Express Yourself...

Magically we will fast fwd six weeks...

That's what it feels like- a blur of sleepless nights and cracked-off bleeding nipples that leak watery milk.

I won't go into the breast-feeding saga, and how my Mother ended up kindly offering her own tit to My newborn son so that he could 'get the hang' of breast-feeding. I mean; Is it just me- or is that creepy?

And I won't whinge about the black tarry shits or my yearning to just get away from this little Screaming Creature, who I strangely loved, but was also terrified of none the less. I'm exhausted all the time, and I often fall asleep while my Son lies beside me on the bunny rug. Someone keeps taking photos of this to prove to me how lazy I am all the time. Like I need reminding again.

Unlike me, He's not a great sleeper, and has bouts of projectile vomiting because of an undiagnosed hernia in his groin. Apparently these types of hernias are relatievely common in baby boys, but I'd never had a baby before, and my Mother only had daughters, so it wasn't until a few months later that the problem became worse and required an operation.

He was about seven months old I suppose, and had been vomiting all night, so I took him to a stupid doctor, who said he was just a 'bit feverish' and to take him home. But when he didn't get any better I took him to the hospital where they immediately determined he would be staying in overnight and having his operation that same afternoon...

I remember tham placing the mask over his little face, and Him just screaming and crying as the gas took it's effect. When he is just about to fall under He looked up at me, like he was silently screaming at Me, telling me to make them stop because he's scared shitless, his frozen eyes practically begging me for help. Then he falls asleep, and I know that he's angry at me for not doing anything.

While he's in the operating theatre for the next four hours they remove a twenty centimeter section of Gangrenous intestine- all of the blood supply had been cut off to it when his testes had descended from his groin and the hole had never properly closed over- and the intestine fell into this empty space, and then proceeded to close upon itself, effectively cutting off all of the blood to the intestine, thus not allowing anything to pass down- or out.

No poo- in other words; and because Nothing could go down, it has to come back out some way, hence the copious amounts of Formula vomit that I constsantly reeked of. All this time my Mother thinks he's just been allergic to the formula- if I had been a milking machine this wouldn't have happened. You know- I have a sneaking suspicion that when Madonna sang Express Yourself this wasn't exactly what she had in mind...

And I guess it hurts when your intestine is rotting slowly away and dying, maybe even more than a rotten tooth, but I just feel inadequate that I haven't noticed the bulging hernia before it got to this stage, whereas Every Other Mother in the world would have been more vigilant and observant and would have noticed before it came to this.

But doesn't it seem to everybody that He was awake really quickly after the operation after they wheeled him into the Recovery Room? Do you think it's possible that he might have been awake right at the end, during the last part of the operation when they are stuffing his bruised guts back in- or during the part where they are sewing him up again with a giant black sewing machine?

I go into him, as soon as he is awake and he has a little sip of orange juice. After a while I have to change his nappy, so I take a quick peek under the dressings, expecting to see some mangled bloody mess. But instead, all there is is a neat red line that's about four centimetres long; it's been internally stitched and then a 'fake' skin applied to asssist in the skin repair...

I told you that I always worry over the little things- not that his condition wasn't serious, but I doubt you could even tell that he's had an operation now. I stopped being able to see the faint scar three months after the operation, and I can't even remember what side it was on anymore.

And maybe my Mother has a point about formula. We all know that Breast Is Best. My Mother probably wishes she was an African peasant so she could have breastfed her children until they were at least five, and would happily have done so.

But I, for one, am happy there is an alternative. In fact, the only present I wanted for my nineteenth birthday was sterilising equipment, bottles and formula- and that's exactly what I got.

And to this day it's still one of the best presents I've ever gotten...