birthday tales

As we emerge from the babyland haze I realized that there were a couple of things that happened on Stella's birthday worth documenting. In the exhaustion and euphoria that followed, I don't think we told these stories to many people. Here goes:

The Distractor
A little known fact about me is that I am a fainter. I wasn't really much of a fainter until I had my appendix out in an Italian hospital during college. A sweet old nun (who spoke no english) was trying to draw blood and having no luck. Finally she started flicking the arteries on my wrist and in my desperation to think of how exactly to say "please don't puncture my artery I could bleed to death or get a bubble and DIE" in Italian, I panicked and passed out. Ever since then, I am not so good with needles or staying particularly conscious during medical procedures.

So usually when I have to have blood drawn, I just give the nurse a heads up that I am a fainter, and she makes sure to ask me a lot of questions to distract me and I don't look. Sometimes they make me lay down. It works pretty well most of the time.

I told Stephen this ahead of time. I didn't want him to see me faint and think that things were worse than they really were. The last two times I have had surgery I have fainted before the party got started, and since a c-section is a surgery and an epidural is the mother of all needles, I thought it best he know that this might just be how things roll for me.

He was glad for the heads up and offered to distract me. He took this so seriously that he even prepared topics for said distraction ahead of time. And told me about them - he planned to ask me about my favorite wineries. Rookie move, I must say. Distractions can't really be pre-scripted, but in retrospect I do admire his dedication to the task.

So there we are in the pre-op room. I've changed into my gown and he and my sister are with me. The nurse comes in to start my IV and Stephen realizes that his moment has come. Here's how it went down:

STEPHEN [with dramatic flourish]: "So, honey, your sister was just on a wine trip..."
ME [seeing where this is going, kind of annoyed and totally not distracted]: "uh-huh..."
STEPHEN: "...and she went to a lot of wineries. What are some of YOUR favorite..." [catches sight of nurse about to insert needle into my arm, absolutely horrified] "...ARM!"

He was transfixed by the sight. My distractor succumbed to his own distraction. My sister and I laughed hysterically and the nurse, without missing a beat, replied "I think she likes the left one"

A Sign?
During the surgery I was pretty immobile and very sleepy. Toward the end I was looking around my limited field of vision and noticed that the word "stellar" was printed on the side of the overhead surgical lamp. As they were finishing things up, I tried to point this out to Stephen. I told him it was a sign for what the baby's name should be.

Unfortunately, he was standing facing the other side of the lamp.

"You want to name our baby SkyTron? Honey, that's a horrible name!"

And so if you wondered why we didn't name her the first day, now you know... we thought it best for me to come down off all the narcotics first.