Cycles

Augh in my head today it's a mess. The previous post sort of displays this in its lack of coherence, and here's a companion random collection of thoughts.

There is something so disturbing about this weight thing. I think it's because I keep flashing back to The Meeting which was when the Sick Kids team brought all the reports and scans and experience they had to the table with Carl and I and talked about Emily and her state and the way things might shake out for her future. That was when they recommended that we take her off the ventilator.

And they also suggested that, down the road, we might want to withhold feeding, and at that my gut truly clenched. As I've written in my other journal, when you make these life and death decisions you never ever get to achieve certainty, in my view. A lack of certainty about your decision is kind of the moral price you have to pay in exchange for that kind of power: you'll never know if you were right; you can only know you did the best you could at the time. But I remember how, sitting there with engorged breasts and a post-partum body, there was some kind of bottom line instinct that said no to that (thank god we never got there). Removing machines was one thing; withholding sustenance was another. It was turning the natural order upside down.

Right now I'm questioning whether the natural order is producing the right kind of breast milk or latch or something.

The more superstitious bits of me, and members of the system, see Noah's lack of weight gain as somehow tied into that: the harbringer of doom that if that was the only thing we couldn't do last time, this time it will be the end. It's really awful sometimes how our life has conspired at times to lead us to that kind of fear and lack of belief in a benevolent universe.

My mother-in-law in her gentle way pointed out that there are about a million things not going wrong, which was good. And it's true. Today Noah turned himself on his side several times and he was awake and looking around quite a bit. He's reaching out more, probably randomly, but his fingers are splayed, not those newborn fists, and he stared at my black and cream striped t-shirt for quite a long while. He's definitely working to come online with the world around him, and he seems strong and healthy. It's just that the numbers on the scale are not right.

I'm really starting to feel the effects of lack of sleep. A pouch equipped with tits would be awfully handy around now. Last night I brought Noah into our bed to lie on me for "just a minute" before getting up to nurse and actually fell back asleep with him on me - now that's scary dangerous. When I woke up about 15 minutes later he had rooted around to my breast and was, shall we say, really blissed out on getting to nurse his own way. But I was sore. And horrified at myself.