End of the Story

Bet you thought I'd never get here, huh? :)

Well, everything was perfect and magical and stayed that way until the day we came home from the hospital. I felt fine until I stepped into my house, and then the reality of the situation set in: that I had two infants whose round-the-clock care I was the main provider of FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. And, I felt the anxiety creeping up--massive, make-you-sweat, cry-for-no-apparent-reason anxiety. I knew it was hormone related because I would get really hot and sweaty and then I'd have a huge anxiety attack.

I'm not the kind of person who waits around to tough things out, so I called my doctor and asked for some kind of medicine the next day. She prescribed Zoloft, but four days later, instead of feeling relief, it felt like I was getting worse. I kept telling Jon that I felt like I was going crazy.

Meanwhile, instead of gaining weight, Nelle was losing weight. This news was crushing. I felt like I was killing myself feeding the two of them and literally getting about two hours of sleep a day, and then to find out that it was all counter-productive was about more than I could take. This news also meant that we had to start feeding the girls every two hours instead of three. With twins, this is no small task. It would take 20 minutes to feed one baby, then 20 minutes for the other, and then 20 minutes to pump. Which only left one hour until it all started again, and that was all day and night.

So, I called my doctor and got my medicine switched to Lexapro, and Jon found a nanny, Nelly. This was the best thing that could have happened to me. Since Jon works so much and especially around the time the babies were born, I had kind of felt like I was going at it alone, but when Nelly started I could finally hand over some responsibility to someone else, and it was exactly what I needed. Within the next week, I slowly started to return to my old self.

At first Nelly was coming during the day, but we eventually switched it to nights, and that's when I really started to enjoy being a mom. Spending the days with the girls is still really exhausting, but I can recharge at night and get ready to do it again the next day.

And now some pictures of my adorable girls:

Fern (my little diva)

Nelle (the sweetheart)

Part Three

As a little background, the women in my family have a history of prolonged bleeding after delivery. When I mentioned this to my doctor, she was especially alarmed because redheads apparently also have an increased risk of hemorrhaging (recessive genes strike again). So, she had taken all the precautions for the delivery, and I didn't have any excessive bleeding.



But, that afternoon I got the feeling that my water was breaking again, except this time it wasn't water but thick, dark blood. And concurrently, my epidural that they had left in for pain management was still not working. So, when I pushed the nurse button and showed her the blood, she called in more nurses who explained that I had a "boggy uterus," which means my uterus wasn't contracting down. The way to jump start that was to massage my uterus . . . that had just been cut open . . . without any working pain medicine. It was the most painful thing EVER, and it happened two more times during the next two days. During this whole time I was telling the nurses that my epidural wasn't working, and they were super condescending and asking me if I normally had such a low pain tolerance. Finally, one night I pushed the epidural button and felt liquid running down my back, and sure enough, the epidural hadn't been in for who knows how long. Weird, it seems like I had been saying that.

At that point they finally gave me pills for pain, and then I was fine for the rest of the stay. I didn't want to leave the hospital by the fourth day because I knew there wouldn't be any kind of nursery to take them at 2 am anymore, and I was going to miss that. Turns out I would miss it a lot more than I ever realized . . .