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My father died on Saturday.
My son took his first steps last night.Current Mood: joy and grief can coexist
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So. Summary update on the baby: he's crawling, he's cruising, he's currently sick for the first time ever and hating it, he still desperately wants to walk. He's practicing standing up without holding on to anything (his record is about four seconds) and trying to figure out how to stand up without pulling himself up (he gets to hands and feet, and then is stuck, but he can pull to stand one-handed). He has no teeth.
I'm struggling to stay afloat because my father's cancer treatment wasn't going well, he's been in and out of hospital (currently in), and a week ago I was told he's been given 3-6 months to live.
So that's why I'm still a lousy correspondent.
Tuesday is my birthday. 15 days after that is Christmas. I was really excited about those firsts with my son, now they might also be my lasts with my dad.
It's been quite a year.
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Okay, so. Several months into parenthood, and how is it?
Wonderful. Yesterday I unironically started crying because of how much I love him and how amazing it is when his little face lights up to see me.
He's just the cutest, and he's the sweetest, happiest baby ever. We're very lucky.
( Just baby ramblings. )
Also I had the first of my annual "see if the cancer came back" scans. I have a followup with the oncologist, but they didn't call me with any urgent comments so I assume it's probably fine, I hope.
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I should update this icon. That picture is about twenty years old.
Because of a silly Star Wars tumblr post we saw we refer to the baby's crying exclusively as "screm". He screm, he scremming, he scremmed.
He's actually a fairly cheerful baby by nature, but his digestive system causes him to Suffer.
I've learned things! I think some of these things weren't things last time I was dealing with babies a lot.
For example, you can get a feed thickener you can mix with a bit of milk and give the baby before and partway through feeding, which helps with reflux. It has the side-effect of causing constipation, which in our case is a secondary benefit because adjusting his poo frequency from "30-40 times per day" to "every day or two" is a significant improvement. His little butt was so raw it was distressing for all of us.
Especially since the first treatment option we tried gave him a rash.
Fortunately, C's cousin is a child health nurse and had some great suggestions, including the feed thickener, which also has him throwing up less. And choking less.
The combination of The Modern World plus her profession created the very weird situation that is texting someone close-up photos of our child's unhappy butt. As she noted: not really up to the usual standard of the pictures I text to various family members.
He's started smiling at me. This is, of course, the most joyful thing ever.
Updates on his likes and dislikes:
Likes: His parents, being cuddled, milk, dummies (sometimes), having his feet tickled (mood-specific, but when he's not in the mood he doesn't care)
Dislikes: The touch of moisture (his nemesis), his thickened gel, being dressed or undressed, two specific bodysuits we have for him
Later this week we will probably add "getting needles", since he's due for his first round of vaccinations. In the hospital he got the Hep B vaccine and only cried for a couple of seconds, then didn't care at all about the heel pricks, but he was all of two days old then and was very "this might as well happen" about most things. He's since acquired a lot more opinions.
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So the baby is three weeks and three days old and sometimes he lifts his head, and I'll often praise him for it. Especially because sometimes it's inconvenient but I'm aiming for praising the good because he is not even a month old, obviously he can't actually do anything wrong.
When I say, "Good head lifting! So strong!" I sometimes get the Barenaked Ladies song What A Good Boy stuck in my head.
I sing to him a lot, but the unedited words don't seem appropriate for such a tiny baby, so I've been gradually filking it.
What A Good Boy (Sami Singing To A Newborn Version)
When you were born, we looked at you and said
What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy
And when you were born, we looked at you and said
What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a pretty boy
You've got these hands hitting you in the face
They don't wanna do anything that it seems like you want to do
They push your food, they wave around
When you get control, that will be good
It's a work in progress.
Talking to babies is important, so I say a lot of nonsense at the moment.
The baby continues well. He is growing freakishly rapidly (I mean, at a normal rate, but at this age, that's freakishly fast.)
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So, the baby had a rough afternoon. Midwife visit which meant health checks (which he hates) and a bit of schedule disruption. By about 5pm he was a bit overtired and ratty and wouldn't settle down at all.
I decided it was worth seeing if he was overstimulated, so I took him upstairs to my room and basically had him in a dim, quiet room (I had white noise on until there was a risk I'd fall asleep because it's the white noise I usually sleep to) and he finally settled down.
He really needed to sleep, so... three hours of lying on my bed with him sleeping on my chest for me!
While I was doing that, I called my dad (speaking softly) for some information I urgently needed.
The baby made a little noise while I was talking to Dad. Just one of those little baby noises newborns make.
My dad - who is, normally, kind of a robot, he's never been officially assessed but we're pretty damn sure he's autistic - broke off mid-sentence to coo and get audibly choked up about the existence of his grandson. Who has, and I quote, "Won [his] heart."
