Archive for the ‘The Pregnancy’ Category

You guys, we have reached a critical mass. I have not slept through an entire night (and I’m not talking about getting up to pee, because that has been a constant since literally the day after I got a positive pregnancy test) in close to a month. The first one of you who tells me that this is preparing me for motherhood is forever banned from commenting, because dude, THAT IS NOT HELPFUL.

It started out kind of slowly. I would wake up with aching hips, which have been a problem for a few months now and would struggle to go back to sleep. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, especially on a weekend, I could just turn on a tv show and let them kind of calm down. But on weeknights it was always frustrating because I knew how hard the morning would be. But at least the hours I was awake were pretty tolerable.

Not so much anymore.

Lately I’m up for hours with heartburn, or heartburn and nausea, or heartburn, nausea and hip pain. Last night I had the worst stomachache I’ve had in a long time and had to spend a solid 10 minutes making sure the stomach cramps weren’t from my uterus (they weren’t). It was 2 hours before I got back to sleep and considering I had only gotten 5 hours of broken sleep the night before, I really really needed the rest.

I am completely prepared for the idea of being up all night with a baby. I am not prepared to be up all night with a stomachache every night for weeks. When still working. And still pregnant. With an angry uterus. I do not need any extra stress in my life.

I really don’t want to resort to sleeping on the chaise couch thing that is kind of upright (to reduce the acid reflux) that we have in the nursery because a) I actually really like sleeping beside my husband (most nights) and b) I think the cats will not know what to do with themselves. Although, on the upside, the cats might not know who to pester at 4:30 am for food, and that might mean more sleep then, so I may revisit this. But it’s looking like a move to sleeping there is in my near future. Either that or giving up sleeping altogether, which isn’t much of a sacrifice at this point.

Work is getting to be hard and realizing that I still have 9 weeks to go is even tougher. I struggle to imagine I’m going to make it through the full 16 weeks at this point, if not physically than mentally, because of the way I already feel now. I want to make it, because the last thing I want is to not graduate on time and have to return to a non-paid clinical after the baby is born and delay my board exam, but obviously the most important thing is my health and the health of my baby.

I knew that the glorious second trimester was going to have to come to an end, I just didn’t realize that the end would be a screeching halt into a totally less pleasant place. Insomnia, heartburn and contractions are all taking some getting used to. Though if we’re being honest, I’m trying really hard not to get used to any of them, in hopes that they’ll all just go away.

What, a girl can dream right?

(And yes, this whole blog post was one big whine session. I am not sorry. Mostly.)

Today was not my finest day.

This morning, I got ready and stumbled downstairs at 6:45 to heat up 2 small cinnamon rolls as I have done every morning for the past several weeks. Don’t judge me. Cinnamon rolls are as close to a craving as I’ve ever had and I cannot get enough of them. I’m sure the results of Tuesday’s glucose test will make that come to a screeching halt soon enough.

Anyways, I realized as I was descending the stairs that I had never covered the cinnamon rolls I baked last night. Under normal circumstances I would not be all that worried. Maybe they’d be a little stale. But no, I live with the cat who has no self control. So all the tops of the cinnamon rolls were gone. He ate THE BEST PART OF ALL MY CINNAMON ROLLS. I may have come close to shedding a tear over this.

My favorite part of this story was that my husband didn’t even notice and ate two of them for breakfast. His only comment when I pointed out what happened was that he wondered why I had only put frosting on the sides of the rolls.

From there, I got in the car and found way more traffic than I expected and as the traffic came to a sudden stop, I watched in abject terror as the car behind me continued to speed along, unaware that I was not moving. Finally he saw and slammed on his breaks. There was NO chance he would stop in time and my only saving grace was that the car in front of me moved like 10 feet, so instead of a big accident, I moved forward as much as I could and got a friendly little love tap from the guy behind me. There are 2 very tiny circular scratches on my bumper from his license plate and I’m not pursuing it. I’m going to put way bigger scratches in my car than that, and I do not want the hassle.

Then I finally got to work, where I opened my locker door and then bent over to grab the water bottle I set on the ground. And then I stood up right into the locker door. There are almost no words to describe how surprising and painful that was.

And just when I thought the ugly part of the day was complete, I ruined my Easy Mac at lunch. Well, the water machine did it. It didn’t stop dispensing water when it was supposed to and so for lunch I had macaroni and cheese soup. It was really kind of awful.

