I volunteered to cut the rainbow cake. I usually do this at family events – I took over from my grandpa when I was a young teen, because he used to do that cut a random size slice and then another random size slice thing, and we’d all pass the slices around the table as he went… thin slices got passed on quickly, thick slices were lingered over like a game of musical chairs but with cake. Inevitably some were deeply disappointed with the slice that settled on them. A quick head count and a little math solves that issue!

IDAHOT is the international day against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. I waddled up following a morning at the printer and framer putting in the final orders for my exhibition, which comes down this Friday! It was a good, fun event and nice to see friends there I haven’t caught up with for awhile. Rose stayed home and used the time to get lots of homework done on my computer. I stayed out and pretended I’m not possessive and territorial about my computer. I’ve coped pretty well with sharing the rest of my home with everyone else, but my computer and studio (ie table) do bring a slightly crazed one-eyed barky critter out in me.

There was a cool badge maker there so I made this for Rose:

Pain levels are still very high, I’ve been re-reading Explaining Pain which was a good refresher, but woke at 3am to cry about how hard this is, and sad, and all the wasted years being sick and swamped by pain. Sometimes even the encouraging and helpful triggers such grief and regret. Bubs is head down most of the time, which is causing bad sciatica, hip pain is bad, and heartburn is bad. I have finally put a bit of weight on this pregnancy though, which is great news. Fibro is a bitch, I’m getting bad facial pain, a twitchy bladder (not the same as pregnancy needing to pee every few minutes), muscle cramps in my calves, chronically irritated skin, and fun new sensitivities. I’ve asked for a referral to the psych team at the hospital as I’m getting nervous about how well I’ll recover from birth and worried about being stuck in hospital needing support. The psych team are the only ones who can override the usual rules about partners being kicked out overnight. The prospect of being forced to be left alone overnight in severe pain with our little baby to care for as well as me is a bit harrowing. If anything has gone wrong and I’m feeling emotionally fragile too, hospital is a horrible environment for me. I recall once waking to find night nurse trying to do obs in the small hours of the morning following my appendix being removed. She touched me while I was sleeping and I woke the whole ward with a blood curdling scream and had clawed my way to the far side of the bed before I’d even opened my eyes. When I did I found I was perched on the edge of the bed about to fall/leap out, and the poor nurse was flattened against the far wall. Following that was the slow wail of all the infants in the ward protesting. I don’t know what adding a small baby I feel intensely protective about might do to that reaction but I suspect ‘downgrade it’ isn’t the usual answer.

Baby is growing well, I’ve been doing finger-prick tests and my results are all great re gestational diabetes, and there’s loads of movement and kicks. We’re into the countdown now and I’m looking forward to having more of the house and sheds sorted ready for arrival. In other news, having made us wait an extra 6 or so weeks for our assigned midwife to come back to work, it turns out she’ll be on maternity leave when our baby is due, so we’re being reassigned anyway. There’s a strange sense of hype and disappointment about the whole process with our hospital. We’ve only had two appointments with our midwife so far, the first we spent talking about delivery options and preferences and worries, the second we discovered she’s not going to be here anyway. It’s odd, because I know that we’re very, very lucky to have access to the healthcare we do here in Australia, but there’s this sense of indifference that’s unpleasant, being very small parts of a much larger machine and having very few choices and little power to influence anything. It makes me want to run away and give birth in the bush.

On the plus side though, my appt with the hospital anaesthologist was surprisingly excellent. I’ve never had a good appt with an anaesthetic doctor before, usually they don’t beleive me about my allergies, or they freak out and make me undergo procedures like endoscopies without any. This guy was excellent, he listened, asked intelligent questions, gave me good information about options and how to get the most out of them (did you know gas and air works best if you start it at the beginning of a contraction, count through them, and stop it about 2 breaths before the peak? This allows it time to be effective but lets you ride the last of it without having much in your system for the rest periods, which reduces the chance of side effects). We wound up talking about self hypnosis and he walked me through a short technique for self hypnosis which I took to. It was a good appointment to follow the others with, I felt like there was actually a point to turning up and that in among the grinding machinery of a big public hospital, the endless waiting and being shunted from service to service, there were little treasures of useful information and ideas. Hooray for those.