Here are some scary pictures that will put you in the mood for Halloween. I’m home convalescing. The surgery went fine. I was scared to death that I wouldn’t wake up again, but sure enough I woke up and I seem to be doing fine. The nurses even said I looked better than most patients do coming out of surgery–health wise. I guess I’m pretty healthy and I’m going to snap right out of this in no time. Good thing too because Baby Bug is not liking the new no-nursing and no-mommy arrangement AT ALL. Poor thing. Thankfully my mom is here and Grandma is the next best thing when it comes to being rocked to sleep. My mom is the best. She sings when she rocks and then Baby Bug sings too. It’s the sweetest thing.

So far I think the hardest thing about this surgery is hearing her cry and want me and not being able to do a single thing about it. I put a pillow over my incisions and tried to hold and cuddle her but it just wasn’t good enough. She whined and carried on something else. The anesthesia narcotics should wear off by noon tomorrow so depending on how bad vicodin is for babies, I should be able to let her nurse tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll have super duper pain tolerance and be able to get by on tylenol. I don’t know. It’s hard to gage right now because I’m still flying pretty high on whatever they gave me.

In fact, other than a horrible case of hiccups that hurt like crazy, I’m feeling pretty good. It’s weird. Kinda surreal. Like maybe it’s too good to be true. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. It’s probably too early to be celebrating a quick recovery. I’m trying to be careful and not twist or turn or pull anything. I really want to get better quick and not end up in bed for days.

One good thing about being in bed is that I get to play on my computer! I haven’t had my computer to myself without the baby climbing up on my chair and begging to be picked up so she can bang on my keyboard in ages! Uninterrupted computer time! Wow! This is kinda cool. If only I didn’t feel so lightheaded and woozy.

But I’m not too woozy to upload the pictures we took the other day at the pumpkin patch. It was a really fun family outing–just Toby and I and the baby. She doesn’t seem very happy in the pictures but that is because the sun was really bright and my daughter is very good at scowling. She’s my little “scowl-ly wag”

I wanted to carve the pumpkin tonight but I think I’m just going to have to give up on that idea. I think carving or bending or walking around is off limits. And ouch! The hiccups are back. %$# hiccups!

Who’s tired of talking about gallbladders? Me! Me! (not that I didn’t appreciate all your comments… I did. It’s just well, you know.) I’m glad you’re tired of gallbladders too because it’s time to talk about BABY BUG!!! The real reason you keep coming back to this blog.

Baby Bug turned nine months a week an a half ago. Poor Bug. I didn’t even hardly pay attention as that day went by. But I have been noticing her many many achievements lately. Gallbladder or not there is no denying that she’s getting so big and coordinated. She sticks out her tongue now. She’s just discovered it the other day. I constantly catch her sticking it in and out and then playing with it with her fingers.

She also has this strange cackle. It’s sort of a laugh. You’ll hear it in the movie. I think it’s her fake laugh. Maybe she’s trying to sound like me when I laugh. I don’t know. Sometimes when we really get her going, by tickling her or doing some silly thing that she thinks is hilarious, the horse cackle will be replaced by a much prettier genuine laugh. I love both though. She can cackle all she wants.

What else…. well, she has two teeth. Just like a little jack-o-lantern in time for Halloween. I think I’m going to carve our pumpkin to look like her. She likes to bite with her teeth too. Thankfully not me. She likes to bite her toys and the spoon when I’m feeding her baby food that she no longer likes. She’s too sophisticated for baby food these days. But you already knew that. Baby food is so three months ago.

She’s crawling faster and faster, just like everybody said she would. I can’t leave her for a minute anymore or next thing I know she’s upending the trash can or eating cat litter. Thankfully she hasn’t beat me to the cat box yet but she has made it to cat’s food bowl. Baby food is gross. Cat food is yummy!

Baby Bug’s favorite toy is me. She likes to pull on my face like it’s made out of rubber. She has quite a grip too! And pincher fingers that are stronger than jumper cables! Man. When she gets a hold of the skin on my neck and pulls, I bend to her will like a noodle. I don’t always let her manhandle me like that, of course. Only when I’m sick as a dog or trying to sleep at 5:30 in the morning and she thinks it’s high time I got up. I know I should keep her up later at night so she’ll sleep in during the morning but I’m so tired by 7:30 p.m. that I can’t keep her awake. So morning people we are. Bright and early morning people.

Yikes. LIsten to me. It sounds like all I do is complain. Motherhood isn’t that bad. It really is everything I always wanted it to be and more. Really. It’s just a lot more. Like maybe too much more. There I go again. But really it is sheer joy to see her smile and laugh. To watch her figure things out makes life fresh and new again. Did I tell you how she talks all the time? Not real words. Just sounds. Always. I love it. I have a feeling she’s going to a jabberbox. Just like her mom.

So before I ramble on again, lets watch the movie!

