Drunken Baby

You’ll be happy to know that I had no residual effects from my wild night of hot toddy drinking and am feeling human again. I told you it was for MEDICINAL purposes. I am a wise, wise, woman. You can call me Doctor if you want.

I promised to tell you about the time I got my unborn baby drunk on NyQuil. And since you stuck with me through my drunken stupor and subsequent rehab I figured I owe you. Here goes:

The year was 2002, the month January. I was 10 months pregnant or 9 or however you count it when it’s the same month as you’re due, with Blade, baby #2. Pregnant math..I’ll never understand it. 40 weeks=10 months people don’t try to tell me you’re only pregnant for 9 months. I digress…back to the story. I had the worst cold in the history of my life, made worse by the fact that I couldn’t sleep because it’s next to impossible to get comfortable with an enormous baby in my womb. I’m sorry I just used the word womb on my blog, please don’t leave. Given that I had already successfully completed one pregnancy and managed to give birth to a very intelligent, beautiful little girl, I felt I was nearing expert level at this pregnancy stuff and no longer felt the need to call the doctor for every little thing. At about day 3 of misery with worst cold in the history of my life, I caved and called to ask what I could take in my delicate state. Their answer? Tylenol and only Tylenol. Tylenol works about as well for me as jelly beans but being a complacent patient I took their advice. It didn’t work…at all. After 3 days of barely any sleep and thinking I was surely going to die from this cold before I gave birth to this baby I did a little self medicating. It was about 2 in the morning (girl whatcha wanna do…that was for you A) when in a desperate move, I chugged a dose of NyQuil. I went back to bed and waited for the magic to happen. The only magic that happened was that I was wide awake, miserable as ever, and fidgety. And I remained that way for the next 6 hours, loopy, wide awake with my body begging me to lay down and go to sleep but my mind racing. Not fun. Wish I’d had a blog then, THAT would’ve been a good post. After the NyQuil buzz wore off I realized that I hadn’t felt baby move in a very long time, like 5 hours long. I laid down and tried to be really still and still nothing. In the last month of pregnancy this freaks a mother out. I called the doctor and they too were concerned and told me I needed to come in and be put on monitors to make sure baby was ok. GI Joe and I made our way to the hospital, where they checked me out and hooked me up to fetal monitors to monitor baby’s heartbeat. There was some concern as baby’s heartbeat was considerably slower than normal and he didn’t move for the nearly 2 hours that I was on monitors. Finally, he woke up and started hiccuping. The doctors were a little puzzled by this but we were all relieved that he was ok. It was then that it occurred to me that maybe the NyQuil had something to do with it. Sometimes I have selective memory. I sheepishly confessed to the doctor that I had indeed taken NyQuil after the Tylenol failed me. A look of relief crossed his face, quickly replaced by a stern look and then he said to us, “Well, that explains it then, you got your baby drunk, no wonder he woke up hiccuping. There’s a reason we tell you only Tylenol.”

Oops. Just another stop along the way to Worst Motherville.

Blade was born a few weeks later with no lasting effects of the NyQuil induced Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and believe it or not they actually let me take him home! You’ll also be happy to note that I haven’t had a drop of NyQuil since that fateful night, thought I’d give it up, you know for the sake of the kids. Now I’ve moved on to straight up brandy. It’s how I roll.

He turned out ok.