Part 8: The dad question

I've been holding on to this part of the dad question series for ages. Now you know almost everything about The Assault, this part will make more sense. I know I've still to resolve what happened after I found that letter, but you'll just have to wait for part 7 because I'm jumping ahead!

If you are new to my blog the saga of my journey From Rock Bottom to Parenthood can be found here:

From Rock Bottom to Parenthood

And then came Noo 

“He’s got red hair!” Mum shouted.

After 39 hours of labour at 9.39am Noo was finally suctioned out of me.

I was exhausted. Traumatised. I didn't feel like I'd just had a baby. I felt so removed from what was happening.

The small red ball of flesh still attached to me via the umbilical cord was placed on my chest for the briefest of moments. My sister cut the cord and he was gone.

I vaguely remember pushing out the placenta and the midwife holding it up for me to see.

“I can't hear him”, I whisper.

“Why isn't he making any noise?” I'm seriously starting to get distressed.

My newborn son had been whisked away from me and onto a neonatal unit where there seemed to be a lot of hospital staff surrounding him, prodding him.

My mum was hovering near the crowd but for some reason wasn't answering my questions.

“What’s going on?” I begged.

And then I heard a squeak. He sounded like a baby monkey.

“3.47 kilos!” Mum announced with pride but I wondered if she understood what that meant not being in pounds. My wonderful mother, who'd just spent the last 39 hours with me, was taking photos of her first born grandchild being weighed.

My sister Yolanda was by my side. My legs were spread and shaking. A doctor was stitching me up.

“Can I hold him?” and finally my Noo was wrapped in a hospital blanket and passed to me. It was the weirdest sensation in the world. Ever.

The epidural was wearing off. My legs felt like balloons, massive and out of my control. Noo’s face was fat and squished looking. He did have the brightest red hair and the most perfect rosebud lips.

I fell in love in an instant.

It wasn't long before my dad, brother and sister in law arrived. I saw my dad’s eyes well up at the sight of his grandson. The moment was pure joy. After nearly two years of horror and worry and despair, I’d finally brought some happiness to my family.

Lots of photos were taken as Noo was passed around the room. Finally everyone left, except for my parents, who held Noo as I showered and cleaned myself up.

Still with a catheter attached I tried to clean my body which didn’t feel like it was mine. I felt brutalised. Quietly in that shower room I felt a sense of disgust at what I'd just experienced. Still affected by the painkillers the doctors had given me I couldn't fully cognate my emotions.

I was given the option to either walk or be pushed in a wheelchair up to the maternity ward. Walk? Yeah, right! I gladly took the chair.

I sat down and winced. The pain was excruciating. It rocketed me back to the last time I couldn't sit down without pain. I shook the flashback off and looked down at my beautiful little boy.

My parents left after settling me into my private room and Noo and I were alone. I didn't know what to do. Hospital staff came and went. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who needed to look at Noo, to check one thing or another.

Midwives came to show me how to breastfeed. It was horrible. Noo wouldn't latch on. A midwife hand expressed some colostrum from me into a cup and we syringed it into Noo’s mouth. There was nothing nice about it. I felt like a failed farm animal.

At one stage a midwife told me about water filled frozen condoms in the freezer of the shared kitchen. I was told to put one in the maternity pad I was wearing so it could help numb the area. It felt pretty gross but did the job nonetheless.

In between going to the toilet to change pads and attempting to feed my new baby, I just looked at him with wonder. At the perfection of his face. I thought he could possibly be the best looking baby ever to have been born (doesn't every mother?).

Friends and family visited but essentially I was alone with my son. Day three was Christmas Eve and the baby blues kicked in. I couldn't stop crying. Midwives asked me if I was ok. It was the most bizarre emotion. I felt terrible but it kind of felt like a relief to cry. I felt like I was crying for everything bad that had ever happened to me but at the same time the tears were euphoric with the love I felt for my baby.

I wanted to be left alone for more than five minutes to cry and cry and cry but still people came. Midwives, doctors, social workers, psych consults.

My sister arrived. I burst into tears again. "It's just the baby blues", I assured her. She suggested staying the night seeing it was Christmas Eve and there was no father to share this moment with me.

A chant in the distant regions of my mind started to become louder and louder:

A square peg in a round hole.

A square peg in a round hole.

A square peg in a round hole.

I'd been saying it over and over during the birth but was only just able to hear it.

I cried some more as I made the realisation that my body and subconscious had connected what was supposed to be one of the most glorious experiences of my life with the worst experience of my life: the night I was raped.

It is why I felt brutalised, why I hated giving birth. I should have had a caesarean section rather than pushing through 30 hours of pre- and nine hours of active labour of a posterior positioned baby.