And the worst part of the day was that though I saw my life flash before my eyes (what, I’m not dramatic at all) in my car and have a huge bruised egg sized knot on my head, I realized that I was far more upset about my cinnamon rolls and Easy Mac. The universe and my cat should both know better than to mess with a pregnant woman’s food.

As I wrote last week, things around here have been really happy lately. I feel like I’m an entirely new person living such a wonderfully blessed life. And of course I’ve always had a blessed life, but it’s so much more apparent to me now. Yes, there have been some serious hormonal ups and downs in these few months, but on the whole, things have just been so good.

But there is a downside to all the good. It’s all the worry.

It’s gotten so hard for me to sit back and just enjoy the happiness because I’m constantly trying to figure out what is going to cause it to go away. Lately my obsession has been counting the days until the baby is viable. It’s 2 more days, just in case you wondered. Not that I want my child to be born anytime soon, but I am finding such an awkward comfort in knowing that doctors would work to save him if something happened now.

Every time I feel him kick I am comforted (and giddy kinds of happy), but I constantly worry that I’ll go into labor early and instead of the happy image in my mind of coming home from the hospital with my brand new baby, I envision weeks and months in the NICU with my child. And this started well before my clinical, just for the record.

I worry that something is going to happen to my family. About half of my crazy pregnancy dreams are about my husband leaving me, or someone I love dying. I had a dream last week that my dad died and I can barely even tell you how horrible it was. Just thinking about the horror of that dream nearly brings me to tears.

I am so immeasurably happy, but in the back of my head I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s been so long since I’ve not had something sucky going on in my life. I have headaches I can manage right now, I am not drowning in school. I am happy. Everything is about as wonderful as it could possibly be. Today started and seems to be ending with a perfectly healthy and active baby kicking the crap out of my insides. I literally cannot keep a smile off my face. There are moments where I feel like I could explode from sheer joy. And it’s so foreign that it scares me.

I know that some worry is normal, especially in totally uncharted territory and truly, it’s not holding me back from my happiness. It’s just there, lingering, threatening to tell me that it told me so when or if something bad happens. And I so desperately don’t want it to be right. I want to hold onto this happiness forever because I cannot imagine life without it anymore.

I have sat down several times in the past few weeks to write here, and I have hesitated and left with the screen completely blank. It’s not that I don’t have anything to tell you, it’s that I feel like it’s not interesting enough. Like writing here and telling you that things aren’t wrong, that in fact, everything is so very right, is not what people come to read.

I am happy. Indescribably happy. Possibly as happy as I have ever been in my life.

Yes, each morning I fight with nausea that can only be controlled with medication, even now at almost 22 weeks of pregnancy. Yes, I have headaches every day, some of which slow me down considerably, all of which are really unpleasant. My physical state is perhaps not perfect and it never will be, but my emotional and mental states are so entirely over-filled with happiness that the rest seems to melt away.

I feel whole, like I am in exactly the place I am meant to be in my life. I feel like my marriage is in such a wonderful place, like the family we are building is exactly as I always dreamed it would be. I have wanted to be a mother for so long, and for this dream to finally come true is overwhelming and a little surreal. I didn’t know that I would be able to have a child, I didn’t know how my body would react. And that I can sit here at nearly 22 weeks and tell you how wonderful everything is, feels like too much. Too much good.

Feeling the baby kick each night before bed has become one of my greatest joys in life. I’m growing a child, a beautiful little boy and this fact never fails to completely boggle my mind. We made this baby, And each time he kicks is a reminder of the partnership we have. We are connected, not just he and I, but my husband too. Connected in this intimate way that no one else can understand. Yes, you can feel and sometimes even see the baby kick from the outside now, but what I feel, the connection I have with my child is so much more.

I’ve come to realize that he nourishes me every bit as much as I nourish him.

I know that in four short months, my life is going to change forever. But I also know that in the past 6 months, it already has. I will never again be the person I was before August, before this baby. He has changed me, changed the course of my life in every way possible.

And for him, for the family that my husband and I are building each day, I am grateful. I am happy.

Well, in case you haven’t seen, we know the sex of this baby.

And we are absolutely thrilled.

The genetics consultation went well. We are lucky in that we have very few other major risk factors to deal with other than my medical history. Though my husband is Jewish, his family is not of Ashkenazi descent, and therefore there are a few less scary diseases to worry about. Especially since my family is pretty much exclusively not Jewish, so even if he is a carrier, I’m not.

