Your first baby is supposed to carry the steepest learning curve, isn't it? The one where you have little to no idea of what you are doing or why, the one that teaches you valuable lessons like don't buy a cream carpet and never assume it's not possible for a baby to do a second poo five seconds after the previous poo (which brings us back to the cream carpet issue), the one that takes a couple of clueless rabbit-in-the-headlights types and turns them into fully fledged
parents.
Subsequent babies are, everyone told me, even better. Less stressful, less fraught,
easier purely because you actually know what you're doing and you remember all the tricks you learned the first time around.
Why did no one tell Amelia this!?
Before anyone tells me I'm lucky to have her and I should be grateful, count my blessings, don't be mean etc etc etc - I know all of that. My love for her is immeasurable (just like my love for her older brother) and defies description, it is something that is never in any doubt. I know there are plenty of people who are far worse off than we are, people in far worse situations, but this is our situation and I just need to clear a few things off my chest.
I was hoping for as natural a delivery as possible, like I had with Nathaniel two years previously. What I got was an emergency cesarean after they realised at forty weeks that she was in a flexed breech position.
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| Flexed breech presentation |
Not only was she breech, she also had most of the umbilical cord wrapped around her legs, the remaining length of cord was coiled directly over my cervix. To round it all off she also had abnormally low levels of amniotic fluid, a condition known as oligohydramnios (more info is available
here), the deepest pool of fluid she had was a mere 3cm and routine antenatal checks had not picked it up. I'd had a show and was having mild but regular contractions so a half an hour after the scan confirming all of this I was in theatre having an emergency section. My little girl is nothing if not dramatic! I'm glad that it was all discovered in time, I'd only gone to see my midwife by chance as my first instinct on having a show and feeling pains was to stay at home for as long as possible, the first I'd have known of a problem would have been when the umbilical cord prolapsed, thankfully we have the rather brilliant NHS who packed me off for an immediate scan!
Everything was great after that. Sort of.
As she was breech and as I had a 'clicky hip' when I was a baby she had to have an ultrasound scan on her hips to rule out DDH and CDH - developmental/congenital dysplasia of the hip - and any other problems (
more information about DDH and CDH). The first scan, at six weeks, showed unusually shallow hip sockets and that her left leg was not entirely in the hip socket. They decided to rescan two weeks later before taking action, we spent a wonderful two weeks in medical limbo worrying about it. The second scan showed that the problem was corrected and her hip sockets were now within normal ranges.
At eight weeks of age she got a cold. Ah, I thought! Colds I can deal with, Nate has had loads of colds. Colds are easy! I dispensed cuddles, comfort, and Karvol. Get me, cool and collected second time parent. This presumption lasted all of twelve hours until she vomited all over Michael. Off I went with her to the GP who took one look and phoned the hospital.
Cool and collected second time parent backfired massively, she had a serious case of bronchiolitis ('the first we've seen this winter!' my GP proclaimed, as if it was something to be proud of). She was in hospital for a week and seemed to enjoy scaring us by frequently kicking off the sats monitor stuck to her foot - I have never known fear like waking up at 3am, having exhaustedly passed out in the armchair, to the sound of my baby's machine frantically bleeping and staff whooshing in to supply her with oxygen.
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| Still smiling though! |
She seemed to settle down after that. Little did I know she was just lulling us into a false sense of security.
Just before Easter this year she started 'teething'. Huzzah! Teething! I can handle the shit out of teething! I can do teething with my eyes closed! Bonjela, cold chewable things, hugs. Right? Right!?
She wasn't teething.
She was grotty and warm and pink faced, grizzly and off her food. That was Monday afternoon. By teatime she had progressed to crying quickly followed by sleepiness. Michael picked her up and commented that she was roasting, she really was - it was like touching an oven door. We gave her Calpol and stripped her down to her nappy and cotton vest. A few minutes later she drew her arms and legs in towards her body, stiffened and began to twitch - a febrile convulsion. Of course at the time we didn't think 'oh it's a febrile convulsion' we thought 'holy fucking shit the baby is having a fucking fit!', or words to that effect.
Once again we did the hospital dash, along the way she began to wail and wailed solidly for three hours. By the time they were done fitting a cannula into her hand, outlining initial tests, and showing us to the exact same room she'd been in during her bronchiolitis I was wailing too. She had a spinal tap to rule out meningitis, she's exceptionally strong and managed to pull away from them during it, I don't think it's any coincidence that she sat up unaided for the first time ever a few minutes after her spinal tap, she was probably worried that if she lay down they'd do it again! She had blood tests and I had to get a urine sample from her. Have you ever tried to get a urine sample from a baby girl using a sterile pot the size and shape of a yoghurt pot? It's bloody hard! It took me 18 hours, four pots, and getting pee'd on more times than I can count before I got enough for them to test.
She had a kidney infection, a nasty one and apparently rare in a baby of her age (at the time she was six months old). We spent another week in the hospital while she had IV antibiotics and scans. This was followed by another week of antibiotics at home and then a daily dose of prophylactic antibiotic that she still takes now. She has had to have tests to rule out any underlying causes for the infection such as problems with her bladder or kidneys and to check that they have not been damaged by this infection.