The juxtaposition of emotions made me feel so out of kilter. Having my son is the best thing that has ever happened to me but I seriously do not wish to go through labour like that ever again. The next baby, if there is one, will be planned. From the beginning through to the end.

Despite everything the fiercely intense love I felt (and still do feel) for this newborn being was not lessened by the trauma of his birth.

I love you my beautiful boy Noo.


V.

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Part 5: The dad question

The first four parts of The dad question can be found here:

Part 1: The day we met
Part 2: A new addiction
Part 3: Walking into the abyss
Part 4: The opposite of rehab

_________________

Together alone

The couple in the back ran the joint. They collected everyone's rent and paid the landlady who would call by once a week. They dealt small amounts of pot which guaranteed a steady stream of weirdos making their way up the hall and past our room, through the lounge room and to their bedroom via the yard at all hours of the day and night. They didn't like him because he was unreliable with the rent and I guess they knew stuff about him that I didn't. He was rude to them and constantly started arguments. They liked me though because when I moved in I always paid the rent on time.

Living off disability pensions, both of them made weekly trips to the nearest methadone clinic which was a bus ride away. In their forties and in bad health it amazed me how they survived. He had no teeth and an incredibly strange pallor to his skin. She was always doubled over with cramps. They did heroin when they could afford it which freaked me out completely. They obsessed over the tiniest issues with the house. There was always some reason to have a go at us or any of the people that lived there: The rent, the garbage, recycling, the kitchen, the lights being left on.

Sharing a tiny sun room off the lounge room were two teenage boys. They were skaters and deviants but sweet and harmless. I liked these kids the best. I felt hope for them. One had completed his HSC and said he was just having a year off to bum around on the dole before going to uni. I could tell he was smart and he was still in contact with his family. The boys would deal a little LSD on the side to make some extra cash. They would do anything to get high: inhale nitrous bulbs, sniff paint. Anything. This also freaked me out. It felt so desperate and dangerous.

Opposite our room lived a single man in his forties or possibly fifties. He worked a regular job at a local supermarket stacking shelves. I had respect for him because he worked and paid tax. He was an ex crim and a functioning alcoholic but he was trying to make his own way in life.

On the other side of our room was another couple. They had the nicest and largest room in the house. Ex junkies as well, the woman also had no teeth when I first arrived to the house. She was waiting for her new Medicare provided dentures. She was thin, with long hair down to her waist, also in her forties. Apparently she was a stunner before heroin stole her looks. She also made regular trips to the methadone clinic and smoked bongs all day but was strict with herself and her partner when it came to booze. No grog til after 5pm. She was a massive INXS fan and when her partner was at work as a painter she played Michael Hutchence and co at full bore. She was fastidiously clean and tidy and was the only one who cleaned the two bathrooms and the kitchen.

Her boyfriend worked when he could. When he wasn't working he was at the house smoking weed and sneaking drinks with my partner who was still enjoying a steady supply of beer and cans of Jim Beam and Coke provided by me. This bloke was a huge Star Wars fan and had a replica light sabre that he would prance around the hallway with as if he was Skywalker himself battling an imaginary Vader. Around the same age as his partner, but short, with a beautiful Japanese koi tattooed on his right arm, he often came to blows with us over silly things. Or should I say, come to blows with him.

The final tenant lived in the other front room. He was a man in his twenties. He lived like a pig. He had a funny little Jack Russell which, when I arrived at the house, was pregnant. The dog lumbered around looking half stoned thanks to the thick cloud laden with THC that permeated the air in the house. Finally giving birth to about four pups we discovered she'd been having it off with a red Pomeranian. The puppies were gorgeous and, in my secret pregnant state, I fell in love with them.

This bloke, when I said he lived like a pig, I was not exaggerating. He worked in a record shop during the day and while away the women of the house would care for the puppies. At night he let the Jack Russell and her pups sleep, eat, pee and shit in his room. Anywhere in his room. It was fucking disgusting. That room was like one big dog pen that was rarely cleaned out. That guy didn't even shower regularly and his feet stunk like they had some sort of fungal disease. I would retch every time the smell would drift up the hall.

Arguments amongst the house's residents could be easily sparked when everyone had been drinking. Especially on dole day because the inmates were flush. He was often at the centre of the blues that could rage for hours. Voices were raised and violent threats were made but it never came to blows. The others knew he could kill them if he wanted to so no one was ever brave enough to throw the first punch. For some reason he never actually hit anyone but it always felt close.