We got our first trimester blood test results and our risks for Down Syndrome and Trisomy 18 are pretty low, one is 1:80,000 and the other was something similar. Apparently we’re not in the lowest risk category, but we’re darn close. I still have to get another blood test to finalize the overall risk, but it looks like things are good there.

The ultrasound looked at every nook, corner, bone and organ of the little dude. And he looks pretty darn good. Extremely cute, too. And boy does he ever like to move. He moved to the point that I think the ultrasound tech was just about to give in on getting any images of his heart or brain because she’d get suuuuper close, and then he’d move. Over and over. And I didn’t even eat or drink anything crazy today.

The ultrasound tech took all the images to the geneticist, who came in and said that overall, everything looks fine. Her only real concern is that his heart is small. Not necessarily that it’s smaller than it’s supposed to be per se, but that it’s so small at this point because he’s very small that they can’t see all the things they need to see. It clearly has 4 little chambers, which is pretty key, but they want us to come back next month to get a second look when he’s a little bigger.

We happily obliged. I can always get on board with extra ultrasounds. So next month we’ll get a second look at his heart and in the meantime, I’m going to refuse to be too worried about it.

At my OB appointment yesterday my doctor decided to move the due date back to 5/7/12 because she didn’t like that the maternal/fetal medicine doctors moved it up a full week after I had my last ultrasound. So it was super fun today to discover that the baby is actually measuring right where he should be if he was due on 5/4/12. So I’m officially choosing to keep the 5/5/12 date. Because Cinco de Mayo is fun and my doctor is being obstinate about the date for no reason.

And that’s pretty much the whole deal. But just because I’m feeling like a proud mom, here’s a picture. Because he’s kind of a looker. If I do say so myself.

So the first trimester of pregnancy was a time of nausea, fatigue and very few headaches. I’m not going to pretend like the first two were pleasant because that is a bold-faced lie, but the third was pretty kickass. I had about 8 solid weeks of almost no real headaches worth noting. It was beautiful.

The second trimester has been nausea free for the most part, I can now eat both beef AND chicken (mostly), and I have a pretty significant headache every damn day. The first two parts are pretty great, but the third is the opposite of kickass. It is literally kicking my ass.

Sigh. The headache honeymoon is over.

I don’t know exactly what has changed, except hormones and maybe stress, but I do know that these headaches are a real freaking drag. They are pretty much my normal headaches, but occasionally with a migrainous twist thrown in. And the worst part is that I know somedays that my migraine medication would make it go away, only I can’t take it because I love this baby too much for my own good. Literally.

I think what is making it the most difficult to manage is that I had all that time off and so my endurance, my tolerance is down. It’s like if I had a drink right now, I’d be hammered because I’ve been sober for so long. These headaches are knocking me over because I’m not used to them anymore. I was living in baseline pain land, and it is extremely pretty.

I had nearly forgotten how awful it was to be in this much pain all the time. There are some days where Tylenol helps a little (takes the pain from about an 8 to a 7.75), but the moment it wears off, the headache amps right back up. And I’m only taking the Tylenol when I’m really desperate because I don’t need rebound headaches on top of everything else.

It’s frustrating because even now when I’m not drop dead tired all the time and I can actually stay awake and do things, I don’t want to. I just want to lay down and make my head stop hurting, or lay down and wish my head would stop hurting, because that’s usually what happens.

I haven’t found anything that seems to trigger the headaches now and most of the time I haven’t found anything that relieves them either, including sleep, which really sucks.

I’m slowly starting to get worn out by the combination of my work and school hours and these headaches. Work isn’t distracting me from the pain as much as it once did, and the pain is absolutely interfering with my daily activities. I hate admitting that, but it totally is and there’s pretty much nothing I can do about it. My OB didn’t like the vitamin combination that my neurologist recommended, so I’m fresh out of options besides the periodic Tylenol.

I know I can manage this in its current state, but I am worried that it’s going to get worse and there’s going to be a limit to my tolerance soon.

I’d really just like some pain relief. Even if it’s only temporary, hell, even if it’s only for tonight.

I never really bought into that whole idea of pregnancy brain, because I mean, there shouldn’t be any physiological changes with these hormones. At least not to your brain. Every other square inch of your body changes because of them, or so I’m finding. And damn if a lot of these changes are really uncomfortable. I can’t feel the baby moving yet, but I can feel it stabbing my innards all day long.

Anyways.

And at first, I didn’t notice any changes in my mental function. And then I began to notice that I was forgetting things more often than normal, my clinical instructor picked up on it too. That may be more related to fatigue than to pregnancy itself, but either way, it’s been happening more in the past few months than every before. I started writing everything down and that has really cut down on my forgetfulness, but it still frustrates me that I even need to do that now.

