Karma

So yesterday I helped out an old friend with a summer class she is taking. She is also pregnant right now and I do have to say she is one of the cutest pregnant people I know. She is the friend your jealous of because the only way you know she pregnant is looking at her cute little belly. She's the friend you have that will walk out of the hospital wearing her pre-pregnancy jeans with no problem. She however is the nicest little thing, and her and her husband are going to make cute babies! Anyhow, she had to interview me for her class and all the questions were on my labor, delivery and postpartum parts of pregnancy. It got me to thinking last night about how in just one year my life has truly changed. How much different everything is now with my little man, and how much my marriage has changed. I LOVE EVERYTHING THAT LITTLE BOY HAS DONE FOR ME, TO ME, AND THE PEOPLE HE HAS MADE MY HUSBAND AND I BECOME. I was unaware how much more I could love my husband when the little man came into the picture. For example the best part of my day yesterday was sitting on the couch last night watching my 2 boys on the floor playing and laughing. It almost brought tears to my eyes. There is nothing I do now that I don't think how it will effect those 2 guys. I am absolutely in LOVE with both of them. They are my world and there is nothing I wouldn't do for either one of them. Anyone who knows me really well knows that my faith has truly been tested the past 7 months. I see things on a daily basis that make me question why things happen. For example, my little guy has some sort of lung disease. We will never know what it is, he has battled with it from birth, and we are constantly monitoring and are worried about weight gain. He is doing good today but we never know what tomorrow will bring. He can't live in a bubble but when he gets what other normal kids would consider a cold or sick, he will be really sick. He will always have to monitor his breathing and be conscious of his surroundings and doings. We did everything right. So why does HE have to deal with this. He never asked to be here, he never did anything to anyone but yet HE is the one who has to suffer, and it breaks my heart that I can't take it away or deal with it myself. Then I turn around and I see people who can't afford the kids they are having, or are having kids for the wrong reasons and there babies are perfectly normal. (which I am glad they are!) But it truly makes me question the order of things. Why does good suffer and bad celebrate? I've come to the conclusion that this is why I HAVE to believe in Karma. I know it may sound wrong and mean, but until you have watched YOUR child suffer in the NICU for 9 days, and have brought your child to the ER twice in 1 day because he can't breathe, and you walk away from EVERY doctors appointment once a month with NO answers and feel like you have just been beaten up emotionally and physically, you have NO right to judge me or my feelings. I have days where I get so mad at the world, that I am so bitter to those with healthy children it makes me feel like a horrible person. I shouldn't feel this way. But then I have my friends who remind me that I have every right to be mad, sad, upset, and bitter. That I shouldn't hold these feelings in because it will eat me alive. I know this sounds like I am always this angry bitter person. But, I am not. I only have these feelings on the days I see my little boy having a rough day, or the day I see my husband so worried about him it's eating him alive. The other 29 days of the month we are a normal happy family that acts like nothing is wrong. We are a strong, happy family that just has to blow off steam every now and again as I am told all families do. We just have a different set of issues. So wow I kinda went in a circle there. I am so glad I could help an old friend out, and I am glad it made me do some thinking. It made me realize after all the shit we have been through, it has only made us a happier, stronger family. And there's nothing more important than my 2 boys, but I've always known that!

I's First Lake Day!

Hello out there!

Again I know its been awhile! You have to cut me some slack I have a very active 7 month old! And just because I feel bad for lack of post, I put up a few extra pics! (I would have anyway.) So the reason it takes forever for me to bog is because currently my office is on the second floor and the only time I'm up here is to put Isaac down for naps and to go to bed myself. Well as of today that's all about to change. My contractor should be showing up any minute to start the remodeling on our formal dinning to turn it into our new office. We are putting in french doors and hardwood floor. We decided we needed the extra bedroom upstairs and the office on the first floor would be more useful! I am very excited!
Isaac is getting stronger, faster, and better by the day. We still don't know what kind of lung ideas he has and probably will never know but he is getting stronger and that's all that matters. I can't even put into words how much I love that kid.
I do have to say with all of this good news my heart is a little sad today. I have to say I am really losing my faith. Faith in why things happen as they do. I can't go into details, but some things are truly unfair. My heart hurts for one of my dearest friends, while I just can't pull myself together to be happy for another. Life is unfair. I don't understand why good suffers and bad gets what they truly don't deserve. Enough of that I know you want pictures!