The house was like a little micro society in itself. Every little thing that happened seemed important because there was not much else going on in our lives. Us three women who lived there didn't leave often. The men came and went. We all kept to our rooms, especially at night. He and I sometimes sat in the lounge room for a change of scenery when we were off our trolley before I fell pregnant but other than that the skaters were the only ones who used that space. Oh, and the Poppy Seed Man, but I'll come to him in a minute.

There was a couch and a lounge chair and an ancient TV that I remember watching reruns of Godzilla on while tripping off my brain. The walls were covered in old band posters, bits and pieces past tenants had pinned up, and graffiti. There was a mannequin dressed in black lace in one corner and an old wall unit filled with pantry goods that had been obtained from the local Salvos. I hated walking through there in the dark on my endless trips to the toilet during that first trimester.

By mid year there was a homeless guy sleeping on the couch - it was too cold for him to sleep in one the caravans in the yard. Cockies scuttled across the split lino floor as I tiptoed out the back to the loo, desperately trying not to wake the transient artist who had passed out after consuming yet another pot of tea he'd brewed from poppy seeds. Yes, poppy seeds.

(I've actually seen Poppy Seed Man recently at our local shopping centre. Total freak out. He's the only person from that time that I've seen in over four years. Guess what he was doing when I saw him? Buying a single bag of poppy seeds from Bi-Lo.)

When it came time for my 12 week scan I was in cautious contact with my family and some friends. A girlfriend came with me to the private clinic and all looked good on the screen. We left and went for a coffee. I got a call from clinic not long after asking me to come back. I'd left before getting my results. I told my friend I'd be ok, everything would be fine so she should go get on with her day. When I returned to the clinic I was called into the doctor's room and told that the baby's nuchal fold was a little longer than normal and they wanted to do a CVS test immediately.

I didn't give myself any time to think about it and agreed to the test. On my own, holding a nurse's hand, the doctor then inserted a massive needle into my uterus to extract some fluid to test. It was scary and painful and I held my breath as I realised my escape from rock bottom could be whisked away from me.

I remember walking away from the medical centre and vomiting in a garden on the way to the bus stop. The chances of a Downs Syndrome child were still slim but not remote enough to not risk a miscarriage by putting a needle in my guts. I was supposed to be in a relationship with the father of this child growing inside me but I was alone and had no one to feel this pain with me. No real partner to hold my hand and tell me it will be ok, if there's anything wrong, we'll just try again.

The next ten days as I waited for the results were the longest ten days of my life. I was starting to see sense in my situation. I was seeing the man I was sharing my bed with for what he was: An addict who was never going to get sober, never going to get a job to help provide for me and my child, a man who didn't really love me but was living off me while he waited for his ex and mother of his other children to take him back.

When it was time to make the call to the pathology centre for my results, I sat alone in the room that had been my home, my prison, my sick bed. I gave my details to the woman who answered the phone. Without having to wait a moment longer she told me everything was fine. There were no chromosomal abnormalities with my baby. The anonymous woman on the end of the phone asked me if I wanted to know what sex the baby was, I immediately said no because he had told me he didn't want to know. I hung up the phone and sat quietly with the knowledge that my baby was OK.

My baby.

My mind flashed through with what I'd learnt of its father over the previous four months and made projections of what kind of person he would be into the future. I picked up the phone, pressed redial, gave my details again and said I'd like to know what the baby's gender was.

"You're having a boy".

I started crying then. With pure joy and happiness. It was all real for the first time. After three months of vomiting, pissing dozens of times a day, doctor's appointments alone, hours spent in the ER with a drip inserted in my arm to rehydrate me, and lying around going over and over in my head questioning if I could possibly stand another minute of this pregnancy, another day, another month...

Sitting alone in that room I named him Noo.

And I wasn't alone any more.

Mid October 2008, six weeks before Noo was born

I took stock of where I was and I made the decision I had to get out of that house. We had to get out of that house. I needed to feel clean and smoke free and back in control of my life and my surroundings. I had to get back to my world. I had to do it for us.

While that seedy little house provided shelter when I needed it, it was now time to leave.



_________________

Sometimes when I think about that period of my life I've described above, it doesn't seem real, or like it happened to me at all. I don't feel bad about it. Not at all. What I do feel is lucky. Lucky to have made Noo, lucky to have my family, lucky to have the support of my employer to give me time to work shit out even though it has taken years. Lucky to have a team of medical professionals over the years that have helped me get to this place I am now.

Noo and me today

Most of all I feel lucky that I gave myself a chance to wipe the slate clean. To start again and begin a new life. It has been a hard road but worth every battle won, every backwards step, every struggle with self doubt, just to look in my beautiful son's eyes and know I love him and he loves me and together we are going to be just fine.


