this week is usually one of my favorite weeks of the year. it was during this week that Lillian was born… but Lillian’s birth was crazy and scary, with a placental abruption and an emergency cesarean that resulted in a … Continue reading
pregnancy is making me OCD(er).
I sweet-talked the ultrasound tech at the hospital to “take a peek” at the baby today. just to check his position.
VERTEX!
please, baby muffin, stay that way for 11 more weeks. then come out. head first.
i’m a crazy nerd, I know. but I felt good knowing right now things are on track. so far.
plus, I got to see his sweet little face again. oh, I can’t wait to snuggle that little bundle 🙂
because no-one likes a whiner, especially over hypothetical labor and delivery problems, here is a much sun-shinier post.
how far along: 28.0 weeks.
baby is the size of: a head of cauliflower. an oblong head of cauliflower at 16 inches and 2 1/2 pounds.
total weight gain: about 11 pounds.
stretch marks: not yet. but i’m convinced they are coming. eventually. so i’m not getting too pumped about averting them thus far.
maternity clothes: most of the time. still like my t-shirts and my normal pj’s. I can still wear a good chunk of my scrubs if they have a little stretch. but wearing mostly maternity bottoms. at first I liked my maternity shorts, but have more recently disliked them… the belly pushes down on them and then they kinda wing-out at the bottom, making my butt look pretty un-desirable. my husband even said so 😦 and I HATE pulling the elastic on the pants over the belly. I roll it, no matter what.
movement: wiggle worm. most quiet in the morning, which always gets me worrying until I get a least one good whack. by bedtime, he’s constantly going. and I love it. but, there are times he stretches out and I wonder how he’ll ever fit in there for 12 more weeks. and the lightning strikes to the cervix aren’t very lovable, but oh well.
best moment of the week: jesse’s theoretical first father’s day. and passing my GTT.
worst moment: eh, they’ve all been pretty good. I love having people ask me about the baby. I actually love being pregnant 99% of the time.
miss anything: running easily. i’m down to about 1 1/2 miles of running in my loop, walking the rest. belly’s getting heavy and it’s harder to breathe. but still love to go. my goal is to keep running until at least 30 weeks.
belly button: flat, sometimes out. I was an outie as a kid, so not surprised it pops out easily.
“symptoms:” fending off heartburn with omeprazole. fending off those nasty leg cramps with magnesium. fending off constipation with Colace. fending off insomnia with Benadryl. get the picture? i’m a health care provider, meds are okay with me.
upcoming stuff: work. school. work. maternity pictures taken by my awesome friend. she did the prof ones on the blog 🙂
mood: i’d say happy, but worried. always worried.
see, much better post 🙂
2/3 done. which is relieving, and yet, kinda sad. but mostly starting to totally freak me the heck out.
it means I have 9 weeks until i’m “full term”… until it’s kosher to actually have a baby. a baby boy. despite the fact we have some of the stuff we need, the nursery isn’t even started. and I’m getting nervous about a baby, a real baby, living in our house. as our responsibility. forever. i’m not certain i’m ready. i’m not certain I will ever be truly ready.
what makes me even more nervous is the total unknown of delivering this little wiggle worm. will it be August 29th? September 11th? September 25th? … all are actual options. that I have ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL OVER. not good for this Type A over here. how about this… vaginal? cesarean? 1st degree tear? 3rd degree tear? vacuum? forceps? post-partum hemorrhage? DIC? fetal distress? pneumothorax? hypoglycemia? I can go on, and on, and on. and i’m really sorry if you’re pregnant, reading this, and hadn’t thought about this yet. but honestly it is my everyday mantra lately.
it wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t in school. and didn’t have a not so desirable boss. and felt good about delivering at the hospital i’m supposed to deliver at. I could deal with a little delivery ambiguity if there wasn’t all this other vague-ness. if I deliver early, awesome for school and clinicals, BAD for going back to work before the semester is over. if I deliver late, really really bad for getting my clinical hours in, unless I start clinicals at a million weeks pregnant. sounds miserable.
if I deliver on the west side (the side I live on and am “supposed to” deliver at), I get the benefit of only being an hour away from our house, with the doc who’s followed me for the pregnancy (unless she’s not on call, but that’s a whole other ball of worry), and probably the ability for my good friend/amazing photographer to capture the birth (from my shoulder view) on film. plus, and sorry family, but we’ll have a little time to group/regroup after the baby is here, before everyone arrives to meet him if we’re 6 hours from them. however, delivering on this side of the state also gives me worry, because they have high infection rates, and the least desirable NICU in the state (my personal opinion).
because i’ll be back frequently, even at the very end of my pregnancy, to the east side of the state, there is a real opportunity for me to go into labor while over there. benefits: a hospital I am familiar with, surrounded by nurses I know, love, and trust. and a doc that will show up for me regardless if he’s on-call, as long as he’s in town. close to our families. a very small infection rate. close to a great NICU. Bummers: my husband will have a 6 hour drive to get here, which leaves a chance he could miss the birth. no photography. a ridiculous influx of family, without warning or control, at all times.