7 months

6 Months

6 Months

5 Months

A change of pace!

So as a mental stress release from all the medical issues we face with my son. J offered up the idea of finally starting my photography business I have been trying to do for almost 2 years now. I am so excited to announce that on April 1st I open Brandy Burke Photography! I love that I can work when I want and as much as I want to. It's a great escape from all the stress. I have always been the kind of person that needs a creative outlet when things get stressful. And I can tell you by the massive amounts of hair my husband and I are finding all over the bathroom that I am stressed! So here's to an exciting week!

Brandy Burke Photography

Nov 4th The rest of the story!

So I had finally started pushing. The doctor left me with my husband and the nurse. All I could feel was pressure. Pushing at the beginning felt great. I was more at ease pushing than relaxing. I was VERY slowly making progress. At 9 the nurse and my husband joked that we could have a baby by 9:30. YES!! Is all I thought. The longer I pushed the more frustrated I got I felt like nothing was happening. Gradually I started to feel alot of pressure. Like OK this pressure is getting painful. I expressed this to my nurse. J looked at my epi pump and to him it looked as if it was empty. The nurse said that it would beep before it ran out. The pressure quickly turned to PAIN. My epi failed and I could feel everything. The nurse left J and I in the room by ourselves and told us to not push. Looking back now I say WTF was she thinking? I had a good 10 very painful contractions that were off the chart and I told my husband to push the nurses button, I needed help. The next 60 seconds went as follows.

Me: Push the G D Button I am in pain

J Pushes button

Nurse at Desk: Yes?

J: She's kinda having a baby in here

Within 15 seconds my nurse, doctor and another nurse come running through the door. My doctor who I will now refer to as asshat says

Asshat: What's the matter?

J: She's kinda having a baby and I thought someone with a medical degree should be here.

Asshat looks at me and says I will be back.

My nurse stays with me and helps to push. By this time I am in horrible pain and an anesthesiologist comes in. He ups my epi but by this time my pain is to far gone to get back under control. by now it's 10:15 and I have been pushing an hour and a half. I AM EXHAUSTED! I am passing out between each contraction and I have no energy to push. The nurse calls for my doctor and we wait and wait. We waited an HOUR pushing and passing out before she comes in. I later find out she was in a C-section and tells my nurse to wait for her. She comes in and tells me I have 3 contractions to get him out or c-section. At this point I am so tired and hurting I don't care how he gets out .he doctor gets the vacuum ready to help him out. He is stuck under my pelvic bone .he next contraction comes and I PUSH. I have a second wind for some reason and I push like no one has ever pushed. THE VACUUM ISN'T WORKING. I scream at the nurse and doctor as they are figuring out that the damn thing isn''t plugged in correctly. I very loudly scream, "Are you fucking kidding me?" 2 pushes later they get it together and he pops out. They lay him on my chest and he is screaming. I help wipe him off and they whisk him away. My husband walks over and takes pictures and I just lay there with no energy left. A few minutes later they bring him back over for me to hold him and explain that they have to take him to the NICU for help. He is needing help to breathe. J goes with him and I quickly wake up! My asshat doctor and my wonderful nurse are about to do many not nice things to my lady bits. Now something they don't tell you is they have to "massage" your uterus after birth to get it to stop bleeding and for it to return to it's normal size. The word "massage" is bullshit. It hurts and it is almost as bad as an epi free delivery. What I found out later because at this time I was so tired and in so much pain and my baby was taken from me I couldn't concentrate for anything was that I wasn't doing well right after and I had to have a D & C, and repair work. Now normally if you have this they will give you major drugs for the pain because technically it is surgery. I HAD NONE! 0! I felt every scrap, stitch, pull and poke. And to make matters worse the asshat doctor messed up my repair work and had to pull all my stitches ans start AGAIN. It took and hour for me to be finished and after that hour I HAD TO GET OUT OF BED! I  had to go to the bathroom and get cleaned up and try to urinate. Of curse I hurt so bad it didn't happen. Now we are 2 hours post delivery and I am in bed eating because I am so hungry. Once I m done I am able to visit Isaac in the NICU. J and the nurse roll me to my baby. I don't know it now but this is the only time I will get to hold him for 3 days. I hold my precious baby for 5 minutes and then I tearfully apologize because I am to weak and tired to hold him and am terrified of dropping him that I make J take him from me. I go back to m room and pass out for 4 hours before the real torture of find out what was wrong with my son.

