We all know it takes nine months to make a baby. Okay, well it probably only takes a couple of minutes or so to MAKE a baby, but 9 months for it to develop and be ready for life outside of the womb. What you may not know, is that it "9 months" is really "38-40 weeks" which is really almost 10 months, which is a really long time to walk around with a mini-me living inside of you, stealing your food, your air, your space, your sleep, your sanity. So maybe that's why my daughter tried to cut that journey short and enter the world at only 32 weeks along. Maybe she was just being considerate, thinking of me, feeling guilty after overhearing some seriously disgruntled words come from mommy's mouth over the course of, well, her lifetime. (sorry for that, kiddo.) Maybe she was just trying to give me a break.
It had been a long 32 weeks up until that point. Just a few days after that late-summer eve when I learned I was pregnant I began experiencing that dreaded pregnancy malady, morning sickness. Which really should be called something more appropriate like "anytime sickness," or "all the time sickness" or "someone-get-me-off-of this-boat-already sickness." For me it truly was worst in the mornings. Many days I was going into work late, disheveled, miserable and probably very unproductive. The exact opposite of someone who a manager hopes to have as an employee. I tried ginger ale, preggy pops, crackers, pretzels, Tums, eating several small meal a day, all of the usual remedies, with not much relief. Then I read about taking a Vitamin B6 pill and 1/2 of a Unisom each night before bed, so I gave that a whirl. It helped some, but left me with a 'sleep hangover' that I didn't like. Eventually my doctor prescribed Zofran and let me say, it really did work! But even though he reassured me that it was completely safe, I was afraid to take it too often, so I reserved it for those days when the "I-think-I-just-puked-up-my-toenails sickness" was at it's worst.
Eventually, like most women who experience nausea, the feeling subsided and I started to feel like myself again. (albeit a rounder, more voraciously-eating version of myself.) Most pregnancy books will say this should happen around week 12-13. For me it took until around week 16, but it DID go away! Woo-hoo! Sadly it was quickly replaced with a new and more scary ailment: fainting. Most of us have probably seen an old movie from the 50's or 60's somewhere along the way where the mommy-to-be swoons, faints then is tenderly carried to the couch to rest and recuperate while some strong man or wiser, older female figure gently chastises her for over-doing it in her ever-so-delicate condition. Well, let me just say, when it actually happens to you it is much less romantic and glamorous. I was standing in the copy room at work waiting for a few copies to print when all of a sudden the world went black and fuzzy. My knees buckled under me and my arms flailed about, awkwardly trying to grab hold of something on my way to the floor. I succeeded only in knocking my head on the edge of the copier. I was out a few seconds when I began blinking back to life, seeing before me the concerned face of a fellow co-worker whom I didn't know very well, asking me if I was ok. Was I ok? I didn't know. Let's see if I could sit up. Yes, I could. Maybe I could stand. No, I couldn't. Eventually I got up on my feet, laughed the incident off and hoped it wouldn't happen again. It did. Quite a few times in fact. My doctor determined that I had extremely low blood pressure (my lowest reading was around 83 over 50, to which my doc replied it was amazing I was even able to walk around upright. lol) The cure: add more salt to my diet. Salt?? Every book I had read and every instinct I had told me that salt was the enemy of pregnant women. And here I was being instructed to add more of it to my diet. Weird. But it helped and by about week 22 I was no longer passing out (thank goodness!)
Weeks 23-32 passed somewhat uneventfully. Aside from the normal complaints that were growing along with my belly (indigestion, difficulty sleeping, etc) things were peachy. Weeks 32 to birth were a different story..and my next blog. :-)
Nanner
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