My wife had an amazing pregnancy. In many ways it was a clean textbook pregnancy with hardly any complications. She carried beautifully, felt great for most of it, and enjoyed the nuances of being the cute little pregnant lady whenever we were out and about. She didn’t mind maternity clothes, she didn’t suffer from a lot of the typical symptoms, and she wasn’t pregnant for the hottest part of the year. In just about every day, we were blessed with how easy it was. Jaime is not a sickly person but when things of a medical nature happen to her, they happen to her in unique and interesting ways – ways that Dr. House might spend an hour long episode trying to diagnose. She saved all of her fun medical mysteries for after delivery, in what we’re now unaffectionately referring to as the fourth and fifth trimesters. And while that may make for fine entertainment on an episode of House Fox, in our household, it was anything but entertaining.
Counting Jaime’s unscheduled c-section, which came after seventeen hours of labor and more than two hours of what turned out to be unnecessary and fruitless pushing, she saw no less than four visits to hospitals in the four short months that our son has been with us. She returned to the hospital two days after being discharged for what turned out to be an infection post c-section. And pregnancy does a number on the body – it really does. Growing an eight pound baby in the abdomen squashes all the vital organs all around it – and so we’ve now returned to the emergency room and the surgical table for a gall bladder attack, subsequent removal of the gall bladder, and more intestinal complications. As we come to a close on this fifth trimester we have to pray that we make no more visits to the hospital until the next time we are ready to bring another life into this world. And despite all of the challenges that have come since the first one entered this world, we are both gung ho about doing it again some day soon!