Birth Story Nov 4 Part 2

So here is a warning and don't say I didn't warn you. The rest of the story will not be sugar coated. Part 1 was the nice and fuzzes of our story the rest is hard, graphic and I will not keep anything back. I do this because the second I am going to think about getting pregnant again I am going to come and read this and when I don't whence and cry by reading it I will know I am ready.


So after I ate all of the box dinner they gave me J and I did lap after lap around the labor and delivery wing to either get my contractions going or to make me dilate more. The Dr had asked what time my water had broke and J asked how long we could go before he had to come out. We were told 24 hours was the limit. At this point I was almost 2 cm before all the walking. When were so up beat and excited. We knew by this time tomorrow we would be holding our little man in our arms. We walked and talked and laughed. We day dreamed about what he would look like and what he would grow up to be. We were thinking we were at the finish line. This was the final stretch. We were planing our trip home on Saturday as a family of 3.
1:30 AM came and we went back to our room. I crawled back in the bed and we waited for the nurse to come in. At this point I knew they were going to start talking drugs to get this thing started because nothing was happening. The nurse came in at 2 and said the doctor was delivering twins and they didn't forget about us that she would be in as soon as she was done.
4 AM the nurse came in and talked to me about this little pill they were going to give me to start thinning out my cervix. Now when I talked to the doctor at midnight and she started talking about Pitocin I told her how terrified I was of it. I had heard horror stories about Pitocin. I was trying to avoid it at all cost. The nurse gave me the pill and said I had to be monitored for 2 hours because it had a side effect of messing with you heart and the babies heart and I could have another in 4 hours if nothing happened. Well 4 hours came and went and nothing.
8:30 AM I realized Pitocin was going to happen soon so I called to get room service as J and I sit and play cards to pass the time. I was on a liquid diet so I got apple juice and jello. This is all I will eat until Nov 5. My new nurse comes in and tells me we will have to start  Pitocin. I ask if I can have my epidural before they start the Pitocin and she agrees. I also ask if I can walk for 30 minutes to see if I can get anything going again before I get my epi knowing once it is in I am bed ridden until he is born. So we walk.
10 AM The aneseoligist comes in the give me my epi. Nothing at this point had scared me as much as this. He explain everything to me and get everything ready. Just seeing all he was going to use scared the crap out of me. The nurse talks to me as he starts and my husband stands by my nurse to watch everything. The part that hurt the worst was the numbing shot. However the scariest part was the needle for the catheter. As he inserted the needle I jumped twice which made my husband jump and then he fussed at me for jumping. The Dr got the catheter in and they put my legs in bed and my nurse puts a catheter in my bladder and hooks me up to all the monitors/
10:30 Pitocin gets started and jump starts my contractions. I thank god I can't feel anything at this point because the Pitocin did it's job. My contractions were getting into a pattern quickly but my cervix was taking it's sweet time dilating.
2 PM I get checked and I am at 5 cm. Things are finally starting to get a move on. The nurse keeps uping my Pitocin every 1/2 and we are making steadying progress. We can see on the monitors that my contractions are starting to get off the chart. I am really thanking god for the epidural at this point knowing if I didn't have it life would suck BIG TIME! Dr comes in and says she is off at 5 and the new Dr will take over if we still don't have a baby by then but she still thinks it's possible.
4 PM New nurse comes in and takes my vitals. I am now running a slight fever at 99.2. I question if we should be worried and if this is OK. Nurse tells me this is normal during labor sometimes if you have been in labor for awhile. Which I have.I talk to my parents on the web cam and talk to the in-laws while they visit and distract us. I don't know this but at this time the nurse backs off my Pitocin which now stall out my labor at 8 cm.
Pitocin with out talking to the Dr and stalled out my labor. The new nurse suggest Tylenol to help the fever. (I am pissed at this point that the other nurse not only stalled my labor but didn't think to give me Tylenol to help the baby or me.) At this time antibiotics are ordered for me to start in my IV so they can get something in me and hopefully the baby before he is born.
8:45 PM Dr comes in and I am 9 cm but she believes I can start pushing if the nurse holds the little lip of cervix out of the way. So we start what we thought was going to be the homestretch of a long 24 hours. We still had no clue what was coming for us.

