I am not sure what made me break. The first thing that happened was I could not catch my breath. I am an asthmatic. It got so bad I got to where I was bed fast. The kids were fending for them selves. Karen was not quite two and spent most of her time in bed with me. She soon found if she had to potty I would get up to take her. So you can guess she had to potty often. The kids played just put side of my bedroom window, so I knew what was going on when they were outside. At the last of my pregnancy, they for the most part lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and what ever else they could find. I never ate much at all and at the end, nothing except vitamin pills. I lost 22 pounds the last month before Kathy was born. One day in August when we had a family gathering at the Salt Plains Lake, the family insisted I needed to get out so I went. I am deathly afraid of water and about lost it when the kids went swimming or even waded. I was not hungry at all, but mama insisted I had to eat something. I took a bite of roast beef that my sister brought and immediately my stomach went into an acid reflux frenzy. I was so miserable I felt I would die. I would guess my stomach was not used to food and when I ate the beef, the acid attacked it with vengeance. My sister, Lila, left her family to stay with me for a week or so. I did get some rest as I had no worries about the children and feeding the family. I felt badly about her not being with her children though. I broke down and cried when she had to leave. She offered to stay longer, but I told her she needed to go back to care for her family. The last few weeks of my pregnancy, Dr Blender insisted that I see him every other day. The trip to town was all I could do. Since I had always been such a strong person, he never had an inkling I was into a emotional breakdown until one day he asked if I cried a lot. I broke into a flood of tears that would not stop. He advised the nurse to send his other waiting patients home and sat with me for close to two hours, comforting and talking to me. Dr. Blender is deceased now, but I will be forever grateful and never forget his kind deed. How many doctors would have done this for a patient? Dr Blender placed me in the hospital 3 weeks early as that is when I usually delivered anyway. They gave me things to induce labor, but nothing worked. I was even on the delivery table with false contractions but not dilating. He told the nurse to give me a triple dose of drugs to put me to sleep so I could get some rest. The shot knocked me out, but good! I awakened an hour or so later to being almost fully dilated and taken to delivery to give birth to Kathy a few moments later. Kathy weighed 5 pounds and 11 ounces. She was such a beautiful little thing with fair features and a mop of black hair about an inch and a half long. Her eyes were dark blue at birth then and turned brown at a year old. I thought she would be our only blue eyed girl. I gradually gained strength and my heart started beating regular many months later. |
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Created May 29, 2021
Updated: 15 June, 2021
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