UPDATE 03/03/2010: I remembered what #9 was going to be in my whingefest, and I also thought of one more good thing about pregnancy. Well, it's not good, more neutral...
Now for those of you who are squeamish and/or don't wish to know me
that well, I suggest you avoid this post. I figure I may as well ditch all previously held notions about dignity, because I'm a few short (or long) weeks off being in what may well be the worst pain of my entire life, having my horribly distorted and sore bits on display to a lady who may as well be a complete stranger, while squeezing out our first-born child. Maybe Gam too, but frankly I think he won't be able to bear to look! Ok, I think everyone who needs to leave has probably left... Fuck glamourising the birth process, I may get high on endorphins and feel all warm and fuzzy about the whole thing when it actually happens... if I'm lucky and not completely out of my mind with pain... but I can certainly face the fact that it's all pretty damn icky. I know I'm glad I can focus on the pain part and someone else will be cleaning up the mess!
Right. There's one or maybe two good things about being pregnant that I can think of. The rest pretty much sucks and is deserving of a massive whinge. Sure I don't have balls- in fact the title could even refer to how Gam might be feeling given how infrequent our sex life is these days... *cough*... but being 'cunt-punted' (Gam's words) by a surprisingly fit and muscular foetus/baby is enough to make a woman grab for her groin and sink to the ground as if she were a bloke who'd copped a blow to the 'nads. Good fun. The first time you get kicked in the bladder is an occasion to remember, too.
Still, I'll start with the good:
1. Orgasms. Never been a problem when I'm awake, but this was just a bonus: Since I got pregnant I can have an orgasm in my sleep. I'm sure there's plenty of people who can do this without being pregnant, but for me it's a pretty nifty side-effect of being pregnant, and one I'd like to hang onto, thanks very much.
2. No period. Um... Ok it's a bit of a stretch given how much other discomfort I'm in most of the time, but I frigging love not getting a period. I hate and despise the whole menstruation business, and all the paranoia, panty-liners etc needed when I know one is approaching. And spending money on 'sanitary products'. And the pain, the blood and god knows what else. The only upside to having a monthly cycle was that week or two in the middle where my libido skyrockets... I'm happy to say I've taken full advantage of not having to worry about periods by going commando almost all the time. It's not that I'm a pervert- I mean, if I am, the pants thing has nothing to do with it- but I find anything with any kind of waistband around my 'bump' to be quite uncomfortable. Although I did disgrace myself by not wearing pants under my dress on my booking in visit at the hospital... I had no idea (though I should've been prepared) that I'd be yanking up my dress so the nurse could listen to the baby's heartbeat... though that week I had a good excuse, it was only a week after we'd moved in and we hadn't unpacked our clothes and I had two pairs of undies that were both in the wash... and thank god I didn't have to see that nurse again!
Now for the neutral- I was initially going to put this under 'good' but then I remembered the SUFFERING I endured at the height of summer... and up until a week or so ago when the weather finally cooled down with. So here goes:
1. Improved circulation. I usually have the most shithouse circulatory system of anyone I know. I'm renowned for wearing ugg boots in summer. In even what most people would consider the mildest weather my fingernails will turn a fetching purple-blue and my hands may go white. I get physical pain in my feet (and hands) when they become cold, and I find that unless the area between my knees and ankles is kept warm, my feet freeze no matter how rugged up they are in ugg boots and socks. It takes a temperature of around 27 degrees Celsius for me to feel comfortable, and at 24-25 I'd be thinking about putting on a cardigan. I hate and despise air-conditioning because it's
always too cold. I unsympathetically mock Gam for breaking a sweat the second the temperature hits 25.
That's non-pregnant me.
Now that I'm pregnant, my hands and feet are permanently warm, even in weather that I previously would have considered cold. While Gam huddles under the sheet and light cotton blanket we have on the bed in this cooler weather we've been having, I've slipped out from under the covers because I'm covered in sweat. On a warm day, I feel hot and lethargic. On a hot day, I feel like I'm being boiled alive and I'll huddle in the study all day because it's the only room in the house with air-conditioning. I avoid eating during the day because not only does it involve trips to the kitchen (i.e. away from the air-conditioning), unless it's something from the fridge I don't want to eat it.
Even now that we're experiencing a spell of cooler weather, my feet are permanently bare.
