Happy Birthday Jenny - 1/14/09

Today is the birthday of my firstborn Jenny.  Happy Birthday Jenny!!!!  What I remember about that time was I got the flu when I was 9-months pregnant and couldn't take anything except Sudafed for the symptoms, which was sort of like sticking chewing gum in a hole in a dam.  Didn't much work.  It was cold, cold, cold and we had lots of snow piled up.  I started labor about 6:00 a.m. on a Monday and she was born at 3:02 a.m. on Wednesday.  I woke up from the anesthesia with a black eye.  Back then the anesthesia used didn't really take away the pain, it just made you forget it so you didn't remember having it (I don't know if they still use this or not).  Anyway I had a theory that I was cussing like a sailor and one of the doctors or the nurses just got tired of it.  The official story was I kept banging my head against the side rails on the bed.  When they first brought my baby to me in my room, the nurse said "Here's your little boy!" to which I replied, "I thought I had a girl."  She did a double take and checked the baby and sure enough it was a girl that they'd just wrapped in a blue blanket.  I remember being wheeled out of the delivery room and my then husband saying "She's beautiful, she looks just like me." 

The pediatrition came to the hospital to examine the baby but when he came to see me I was in the shower.  He later called me on the phone (on the phone!!!) to tell me my baby had hydroencephalitus (water on the brain).  I spent that day in hell believing that my child might be brain damaged or might die.  My Mother had had a daughter with that disease that died at birth and one of her aunts had as well so it was an easy theory to believe.  That night when my OB/GYN came in to make rounds, he told me there was nothing wrong with the baby when he delivered her.  A neurologist had been called in and the next morning when I saw her, she was a little miffed and couldn't figure out why she'd been called in as there was nothing wrong with that baby.  Needless to say we didn't keep that pediatrition.  My then Mother-in-law was a  Christian Scientist and she brought some of her church members over that first night to pray over the baby so she thought they had cured her with prayer, and who knows maybe they did.  I'd be the last person on Earth to say it was outside the realm of possibility.

Hope your Birthday is a happy one Jenny.