Thanks again for reading.

V.

Part 4: The dad question

I've been avoiding writing the final part to this story for months now. I have to get inside my head and find those memories and feel, smell, breathe them so I can convey the tale to you accurately. I'm coming to the end of the story that forms the bridge between my old life and my new. I don't want to fuck up a detail and it is turning out to be a longer story than I first remembered. I'll have to break it up over a couple of posts.

Make sure you read the first three parts before you get stuck in here so it all makes sense:

Part 1: The day we met
Part 2: A new addiction
Part 3: Walking into the abyss


_________________

The opposite of rehab

The cab I ordered from the hospital took us straight back to his share house in the Inner West of Sydney. The house was on the corner of a busy road and a tree-lined avenue that lead up to the main street. All six bedrooms were occupied and there were two dilapidated caravans in the yard that sometimes housed random transients.

It was one of those old single story inner city homes that had had any trace of garden ripped out and replaced with concrete. The front door was never locked because there was always someone home and people were constantly coming and going. It was always dark inside to keep the power bills down because of the nine regular residents, only three had legit jobs.

The smell emanating from the joint was of weed, nicotine and damp. You could smell it from the footpath out the front of the house despite the constant stream of heavy vehicles which passed throughout the day. Every single one of the people who resided there smoked both marijuana and tobacco which bellowed out of the house like rotten dragon's breath. They each had a host of other drug and alcohol issues to their names as well. This was the only thing I had in common with them.

This house was the opposite of rehab, the place I had just escaped from: it was where people who didn't want to recover or couldn't afford to recover went to eke out the best life they could while maintaining their addictions. I could have gone back to the room I was paying extortionate rent for in the next suburb, but I felt comfortable and oddly safe here amongst society's dropouts.

His room was the second on the right. It was smallish, about three metres by four or five. He had an old wardrobe in the corner where the few clothes he owned were piled. Also, sitting on an upturned milk crate, was an outdated rear projection TV, alongside a kid's motorcycle, a chair and finally a single mattress made of foam laying directly on the linoleum floor.

I dumped the belongings I had taken with me to rehab on the floor: some clothes, toiletries and my doona, pillow and ugg boots which came with me every time I entered a psychiatric facility. No one should do rehab with hospital issued bed linen!

Before I even sat down we were on the phone hunting out drugs. I had to get wasted; as fucked up as I possibly could without dying, although that probably wouldn't have bothered me either as long as I got to enjoy myself and go out with a bang. I just needed something to shut out the voice of reason. The voice of anger. The voice of despair and worthlessness. The echo of the argument I'd had with my father only hours before.

And so began a three week orgy of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Back in London, in my cocaine snorting days, I'd always had the delusional fantasy that I was bit of a rock chick, cool with my constant supply of Charlie and ability to consume vast amounts of alcohol. Now though, spending nearly all of my time with this person on a foam mattress on the floor, off our heads for all our waking moments I felt like Sid and Nancy or Kurt and Courtney: So rock. So cool. So fucked up. But with a couple of glass pipes (one for smoking weed, one for meth) instead of a needle.

The only reason I didn't completely lose my head was a handy supply of Seroquel, an antipsychotic medication that when taken after consuming amphetamines will help bring you down and let you sleep. It also prevented any of the usual come downs I was used to in the past. It made having a three week binge possible.

The other factor allowing us to go on the ultimate bender of avoidance was my UK credit card which I'd paid off with an Aussie personal loan when I first arrived back home. In my "I don't give a fuck about anything" mind frame I just kept withdrawing cash off it. This, in retrospect, was why I think this man who would provide the seed that created my son, hung around for so long: I was buying him drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, paying his rent and feeding him. I even bought him some clothes and a pair of shoes in the short time we knew each other.

We hardly ever left the house. Actually, I hardly ever left the house. In my position as money provider I had all the power in the relationship and I used it to send him on trips for drugs, food and other supplies. I even gave him my pin numbers to get money out of my accounts from the ATM because I just couldn't be bothered to go anywhere.

I occasionally went up the road to the shops. Eventually I got all my stuff from my room in the boarding house and ended my rental agreement with the agent. While I was there I discovered that he had taken money from one of the students that lived in a neighbouring room with the promise to score pot for him. He'd never got the pot or returned the $50. I repaid the debt. Something I had to do on numerous occasions.

About two to three weeks from the day I left the hospital and arrived at the house I knew something was up with me. My last period had been strange: late and it stopped and started. I figured this was because of all the drugs I'd been taking. When it was late again, I thought I might be pregnant but I doubted it. Was my body even capable of such a task? I really thought it was probably the same situation as the month before.