I'm having feelings of my own about it.
Dad's going through a rough time with his cancer right now and a friend of his died last week. I think the baby might be giving my father a reason to keep going.
And just... my daddy loves my baby.
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So my concussion specialist is currently giving me a break from pretty much all of my brain exercises, because the combination of stress and excitement about the baby is basically guaranteed to be frying my brain.
Braining is really hard right now. I should experience significant improvement once V and the squirmloaf are safely separated.
The baby is very squirmy. He is also very loaf. He's still horizontal - at 38 and a half weeks, this is unusual - and various movements make V's tummy form a very emphatic loaf shape. So for these last few days: squirmloaf.
We're pretty much ready for him, which at least has stopped my stress levels from increasing.
However, my uncle died this morning.
Not my biological uncle, but the uncle first-gen kids have who is probably also first-gen - mine's Italian - who is much, much closer than your biological family.
It's hard to even process. I think because my brain is so fried.
My physio told me yesterday about the conversation he had when he was doing handover to one of my other physios - at varying frequencies, I see three, at the moment - and there was a bit that has helped me put into perspective my frustrations with the slow progress of my rehab.
Physio 1: She had this surgery on this date, and this surgery on this date, and then a few months ago she had surgery on her lung.
Physio 2: So she's in a wheelchair?
Physio 1: No, she'll just walk right in.
Physio 2: Are you serious?
So even if I can't walk that far or stand that long (currently I can walk longer than I can stand, it's a thing) I'm probably doing quite well actually.
(I said as much to Physio 1. He said YES, YOU ARE DOING GREAT.)
Maybe by the time the kid is running around I'll be doing okay for keeping up.
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hm
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Feb. 23rd, 2024 @ 11:24 am
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The genetic screening clinic has a questionnaire that basically wants more information about my life and my family than I think I actually have.
Even things like "date of cancer diagnosis" I mean do I count when the oncologist spotted it or when it was first seen on a CT but not yet then identified as probably cancer or, like, when the lab results came back saying it was definitely cancer, which, at that point was it really me having cancer since it was no longer in my body actually?
(Because the attempt to figure out in advance if it was definitely cancer did not go well and we only actually got confirmation when the surgeon just took the whole thing out and they sent that to a lab. I consented to it being used for research or further study, so who even knows, maybe someone wanted some nice slow-growing cancer cells to culture and some of it is still existing, which is a vaguely weird thought, but probably I think it's all been incinerated by now? But I digress.)
But also family history. Like. These people live(d) on another continent and many of them I had not met.
Anyway. I'll try to get it figured out soon and notably they did give it to me well in advance but I might also have to actually see my doctor about some of it.
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Our washing machine's gasket is torn and the laundry is mildly flooded.
I am choosing to perceive the good news that this happened a few weeks before we bring home a newborn, not, say, right after.
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Christmas was EXHAUSTING.
I come from a first-generation immigrant family. Christmas growing up was my parents and sister, maybe we go see some family friends.
Quiet. Peaceful. Admittedly somewhat dull.
This year? THIS YEAR? Hoo boy.
Obviously it's somewhat my own fault, what with how I got myself into a committed relationship with a partner who not only has a family but also has a husband and he has a family, so on Christmas Day we had V's older sister and her husband and kids over for morning tea, then her younger sister and her husband and kids and their parents for lunch, and then my parents for dinner... and then on Boxing Day we went to C's family lunch.
V's brother and one of C's brothers weren't even there. Still kinda overwhelming!
With the help of V's sisters and one of her nieces we've made substantial progress in getting the house ready for the baby. We're talking about plans for decorating the nursery. So far in terms of Unique and Special Decorations all that's really there is a little drawing of a Totoro on the wall inside his cupboard, it's super cute and I'll have to show a picture of it at some point.
I drew it. Helpfully, I got paint markers for C's family's secret Santa.
The baby is, of course, continuing to grow and be more active. Highlights in externally observable development:
- I startled him. I didn't mean to, but I was lying with my head in V's lap and I was being performatively outraged about something for her entertainment and I was maybe slightly loud. He had been asleep, but he jumped.
- Last night, he was very active, but it was getting close to V's bedtime and I've been encouraging him all along to make sure he doesn't keep her from sleeping. I sang him a lullaby... and it worked. He stopped kicking and moving around.
- Today I had to sing him two lullabies. He'd been quiet during the first one, but started kicking again as soon as I stopped singing. The second one he stayed quiet.
- Sometimes he presses and holds against V's tummy instead of just kicking. If you press back gently a couple of times, he stops. (It gets uncomfortable for her.) I'm not sure it's required to say, "High five, baby! High five!" when you do it, but I do.
