The Post Nanowrimo World

(The Nanowrimo website is not allowing updates to word counts anymore, so I switched formats on my blog to allow me to add a word count widget so I will stay accountable towards my goal of 50k words on Peasant and Enjoyable (Working title for my book. Plot is kind of like Clerks meets Narnia). Let me know if the new format doesn't work for you!)

I love Nanowrimo, but as I predicted, I failed this year, but not for lack of trying. I doubled up my efforts early in the month with the hope of reaching 50k by November 25th (Cleo's initial arrival date) and despite getting massively sick and having a baby early, I still reached 30,000 words. I love the camaraderie of Wrimo, I love the challenge, and I love having that word count goal getting knocked out of the park every night.

The downside of Wrimo, though, is that I'm not sure how well it does with establishing healthy writing habits.

I believe this man was the winner.

Consider the Bicycle Commute Challenge I recently participated in. I bike to work nearly every day, about 4 out of every 5. During the BCC, though, you tracked your miles and frequency of biking for a month. So it became 5 days a week, regardless of weather or health. This was in the peak of fall soccer season, mind you, so I was playing 90 minute games on the weekend and, in order to keep my perfect commute record, I would bike from work to futsal, play 1-2 futsal games, then bike from futsal to home.

It wasn't a huge change for me, but four weeks of me pushing on regardless of what signs and hints my body gave me over the month was significant. I ended up with an injury at the end of the month. Thankfully it was only a small injury, but I ended up missing the last 4 days of the Commute Challenge and a soccer game.

What WAS concerning, though, was how long it took me to get back to biking 4 days a week!  For the entire month of October, I biked maybe 2 days a week. I had gone too far and burnt myself out. It wasn't until Cleo was born and I needed to go back to biking for financial reasons that I transitioned back to 4 days a week.

Not my problem if you can't type one-handed Dad.

So it has been with Wrimo. I was clocking about 2k words a day for early November. My goal currently is about 500 words per day.  Much more reasonable.  Much healthier and saner for me.

And damn near impossible lately!

Obviously there are constraints to writing with a newborn (that's a post for another day), but when I do find the time, it's harder to sit down to write. All that white space between writing sessions gets filled in with doubts and insecurities, too, so that it become harder to sit down again the next time.

Anyhow, I'm hoping that progress bar in the top right corner will help me keep going. Feel free to drop me a line if you see it hasn't moved in a while!

Cleo's Birth Part 3: Welcome to our World

A lot of guys say that after a pregnancy, your respect for your partner goes up through the roof, and I have to say I agree. H has never been a big one for discomfort and pain. When it comes to things like hiking or bike rides, H usually gets frustrated and quits when it comes time to "feel the burn", and I admit, I was worried about labor. There is no quitting or backing out when it comes to this and I was dreading what her reaction would be.

I didn't need to worry. She was magnificent.

There was an amazing toughness about her during this process and never once was there any of the crying or complaining I had secretly anticipated. Only steel resolve and strength. I don't think I've ever loved her more. (The downside for her is that when we go hiking or biking again, I know damn well how tough she really is and probably won't go so easy on her in the future!)

If the argument H and I had earlier in the night is one of the weaker moments in my life, I have to say that what comes next is one of the stronger ones for me. H was propped up in a way so that she could not see the monitors attached to her and Cleo. While I was holding her hand and looking into her eyes, coaching her in breathing and telling her how amazing she was, I was also able to see the monitors behind her.

And they were goddamn terrifying.

You see, Cleo had the cord wrapped around her neck. When H pushed, Cleo's heart rate would go down. Way down. Normal is 133 bpm. Cleo's heart rate would go down, down, down, to 30 bpm or lower (at one point, the sensors couldn't even detect a heartbeat for a few moments). Then it would struggle, wavering up, down, up and down and up again as it worked its way back up to 130 over the next few minutes. The docs had H skipping every other contraction due to this. They weren't saying anything concerning, but at one point a specialist was called in and I knew things were not right.

Watching that heart rate creep back up was terrifying, but H was looking right at me pushing past pain I couldn't comprehend with so much effort and courage! I couldn't let her see me freaking out about it. My only goal during this time was to make sure H felt supported and that she remained blissfully ignorant of how bad things were behind her.