I went to the chemist to get a test seriously thinking I was wasting another $20 bucks or whatever they cost at the time. I did the test as soon as we got back to the house and there were the two purple lines. I was pregnant and everything changed. Strangely enough it was almost one year to the day since I was raped in London, the almost catastrophic event that sent me skidding into the abyss in the first place.

When I showed Noo's father the testing stick he was shocked. The look on his face told me exactly what he thought and it wasn't positive. He actually looked scared.

Even though I'd only known him a short time, he'd already told me he loved me. He told me all the time that I was beautiful, that he was in love with me, that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. We spent all our time together in our room in that house, except when he was on missions for supplies or when on the weekend he would see his kids.

He spent one day every single weekend with two of his children and he loved them very much. Although he talked to me about them in great detail, I won't write about them or their mother because I don't feel that is my right. All I'll say is he was estranged from their mother. I found out she had an AVO (Apprehended Violence Order) taken out against him and he wasn't supposed to go anywhere near her or the kids but they had an agreement he could see them one day a week because she had to work.

He and I had spent so much time talking and getting to know one another that a sort of bond had formed - for me anyway - but I hadn't returned the 'I love you' until that moment I showed him the pregnancy test. All that desperation, helplessness, uselessness I had felt for so long started to lift almost immediately. This wasn't going to be just another day to get high and avoid the reality of my life.

Morning sickness kicked in around three days after I found out I was pregnant. At first I was just a little nauseous but that could have been because I'd completely stopped all forms of illicit drugs, alcohol and cigarettes and my body was in shock. By the second week I was vomiting from 3am through to 5pm every single day and continued to do so until week 14.

Still not speaking to my family or friends I had to think about how I was going to manage my recovery and the pregnancy on my own. There was no way he was going to get sober with me, although I talked about it with him constantly. I was pretty naive and somehow thought that we would work this out together. I'd convinced myself that I did love him, despite the fact that we had nothing in common but a love for being wasted.

His mother was 16 when she had him and he'd been mostly raised by this grandparents who were Ten Pound Poms that came out to Australia in the late 60s. He somehow made it through the school system without learning to read or write. He told me he had excelled at all sports and that was how he scraped through.

His grandfather, a tradesman, took him on as an employee at age 15 and I'm guessing because he was illiterate he wouldn't have had any official trade certificate. In retrospect I guess he got through life with charm, wit, violence and a pathological ability to lie on his feet.

I heard him on the phone to his ex partner all the time lying through his teeth with ease. He was enormously paranoid of her coming around to the house and finding me there, which she never did. He was also overly concerned about any police attention the house might attract. I never understood either because, as far as I knew, they were broken up and, except for breaking the conditions of her AVO against him, the police should have no reason to want him.

As time wore on and I sobered up I became more and more incapacitated by the pregnancy. Vomiting all day had made me extremely dehydrated and couldn't even keep my antidepressants down. I saw our family doctor who was unimpressed with my state and told me he was very sad that I was pregnant. My doctor's connection with my parents was too strong so I opted to change GPs to keep them out it.

As the news I was pregnant made it around my family and old friends the reaction was negative to say the least. How could I possibly care for another human being if I couldn't care for myself? Good question. I had to somehow prove that I could do it. I had to clean up my life.

When I first laid eyes on the screen of the ultrasound equipment reality kicked in as the tiny little blob kicked around for us to see. It was just a little white foetus on a black background but it was moving its tiny little legs furiously and looked full of life. He came with me to that first exam. He showed some interest but he'd done this all before. Several times before.

Weeks turned into months and we were still living in that one room in a house full of misfits. I'd gotten one of those 24 month interest free loans from a furniture store and bought us a queen sized bed, chest of draws, HD TV and TV stand.

I spent day after day in bed vomiting into my red garbage bin. I was given that bin for my 14th birthday (yeah, go figure!).  It had somehow survived all my moves to and from Melbourne, been stored by my dad while I was living in London and made its way back to me when I moved to the boarding house. I love that bin.

My 24 year old red bin today. We've been through a lot together.

I would start every morning retching, head bowed over the rim of that fair dinkum Aussie made red plastic garbage bin, early before anyone else in the house was awake. He was always worried the other tenants would figure out what was going on and constantly told me to keep it down. He didn't want anyone to figure out I was pregnant, but they didn't clue on as far as I know. He told me he didn't want his ex to find out on the grapevine, or in retrospect, he didn't want her to find out at all.

During the day I would get him to clean out the bin of its watery contents. I was obsessed that it would make it back to our room. Anything left outside was fair game for anyone to take. I trusted no one in that house. Not even with my old red bin.