I only wish that I'd been heavily pregnant over winter rather than summer, as my circulation will probably snap back to normal as soon as I give birth and I'll be in agony the minute we start getting night temperatures below 18 degrees.
Alright, now for the bad and the ugly:
1. Morning sickness. Obviously. For most people, pregnancy = morning sickness. By anyone's standards, I did not have
bad morning sickness. Instead I had this niggling all-day sickness that mercifully never quite eventuated into episodes of heaving over a toilet bowl. But as anyone knows, feeling like you're about to vomit is often worse than the vomiting itself. And when that hangs around from dawn til dusk for weeks on end, life is pretty miserable. Especially when you have an insane need to eat at the same time. Especially when that insane need to eat consists of very specific foods because the thought of absolutely anything else makes you feel even more nauseous and vomit-y than you already were. Gam still reminds me about the 8pm gelato run I made him do to Gelateria Cremona when the only thing I felt I could stomach, after feeling too sick to eat anything pretty much all day, was nice sweet-sour, fruity gelato.
The weirdest thing about morning sickness was that it wasn't just the smell or taste of particular foods that made me feel like hurling. We could not even drive past a sign bearing the word 'pizza' without vomit rising in my throat upon seeing the word. Or even
thinking it. Utterly bizarre. Pizza was the worst- it was the first food I went off and the last food I found myself able to eat again as the morning sickness faded. Most times the food aversion was more random. With the exception of gelato and juicy sour-ish fruits (i.e. not things like banana) I could not eat the same food two days in a row- if I could stomach it one day, the mere thought of it made me feel ill the next. Funnily enough I didn't have any particular aversion to fatty foods, or cravings for dry crackers and plain carbohydrates, like all the 'helpful' guides to morning sickness suggested. I actually craved meat a lot more often than usual. Funnier still that the nearest I came to vomiting was when I would drink a glass of water in the morning and without even feeling sick or nauseous the water would come straight back up my throat as my stomach reflexively rejected it. I learned to be really careful about how quickly I drank my morning glass of water, as I nearly lost it all over the floor quite a few times.
2. Tiredness. I was never the most energetic person to begin with
before I got pregnant. I functioned as a productive human being only by swallowing relatively large quantities of caffeine, mostly in the form of tea and coffee, but also sometimes in the form of those tasty little penguin mints. Problem was, once the morning sickness hit, I could no longer stomach tea or coffee and the one time Gam could take no more and encouraged me to have a mint, even that tasted foul and made me feel ill too. It wasn't just the absence of caffeine that made me so damn tired though. I can't even explain what it's like to sleep 12 hours and then need to take a 2 hour nap again after only a couple of hours.
More than anything, that level of lethargy is incredibly frustrating. I'd been seriously tired on previous occasions as a result of having low iron- that usually meant I would be semi-functional and need a nap at around 3pm, making me unproductive enough. But that first-trimester tiredness was like nothing I've ever experienced, even though my iron levels were fine (borderline low, but fine).
It improved around 14-16 weeks before getting much worse again at about 24 weeks. I'd read that it was normal to start feeling tired again in 3rd trimester, so I put down my light-headedness, racing heartbeat and need to regularly pass out in bed (or almost on the bus quite a few times) down to 'normal' 3rd trimester tiredness. Until a blood test showed that my iron levels had plummeted, along with my blood pressure (fairly normal in pregnancy). Didn't I feel dumb...
Anyway, while I'm pretty sure my iron levels have picked up (still to be confirmed), I am still insanely tired most of the time. I guess low blood pressure doesn't help much either, because I get woozy just standing up. It's hard to describe just how damn tired I am, but the brief and precious flashes of feeling normal that I get a couple of times a week are almost like being on some brilliant drug it feels so good *not* to be almost keeling over with tiredness. There have been times when I've been incredibly hungry and incredibly tired and I've opted to go to bed and sleep because I'm simply too tired to eat:
that's how tired I've been.
3. 'Lead legs' and sore feet. This was first trimester. At a time when morning sickness, sore boobs and tiredness are supposed to be the only problems, I went from being able to routinely run 5km without any real effort to barely being able to walk. The 'lead legs' came first. It was the weirdest thing. I was fit, but my legs felt physically very heavy and when Gam and I did get out for some exercise I could not manage more than a snail's pace. That said, I'm sure it was faster than I am now at 33 weeks, but it was irritating and puzzling. I knew I should be keeping fit, but even when I could muster the energy to stay out of bed long enough to exercise, I had this weird feeling in my legs that left me barely able to move. It affected Gam too, because he didn't feel able to leave me at home while I was so crook and exercise on his own, so he lost his fitness as quickly as I lost mine- and to be honest he'd had to work a lot harder at it than I had, suffered plantar fasciitis etc. I'm sure it frustrated him as much as it frustrated me.