SO, while I know that God only knows when this baby will come. and how. and with what level of health, I am descending into small vat of freak-out. please help me!
good news? no gestational diabetes. phew. but of course, anemia, so bring on the iron.
i’m a little behind this week, but it’s been pretty busy. i spent 2 solid days recovering from the flu. then drove back for class on thursday and friday, returning friday night… and worked all weekend.
tonight i walked in the house and my hubby happily states, “i’m grilling us some father’s day steaks.” i feel kinda bad he had to make his own very first father’s day supper. but, luckily the baby and i got him a gift ahead of time 🙂
I’m really excited for jesse to be a dad. he’s really excited to get the baby OUT and actually get to know the little guy. he calls the baby by his name all the time at home (it’s a secret… no mom, i’m not spilling the beans on the blog early either!)… sometimes I think jesse is more excited for the actually person this little man will be, and I’m more excited for a baby in the house. jesse is not into the whole pregnancy belly. one night i was trying to get him to be patient and feel the baby moving around – he looked me straight in the eye, kinda frowned and said, “honestly honey, the belly freaks me out. i’m excited for the baby when he’s acutally here, but this is weird.” ok, fair point. from what i can tell, jesse wants a healthy baby here and his wife’s waistline back 🙂 me too, sweetie!
oh, and i asked him if he wanted to attend the child birth class. i am 100% willing to go, even though i’m as well versed in labor and delivery as i possibly could be for my first baby. his comment: “you’ve done everything but actually shoot the bun out of the oven. as long as you’re conscious, we’ll be fine.” gotta love a staight-forward answer. (i TOTALLY support childbirth classes by the way, just don’t think i will personally benefit much from them).
and while we’re on the subject of fathers and their day, i CAN NOT wait until my dad is an official grandpa. i just want this little boy to be grandpa’s helper on the farm. he asks every time we talk how “little muffin” is doing, which is so cute. and when i was at home 2 weeks ago the look on my dad’s face when he saw how big my belly had grown was priceless. one of those moments when you know he was faced with the fact i’m a big girl now!
as for me, i keep growing. i have my glucose tolerance test tomrrow… i’m nervous, especially after tiny, little kearney got her GD diagnosis. i’m a mtn dew drinker, i drink at least one a day. selfishly, if have to give that up, i’ll cry. i will literally cry.
friday during class muffin was definately breech… i got a solid lightening strike to the cervix when he kicked – it made me jump in my chair. and i could rock his little head back and forth from under my right ribs. i started to have a pregnant lady panic attack driving home. i don’t have the mental capacity for a cesarean and grad school. and the hospital where i am supposed to deliver just got a “D” rating… mostly based in their not-so-awesome surgical care. so then i started mentally planning going back to the hopsital i worked L&D at, the one with my family, friends, and beloved Dr.K to have an scheduled cesarean. by the time i got home, i had come to terms with my new birth plan. one with a family-centered cesarean. i’m not even 28 weeks yet people. at 27 and a 1/2 weeks, i’m having a mental freak-out over a real or not-real cesarean. someone needs to slap me.
luckily tonight i’m quite sure there are feet under my ribs. in fact, i’m pretty sure i can identify the moment he flipped when i was at work today. it was a whole lotta insane flipation going on. so, God answers prayers. cesarean averted for today. 12 weeks and 2 days before our due date. i am a nerd. and, he’ll probably flip back, ’cause i’m lucky like that 🙂
and here’s the bumpdate from last week… i look so darn tired. stupid flu! but look at that BELLY. yeesh!
Gertie is a good snuggle buddy when mama’s not feeling the best. And the baby doesn’t seem to mind the purr-box laying on him.