_________________


That is enough for now. Part 5 is written. I'll post it later in the week.


Thanks for reading.

V.

Goodbye Blue Mountains hello Sydney!

Noo and I are now at the tail end of our ten day break in the Blue Mountains. It has been wonderful to hang out with Yolanda, my sister, and her seven month old daughter Mala, as well as to catch up with old friends.

We've had great days chilling at home as well as some fun day trips around the Mountains. The weather has been perfect: cool, crisp days with blue skies and sunshine. There's been lots of good food both cooked at home and eaten out. And with only one day of anxiety it really has been a relaxing week away.

Today: a perfect sunny Blue Mountains winters day

The part of the Blue Mountains where my parents reside is nestled about 10km west of the main road from Sydney. It is really quiet here. There are no cafes or tacky souvenir shops. No playgrounds or tourist buses. Just a fire station and a post box serve the residents who are surrounded by the most beautiful Australian bushland. The road leading in is a tree-lined avenue that is as stunning this time of year as it is in spring and almost as beautiful in winter as it is when the leaves change colour for autumn.

My sister and I know how lucky we are to have this place as a sanctuary. A place to escape to when city life gets too much. I used to come here, before Noo was born, before my years in London, to recuperate from a hectic life of working and partying. There is no mobile network here but back in the mid 1990s to early 2000s we didn't have internet either. We were completely cut off. With fresh air and lots of good food, this was the perfect place to detox, like a mini weekend rehab.

In the months after leaving Noo's father I spent a large part of my pregnancy up here, away from the dramas at home. After my breakdown, subsequent hospitalisations and sojourn to rock bottom I lost a lot of my usual support network. The general response to the news I was pregnant was negative. Most of my friends thought I wouldn't cope, that it was unfair on the unborn child. People didn't know how to be around me. And I don't blame them. I was a mess.

I spent the first trimester of my pregnancy in very little contact with my family or friends (the period which will be the third instalment of the "The dad question"). When I finally did leave Noo's father I I had an enormous amount of work to do to mend the very damaged relationships I had with those closest to me. My relationship with my sister was one that was hurt the most. She had borne the weight of my declining mental health and increasing addictions since well before my return from London. She was tired and needed to be free of my shit for a while. It was hard. Horrible actually. But that is another story.

During the second and third trimesters I wasn't working so I spent most of my time with my parents. Actually, I did attempt a return to work but the anxiety attacks became daily again and I wasn't sleeping so I didn't last very long before I was taking early maternity leave.

Despite the hardships they'd endured during the year previous my parents were still there for me. They helped me build a home for me and Noo in a little apartment I found in the inner south west of Sydney. I also stayed with them up here in the Blue Mountains quite a bit. It was so relaxing. Mum and I would spend hours and hours every day talking about my pregnancy and Noo's impending arrival.

There have been times too when I've hated it here. Hated the seclusion, the heat in summer and the bugs! But mostly I've loved it, but only as a place to visit. Which gets me back to today. Our last night after a long week away.

The sun setting over the valley for the last time while we're here this trip

And I am so looking forward to going home! I love the city. The buzz and the hustle and bustle. The people and beeping horns. The tall buildings, the Harbour and the cappuccinos. The city workers, the inner city mums and kids at the park. Friends and daycare! My bed and my desk so I can get into a better routine to blog.

Yes, I am ready to go home.

Can't wait to get back to the bright lights of the city

'Til next time.

V.

On the night before surgery...

Well, this is my "night before" blog. I've been thinking about what to write all day, as well as reading loads of other blogs, but I haven't been able to come up with any profound last words before I go under the knife, so I'm just going to type and see what comes out...

I've been quite consumed with anxiety about it all but not because I'm fearful of the surgery or the anesthetic. Quite the contrary, I don't mind being sedated and having that lovely dreamy feeling when you wake up. I'm not too scared about the pain either, I figure I endured a 39 hour labour when Noo was born, I can endure any pain that I might be inflicted with. What I'm really scared about is what losing weight means to me.

I am at the tail end of what has been a very long, very hard journey that started in 2007 when I had a massive breakdown.  One minute I was living and working in London, the next being admitted to a psychiatric and rehabilitation hospital in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Its been an incredibly hard and bumpy road that has found me here, typing this blog getting ready to be banded to help me shed the fat I've been hiding behind while I heal what have been some pretty heavy emotional scars.

Before 2007 I was a bubbly, funny and energetic party girl. I lived to party and have fun. Then something very bad happened and all that came crashing down. The year that followed was a living hell. I started to self medicate with drugs and alcohol and when I finally came back to Sydney it was to detox to save my life.