Birth Story Nov 3 Part 1

I wanted to write this a lot sooner but as you will read it wasn't an easy labor or delivery and recovery wasn't easy at all.

Wednesday Nov 3
So that afternoon around 2:30 at work I went to the bathroom because I pretty much lived there the last 3 weeks of my pregnancy. Now I thought I had lost my mucus plug earlier in the day but that was apparently only bits and pieces. This was no doubt my mucus plug. I knew this really didn't mean anything. Some women will loose theirs days before they actually go into labor, but I finally felt like something was happening! That afternoon at work I took care of a lot of last minute things I need to do before I left for maternity leave. I guess subconsciously I knew something was going to happen soon. I left for the day laughing telling the other girl I work with that I hoped I wouldn't see her tomorrow. I came home and J cooked dinner and we ate. It was this little stir fry thing that wasn't very big but my stomach wasn't tat big anymore so I was eating small meals but just always eating. After I ate I went take a shower and then J and I crawled on the couch to watch our Wednesday night shows. I was so tired I don't think I moved from 7 to 8:30. At 9 I told J I was going up to bed and he said he would be up by 9:30. I went up and brushed my teeth and was walking towards the bed to crawl in when I felt this wetness on my leg. Now I won't lie I had lost so much control over my body in the last week of my pregnancy my first thought was, "crap I just peed on myself." Then quickly I realized it may have been my water. Now my Dr tells me at my last appointment 5 days earlier that only 5% of woman's water breaks before contractions start. SO I go on believing this is not my water. I am an idiot and I just peed myself. But I also know once your water breaks the clock is ticking and there is only a certain amount of time you have to get baby out before there are serious health risk to you and baby ( which we learn first hand later.) So I call the office so they can page the Dr on call and tell them what's going on. So I am playing on the computer while I wait for the call. Those 5 minutes seemed like 30. And of course my phone didn't ring it just went to my voicemail. So I really never got to talk to the Dr. She left me a message saying come in and lets get you checked out. So I walk downstairs and look at my husband. The conversation goes as follows,
Me: Hey Babe
J: Yeah (as he keeps his eyes on the Batman cartoon he's watching, I promise he is 29 not 16)
Me: Um.... Yeah... so I think my water broke and I called the Dr and they said to come in and get checked out.
J: Alright lets get moving ( Then random mumbling to himself which I have no idea what it was but knowing my husband the ENGINEER he was going down a checklist he had made in his head for this exact moment the second he found out I was pregnant and had been adding to said list for the past 9 months)
He proceeds to put the dogs out and fly up the stairs to our bedroom and change his clothes and finish packing faster than I have ever seen him move. In the process of this what e will call his "flash dance" he ask me to pack this and grab that. When I am not moving fast enough for him he says oh I will get it you just get dressed and get to the car. The whole time he is doing his "dance"  I keep telling him I really don't think this is it. They are just going to send me home. I was in such a disbelief of what was happening. I was expecting that we would be leaving when I was have really bad contractions and I had labored at home for hours. (Looking back now I think my body was trying to start contracting the past 2 nights but as soon as I would fall asleep they would stop. More on this later)
So after I am dress and down stairs I call my parents and let them know we are leaving. J gets everything in the car and away we go. The entire trip I am trying to convince J they are going to send us home and this is a wasted trip. He spends the 30 minute drive telling me you are in labor crazy lady. The one thing I will always remember from that ride is both of us realizing the next time we walked in our house we would be a family of 3.
We got to the hospital and went up to L&D. They put us in a room and said they wanted to test my urine and wanted me to lay down for 30 minutes then they would check to see if my water had broke. My urine came back with some protein in it. The doctor came in 30 minutes later and as soon as she lowered my bed to see if my water broke the rest of my water came gushing and I mean gush out. She said you are officially admitted. You are not going home your staying. Then she did a quick ultrasound to make sure he was head down. They put me on the monitors to see if I was contracting and apparently I was  a little. She asked me to walk for 2 hours and see I could really start contracting on my own. At this point I begged for food because I knew as soon as I got the epidural or starting really contracting it was all of limits. She must have saw the desperation in my eyes because she let me eat! As soon as I finished it was midnight and my doctor predicted we would see a baby by 5 the next afternoon. But oh how was she wrong. If we only knew what was in store for the next 24 hours.