O.M.G. you guys. I took care of a 6 year old little girl Sunday morning in the ER who had the stomach flu. I wore gloves and disinfected every surface like a Nazi. Sunday night I went to sleep at 9pm. At 10pm I woke up with terrible nausea. I haven’t been nauseous this whole pregnancy. My nausea must have been annoying the baby, because he started moving and moving and moving. Which made the nausea worse. Pretty soon I was up and puking. And then the diarrhea started. Worst night in a long time. Called in sick to work by 11pm. Didn’t get more than 15-45 minutes of sleep at a time all night. And I kept getting contractions when I’d jump up to run to the bathroom.
By morning I called my OB and my PCP in town. Went in for IV fluids and meds to stop the nausea. My PCP was worried about PTL… but I said I just needed fluids. And promised if the pain and cramps didn’t go away after the fluids and a nap, I’d go to the OB floor for monitoring. Went home, slept almost solidly until this morning. With the exception of eating a little chicken noodle soup. And texting my boss to tell him I wouldn’t be at work tomorrow. Because that makes sense, right? To not go to work if one can’t even eat toast? Especially to a boss who’s a nurse. Who also got a note from my PCP confirming my illness and excusing me from work.
(I try to not use this blog as a rant-hole. warning: rant in process). HE sends me a message back asking if I will make it to the “mandatory” in-service the next day (today) at 2 pm. I said, no, not unless I feel a million times better. I fell back asleep then. And woke up this morning to a text that said, and I quote, “So you are requesting to be absent from your shift and a mandatory meeting?” WTH? I couldn’t even reply without being snotty. So I didn’t reply at all. BUT SERIOUSLY? Like I requested to get sick? I still am not eating well. My pee still looks almost orange. I still don’t have the energy to get off the couch. And MAYBE if I wasn’t pregnant I would try to go to the meeting… BUT I’m in charge of 2 lives here, and the responsible thing is to get healthy before going 100% again. Not to mention, this is a pretty catchy little virus, does he really want everyone I work with exposed??
Needless to say, I’m really mad about it. And hopefully getting it off my chest on the blog will stop me from telling him this to his face. My husband suggested I ask him if he want to share a glass of water with me. If he wants the flu? Anyway… the moral of the story is I am NOT going to the stupid mandatory meeting. I followed the correct channels. I have an excused absence due to illness. And I’m doing what’s best for me and my baby.
Hope everyone else feels better than I do this week!
this week was pretty standard, school and work.
but something, well, fun started happening at work this week. The old people starting asking me about being pregnant.
I think I’ve looked obviously pregnant for at least the last 7 weeks. but scrubs are forgiving and hide things (both good and bad) pretty well. so, at work the only ones who would make comments about my growth were co-workers who knew what I “normally” look like. However, in the last week I’ve have a 90-year-old women who had no idea about many things going on around her look me straight in the eye and ask, “Are you PG?” haha. yes, mama. and then an old man waited until I had both hands busy opening his pills, reached up and rubbed my belly! at first I was a little shocked, but seriously, it was so dang cute. these little things haven’t stopped since. my elderly patients LOVE talking about me being pregnant. they want to know gender and due date and names. They have no filter. They’ve let me know how to be a parent and how to love a child.
In the everyday normal world this would probably get annoying. But with my patients, it makes them happy, so it makes me happy. they want to remember being young, they want to connect with that, and I guess this baby-belly reminds them. in fact, a woman I cared for this week will be almost 100 years old this September… she really, really wants me to deliver on her due date and let her know all about it. Just another thing I love about nursing.
so, this week, in honor of the sweet elderly population, I didn’t change out of my scrubs to take the picture.
OH, guess what else????? if you’d followed my previous blog about trying to get pregnant, you might remember a story of how much I struggled to tell one of my friends when I got pregnant because she was struggling with sub-fertility, too??? She’s due in December!! YAY! It’ll make going to class a lot easier again, since we will be back on some common ground, but gossiping about breastfeeding instead of semen analyses. It sucked when it felt like I had something she didn’t, and every time I saw her, I felt like I was hurting her feelings by just being there. It is such a stinky thing to be pregnant when someone else wants to be, but isn’t.
I have one more close friend who is still striving to get there. Breaks my heart, because part of me knows. I know we didn’t have to try as long as some. I know I get to feel the rolling around of our little boy everyday, and it heals some of the pain of those months when I thought I’d never be here… BUT, anytime you have to use science to get pregnant (I was on multiple medications) it loses its intimacy and spontaneity. It becomes everyone else’s business. And it sucks. SO, I’ll keep praying, and I ask you to do the same as she and her hubby continue to pursue parenthood.
-a.
the mcmuffin house 