Getting sober at first was like being striped clean with bleach. I had nothing to help me hide from the thoughts in my mind and was forced to face what my life had become. I was 32 and I had nothing but a massive UK credit card debt and a serious drug and alcohol problem. I was not the cool party girl/rock chick, in control of her habits, as I had somehow managed to convince myself I was. In those three weeks in the hospital I began to realise I had no idea who I was. Since I was a shy teenager who discovered drinking alcohol gave me the confidence I could never have alone, I had made drinking and partying the central part of my personality. Now that it was gone I was left open like a raw weeping wound without a band aid. 

In the hospital I was put on various medications to help with detoxing and with the deep depression I now found myself in. Over the last three years I have tried eight different anti-depressants and about five different anti-psychotic/mood stabilisers (which I don't need any more). Some of these medications really affect your appetite and by not being able to drink, I was seriously drawn to food - particularly chocolate and any other sweet food.

Chocolate is addictive and affects the same neuro pathways as drugs and alcohol do. With my increased appetite thanks to whatever meds the psychiatrists had me on I became obsessed with chocolate - it was my new cocaine! 

Finally, after four admissions and almost a year to the day of that terrible thing that happened, I found out I was pregnant with my son. It was make or break time. Get sober and live and raise a little baby out the ashes that was my old life or, well, the or just doesn't bear thinking about.

So I was preggers. The first 14 weeks I had horrific morning sickness and couldn't eat so actually lost 13 kg.  I got down to my lowest weight since giving up the booze, etc, and was 83 kg as I headed into the second trimester. By the end of my pregnancy I was completely infatuated with lollies and chocolates and fruit and ice cream and anything sweet I could get my hands on! Most importantly though, I found a new hope and could finally see a future for myself as I fell deeply in love with the little baby that was growing inside me.

By the time Noo was born I was 104kg. In the few weeks and months following his birth my weight never really dropped below 95 kg.  I was hungry all the time. Seriously starving 24 hours a day. I would eat whenever he needed a feed, even throughout the night. My appetite was bigger than it had even been on those horrible mood stabilisers! I complained about it to my doctor and it was just put down to the fact I was breast feeding. I also started to get other symptoms - profusive sweating, sleeplessness, and extreme anxiety. I began to feel like the world was going to end. I had this overwhelming feeling all time of impending doom.

Once again I went back to my GP and I was seeing a psychiatrist weekly but still my symptoms were put down to being a new mother who was breastfeeding. I was also on a massive dose of an anti-depressant which was giving me a strange side effect that my head would experience a buzzing sensation whenever I moved. Both my GP and the psych put it down to anxiety and kept increasing my dose.

By the time Noo was just over 3 months old, I was losing it and finally I was admitted to a psych hospital again to come off my meds to try another type of anti-depressant. As is routine when you get admitted to these places, the hospital's GP ordered a stack of blood tests. I was later called in to see the doctor and told that my thyroid was malfunctioning and was extremely hyperactive, to the point where he thought I might have Graves Disease. I had my laptop with me so was straight on to Google when I got back to my room. Symptoms included, anxiety, fast metabolism causing increased appetite, profusive sweating... I could not believe it! Here I was thinking I had regressed back to the depressed state I was in back in 2007 and what really was the issue was that I had a thyroid problem! 

I was furious to say the least.  I'm still not over it really, will never be, that my doctors did not test my thyroid function given my extreme symptoms. I suffered for about 4 months with a newborn who I was struggling to care for because I was losing my mind. When I finally got to see an endocrinologist I was diagnosed with postpartum thyroiditis. Phew! That was well over a year ago and my recent appointment with the specialist confirmed that the thyroid disease has righted itself and is functioning at normal levels now.

Wow, this has become a much longer entry than I expected but I suppose it goes to how I find myself here, on the eve of my gastric band surgery.

I tried many diets in an attempt to lose the weight I had gained including Weight Watchers (x2), Jenny Craig and two sessions a week with a personal trainer. Still nothing was working, or it would work for a couple of weeks to a month and next thing I knew I was falling into bad habits again.

In one of my stints in rehab I met an alcoholic girl around my age who would eat very little food. I must have asked her about it and when she told me she had a gastric band I was completely intrigued. When my Jenny Craig diet failed last year, I started thinking more about that young woman and began researching all about laproscopic gastric band surgery. I have read everything, I think, there is to read about it, and I knew it was the thing for me.  I know I have a lower BMI than most people who have the procedure but for someone who has been in the overweight/obese category for most of my adult life, I really think its the right thing for me.