I still suck at reading my reading page. In my defence the last couple of weeks have been rough for concussion stuff. Going through all the stuff for reorganising to clear baby room is a lot of memory things that are still very taxing for me, and then So Many People and so many screaming children at Christmas.
I'm not sure I could have managed Boxing Day, actually, but for the first couple of hours I wasn't out with the crowds, I was in one of the bedrooms playing Lego with one of the nephews.
Before that he gave me a tour of the house (or at least, of all his toys in all the rooms in which they were located). As he was showing me around, he noted: "You're very big! And fat. But really big!"
It is hilarious to me that he clearly wanted to be clear that he wasn't calling me fat... by specifically drawing the distinction between the fact that I am fat and the thing where I am very big, because he is three feet tall (and four years old).
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Seriously, my Physitrack listing runs to four pages. I now have an alternating program.
I am just not capable of counting reps properly. Like, I have an exercise that involves raising a weight to this point, then lowing it to that point, repeat. I will lose count if I try to count reps.
So now I double the target number and count off at top and bottom. it works for me.
Life is very stressful. Added to the pregnancy-related things, a family member has a brain tumour that looks... bad.
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So I was working on an original story until the concussion brought progress to something of a screeching halt.
Tooling around with writing became one of my rehab exercises but the totality of the story was still difficult, especially because I was blocked at the new point (I need to change some of the leadup to fix it).
What I ended up doing for a while was writing a crossover fanfic with my own original fiction and Stargate Atlantis, because it entertained me.
I have no intention of ever showing this to anyone other than ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya and maybe one other person.
Which in its way is freeing already because so long as this is entertaining me all good.
The thing is, because a lot of it was from the point of view of Atlantis characters, it was functionally Outsider Point Of View on my characters, and then my world, and it did an amazing amount of good for my sense of the world. I really solidified a lot of stuff in the course of writing about it that way.
Which makes it a lot easier to write about from the inside in turn, even though the SGA crossover was set like thirty years later.
For original fiction in a novel setting I really recommend writing some throwaway bullshit secondary story in which someone has to have all of it explained to them.
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Reading someone talking about the validity of people asking for tags about content, while also considering the dumb shit people have asked me to tag for.
The dumbest, of course, being the person who complained about me including content that not only had I tagged for, but there was also a specific and extended author's note warning at the start.
They decided I probably didn't mean it, but also skimmed ahead to check and had a wildly wrong idea of what was going on at all? And complained about it?
Writing a fic that gets popular and becoming a moderately popular author has many consequences, and among them is developing a deep contempt for people who leave complaining comments. Because I wrote a story that got popular, and am now a moderately popular author in that fandom, and I get some of the dumbest complaints.
I also got to develop a deep contempt for antis, even though I write the popular pairing. Not least because I have written that pairing in AUs that hit every aspect the antis claim as justification for being hostile to other pairings, and I've never had those complaints at all.
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Surgery update: I am recovering well. I am home. I am astonishing and impressing every doctor and physiotherapist with how generally sprightly I am.
The physio I saw this morning was also slightly awed by my collection of doctors, since I have basically The Best Respiratory Physician, The Best Sleep Specialist, The Best Oncologist [For Lungs], and The Best Cardiothoracic Surgeon.
It just sort of happened? I needed a respiratory specialist and The Best One was still taking new patients at that time, and he referred me on to the sleep specialist (who works with him) and the oncologist, and the oncologist referred me to the surgeon.
Exciting Life News Update:
So. In 2021 I had a hysterectomy I didn't want (also because cancer; I continue to blend Very Lucky and Very Unlucky, in that I've had TWO cancer findings at the age of 42, which is A Lot and Very Unfair, but also they've both been caught early enough that it was handled surgically with no chemo/radiotherapy required).
I was devastated. It was a whole grief process, especially because I hadn't quite given up hope of motherhood, which I desperately wanted. I thought I'd never have the chance to be a mother and I cried a lot and all of that.
Except.
IT TURNS OUT.
I am in fact going to be a mother.
I'm just not going to be the one getting pregnant. I will be one of my kid's three parents, because velithya is pregnant and I'm going to be co-parenting.
Special mention of gratitude goes to the sonographer who did the fourteen-week anatomical scan (everything looks perfect!). She worked late to add us to the end of her list a couple of days before I had lung surgery specifically so that I could be there for the scan.
I would have been devastated to miss it. The baby was doing somersaults and flips and kicky feet and I got to see it, and it means so much to me. I got to watch as the sonographer zoomed in to count fingers and thumbs and have the reassurance of watching as she checked that blood vessels are going the right way, all four heart chambers are there, all of the everything.
When my child is old enough to understand the words, I will never be saying, "Just be normal!"
But at this point, "everything's normal" are sweet, sweet words to hear.
