Rump Bumps in the Road

Our PMT (Project Management Timeline) wasn’t updated much this week.  A lot of it had to do with laziness on my part, but mostly it was spending 4 hours Saturday morning in the Emergency Room that did it.  Yup, you heard right.  Nothing that had to do with the baby, it was me and my…ahem…pilonidal cyst.  Have you ever heard of this?

A pilonidal cyst is a boil that shows up on the upper inside of one’s butt crack.  Most of them can be handled with warm compresses and sitz baths, but some of them get so big and infected that they need to be lanced (cut open) and drained (my new least favorite word).  Talk about excruciating pain – both the boil (one tends to not be able to walk, sit, lay or talk without using curse words), and the lancing, draining and follow-up care.  There are three schools of thought on why these pilonidal cysts appear.  The first is the least scientific and comes from my first doctor on the Upper West Side (Dr. Irene Shapiro – and you must go back and say her name in the most Jewish – New Yorker way possible.  I’ll wait.).  She says that when I was being created in the womb, my bottom didn’t fuse together correctly so I’ll always have an opening there.  And once bacteria get in that miniscule opening: infection city.  The second and third come from the internet and, I’ll admit, are easier for me to believe.  Either it is an ingrown hair that was infected with extra skin and hair – or – my coccyx was irritated by sitting too long on it.

And yet there are also two unscientific explanations from non-Doctors: Dad seems to think it’s my twin rearing its ugly head and Doug likes to say the cause is impacted shit.

While I’ve gotten baby cysts (or what I like to call “butt bumps”) many times over the last 8-9 years, this November was the first time that I’d ever had one that needed to be taken care of by a physician.  I was 11 weeks and went to the absolutely WRONG doctor.  He didn’t know if I could have the numbing agent so gave me only 1 cc (he basically spit over me), didn’t wait for it to numb (if 1 cc was going to do ANYTHING anyway) and dug in.  At that point it was the Single. Most. Painful thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.  Oh, and I didn’t mention that he had 3 med students in there with him studiously poring over my lily-white ass.  However, the lancing – or rather, stabbing – had nothing on the procedure of packing the wound.  Doug can tell you first hand that this is not a pretty sight.  Sit back, take a breath and imagine someone inserting ½ inch gauze little by little with a tweezers and the sharp end of scissors into a freshly made wound.  Now imagine your amazing husband having to do it to you day after day while you bite a washcloth, shake with adrenaline and pray fervently (and mildly irrationally) for God to make the pain go away, hoping that this time he has to insert a little less gauze and the procedure takes a little less time.  Rough stuff, right?  Riiiiight.  And people wonder why I sit on an inflatable donut at work.

Since then, I’ve gotten 3 more pilonidals.  I think it must have something to do with all the growth hormones surging through my pregnant body.  One of the three didn’t go away on its own, so I got some antibiotics.  Drugs that, I’m pretty sure, made the cyst very, very ANGRY.  As in take-a-Percoset-and-then-I’m-going-to-rupture angry.  I called my brother-in-law (thank GOODNESS for a doctah in the family), who helped me to make the hard decision – go get it lanced.  We decided not to return to Dr. Hannibal Lector and took our chances with the ER instead. While it wasn’t Candyland and was still toe-curling, Doug’s shirt grabbing, Lamaze breathing torture, Dr. Lin was very gentle and used a truckload of Lidocaine.  Actually, I'm pretty sure the multiple injections of Lidocaine were the most painful portions of the procedure.  Now let’s see how I feel when I have to get it re-packed for the first time.  Zoinks. 

Now because my ass is packed with iodine-laced gauze, iodine is coming out of my pores (seriously, I blow my nose and smell hospital and old people) and I might have to walk around in Doug’s boxers for the week.  Please pray that I heal enough to fly to Minnesota next Friday for our shower!

Good thing this week is Make-Up Week for all the projects we didn’t get to.  However, one thing we DID do was go to my work and pick up all the presents that have been accumulating in my office.  We picked up the car seat that Aunt Jill and cousins Marisa, Holli, Heidi and Heather got us, the Pack ‘N Play from coworker Sanjay, our crib and all the items my coworker Adrian brought in from his twins.  The nursery looks more like storage from someone moving in than a baby’s room, but it’ll get there!

And here are some pregnancy photos!  Don't be alarmed, no pictures exist from my backside - much to Mama Cook's chagrin. 

The nursery as it looks at 30 weeks. 

This is only half of it because it's also our place to leave wet clothes to dry, and you don't wanna see that.

 Love, Health, Safety and Good Sleepies.