She had an MCUG - micturating cystourethrogram - where they filled her bladder with contrast fluid and waited for it to empty, scanning it the whole time. We got to wear snazzy lead aprons and she got to pee on a very expensive scanning machine. We take our joy where we can find it.
She also had a DMSA scan - dimercaptosuccinic acid scan - where the radioactive DMSA was injected into her arm and a little while later she was scanned with a gamma camera. The acid attaches itself to healthy tissue, any areas that are damaged or not functioning show as dark areas. We haven't had the results yet but I'm seriously hoping her insides were lit up like Blackpool!
A few months ago she started to cruise around the furniture and we noticed that her left foot was turning outwards, almost at at 90-degree angle to the rest of her leg. I mentioned it to the Health Visitor and expected her to tell me it was normal and I'd walk away feeling like a slightly silly overprotective mother. Well she didn't, she referred us to a physiotherapist.
The physiotherapist diagnosed hypermobility, something I have too. Amelia is exceptionally bendy, to the point that even the physio was amazed at her range of motion. It sounds comical, Amelia the rubber baby, like she's the result of a torrid affair with Mr Fantastic (a little geek reference there for Michael).
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| This is her comfort position |
Her left leg appears to be longer than the right. The creases don't marry up, the ones on her left leg are noticeably lower than those on her right, as is her left knee. The physio thinks it may be fine and could just need monitoring as she grows however it's her left leg. At her original six week hip scan it was the left leg that wasn't in the hip socket, that had corrected itself by the eight week repeat scan. She was breech. She has a first degree relative with DDH (me). Her foot is turning out. Her creases are uneven. All warning signs of DDH. She referred us to a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon and we're now waiting for an appointment with him where he will do further checks to determine whether or not there is a problem.
Best case scenario is that there is nothing at all problematic with her hips. Worst case is that she has DDH, that she will require surgery, plaster casts, physiotherapy - the same road I walked as a child. I want to stay positive, we don't actually know anything for certain just yet, but at the same time I don't want worst case scenario to come as a shock, should it happen. I know it bothers me more than it bothers Amelia! If a diagnosis comes it'll make little difference to her, she'll be the same Amelia she was the day before.
This blog post has turned out to be my longest entry to date! I haven't even covered the trip to A&E at two weeks old when Nathaniel threw my iPhone and, as rotten luck would have it, it smacked her directly on the fontanelle. Or the dash to hospital at ten days old when she produced a poopy nappy full of blood clots. The weird rash that we thought was chickenpox but didn't blister and lasted almost four weeks. The speckled rashes she would get shortly after nursing that seemed to coincide with me eating certain foods. The vomiting (my poor, poor no-longer-cream-coloured carpet). The episodes of choking should any sort of lump pass her lips - noisy gagging we're well acquainted with, Nate was one of those babies who used both hands to shovel food into his mouth, but this was silent, slowly turning purple choking that made sure we got our moneys worth from the baby first aid class we did years ago. The bumped heads, if Amelia is within fifty feet of a solid surface, any surface, she will find a way to smack her head on it. A major brownie point in our favour is that she has yet to actually fall
off anything, Nathaniel had fallen out of our bed at least five times by this age. Score one for us!
Today she 'walked' for the first time, not unaided but she's been cruising the furniture for ages with no signs of wanting to actually go anywhere. Today she grabbed hold of the baby walker and used it to bimble happily around the garden for ages.
I was so proud except I kept looking at her left foot which is still turning out and her right leg seems stiff, maybe to compensate? I'm probably reading too much into it but once she was in bed I got to worrying and my worrying got to feeling anxious and before I knew it I was tearfully having a 'what if' conversation with Michael.
I have all these stupid anxieties and concerns, I'm fretting over non-answers and incomplete information, I even have a ridiculous sense of guilt. I can't fully articulate what it is I'm feeling, we're in that medical limbo again where we have no answers yet and nothing to do but wait. She gets her kidney results in a couple of weeks and, hopefully, an uneventful hip check not long after that. All being well she'll be signed off - no more surgeons or tests or paediatricians or daily antibiotics - at which point we can draw a line under it all and find something else to worry about. Between Amelia's bad luck and Nathaniel inheriting the clumsy gene I feel like we're never away from A&E, our GP, the out of hours GP (conveniently located next door to A&E), the children's ward at the hospital, and the Health Visitor clinic. If it's not too political a statement for my very non-political blog I am eternally grateful for the NHS and the myriad of staff we've encountered, there is no way we could have afforded all of these tests and treatments without serious financial hardship, especially the quality of care and the speed at which they've all been carried out.
I'll get off my soapbox now.
So that's it. That's my Amelia. She'll be one year old this coming Friday and it's been an eventful twelve months. She's supposed to be my easy second baby and instead she makes certain that she keeps us constantly on our toes. Nathaniel taught us how to be parents, Amelia seems determined to teach us to be doctors!
She's bloody brilliant.