There's no range for being, like, better than normal at this point. At this point I want normal. Most of all I just want healthy.
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I should be going home tomorrow!
All the tubes have been removed (I had a lot of tubes in me, at one point) and I am no longer on my fascinating cocktail of ketamine + fentanyl + oxycodone + other things, it's mostly just paracetamol and oxycodone now.
For a couple of days I had ketamine on steady with a button to press for fentanyl, which was very effective but also did a number on my ability to keep my eyes open and/or focus rather than seeing double when they were open.
I'm now dealing with a strange after-effect. I have no sense of vertigo or disorientation, but I also have no sense of balance. I just... tip over. Really easily. It's weird.
I'm also up after midnight because I'm long enough off the fentanyl now that the cough-suppressant effect has worn off and a whole lot of gunk wants to come out of my lung RIGHT NOW.
About to try and have a go at sleeping.
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Apparently this room is only my room until tomorrow morning. After the surgery I'll be going to ICU. Fun.
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"It's the most painful operation you can have on your body." - my surgeon, this morning
It doesn't make most of the lists of you google "most painful operation" but they usually just list orthopaedic surgeries, and I can definitely state with absolute confidence that at least one of the ones mentioned isn't nearly as painful as having a cyst removed can be, so there's that.
Really, these things are so variable and subjective!
He seemed mildly concerned that I'll have an unpleasant time because of how many painkillers I have adverse reactions to, but that's a discussion to have with the anaesthetist.
My surgery will be on the second of October, which is at least a couple of days after velithya's birthday. I go into hospital the night before and come out... at some point. It depends on various factors to do with how the surgery and recovery go.
Unnerving comments notwithstanding he seemed very nice.
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At the start of last year I started working on a piece of original fiction. I was a bit over 300k words into it when I got the nasty concussion, which really impeded progress.
I'm picking it up again by doing a rewrite pass, because I was always intending to, and there are some adjustments I need to make to be sure the ending will be workable.
I don't want to throw away all the stuff I've got to write a new story diverging from the same starting point, or at least not yet, but I do have ideas.
If nothing else, the idea of: "what if I wrote the story I had originally thought of instead of the wildly different thing this diverged to"
It's challenging to plan it structurally, because it involves flashbacks and time travel and all sorts of things like that, but the starting point I have - and I think this does need to be the starting point - risks giving people a rather inaccurate view of one of the central characters, because at the point where the story starts he seems like an arrogant and standoffish asshole, whereas actually, no, he's a nice guy, he's just in a very stressful situation surrounded by people he hates.
I might start posting excerpts/meta here. I'm not planning to put them on a filter immediately. They'll be cut tagged if you don't want to see them.
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Sep. 16th, 2023 @ 07:01 pm
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Me, a fool, on Saturday afternoon: Man, it sucks that we're not going to hear from the surgeon until at least Monday.
The surgeon, Saturday, 6pm: "Sorry to call you so late. Are you available to come see me at 10:30am tomorrow?"
My oncologist, my respiratory specialist, and a cardiologist to whom I am socially connected are all in agreement that this guy is a top tier cardiothoracic surgeon.
I don't know why I would have expected him to take weekends off.
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... that the ability to compartmentalise in a crisis doesn't mean you don't have the emotions. It means you postpone them.
It's such a weird thing. Yesterday through last night all the terror of Wednesday's medical misadventures hit me in a rush.
I spent a lot of time verbally rationalising. Both why it was okay to be afraid - you know, the experience I went through being legitimately terrifying actually - even though it was two days later, and also why I wasn't in serious danger at the time.
Because the whole thing would have been genuinely life-threatening outside of a hospital situation, but I was in a hospital, so it wasn't.
They had oxygen tanks on hand. If I'd needed a transfusion they would have had the supplies on hand and I was already cannulated so they wouldn't even have had to mess around trying to find a vein. There was a doctor right there. There were nurses right there. Guaranteed if they needed to call the crash team that will have been something they could do in seconds, and hospital crash teams don't fuck around. (We had to call one for my mother once. They turn up astonishingly quickly.) They had a pulse oximeter on my finger pretty much as soon as the problem started and they were watching my saturation levels very closely.
I was fine.
And on some level, for all that I was, in the moment, clear-headed and outwardly calm, on some deeper level I was also absolutely terrified and that's okay too. That was a scary thing to experience.
It was, mind you, a lesson in why that kind of compartmentalisation - which my parents do, too, I have no idea if it's genetic or learned or what - is generally speaking a very good thing, I think.
Because if I'd been feeling that terror in the moment? If I'd panicked? That would have made the situation so much worse and I might in fact have had to have the really unpleasant outcomes. If I'd started hyperventilating I would have been in so very much more trouble.
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