To complicate matters, they put an oxygen mask on H to give Cleo help with recovery.  However, H was in a world of near aneurysm inducing pain and exertion where she wasn't completely rational. She didn't fully understand why the mask was on her and the pain and the effort of pushing would cause her to rip off the oxygen mask (H said it made her feel claustrophobic). After she was done pushing, I had to gently (sometimes firmly) place the mask back on H with her glaring at me as if I were a hooded torturer, all the while trying to remind myself to breathe as Cleo's little heart wavered back up to normal.

Two hours of this.

Then came the moment of truth. H would have one big push and the docs would have the opportunity to get the cord out of the way.

And suddenly there she was. My little girl's grimacing face, out in the world. Thankfully the docs moved quick, and the cord was off from around her neck. A few more pushes and she was free.

There was a partial cry. Then a few moments... and a full cry! With a squeak at the end of it when she sucked in breath! H was visibly overwhelmed with astonishment, saying "Oh my god!" over and over again as they put Cleo in her arms, tearful and and amazed. I cried. A lot. More than I ever have in my adult life.

Thankfully, despite the incident with the cord, she was completely healthy (Apgar of 9). I'm not sure about H, but due to the kidney issue, I was worried there could be more wrong with Cleo, and I was able to breathe easily now that I finally saw her and doctors pronounced her perfectly healthy.

And with a shaky hand, I cut the cord.

They whisked the little one off to the sink to wash her. Her cry and squeak continued, and I witnessed the act that will likely be my downfall in the years coming when I discipline her: her lower lip trembling as she cried. I still tear up thinking about that.

After the bath, I held her for the first time. I haven't held many babies in my life, and it was extremely awkward, but it was also amazing! I had never really wanted children until recently and was completely unprepared for the amount of love I felt. I thought I would grow to love her, but instead, it slammed into me, catching me completely off guard with its own uniqueness.

The sudden love for your child is a hard love to describe, but since this is a geek AND dad blog,  I'll try using the medium of Doctor Who.

In season 5 of the new series, Amy Pond has the memory of Rory, the love of her life, erased from her mind shortly after he dies. For the most part, she just continues on with her adventures with The Doctor, only occasionally feeling that there is something wrong with her life. But when  Rory is brought back to her and her memory comes back, she cannot even comprehend how she could have forgotten him!

That's how it felt for me with Cleo. Once she was here, I suddenly understood that there was a gigantic hole in my life that I had never, ever noticed before, but now that it was filled, I now can't imagine how I could have missed it for all these years!

A super geek comparison, but not really out of place. As I looked at her for the first time, alien eyes blinking and unused to light, lungs erratic as they begin to comprehend how to breathe a gas instead of a liquid, I was struck by how odd it is that something that is so incredibly ordinary about humans could be so sci fi! She is an amazing, life changing traveler from another reality that somehow always belonged in mine. And I cried again.

Welcome to our world my special little traveler! I promise I will do everything in my power to make your stay here the best it can be!

Cleo's Birth Part 2: At the Hospital

So after a disappointingly normal drive to labor and delivery, we got H checked in. She was apologizing to the midwife in advance for wasting her time (H still wasn't convinced she was REALLY in labor). That's when we were informed that H was 5 centimeters dilated! Judging by H's face, this was both validating and terrifying for her. We both shared nervous smiles during this time as they started the machine chugging along that would end with us having a baby. This was really happening!

We were escorted back to the delivery rooms. I knock on Kaiser a lot and I personally had a decidedly less than pleasant experience staying in H's recovery room for the following days, but the delivery rooms are quite pleasant. Kind of a dim, hardwood decor going on back there like you get in a really nice Starbucks.  H requested a laboring tub and they went about getting things prepped for her to do this. They set her up with an IV bag (Not fun. H has tiny veins and is always a hassle to even draw blood from, much less set up an IV), and we were shown into the tub room.

For those of you who haven't seen a laboring tub before, it looks pretty freaking nice. It's like half a hot tub, molded into an oval shape. For the next 5 hours, H would be in there, moving around and breathing. This was the first (but not the last) time this night I would be immensely impressed with H. Her pain level was very, very obviously high at this point, but she was doing her best to move past it. Finally, though, she asked for IV drugs.

The image of this will stick with me till the day I die. I'll try to paint a verbal picture of this.

I demand narcotics as Tribute!

