusses everything that will or can happen during the caesarean section. The name of that midwife was Denise and she was really nice. The whole thing took over an hour but we didn't feel that we had to rush or anything (even though she was running an hour late already!).

She informed us that we needed to be at the hospital on monday for 7am (as opposed to 7.30) and that if everything went as planned, we'd be going in at about 10.30/11am. There are two planned caesareans that day, and the first lady will go in at 8.30am (as she's diabetic, she needs to go first, which is fair enough!). All going well, we will be next (assuming there are no emergencies along the way for other women) and that will take us up till about 1pm or so. We then get taken into the recovery room for a couple of hours and if everything goes well, we get moved to our room/ward. I'm hoping for a private room and chances are we'll get it - I hope anyway. They might take pity on the fact that I have placenta praevia and would have had a more traumatic experience and so give me the single room!

She then said that on the 2nd day (tuesday), they will help me out of bed and we'll have my first shower - I'm panicking about that because of the wound and the dressing/bandage! But they seem to know what they are talking about ... and if the doctors check both me and baby out and think that we are ok, we can then be discharged! I'm surprised that they think we'll be out on the 2nd day but it has been done. We then have the option of either coming straight home, or going to the midwife-led Birthing Centre at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. We have been thinking of doing that, but we're not quite sure about that now, only because their beds are the regular ones as opposed to the beds that can be controlled and moved about. Ordinarily that might not make a difference to a woman who has just given birth, but with a c-section, it would be better to be able to have a bed that can be moved with the control buttons.

Because the K&C is 10 minutes from our house as opposed to the QEQM being 30-40 minutes away, the K&C is an attractive alternative. We'll see what happens.

ok - gotta go have dinner now.

Love
P and the blue pea
38+3 weeks