As for sore feet- what reason did I have for sore feet? I'd already stacked on a couple of kilos, but weight couldn't have been the cause of it, as I was reasonably slim and fit, with a pre-pregnancy BMI of 19-20. Yet my feet started killing me. Just agony. I have no idea why. NFI. In fact they get less sore now that I am absolutely massive than they did in late first trimester and throughout the second.
4. Feeling the baby moving. This was more a case of subconsciously misplaced expectations than anything. It's not like I expected it to feel
good, it's just that wherever this is portrayed, it's portrayed in a really 'feelgood' manner. An opportunity for romantic bonding between the parents, or whatever. Think Hollywood. Think baby ads or magazines. Yeah right.
What it feels like is exactly what you'd expect it to feel like if you think about it objectively: A little alien creature tumbling and elbowing its way around inside your belly. Fascinating, kind of gross and nearly always a bit uncomfortable. A
lot uncomfortable if said foetus/alien creature decides to practice its footy skills on your cervix or use your bladder as a trampoline.
I started feeling 'something' around week 15 but nothing definite until week 18, when a smart blow from a tiny leg actually bumped my hand as it rested on my belly. The only thing to like about feeling him move is that I know he's ok... in fact in the odd paranoid moment I've actually made an effort to shake or poke him awake if I haven't felt anything in a while. He'll have his revenge, so I don't feel guilty!
As he's gotten bigger there are definitely fewer painful episodes because his head is down and his legs are mercifully nowhere near my cervix or bladder. But the uncomfortable episodes are still plentiful. God knows what he's doing in there, but there's not nearly enough space to be doing it.
5. You know that feeling where all your insides feel like they're about to fall out your vagina? No? I didn't either. Another thing they don't warn you about. It's fucking horrible. You read about some feeling like that happening when the baby is actually big (though they never phrase it as such- it's always benign terms such as 'feeling pressure'), but this feeling started around maybe 15-16 weeks and scared the crap out of me. Especially when my 18 week scan showed I had a short cervix with 'funnel-shaped os', both risk factors for preterm birth, and more so when they appear together. So for all I knew maybe my insides
were falling out, or about to. Even now I don't know how to describe the feeling. It's certainly painful. Thankfully I had some reprieve from around 20-something weeks until around now, and given how huge Junior is the pain seems almost justified. When he was, what, 15cm long though? Certainly not justified. What on earth was my body thinking? While that feeling was hanging around, I was damned uncomfortable from morning til night. Literally the only time I felt comfortable was lying in bed. I would have spent all day there if I could. Now even
that is painful...
6. Ow my hips. I can't remember when this started happening. Maybe around 20 weeks? It's gotten worse though, much worse. After a while, when I'd read about the same thing happening to other pregnant women, I resorted to sleeping with a pillow between my legs, as was often recommended. I have since decided it doesn't work, but I still do it from time to time when I get desperate. This too is hard to explain. The pain seems to occur where my femurs presumably meet the hip sockets. Rolling over in bed has gotten progressively more agonising (not just difficult because I weigh a tonne!), and getting out of bed first thing in the morning is excruciating. I sit there on the edge of the bed letting my hips adjust to that first movement. Then I stand up and stand still to allow them to adjust to being upright. Then I hobble to the bathroom. Sloooooowly, because I physically can't move any faster. If I've woken up with a full bladder and a Braxton Hicks contraction, I literally cannot move at first. Then when I do there is immense pain and a feeling like my legs will give out from under me. This then subsides barely enough for me to stagger to the bathroom. Hobbling back is somewhat easier as things seem to free up a little, but I move like some hybrid of an old arthritic woman, a duck and a slug first thing in the morning, before things improve to the extent where I move like an old arthritic duck. Any time I sit or lie down too long my hips seize up again, but if I stand up for any length of time my low blood pressure means I get woozy very quickly. I can't win.