H stood up from the tub as the nurse came in. Nine months pregnant, mostly naked except for a swath of cloth attached to her to hold the monitors in place, she emerged from the birthing tub like a goddess of the sea! Water cascading down her, her hand clutching her IV stand like a trident imbued to summon the Kraken lest you thwart her will, she requested her pain medication to be bestowed upon her as if she were decreeing it to her mortal attendants. IT WAS GLORIOUS!

What followed, unfortunately, was not as glorious. They gave her the IV meds, but also examined her and found that while earlier she had dilated to 8 centimeters, she had now stalled. The doctor brought up breaking H's water, but H declined. The IV drugs helped some, and H gave it another hour in the tub, but it was obvious the pain was breaking through. The time had come for an epidural.

It must be odd to be a hospital specialist. For you, this is just a day. For everyone else, this is major fucking stuff. So it was with the anesthesiologist. He was a good natured man who had worked up in Alaska, and upon finding out that H was from Alaska and that her mother had been in the same medical outreach program as him (decades earlier) he was really fascinated by this.

H, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the pain.

"So, how long did your mom work for them?" the anesthesiologist would say from behind H as he inserted a tube into my wife's spine. H would answer him politely, but from my perspective in front, she was positively feral, with wild darting eyes and teeth bared.  I hope I never see that expression from her in another circumstance because it will likely mean she is going to drop to all fours, grow fur, and savagely pounce on someone, incisors going for the jugular. Finally, the epidural was in place and the snarling creature turned once again back into my wife.

The good news was it was enough pain medication that H was able to sleep, meaning I was able to finally sleep too. She was the one in massive life changing pain, but I was still sick, downing Mucinex, Sudaphed, Ibuprofin, and cough drops continuously.  I had slept 2 hours out of the last 48 and was probably not in a great mental state myself as I crashed on the "dad couch" in the room.

The bad news, we found out later, was that the epidural had squashed the contractions down significantly. In fact, Hydee was now only dilated to 7 centimeters. They put her on close to an 8mg drip of Pictosin (synthetic oxytosin) to re-induce labor and left us to rest.

This was not good. The kid was not dropping into the right position. No one had ruled out the dreaded C section, yet the specter of it was lurking in the glances the med techs gave each other as they drifted in throughout the night to check on things.

As a guy, the whole "git it done" mentality is damn near imprinted into your head from birth. So in a situation where there is nothing for you to get done, it's hard to keep a lid on your frustrations. Throw in sleep deprivation and cold medicine and I was an emotional walking wound myself. Which is how we stumbled our way into the conversation.

The short of it is that I expressed some frustration about how she hadn't allowed the midwife to break her water yet. H countered that she wanted a non-invasive pregnancy, and I got huffy, saying that the epidural had already made it invasive and now we might be facing a Cesarean.

I immediately regretted it. I'm good in a crisis when there's action and had been a rock for her while she was in pain, but now that things were getting slow and ponderous (and I was still sick and sleep deprived), I was beginning to founder.

Thankfully, H tells me it did have an effect on her in a good way. We were able to back away from the volatility of it and have a calmer conversation. As H describes it, she had an ideal of how she wanted the pregnancy to go, and even though we were way off the map, she still was trying to force it back into her ideal image. With us finally talking about it, she realized that instead of trying to shoehorn things back into the plan she wanted, she was able to take her situation for what it was and move forward instead.

Call me superstitious, but I kind of wonder if that's what did it. When the nurse came to do what felt like the final check to see if they needed to start talking to us about a Cesarean, Cleo had dropped. They propped H up on her side, the epidural began to wear off, and the pushing began!

Part 3 coming soon!

Cleo's birth (Part 1): At Home

So on Tuesday, November 13th, I was sick.  Really sick. When I was in bed, I was burning hot, but if I moved the covers a fraction off of my chest, I started shaking.  That kind of sick. I had called in sick to work that day. I was too congested to breath when I would lay down, so I was trying to sleep on the couch when I got a call from H that evening.

"Hello?" I said.


"I may be going into labor tonight. They have me on a monitor. If the readings get more concerning they're just going to induce me."

"Who is dis?" I mumbled around blocked nasal passages.

"Funny. Can you pack the bag up for tonight?"  H and I were expecting the child on the 25th and since we were told that first pregnancies are usually late, I was expecting the child sometime in early December. The "pregnancy bag" consisted of a few halfhearted items thrown together into our travel bag. This is not the task I was hoping to take on at this time.

