A New Life

9.4.2020

Dear diary,

It has been a long time since we met last. It was probably sometime in the middle of my pregnancy. The last time we got talking was when dear sleep eluded me. Today again, I am unable to sleep.

The last time, remember, I told you about my increasing discomfort with the growing belly, rising temperatures, sweat dripping from all parts of the body and settling along uncomfortable crevices. A lot of water, almost a river swelling over to the banks, has flown under the bridge thereafter, buddy.

An emergency necessitated my visit to the hospital. A barrage of tests were mounted upon me with doctors using myriad tools of modern medicine to identify the malaise that seemed to gripping me with an iron hand. One can only tolerate so much of the intermittent, alternating bouts of high temperature and cold waves chilling the bones. Yet I rode the crests and troughs like I was riding on horseback through dense wilderness, for six full days. Until one fine day, my body sat down, exhausted and spent from fighting the fever and said ‘no more’. The baby’s heartbeat had started racing and so had mine. The doctors decided that it was time I go under the scalpel and not dither any longer for the sake of both of our well being – myself and the tiny life growing inside me.

What followed next was a blur of activities – I being wheeled into the Operation theatre, the anaesthesiologist expressing strong reservations about going ahead with the surgery and letting me know that things could go horribly wrong putting both our lives in grave danger, me accepting the risks involved - for what I was going through hell anyway. As I was laid on the operation table, I could see the green lights glow overhead. A black mask connected to an oxygen cylinder was placed over my face.

“Just a small prick and you will go into deep sleep,” a kind voice from over my head, had said.

After what seemed like a couple of seconds, (but in reality was half an hour) I woke up with excruciating pain. The duty nurse told me that I had had a baby boy who was fine and stable. I registered what I could, transiting in and out of sleep in a daze, swaddled by the drugs that coursed through, shielding me from the terrible pain of having the body spliced open.

The next few days passed by in haze as the fever came riding in waves leaving me dripping with sweat, face blistering red and head singeing from the burn of the white hot knife of pain. The reports of the tests that I had been subjected a week ago finally made their way to the doctors’ table (phew, thank God for that) declaring that I had been down with a case of the much dreaded typhoid. The medication was suitably altered to tackle the menace and I got better eventually. I, finally, held the little one in my arms after a full week of him coming into this world. For the first time, it hit me that I was looking at a tiny version of myself.

Sorry to have kept you out of all this, I wanted to let you know earlier, trust me. But, life has been a roller coaster ride, these last few days, with my reserves of energy and time, depleting faster than the rate at which cookies are devoured by hungry children.

The baby is here with me now. As I talk to you now, he sleeps silently in his crib. When we got him home, he was extremely tiny, tiny baby – he was called. His entire frame was just half the length of my hand. But, time flies and life grows. After two months, he has almost caught up with other young ones his age.

Sleep, these days, is a valuable commodity. It is getting rarer and rarer each day, just like the levels of oxygen as one climbs up a mountain. Only, the mountain that I am trying to climb here, is that of trying to find my way through the fragile world of new born babies.

I wake him every two hours, to feed him, through the night. I have a time table to help me in my cause. He is supposed to be fed - once at one A.M, next at three A.M and again at five A.M. I have set up an alarm, the sound a temple bell clanging, just in case I doze off unexpectedly.

Anyway, waking up the little doll from the depths of his deep slumber is a mammoth task. On an average I spend a minimum of one hour trying to get him to open his eyes, which he does after a lot prodding, coaxing, cajoling and bawling, bringing the house down along with him. So technically I spend one hour waking him up, after which he suckles for around fifteen minutes and promptly drifts to sleep. Lo and behold! In a matter of another measly forty five minutes, I have to wake him up again.

I have to admit that I cannot have a rendezvous with dear old sleep in time slots of forty five minutes. I like my sleep to be long, deep and uninterrupted. You know that. I have told you insanely umpteen number of times that I do, in the past. So these days, I indulge in other things that are possible with eyes wide open, during the night- like catching up on the old issues of newspaper that I missed or following posts of my favourite bloggers or sifting through sepia tinted photographs and turning over the images in my memory. Sometimes, I can hear dogs howling away in the dead of the night. Yesterday, I even heard the twittering and chattering of birds at the unearthly hour of four in the morning.      

Also, there are times when soiled diapers require change. There are other times when the baby is wide awake, gurgling, staring into the ceiling and playing by himself in his little baby world. These times are the best for us to bond. We play games of introduction, where I introduce him to everything around, pointing out each object telling him what is what, myself included and he responds with a smile, that reaches the edge of his eyes and warms the cockles of my heart.

Anyways, now you know why I am up this late at night and why sleep is elusive. Oh! I can hear the little one cry, got to go. We should do this more often, I tell you. Hopefully, we can talk tomorrow. Until then, keep my secrets safe.