L'chaim!

I tend to get pretty emotional this time of year. See, its nearly my daughters birthday, which in and of itself isn't much to get all choked up about, but for me there is so much more to it than that. My delivery was at once the most amazing and the most terrifying night of my life. I had succeeded in delivering my daughter in swift fashion without drugs, having cleverly absconded to the bathroom every time one of the drug pushing nurses came into the room, and was resting happily in the dark as this tiny new person suckled away as though she had been doing  it, well, all her life, that's when the scary part started.

Having been given an unnecessary dose of pitocin, I began to have contractions..again. Fast forward past the gross parts you really have to love me to hear, I was bleeding to death. I handed off my daughter to my terrified and exhausted husband and was rushed into the operating room. I had already lost a good part of my hearing and my vision was fading fast on the edges, I was going into shock and in the process of actually dying. It was like one of those horror movies where the heroine is strapped to a bed and surrounded by bright lights and doctors with masks in place of where noses and mouths belonged. I was prodded, poked, hooked up to bags of blood. Yes, I said bags, as in more than one. As in I had lost so much blood they had to give me double doses for the next three hours. In the end I am alive, obviously, and I had my daughter with me in recovery and was able to watch her sleep. She was such a trooper, they kept trying to give her a bottle, something I really didn't want her to have, and she just kept falling back asleep, already the adorably little sneak. My body was a wreck for at least two months, no one tells you how you're going to feel with someone else's blood in your veins and let me tell you, it ain't great. But, I was alive. Every time she woke me to nurse, I was alive. Every minute of lost sleep, I was ALIVE. In this country we take for granted the dangers posed by child birth ( not to mention inept hospital employees). Never in a million years would I have imagined I would find myself on the wrong end of a bag of donated blood, but there I was.

Every year, around this time, I get to thinking about what would have happened had I not been lucky enough to find myself in an American hospital, a point of fact I find ironic considering my overall opinion of the medical "industry" here. How many smiles I would have missed, how many hugs. What would life have been like for them; my husband and our children? My daughter is an amazing little being all her own, full of song and art and all the wonder one imagines a little girl should be, but to me she is the very personification of life. With every year she celebrates her birthday I, too, celebrate my life. On that night I was reborn. I was enlightened. Life is the briefest of things, the most precious of treasures. In her sparkling little brown eyes are all the potentials in life. In her dimples are the hopes of tomorrow. Excuse me as I wax poetic, but I really cant help it. This little person, a girl I had hoped would be a boy, has taught me so much with her very presence. She reminds me of all the wonder I had become too jaded to see, she reminds me that tea parties are great fun and that little girls may have a lot harder fight in this world but are every bit as great to raise as boys are.

So, happy birthday to my ninja princess surfer girl. You make my days bright and cheery and my life richer than I could have imagined.

Also, I'd like to get a little preachy...if you qualify and are able, please donate blood. The life you save could be mine.