Labour of Love

---

Thank you, everyone, for all your good wishes, cards and congrats! It’s been great getting all your messages and I will be in touch properly soon to thank you all personally ... in the meantime, the blogger in me can’t resist putting pen to paper ... (you’re probably wondering how I found time! So far - and I don’t want to tempt fate here - Mathias has been an amazingly good baby!)

Well, it seems I should have packed my hospital bag earlier after all. At a routine appointment, the doctor ominously disappeared from the room. When the door re-opened, she delivered the words, ‘I’m going to throw you a curveball.’ She wanted the baby to be born in the morning while I was still free of preeclampsia - with or without my husband present. Now, it’s not often that The Pilot is thrown into a panic but, given that it was already 6 p.m. in Dubai, the text message, ‘Ghengis being born at 8 a.m. tomoro. Can u make it?’ did the trick.

A Tall Order
The next morning, as I was getting ready for surgery, the nurses kept asking me - in a slightly nervous tone - if my husband was going to make it. The surgery team were anxious to get started on the elective c-sections and I was first. Being a pilot does have its advantages and so Michael had jumped on an overnight flight - but was stuck on the M25 in a traffic jam, of course. Amazingly, the door opened and he walked in, just in time to put his scrubs on and accompany me into the theatre. My knight in shining armour - well, in green hospital attire, at least!

Special Delivery
Mathias Laurence Makdisi was born at 10.16 a.m., weighing 8 lbs - a bundle of cuteness with a fine pair of lungs. The atmosphere was totally relaxed, with the radio on, the doctors and nurses chatting happily to us, and Mathias was handed to me straight away. Wow, I thought, so much easier than last time! Famous last words! I won’t go into the gory details, but a couple of hours later I made my second theatre trip of the day, haemorrhaging two litres of blood and requiring two blood transfusions, as well as a good 20 minutes of stomach pummelling to contract my uterus. Aside from feeling like I was starring in my favourite programme, ER, I did manage to joke to The Pilot that I only did it so he’d have to put the hospital scrubs on again! So, recovery-wise it’s been a lot rougher this time, but on the upside, my extended stay in hospital meant I collected loads of material for my blog.

On the Ward
I’m well aware that I was totally spoilt last time, having Max in America - and I am a huge fan of the NHS. The medical care and people were amazing -and it was all completely free. No bills arriving for months afterwards like in the U.S. But, inevitably, the cosmetics of the NHS do need a brush up. In fact, my five-day stay felt a little like youth hostelling - people of different nationalities in the beds around you, packets of cereal and a toaster outside, comings and goings in the middle of the night. Add screaming newborns and women in labour to the mix and I think you’ll understand why I resorted to sending my husband SOS text messages in the middle of the night. He’d reply cheerfully, the following morning, and we hatched various crazy escape plans (including jumping out the window, except most of them were locked shut!) - none of which came to fruition.

My first night was spent separated by just a curtain from a poor woman who screamed in agony all night. We talked a bit and I did try to offer some encouragement as her husband wasn’t with her for much of the time - but I was a little sceptical as she also kept disappearing for cigarette breaks! Turns out, the consultant - who caught her on a fag break - was a bit sceptical, too, and in the morning, informed her that she wasn’t in labour - but was simply constipated. Her husband was sent out with instructions to buy lots of fruit to help ‘get things moving’. A day or so later, after I’d been moved to a different ward, my husband reported that he’d seen my bed buddy and overheard her talking about the weight being 5lb. Could she have delivered a 5lb poo, I wondered to myself? I went to investigate and it turned out she did have her baby, at 32 weeks gestation, as things took a turn for the worse, and he was doing well in the NICU.

The second night was a little quieter, once the extended Polish family - who seemed to be holding a party around the bed opposite me - had dispersed. I snatched sleep where I could - in between being woken up by Mathias, the other babies on the ward, the midwives who needed to keep checking my blood pressure, then at 7 a.m., a bright and breezy lady who refilled my water jug with a little too much cheeriness - who I’d have chased off if I’d been more mobile. By the third day - the bags under my eyes looking worse than my scar - I was so ready to go home, when my neighbour’s husband enquired, ‘Are you Marianne?’ Erm, yes....and would you believe it, he was an old school friend, who I think, yeons ago, I may have had a very very brief fling with. A very nice chap, but I would have preferred to have caught up on Facebook rather than on the post-natal ward, looking and feeling like I’d been run over by a bus.

Homecoming
Our homecoming on the fifth day was wonderful - and that’s when the fun really started. Our beloved firstborn - the Big Boy - is thrilled by his little brother but determined not to be usurped and has upped his demands in response. Seeing them together is heart-warming - and nerve-wracking, too! ‘Baby needs food’, declares Big Boy, as he tries to feed crisps (American sp. chips) to his brother. ‘Bounce baby’s chair faster, faster,’ he calls with glee. People ask me who Mathias looks like - I think he looks just like my husband did as a baby, and they have the same calm nature too - maybe my husband has managed to clone himself, but I’m well aware that now Mathias’s official due date has passed, he may roar into action and become more like his high-energy brother.

The Big Boy, meanwhile, is finding new ways to entertain himself and divert attention. Yesterday saw the instigation of a new game called ‘Bombs’, in which he lurks at the top of the stairs and drops surprisingly heavy objects on passers-by underneath. He’s also broadened his Youtube.com viewing, and I must confess, the new subject matter - marble racing - makes watching toy trains seem exciting in comparison. There’s no mercy for me - after a night of feeding the baby every 2-3 hours, the Big Boy bounds into the room calling ‘Morning Mommy!’, pulls the covers off and prizes my eyes open. Happy days!

Postscript: You may remember that I wrote previously about the knife-wielding junior doctor at my last c-section. This time, my husband swears that he heard one of the surgeons say afterwards, Thanks for letting me practise!’ On the paperwork, it names A Locum as one of the doctors present - presumably not Andrew Locum, but a freelance doctor. Oh well, I guess practise makes perfect!

---