Here you are. Enjoy! (2.93 mb quicktime)

I went to the surgeon yesterday afternoon. He’s a funny little man with dark hair and beady eyes. A grandfather probably. As we sit in his tiny little waiting room, restraining Baby Bug from ripping up the three hundred worn copies of outdated People magazines that are stacked from edge to edge on the coffee table, I hear him through the wall ask a man to drop his drawers, bend over and grab his ankles.

What? I turn to Toby with eyes wide and eyebrows lifting up underneath my bangs. Are we in the right place? Why are the walls so easy to hear through in doctor’s offices? Everything seems so dirty and low tech. Like I could be in the waiting room at a used car dealership or a mobile home park, or maybe I’m waiting to hear if I won a time share or something. A black plastic clock radio sits on an white whicker end table blinking at me, beside it sits a Gideon bible. The standard Motel 6 oil painting of a boat sitting in still water rests on the muted floral wallpaper behind us.

I don’t know what I expect of a surgeon’s waiting room, but this is not it. I am so disappointed with the field of medicine these days. When I was at the hospital getting my ultrasound, everything seemed so high tech. The machines whirred silently as images of inner-space flashed across a monitor above me. It really seemed like they were looking inside me and getting to the bottom of things. But now I’m here and I’m supposed to trust this guy who wears a funny tie? I feel like I’m in the land of doctorville where medicine is a business and this surgeon is just as happy to cut out my gallbladder as a Jiffy Lube technician is to change my air filter.

When he calls us into his office, (all of us: Toby, me and baby–which was really nice of him) he ruffles through my chart. He looks at me. He’s quiet. He seems to be enjoying some kind of inside joke. Then he shows me a paper inside the folder he is holding. It says “Brenda Ponnay, diagnosis: hemorrhoids”. Hemorrhoids!? Who said anything about hemorrhoids? I don’t have hemorrhoids. This is really not helping. I’m starting to freak out.

“So I gather you do not have hemorrhoids,” he says with a chuckle. He scratches out the offending word with a ball point pen from behind his ear. I have the feeling he sees about a thousand gallbladder patients a day and this is his way to liven things up. I am not amused but I’m so anxious to trust this man, who is supposed to be an expert, that I try to see things his way. I tell him about my pains and he rocks back and forth in his squeaky metal chair, sizing me up.

He leans forward and puts his elbows on the paper of the examining table that I am sitting on. “It’s like a game of bridge,” he says. “Do you play bridge?” Toby and I shake our heads. Neither of us have ever played bridge. “Someday you are going to have to have your gallbladder taken out. You can do it now or you can do it later.” He looks at us to see our reaction. We have none so he continues on, “You can spend the next four months talking to an intestinal bla-bla-bla bla-big-word and they might find out your pain is caused by something else. Or they might not. Or you can have your gallbladder taken out and that might solve your problem or it might not.”

And the answer is…? I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s just a great big mystery. So why not just take your gallbladder out! You don’t need it. It’s a useless body part! An extra piece that God threw in just for kicks! It’s easy to take out, so why not? It could solve everything. Or it might not. You came to a guy who takes gallbladders out, what more do you want?

What I want is to see the pictures from the ultrasound. I thought he would pull them out, show me the sludge and stick them up on the wall or something. Maybe he would have a pointer and point to the sludge. I thought he would have numbers and percentages and maybe he’d circle some things and boggle me with science. But no. There are no pictures. I can see everything in my file and it consists of the questionnaire I filled out in the waiting room, a form saying I will sell my next child if my insurance doesn’t cover all my expenses and some kind of fuzzy faxed xerox copy of something that probably is related to the ultrasound pictures. There are no pictures though. It probably just says that I am actually a candidate for gallbladder surgery.

I’m so bugged about the missing ultrasound pictures that I ask him about them. “Did you see them?” I ask. “No,” he scoffs. “I don’t read ultrasound pictures. I have readers that read them.” Oh. My bad. Like ultrasound pictures are such a waste of time for surgeons.

But seriously. I don’t mean to doubt him. I’m sure he is a very good surgeon. He probably has the steadiest hands this side of the Mississippi. I’m sure that it’s totally normal that he doesn’t “read ultrasound pictures”. It’s just that I wanted to feel a little more assured about this surgery. I know it’s routine and probably the easiest thing to do next to pulling a tooth but still it’s my body and I’m usually pretty healthy. I don’t like to mess with things. I don’t even take birth control pills because I like to keep things as natural as possible. Cutting me open, taking a body part out and then clamping it back together with METAL tags that STAY THERE FOREVER just doesn’t feel very natural.

Buuuuuuuut, neither does puking for weeks on end either. So it’s a gamble. And even though I don’t have a good feeling about it, it’s a gamble I’m going to take. (Not that I don’t mind a fat free diet. I’m doing great on rice and broccoli. I love broccoli. I found out I can have skim milk too so I’m living high on Kellogg’s Special K with strawberries. Good thing I’m allowed to have sugar.)

I set up an appointment to have the surgery on Monday at 10:45.

IN OTHER NEWS…. I owe you guys a movie. Guess who turned nine months during the great illness of 06? Stay tuned.