On Thursday I was finally able to take Noah in for an OT/SI evaluation with the Super Amazing SI Therapist who's been working with Nick for a few weeks now. Before running Noah through all her tests, she asked me some premilinary questions about my concerns regarding Noah. I told her about how he can't moderate himself, getting overly amped up in sensory-stimulating environments, told her about how his sense of hearing and sight and touch are hyper-sensitive, but how he can't smell at all.
When she heard that, she stopped me. "What was his birth like?" she asked.
Noah was born nearly two weeks late. I was having contractions all that time, enough to keep me from sleeping but not enough to get the child born. The OB decided we needed to induce. And so we got to the hospital at an ungodly early hour (I think we were supposed to be there at 5 AM) and waited. And waited. And waited. Labor and Delivery didn't have any beds so they eventually sent us home. By afternoon they called to say they had a bed and we went back. Pitocin was started. Contractions increased in intensity, but I was too scared of the needle to get an epidural (stupidity, as I later learned). I still wasn't progressing enough so they broke my water for me. Late into the night it was finally time to push. I pushed and pushed and pushed for two hours. I was so exhausted that I kept falling asleep--W or a nurse would wake me up to push every time contractions showed up on the monitoring screen so that I could push again.
I may be small, but I'm TOUGH. I pushed the heck out of that child.
Midnight approached and my OB wandered in and slumped into a tired pile on a chair in the corner. He told me my baby was transverse; he'd hoped that pushing would straighten the baby out, make it go the right direction, but it hadn't worked yet. I could keep pushing, which would likely lead to vacuum extraction or the use of forecepts, or I could have a c-section.
And so I went off to the OR, got the spinal (a needle prick that I barely noticed), had a c-section and a healthy baby boy.
Noah's head was completely smooshed from all that pushing. It looked awful. The doctors and nurses laughed--it was FINE and would reshape itself. Noah's APGARS were good so there was nothing to worry about. He was FINE.
The Super Amazing SI Therapist said that the area where Noah's skull got smooshed by my pelvis is right where the sensory processing area of the brain is. She thinks that some nerve or neuropathway got pinched by the skull bone, leading to his sensory processing difficulties.
In short, my pelvis broke my baby's ability to smell.
I'm still sorting out how I feel about this. Part of me is angry at the doctors and nurses who reassured me that Noah was FINE; if I'd only known that my labor experience could have led to difficulties for Noah, I might have been able to watch for signs, get him help sooner. Part of me is sad that doing the most loving and natural thing for my child--trying to bring him into the world--wound up hurting him. Part of me is frustrated that it took eight years for a doctor to tell me any of this.
There was a lot more to the appointment, and I'll probably blog about it more later.
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