But today was the clearest indication that my brain is not working at full capacity.

I was about seven seconds from signing off on a new patient evaluation form (which cannot be edited afterwards) when something caught my eye. Something that should not appear in any patient documentation ever.

You see, the letter f is by far the most important letter in the word shift. And if you leave it out, the sentence “the patient has difficulty completing a full shift at work because of pain” takes on a whole new meaning.

I think my kid already has an awesome sense of humor. Or is a really bad speller.

So today we had our 1st trimester screen, which is going to be ironic later, I promise.

We arrived 30 minutes early to check in, as requested, signed 3 papers and then were told to wait. So basically the 30 minutes early was kind of a crock of crap. Whatever, we were there to see this baby and they could make me sit in the waiting room for however long they wanted, I would’ve happily done it. Though we ended up waiting about 45 minutes because it turns out that one of their ultrasound machines was broken, and most likely we would’ve been rescheduled, were we not doing this test on the very late cusp of when it could be done.

They called us back, my pants magically were pulled down, again, and goo was rubbing all over the place. They had a screen for the ultrasound tech and then a screen mounted in front of the bed, so that we could easily see what she was seeing.

And right there, was my baby. And you guys, it totally looked like a baby.

It had a head, it had a body. It had legs and arms and even fingers and toes. It had a sweet little profile. At one point we realized that the baby had positioned itself, one hand bent behind it’s head, just like I was. And then I died of cute.

The tech did a lot of prodding, freezing and measuring. I saw the numbers for the size of the nuchal fold and I just totally didn’t care. It doesn’t matter because that little figure on the screen was my baby. And his or her nuchal fold looked perfect to me.

About halfway through the baby got totally irritated and started moving and let me tell you, that was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. I mean, I could see the heartbeat so obviously I know it’s a real living creature, but the baby, it like, rolled and moved and stuff. It’s all like, real. Which sounds stupid, but since I can’t feel it, it’s kind of surreal to watch.

At the end of the scan the ultrasound tech flipped the image to 3D and gave us a few pictures of the baby. Frankly, I think it looked cuter not in 3D since it mostly looks like a gummy bear, but she also gave us a 2D shot of tiny little baby legs that make me talk in a really high pitched voice every time I look at them.

The picture I have for you is a picture of the ultrasound, it’s terrible quality and it’s more like an inkblot test. But if you squint you can tell that the baby has one arm bent behind his/her little head. And is just hanging out. On a pile of something all up in there. It looks pretty cozy.

When the tech left she told us she was going to tell the doctor the numbers and if she needed to, she’d come in and talk to us. We weren’t worried. We were a little more worried when the doctor came in. She said the numbers were fine, she just wanted to check one measurement, because by period math, I should be 12w5d, but the baby was measuring ahead. A lot ahead in baby time. She doubled checked and agreed, the baby is in fact 13w4d, which means that we totally did our first trimester screen in the second trimester, and within 2 days of the time limit. We continue to be awesome at planning.

It also means I have a new due date. 5/5/12. It looks like we’re having a different kind of Cinco de Mayo celebration this year.

I had my second OB appointment today, which was kind of a mystery to me. I knew what was going to happen at the first appointment because it was the big one, but I really had no idea what today was about. I knew it wouldn’t be another ultrasound, but I didn’t know really what else there was to do at this point.

Now, you should all probably know that I am a prude. I don’t like disrobing, I don’t usually talk about “unsavory” topics unless they’re political. So I was really hoping that today’s OB appointment was a pants on appointment.

But I’m learning that I’m going to quickly need to leave my modesty behind for this baby. Yea yea, I know, that’s no great surprise. The very first thing my doctor did today after saying hello was make me lift my shirt up, unbutton my pants and pull them WAY down so she could use the Doppler to hear the baby’s heartbeat. Obviously I did it because, hello, reassurance that everything is fine and hearing my baby? Of course. But yea, the idea of being unclothed in front of a relative stranger is taking some getting used to.

There were about 7 seconds where the doctor fished around to find the heartbeat where I was completely freaking out, but she found it and the little whoosh whoosh sounds were pretty cool. If I was a crier (I’m not), I probably would’ve cried. By I’m stone-hearted enough that I kept it together. I’m pretty bummed that my husband wasn’t there to hear it though. For those who are interested, it was 158 bpm, which has caused just about everyone to label the baby a girl.

