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It’s Andy’s first day of school on Monday. He’s achieved a lot already just by going to orientation. He got his ID, made it through tedious lectures on HIIPA and ethics, and spend $6.5k on dental tools and hand-drills. $6.5k. I’m trying to take my reaction to that and times it by 35, because that’s how I’ll be feeling at the end of dental school when we’re in a hole $230k deep. Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.
Andy has to wear scrubs to dental school. At first I thought that was stupid, since he’s not seeing patients yet. Who wants to go to school in pajamas? Then I thought ‘who doesn’t want to go to school in pajamas?’. Then I thought ‘Me, I don’t really have any pajamas’. Then I decided I wanted some pajamas. Pajamas aside. Andy wears scrubs to school. The first time I saw him in scrubs I was completely weirded out. Like I was supposed to be calling him Dr and asking him to take a look at the mole on my back that I don’t actually have but felt magically compelled to have him check anyway, all because he was wearing scrubs. He makes scrubs look good though. And not because he’s customised them with glitter or anything.

How bizarre is the word ‘Dwarf’?

Julian was sleeping until he heard the shutter on my camera.

Well, like I said before, everything Julian does, I’m doing. So for now I’m going to keep stuff about him on here. I’m a lightweight; I can’t handle maintaining two blogs at once. Once I get security upped I’ll probably move the baby stuff back over to the other blog though, so keep a handle on the log-in junk if you care to. I was just having a mental block about chronicling the same events on two blogs.

Mormons don’t believe in original sin thus we don’t baptise babies. We do bless them though. Julian was blessed on June 6th.

I hope I’m enough to help Julian be all he was blessed to be. His dad is.

Julian is awesome.

Andy got him smiling when he was about three weeks old. I couldn’t coax more than a solemn stare out of him until about four weeks and the first time he smiled at me I about exploded. This photo is of one of his first smiles not inspired by milk or a successful nappy-fill.

It was Andy’s birthday on Sunday!

I like to make poor creative efforts at fondant cakes for Andy’s birthday but Julian doesn’t really nap long enough for me to do much more than make a sandwich nevermind a cake. Instead, I bought a Caterpillar cake, akin to the ones I had as a kid. I felt bad that we didn’t truly celebrate his birthday. A consequence of being too tired from Julianning to do something novel and inventive, not wanting to spend money, and the birthday falling on a Sunday, but it was super pleasant to eat cake together and sit out in the sunshine. One of the highlights of the day was probably our clandestine mission to retrieve a ball from the yard of a grumpy old neighbor. Although, she’s not so grumpy now that I’m not 7 years old and roller blading around the back yard shouting something Power Ranger related. Anyway. Andy’s 26 which is probably an unusual (dare I say, Unripe?) age for being a dad, husband, and dental schoolee, but he does a stellar job of everything and I love his face off. I got him a membership to Chess.com as a present. Geeeeek. Only kidding, Andy. Although I have to admit your chess books look like they’re written in an encrypted form of ancient script.

Andy would like to mention that 75% of his family forgot his birthday. Boo!

Half an hour after I delivered Julian I started throwing up. This went on for fifteen minutes or so, and then I suddenly had a blinding headache. I felt like someone had just jammed an axe through my frontal lobe. The next two hours of my life went by in a flash. Andy took Julian, I started begging for a cold cloth to put over my forehead, and the midwife took my blood pressure and started panicking and yelling for other members of staff. My blood pressure had gone up to 195/122 which is beyond hypertension and dangerous. A doctor arrived on the scene and injected me with Cyclizine to stop me from throwing up so I’d keep down an oral administration of a drug that would lower my blood pressure. I didn’t react to the pills and that’s when doctors, anaesthesiologists, and midwives rushed the room. They pushed 50ml of morphine into the back of my left hand, swiftly followed by something else, and started ordering scans and packing up the bed in order to wheel me to the radiography department.

About the time I heard a doctor remark to another that he thought my blood pressure was causing brain swelling, that he hadn’t seen anything like this before, and neither of them knew what was going on, I started thinking that my headache was an indication of something more sinister. When it registered with me that they were about to take me somewhere else for a CT scan, I started panicking wondering what was wrong with my brain. The need for a scan and the impossibility of the pain made an aneurysm, embolism, or clot a much less abstract fear than one might hope. I was overwhelmed with a bizarre sense of my own mortality. During a lucid moment, I looked over at Andy, who seemed very far away at the time, holding Julian tightly and feeding him from a bottle because I couldn’t nurse. I tried to express to him how scared I was but I couldn’t really speak because I was scared I’d just start to cry. As they packed up the bed in order to wheel me to the radiography department my eyes started misting over. Within split-seconds the thought I might not come out of the experience with the same mental capacity, if at all, crossed my mind and I started crying because I didn’t want to leave Andy and Julian. As I looked at Andy and he looked back at me, I felt an untimely sense of peace knowing Andy would take care of Julian even if I didn’t get out of the experience whole.

As of this month, Andy and I have been married for three years. We’ve only known each other four. Funny to think that two people can go from making each others acquaintance to sharing their lives and creating a new one in such a short time. I didn’t need to have such a scary experience to realise how much I need, trust, and adore Andy, but it reaffirmed such. Even without me in the picture, I knew that Andy would raise Julian as well as we’d want him to be raised, and be all Julian could need. I don’t have that trust for anyone else, and I’m overwhelmingly grateful to have Andy as my mainstay. Maybe Andy becoming a father reminded me how much I love him as a husband. I’m always slightly uncomfortable when people share intimate thoughts publicly so I’m sorry if not passwording this post made anyone squirm. I just felt like sharing this experience because mortality is a fragile thing, and that’s true for anyone reading this blog so I felt like this commonality might make my experience universally understandable. I’m excited to have been married to Andy, and treasure our sealing. So. Happy Anniversary, Andy. Thanks for taking care of Julian and I.

Oh. In case you’re wondering what happened to me on the medical front, the CT scan came back clear, my blood pressure dropped, and my headache dissipated. I had three samples of blood drawn from me on six separate occasions for tests and I was interviewed by a doctor who wanted to report of the incident to a medical board because it was highly unusual. I was hooked up to a drip of magnesium sulphate to stop my body from going into convulsions and monitored around the clock for the next day. I was kept in hospital for three days before they’d let me out and I was discharged with a note in my medical records of the experience and three doctors signatures attesting to the fact they had no idea what happened. I have to go back to the hospital in June to see if they have any answers for me. Fingers crossed it was nothing more than a post-partum version of preeclampsia on steroids.