So I've been sober two and a bit years and I am the mother of the most wonderful little boy. Getting pregnant got me sober and being a parent keeps me sober.  I don't know if anyone would understand this but being obese also keeps me sober. I hardly ever go out at night and I haven't even thought about another relationship or men in general, since this whole saga began. At the beginning, I was too broken for a relationship, now I'm just too fat. But a healthy relationship is something that I want but it frightens me so much at the same time.

Will losing weight and feeling good about my body be enough to make me want to go out and meet people but also tempt me to drink again? Its a frightening thought but honestly, I don't think so (the drink party I mean, not the meeting people!). Writing this blog has made me realise that. I am so far away from that shell shocked girl that came back from London in June 2007. I am a strong and resilient woman who has come back from the brink of oblivion and I'm ready to let go of this mask, this armour, and let the new and fabulous me come out and shine!

Next time I post I will be banded! It is midnight so I must go to bed.

Vanessa

The last supper(s)

COUNTDOWN: 11 sleeps to go.

I had a terrible day for eating today.  Absolutely shocking.  It hasn’t been a day of emotional eating or boredom eating or anything like that, it feels like “last supper” eating.  Did you ever play that game “if you were on death row, what would you choose to be your last supper”?  That’s how I kinda feel. Not that getting a lap-band is like being sentenced to death... actually, wait a second, maybe it is.  A certain part of me has been given the death sentence.  That fat girl with the “insufficient self control” issues has been given notice.

Today I had my last doughnut, my last meat pie, last bag of hot chips with chicken salt and possibly my last Cherry Ripe (possibly not, there are 10 days to go!).  Look at that list of food!  I never used to eat like this pre sobriety.  I’ve always loved food, don’t get me wrong, but never like this.  These last few years have been so junk filled I barely even crave the good stuff now and I can’t wait to have that back.  I’ve become a dead-set salad dodger!

To give you a little history, I grew up in a family where food was and still is, very important.  Not only did food fuel us but we loved to talk about it, watch shows about it, read about it and food was also what helped but a roof over our heads.  My mum ran her own successful catering company from our family kitchen for 15 years while we were growing up.  Her passion for good food inspired me and my brother and sister to also have a very strong interest in food.

In these last three years, since returning from a four year stint living overseas, I lost that enthusiasm for good healthy food and I don’t understand why it went.  

When I fell pregnant in April 2008 I had the most hideous morning sickness for the first trimester.  So much so that I threw up every day from 3am through to 5pm and lost 12kgs in the process.  My only real cravings during this strange time were for iceberg lettuce doused in Kraft French dressing.  I would eat a whole head of lettuce shredded and swimming in the vinegary liquid.

Once the nausea subsided and my appetite returned and Noo grew bigger and bigger in my belly I developed a growing need for sugary foods.  I also had the best excuse to eat whatever I wanted – I was pregnant, I’d lose the weight again after the baby was born.  It’s a wonder I didn’t develop gestational diabetes with all those lollies and ice blocks.

So my son was born three days before Christmas, the biggest feasting time of the year.  Noody and I had our first Christmas lunch together, just the two of us, in our private room at RPA (the Royal Price Alfred Hospital) – he having a clumsy attempt at a boob and me with a skinny piece of pork and some overcooked and sad looking vegies.  It wasn’t much but it was the best Christmas lunch ever.

The whole family turned up not long after, including my 98 year old grandfather who I was so glad could be there to share in that wonderful day.  They brought plates of food and the best Christmas pud with hard sauce and custard. 

So I wasn’t pregnant anymore and along with grog, the fags were also long gone, but my tastebuds did not all of a sudden crave the good food I’d once enjoyed so much with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer.  My understanding has always been that once you give these things up, especially ciggies, your tastebuds become more sensitive and you can appreciate the taste of food to a higher degree.  Nup, not me.  The yearning for all things sweet and fattening continued.

Which brings me back to today – DISGUSTING!  My therapist (yes, I have a therapist, I feel like I’m saying a line out of a Woody Allen film, but I’m not, it just is that I am in therapy) suggested I do a sugar detox three days before the op to prepare myself for everything.  Most people being banded have to do the Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD) with Optifast before the surgery in order to reduce the amount of fat around their livers making it easier for the surgeon to do his thing on the day.  Because of my relatively low BMI I don’t need to endure that two week long torture which I’m stoked about.  On the other hand I think it would be good to do in that you’d feel so relieved after the op that you can then at least have something a little tastier than a diet shake.  Eating as I currently do right up to the day feels like I’ll be jumping straight into the deep end.

Jumping into the deep end is something I’ve been pretty good at so I might as well take the same approach here.  I might change my mind, but in the mean time I’ve got a number of last suppers still left to have.

V.