There and Back Again – A Harrowing Year and a Break From Anime

Content Warning: Discussion of pregnancy complications and other medical situations.

Well, it’s sure been a year, hasn’t it? Calling it a full year isn’t entirely accurate in that I think my last actual post here aside from some convention information was back in October 2022, but it’s close enough I suppose. Like most of the “breaks” I end up taking from this blog, this one was as unintentional as any other, but as I mentioned back then a large part of my inability to focus this time around was due to undergoing fertility treatment – the medication regimen itself and the fact that caffeine (my way of self-medicating my ADHD) became a big no-no put a real damper on things.

I will not be news to at least a few of you that the treatments and transfer ended up being successful, and a couple weeks into November 2022 I found out I was pregnant. This was of course happy news, but with that news came with it some additional complications that ended up taking a lot of my mental energy to deal with. The major one is that I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, a form of insulin resistance that occurs in pregnancy and is caused by basically an overactive placenta. The consequences of leaving this condition uncontrolled is an increased chance of giving birth to a very large baby (who then may end up hypoglycemic after being born, which can be dangerous), as well as premature placental degradation and a greater chance of stillbirth as a result of that. I took the diagnosis really seriously and spent a ton of mental and physical energy planning my meals and exercising in order to minimize the chances for any bad outcomes. I had some additional risk factors, including my age and the fact that this was an IVF pregnancy, so I really wasn’t messing around. I felt very lucky that I had access to the type of foods and the cooking know-how to deal with it all, but “dealing with it all” left me with very little desire or ability to indulge in my hobbies (and I was really looking forward to spending my pregnancy doing leisurely things and eating what I wanted!).

After a certain point I had twice-weekly appointments with my doctors to monitor mine and the baby’s vitals due to the various risk factors – luckily for us (and especially my nerves) everything always looked really good at every check-up and we were on track to induce labor during my 39th week.

My experience of childbirth was often interesting and had a wild ending. Without going into every little detail which I doubt will interest most readers of an anime blog, I was in labor for a couple of days, and ended up having an unplanned C-section after 4-5 hours of pushing that left me exhausted. Additionally, after the surgery was complete I started to hemorrhage and was rushed back to surgery and put under so that the doctor could attempt to get the bleeding back under control. I woke up some time later in the ICU recovery area to discover that, not only had I had basically the equivalent of all my body’s blood transfused over the course of the event, in order to stop the bleeding they had to give me a hysterectomy. This didn’t really upset me (we weren’t planning to have any more children, and also I don’t have to worry about birth control ever again) but it was definitely wild to hear about! Thankfully baby came out okay, average sized and with perfect blood sugar readings, so I was really relieved about that (I didn’t cry much throughout the whole ordeal, but I did a little bit once learning that he was healthy!).

All told, I (and my spouse) ended up spending about a week in the hospital recovering from surgery and learning about taking care of our new addition. It took me a few days before I could actually get up and walk (when they transferred me from the ICU to the maternity recovery area of the hospital I got to get lifted onto the transfer bed via a medical lift in the room, which I have to say was the crappiest ride I’ve ever been on!).

I’m doing fairly well now, a little over six weeks out. Since I’d had basically all my blood replaced, it took a while for my milk to come in, but that’s pretty much resolved itself at this point. Unfortunately, there have been a couple of other hurdles we’ve dealt with since returning home, including some surprise water in the basement of our house upon our return (that resulted in nearly $25K of plumbing work, fun!) and finding out that the daycare we’d had set up for when we went back to work was possibly going to be closing around the time we’d need to utilize them (which we’d discovered not from any alert from the daycare itself, but from a random news story I happened to see linked from my Facebook feed about a week after we got home, yikes). Luckily, in regards to that situation, we ended up finding another place with openings that we actually liked a lot better and is located on our way to work (we both work downtown in the major city where we’re located).

I think that mostly brings us up to the current time. I had the naïve notion that we’d be spending our parental leave watching tons of anime and other TV series in our backlog, but I’ve found that I haven’t had the mental energy to pay attention to much narrative media (aside from old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’ve been making my spouse watch with me). We finished off the series that our anime club was watching over the Summer session, but I’ve done next to no work keeping up with any anime currently being broadcast. I’m giving myself some grace in that regard, since I get the impression that the first several months of having a new baby are essentially survival mode, and I’ve been prioritizing sleep as much as I can. I imagine when Little One heads off to daycare he’ll be on a bit more of a solid routine, so I might have some energy to reassess at that point (or I may still be totally out of it, only time will tell – the only constant I’ve found is that babies are different from week-to-week, and that in itself is interesting in its own way).

So that’s pretty much it as far as what’s going on in my life at the moment. As far as my writing is concerned I’d like to start easing back in. After this whole experience (meaning having almost died in childbirth), I have some inkling of an idea for an essay about how several anime have issues with “dead moms,” but I’m going to try to workshop that a little bit before I really put any energy into it. I also watched a lot of anime in preparation for Anime Detour that I have feelings about (a lot of what I watched were series that were somewhat more obscure, as much as anything is obscure these days, so I’d like to shine a light on some of them even if those thoughts are no longer timely). I have to say, one of the weirder side-effects of motherhood has been a large decrease in my overall anxiety level (the exact opposite of what I would have expected especially considering the lack of sleep) so I find myself not worrying that much about how my long absences at this humble blog look to outside observers, and it’s made the prospect of writing about what I want on my own timetable all that much more appealing lately.

Once again, thanks to those willing to read something that’s not really related to anime. I know my personal life is probably not all that interesting to those looking for information on the newest anime releases, but I hope that some insight into what’s going on with me at least provides a more well-rounded picture into the writer behind the writing. My spouse fairly recently gave me one of the nicest compliments that I think I’ve ever received – he told me that when he’s looking for information on media, something he looks for is the “why” behind the reviewer’s opinion on it, and that he thinks I’m one of the best examples of that that he can think of. I hope I can keep living up to that!