Getting dressed is the worst, though. Lifting a foot off the ground even a couple of inches to step into a skirt has been painful enough on occasion to make me need to lie down until the pain has passed. A sarong, or any dress I can pull over my head, is my preferred option for attiring myself these days. Or, if I'm at home, not bothering to put clothes on at all and heading out to make coffee in the nude. Nuding up is not an option these days, with our house full of tradies while the bathroom is being renovated, needless to say.
Once, I bent down- a little too quickly- to pick something up off the floor and suddenly got a combined pain in my right hip and some nearby ligament or muscle so bad that I yelled swearwords and found myself on the floor groaning and swearing in pain, hoping like hell our neighbour hadn't heard and wasn't calling me an ambulance thinking I'd gone into labour... that was painful and terrifying enough that I've been very careful from then on. Nothing quite that bad since, but this morning I had a pain in my left hip/groin area so bad I felt the need to lie down, only to reach the lounge and find out that I couldn't lie down because it was too painful to bring my leg up onto the couch. I finally got a referral to see a physio, who I'm told will probably recommend some kind of belt to hold my hip joints together, but given it's the public system I may just wind up giving birth before actually getting to see anyone!
7. The gas. Not that nifty mix of nitrous oxide and oxygen they give you when you're in labour (that I will do my best to avoid but will probably wind up huffing myself silly on), but the kind of gas otherwise politely referred to as 'wind'. Or, less politely, 'farting;. You'd think this would be a late pregnancy thing, with a baby squashing all the internal organs, but it's apparently a hormonal thing due to the effect of progesterone on the gut lining. Whether that's true or not I don't know, but I've been a total fart-bucket since pretty much day dot. It's horrendous!
8. The paranoia. To be honest I don't think I've had it so bad, considering. Technically, my entire pregnancy has been free of complications. But at my 18 week scan there was the report of 'funnel-shaped os' and borderline short cervix. Both are risk factors for preterm birth, more so when combined, and especially more so when the shape of the 'funnel' is taken into account. So with the whole 'my insides are about to fall out of my vagina' feeling and what may or may not have been cervical pain during the ensuing weeks, I was naturally a bit edgy about things. A couple of times walking home from work was actually scary I was in so much pain. What didn't help was that the follow-up scan in third trimester showed my cervix was absolutely fine and had barely changed but there were new potential problems picked up with the SD ratio of the umbilical artery... more doctor's visits and more extraordinarily costly scans (not wholly reimbursed by Medicare, and in one case not at all when the clinic wrongly coded the scan as an 18-19 week scan- at 30 weeks- and Medicare informed me that I had already 'used up' my maximum number of 18 week scans... god knows what women with complications that require multiple scans around that time do). Finally, just after the 32 week mark and just after my supervisor suggested I go on maternity leave because I wasn't coping with things (my workload and the whole pregnancy thing...) I finally had a scan that gave me the all-clear. Scarily, the last couple of scans showed that our baby's head circumference was measuring 4 weeks ahead for dates, and slightly less ahead for the other measurements... I know I expected all along that Gam Jr would have a big head, as both Gam and I do, but having confirmation of that fact means I have to try extra hard not to get paranoid about what the hell actually giving birth to such a ginormous baby is going to be like... assuming he keeps growing at this rate, of course.
9. Heartburn. Bloody heartburn. I remembered what point 9 was going to be as soon as I went to bed after writing this post, when I felt the reflux creeping up my throat. Heartburn is something an awful lot of people suffer without being pregnant, but I've never really been troubled by it before. Well, that changed a couple of months ago when for the first time I spent a good couple of hours kept awake by that horrid burning, creeping sensation. I discovered that it's worse when the reflux doesn't wake you up as it occurs and you awake with your throat in pain from the stomach acid that's been sitting there. I discovered that it can be even worse than that when, a few days ago, I was in such bad pain after dinner that I was writhing and stretching in an effort to get more comfortable... I eventually resorted to drinking bicarb soda mixed with water- not having antacid medications of any description in the house, that was all we had. And it was
revolting. By that stage, though, I would have been happy to throw up (and I felt quite close to doing so), the pain was so bad. I certainly can't compare the mild indigestion I'd experienced on infrequent occasions before becoming pregnant to the full-blown agony of real heartburn. I have a new-found empathy for people who suffer from this regularly without an end in sight. At least I can look forward to not being pregnant in a few weeks!