After I got to put my pants back on, she went over my blood test results, where we established that I do not have Syphilis (yay! though not a surprise), I’m not a cystic fibrosis carrier (yay!) and my blood type is B negative. Which I knew already, but which had to be confirmed. Since we don’t know what blood type Slappy is (this is weird, right?), we have to assume the baby is a positive blood type and be really careful if I have any bleeding and when I get pregnant next time, because my body will build up antibodies to positive blood factors and that puts the baby in danger. It’s just great that my body can attack this baby for no reason. Not scary at all.

And then she asked me if I had any questions. Wherein I promptly forgot all of them. Like, her asking me if I had questions blindsided me, because I assumed that there was more we were going to do and I’d have time to think. So I asked a few little questions, asked why I periodically feel like someone is pinching my insides (ligaments stretching, or really aggressive baby with great dexterity) and that was pretty much it. Approximately 7 seconds after I walked out the door I remembered that I needed to ask for a new prescription for Zofran (no, I do not want to discuss the current morning sickness status), but I can call this week and get that done.

So now we’re waiting to schedule our genetic counseling appointment and we were able to schedule the second trimester screen, where we will also likely get to find out the gender. Unfortunately it’s not until December 12th and I might die of wanting to know by then, but at least we have a date. But if our genetics consult is earlier, we might get to have the ultrasound then, which would be awesome. We’ll see, no breath holding.

And that was pretty much it. She didn’t chastise me about my weight gain (which was only 4 pounds on my scale, but was SEVEN on hers. Bastards.) and she was pleased with how everything else is going. I have another appointment at the end of November with her and I have an ultrasound on Wednesday for the first trimester screen, which we’re not worried about, but are really just doing so we can get another ultrasound that our insurance will cover. Yes, I’m abusing the system, God knows I’ve put enough money into it.

So now we sit back, relax and let this little (lemon sized!) baby continue to grow and develop. 13 weeks down tomorrow, 27 to go.

(That title sounds a little like a zombie’s diet, no?)

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my neurologist. I made the appointment months ago when I was in the middle of a horrible headache cycle. I’m pretty thrilled to say that my head has actually been pretty good for the past month. Apparently pregnancy agrees with one part of my body.

I’m still going to the neurologist even though the headaches are better because I have a few pressing questions for her. And I decided I may as well go now and have these conversation instead of putting it off.

When I was initially diagnosed with Chiari I was told I wouldn’t be able to give birth naturally. The thing about Chiari is that you don’t want to do anything to increase the pressure in your head. And while I have never tried to push a baby out of my nethers, I understand that it takes a bit of force. And that force absolutely increases the pressure in your head. So the worry is that in pushing you’ll be basically also pushing your brain even further out of your skull. That’s not so much a bundle of joy as much as a bundle of holy crap.

My husband, (who’s a practicing neurologist right now) is of the opinion that because I’ve had the decompression surgery and I actually have chronically low intracranial pressure, that delivering a baby won’t be a problem for my brain. I tend to think that he’s probably right (whoa, did I just actually type those words?) I mostly just want the blessing of someone who has looked at several of my MRIs and can give me an objective opinion.

The second part of what I need to talk about is trickier. I have a really rough history with needles in my spine. Every time someone puts one in there, I spring a leak. A leak of spinal fluid, which is NOT something you ever want to leak. So the whole epidural thing is a a bit of a concern. I worry that getting one will result in another spinal fluid leak that will wreak further havoc on my already sagging brain. Simultaneously I worry that there is no way in hell I can give birth to a kid without one.

I have never been jazzed about the idea of them in the first place because I hate being numb so very much, but the thought of the pain is also not all that appealing.

I might also discuss with her if there’s any reason why my headaches would be better now, pressure wise. Obviously there’s a hormonal possibility, but since my headaches were never hormonally charged before it’s hard to imagine that it was driven by that in the first place. I’m wondering if the increased circulation could be a part of the solution, but I realize it could also be about 20 other factors, so hopefully she’ll have some insight.

And if nothing else, it’s another person I’m allowed to actually say, out loud, that I’m pregnant to. Despite spilling it to all of you, I haven’t gotten to say it out loud that many times yet. I know that there will come a time for telling, but it’s still fun in the meantime.

Hopefully this appointment is full of as much good news as the last one. Well okay, since there will be no baby viewing it’s unlikely, but hopefully there will still be good news anyway.

Latest Babble posts:
How an Emetophobe Handles Morning Sickness
Waiting for the Other Shoe