I'm not one to shirk husbandly duties, though, so between bouts of shivering where I would retreat to my fortress of blankets on the couch, I spent the next few hours packing the bag.  I remember thinking to myself, "Oh god, not tonight" as I planned out how I would take a taxi to the hospital since there was no way in hell I could drive.

When H called to say they were letting her go home and not inducing, I sighed with relief and collapsed onto the couch. The downside of the whole experience was that no matter how stressful that night was, I couldn't call in sick the next day. Once per year, my program does an extensive crisis in-service at the police training facilities. They break us up into partners as if we were going out onto calls and the supervisors take the worst calls and situations of the last year and act them out, seeing how we all react to these situations that were botched horribly the first time around.  It involves fake scenarios, real police officers, supervisors acting like crazed clients, and they are even staged in fake apartments and fake school rooms. You almost invariably fail but it's really about helping us learn about what we do wrong on calls and trying to correct our habits going forward.

It's our equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru.

Emma comforting H through the process

So I pumped myself full of cold medicine and stumbled through the day. Thankfully my assigned partner was awesome and did most of the heavy lifting and I was able to look halfway decent even though I felt halfway dead. It was a long, stressful day that completely drained me. However, when I got home and tried to sleep,  the congestion again thwarted my efforts at rest and at 11:30pm, I surrendered to a night propped up on the couch again. I drifted off and got about 2 blissful hours of sleep when I was gently shaken awake by my wife at about 2:30am on November 15th.

"I think I'm having contractions," she said.

"You think you are?"

"I don't know. I've never had them before. It feels like cramping, but it keeps coming and going."

I sighed and we fished out H's iPhone and pulled up a contraction timer app. It's a great little app that times between contractions, averages out the times over the past hour or so, and gives you a great idea of where you stand on the 5-1-1 situation.

That is, if you use it.

I love my wife dearly, but until we got an automatic rice maker, rice making was always a disaster in our house. She's a free spirit who doesn't like to be constrained by things like time and space; a sort of zen cook who goes by the feel of the cooking. This works MAGNIFICENTLY when she has recipes going on that demand her constant attention. However, if she is allowed to wander away from the kitchen and the recipe has several steps like stove top rice does (boil 5 minutes, cook 15 minutes, let stand 15 minutes), it becomes a very chancy thing. We have had everything from crunchy rice to a proto-tapioca to accompany our food, as well as a few unsalvageable pots and pans sent off to the dumpster to the sound of our smoke alarm going off.

It was very much like this with the timer. To be fair, I suppose she had other things on her mind. I attempted vigilant questioning to determine that the timer buttons were pushed at the appropriate times but being sick and sleep deprived made me a poor timekeeper and in the end, we didn't have a damn idea what the contractions were at.

"What have I gotten myself into?"

They started out light, and for the longest time H wasn't even sure she was having contractions.  The morning crept on, though, and as the hot showers became more and more frequent and the requests for hot water bottles came more often, we both knew it was getting up there. I took an opportunity to get snacks and stuff for the hospital from the store (not to mention gas up the car) and came back with plenty of time to spare.

At 2:30pm, she reached a new level of pain where the hot water bottles weren't helping. At 3:00pm, H decided to call labor and delivery. She still was somehow unsure that she was having real contractions, but L&D told her to come on in.

I was hoping we could be like the movies, where I would gun the Civic into the red and creep that speedometer up past levels it had never been to before, rocketing along I-205, cops motioning for me to pull over as I, in turn, motion to my screaming pregnant wife in the back seat. Then they pull ahead, sirens blaring to clear traffic for me as we race to the hospital. Sadly, the trip in was pretty anticlimactic but at least it was safe.

Part 2 coming soon!

Another Sigh of Relief

What. A. MONTH! It's been a while since I posted last due to a few factors:

Where are all the posts on me?

1) My daughter Cleo was born on 11-16-2012! I will be posting the birth story soon and massive amounts of pictures for the foreseeable future.

2) Nanowrimo is over. I cleared 30,000 words before Cleo came along. I'm still plugging away at it at with a much more reasonable 500 words per day goal. I'll have a post with my reflections on that soon.

3) I was incredibly sick for a good part of November. So with being sick, the novel writing, the new child, and massive sleep deprivation, last month was seriously like some sort of fever dream that is just now starting to make sense.

Hopefully I'll be getting back into a routine of writing some stuff regularly!