in which manual breast pumps are mentioned

A picture from the end of the summer. Feels like yesterday, but holy crap, look at how tiny she was!
9 days after Isla was born, Tyson and I headed to her second pediatrician appointment with both of the kids. We checked in, and were sitting in the waiting room when I began to experience some pain in my abdomen. I'd been having post-delivery uterine contractions all week (aren't those great), so the pain didn't catch me totally off guard and I tried to ride it out in silence. Soon though, it became too much to barrel through while in a public setting, so I left the waiting room and locked myself in the bathroom. Within a few minutes, the pain grew until it was excruciating, leaving me doubled over in tears and a cold sweat on the bathroom floor. After a few minutes, and with no responses from me on the phone, Tyson asked a nurse if she would head to the bathroom to check on me. And there I lay. After determining that I was immobile, the nurse decided to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital. Isla, voracious nurser that she was (is), began to be hungry, while I remained in a state that kept me from feeding her. Everett, who followed Tyson back to check on me, came to my side and started rubbing my back, leaning over into my face to ask, "wus wrong mama?" and after seeing me the way I was, began to cry. The nurses whisked him away with some stickers and dum-dums and reassured him that I was alright, which I was so grateful for, since my own reassurances were clearly not convincing enough. I heard the conversation between Tyson and the nurse in the hallway, trying to figure out how best to take care of our hungry baby. And then suddenly, there was an excruciatingly attractive paramedic lifting me onto a gurney and into the back of an ambulance while he asked me questions about what I was feeling. I somehow managed to say the word "vagina" out loud more than once. Since once was obviously not enough to get my point across. I GUESS?? Tragic.
A friend of ours met Tyson in the parking lot of the hospital and took the kids back to their house so Tyson could run in and be with me. The nurses had loaded our bag up with formula packs and bottles to feed Isla and a friend even offered to nurse her in case she wouldn't want to take a bottle at nine days old. Even Tyson's parent's drove up that same day and cared for us over the next few days. It was the greatest anxiety in the world for me, getting whisked away from her and her hungry cries at the doctors office, so it meant so much to have so many people step in and care for her when I couldn't.
We ended up staying at the hospital for the rest of the day and into the night, so for several hours, it was just me and Tyson under the stark lights of the hospital room - a real strange thing to experience right after having a baby. My breasts were starting to become painfully engorged, so Tyson went out and asked if we could have a breast pump sent over from the maternity ward. The nurse graciously dropped it off on the end of my hospital bed, and asked if we'd ever used a manual pump before. We hadn't. She hadn't either. So she left us to it. Tyson put it together and scooted his chair up closer to my bed so that I wouldn't have to do the pumping myself. And there we were. Me in a hospital bed with my boob shoved into a pump while Tyson sat there, his arms working, literally milking me, and slightly mesmerized by the process. My milk supply really struggled after Everett was born, so while Tyson pumped and watched this bottle fill, it was sort of like this mildly victorious moment, laced with wonderment and congratulations. Sitting there, I couldn't help but think back to the first time we met. I don't know why. But I suppose when you're sharing a deeply personal moment with someone, and/or being milked by that someone, you think back to that first exchange of phone numbers and laugh that those two human beings, flirting for the first time, couldn't possibly have imagined that this manual breast pump moment would be in their future together. It's fun. All of this with him.
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In other news, Tyson will be here tonight! For exactly 36 hours. And then he'll take a flight back to school until March. We originally didn't think he'd be able to squeeze this quick trip in this month, so it was an enormously happy surprise. And it will be an enormously happy 36 hours. I can't wait.