Week 26: A spot stopped my heart

Next week marks the beginning of my third trimester. No wonder I’m feeling so uncomfortable…

This week baby has hijacked my appetite. When my friends and family ask me how I’ve been feeling, I tell them I’m hungry. I was joking with my mom and I said, “I’m trying really hard to be healthy but sometimes I just feel like, whatever, I’m getting huge anyways, might as well enjoy this tasty cinnamon roll!” She laughed and then said, “Well, sweetie, the thing is…if you eat like that then it’ll be harder to lose the weight once the baby comes.” …I consider myself a relatively smart person, but my common sense definitely escaped me on that one.

Seth and I started talking about our future hopes of having children before we were even married. We dreamed about names, how many we wanted, and of course, when. After a few months of trying we saw a dark pink line and a slightly fainter but very present second line. All our dreaming could finally be put into motion. However, it wasn’t long after our celebration of running around the living room screaming and crying that a startling reality set in. We thought the hard part would be trying to conceive. What if it didn’t happen for us? Now that we were pregnant we realized the hard part wasn’t over. Just like we had no control of if we could conceive a baby, we had no control of whether or not this little life survives. I could contribute by being healthy and taking care of myself, but beyond that it was totally out of our control. That’s a very sobering thought when the thing you want control of the most in your life is completely out of your hands.

A week and a half ago we had our first real scare. I went to the bathroom and found out I was spotting. I’ve heard that can be pretty normal so even though my heart stopped for a moment I quickly recovered and thought it was probably nothing. I looked up a couple creditable pregnancy websites and both said in big bold letters that if you have any spotting after 24 weeks to take it very seriously and call your doctor immediately. At that point I was 24 weeks, 4 days.  While I was waiting for the nurse at the hospital to call me back I frantically tried to get baby to move. My doctor had told me that active movement actually rocks the baby to sleep and when you lay still baby will most likely wake up. I stopped my erratic pacing and gently lay down on my side. I stayed there frozen for a few minutes, waiting, hoping, praying. Nothing. I started poking my belly trying to urge him/her to just give me something. Finally, I felt the tiniest little bubble. It was enough to calm me down a little but not enough to make all my worry go away. When the nurse called back she recommended I come in just to make sure everything was ok.

By the time we left the hospital we were incredibly relieved and undeniably grateful. We got to hear baby’s heart beating, baby had woken up and started doing cartwheels, I had gotten a cleared urine test, and we found out (the not-so-fun way) that my cervix is still closed. Those of who read my post from Week 21 know exactly what was going through my mind when the nurse said she needed to check my cervix. I blankly stared at her for a moment while the reality set in. Then I said, “ohhh..that doesn’t sound very fun..” She paused and then replied, “You know, unfortunately, there really isn’t a way to make this enjoyable. You just…have to breathe.” So breathe is what I did. And squeezed Seth’s hand so hard I’m pretty sure he lost circulation to his fingers.

One of my friends told me the worry about the safety of your children is always something you have to work through. It’s not over once you finally give birth and see your child breathing for the first time. So I guess Seth and I have embarked on a life-long journey of learning to put our trust in God, especially with the things we hold most dear. I say that like it’s easy, but it’s really not. One of my best friends lost a baby about a month before her due date. The pain and sorrow I felt for her was intense. I remember praying and actually yelling at God. It made no sense to me. Time has passed and I know my friend and her family are still learning how to cope with their loss. Last Christmas marked the one-year anniversary. They sent out a card that said, “A year ago our son joined His Creator in Heaven, his joy far outweighs our loss.” Wow. Trusting God with the things we hold most dear can be extremely challenging when we look at it from our Earthly perspective. But a lot of the time, we don’t know how to look at it any other way because this is all we know. My friends have continued to trust God through the worst of circumstances, and that’s pretty powerful.

Mommies and Pregnant ladies: Did you ever have to go to the hospital because something was wrong? Were you as freaked out as I was?

Blessings,

Shantastic

Week 23: My belly is a bounce house

I can’t put my socks on while standing up anymore. And I think I may have found a stretch mark. I’m praying it’s just my imagination. This morning I was feeling baby move stronger than I ever have. At one point I thought I saw my shirt twitch and couldn’t believe it! I lifted up my shirt to look and my belly started bouncing! It looked so cool!

 A couple days ago Seth and I were watching a video of our favorite comedian, Jim Gaffigan. He earned our number one spot because he does a 15-minute bit on the awesomeness of bacon. He was talking about how he and his wife just had their fourth baby. He described with amazement all the crazy cool things a woman’s body can do. He basically said, women can grow a baby inside their body, delivery that baby with their body, and then miraculously feed that baby, with their body! Then he said when you think about what man’s contribution to life is, it’s really sort of embarrassing. 

Although the physical contribution of the sexes is unfortunately a bit more significant for the woman, I was shown this week what some of men’s different roles can be when their wife is in the “growing the baby with their body” stage. This week Seth has made a late night dessert run and painted the baby’s room. He even earned extra points with me for agreeing to paint one of the walls Kelly green. Sure, the guy can be the one who does projects around the house, runs out and gets you whatever your little taste buds desire, and tells you how beautiful you look even though you feel like a blob. Seth has done all these things, but this week he reminded me of how crucial our husbands are in the baby-making journey.

 I woke up on Friday morning with some minor pain in my lower abdomen. It sort of felt like the annoying pain you get when you have accidentally “held it’ for too long. I thought nothing of it but as the day went on the pain kept growing stronger. One of my greatest weaknesses is freaking myself out over situations that haven’t even happened yet. It could be a potential illness, the future, finances, etc. and I could sit there and worry for hours over nothing. I’ve really been working on it the last few years but I definitely backslid during our first few weeks of pregnancy. I Googled terms like, “ectopic pregnancy” and “signs of miscarriage” if I felt any sort of pain or cramp. I was giving myself different Google diagnoses everyday! Things had gotten out of control because I was trying to take control. I had to stop letting Google diagnose me. So, when I was feeling this ever-increasing pain in my abdomen I told myself to be calm and stop getting all worked up over nothing. Unfortunately I didn’t pray about it in that moment, I just tried to brush it off. Thankfully God used my body to talk to me since I wasn’t talking to Him. At around noon I was sitting on the floor and when I reached for something I felt a shooting pain go through my pelvis. I froze and realized that I had been in a fair amount of pain for a few hours but had been just trying my best to ignore it. I wrote Seth a text in a “just so you know this was kind of weird and I thought I’d tell you” sort of way to tell him what I was experiencing. I don’t think he’s ever responded to one of my texts sooner. He called me immediately and when I said hello he said, “Call the doctor.” I laughed him off and tried to say it was probably nothing. He was so insistent and said, “When it comes to you and the baby we don’t mess around. Just call.” Seth and I never tell eachother what to do. If on occasion it does happen, we know that the other person is strongly insisting on being taken seriously. I reluctantly agreed, called the doctor, and got an appointment for later that afternoon. After our appointment Seth could have given me a huge dose of, “I told you so.” But thankfully he didn’t. The pain I was experiencing was from a bladder infection, which my doctor told me if left untreated, can lead to premature labor. WHOA! I got the antibiotics and started feeling relief a few days later.

 Married ladies out there, I hope you have husbands who can fulfill the stereotypical male pregnancy-related duties, but even more than that, my hope for you is that he is a man who cherishes you and will take care of you when you aren’t taking care of yourself. By trying to ignore what my body was telling me I wasn’t taking care of myself, or our baby.

Blessings,
Shantastic :)