Sick and pregnant: useless

The upside to being sick while pregnant: getting to say home and sleep! Yay!!

The downside to being sick while pregnant: having to stay home and sleep .... because you can't take any medicine. Boooo!!

Now I count myself among the lucky. I got a flu shot early in the season, which seems to be working it's magic. I haven't come down with anything monstrous thus far. I seemed to have skipped the gastric nightmare that's passed through the guts (and up the esophagi) of many colleagues (I am knocking on wood as we speak). 

But I contracted one nasty head cold last week and it just won't go away.

 

How much snot can a body produce?? Really?!

Normally, if I come down with these symptoms I'd visit the well-stocked medicine cabinet in our home. I'm not a huge pill popper or serum taker normally, but since I hate not being able to function, I swear by Motrin, Tylenol Sinus and Cold and Flu whenever I need it.

 

But, they are all off limits to a prego! Bah, I say.

 

There is no choice but to tough it out.

 

"Well, we can't really give you anything," the nurse at my doctor's office told me over the phone. "So, come in tomorrow if you still feel bad and we'll see if there's something we can do."

 

I felt like yelling "give me some drugs!!!" but decided against it.

 

Modern science is capable of creating life in a test tube and launching rockets into space, but there's nothing they can do for a sick pregnant woman. Makes no sense to me at all.

 

The worst part about being sick at seven months - aside from feeling like crap - is that I can't really revel in being stoic for a higher purpose.

My sickness confers no benefit to this baby (he or she could care less that I'm sick and is happily pummeling my insides as I write this from my tissue-strewn bed).

 

Since we both have separate blood supplies, the immunity I build to this darned cold won't get passed onto the fetus.

 

So this being sick thing is totally, utterly useless.

 

There must be someone I can talk to about that...

 

 

 

Nature - can you hear me?

Nature works in strange ways.

All at once it's very clever and quite amazing the way it can fashion an entire human being out of left over macaroni. But it's also baffling.

For instance, shouldn't it know that since my body will suffer from a chronic and dizzying lack of sleep in three months, that I should probably rack up as many shut eye hours as possible, right now??

Progressively over the last few weeks, sleep has become more and more of a fleeting commodity.

Where, since the start of this pregnancy, I would pass out on my pillow at 10 p.m. (or earlier) and wake up at 7:30 a.m. (or much later), I am now lucky if I can stay asleep until 4 in the morning.

From there, its a fidgety, half in, half out slumber or a restless awakeness for the rest of the night, where I try to convince kicky the fetus, sometimes out loud, to stop sitting on my bladder, please get off my lungs, and quit running through my mind, so I can please, please have enough stamina to function at work!

And the dreams are preposterous! 

My mind usually gets snared by some nightmare - that I've got a baby but can never remember to feed it. Or, the newborn eats so much that I can't keep up and it grows taller than me by the time it's nine months (I'm pretty short, so that may actually happen). 

Or, I've left my house, but forgotten my kid! Or, I get eaten by Jack McBrayer - the comedian who plays an NBC page on Tina Fey's 30 Rock.... but that's an entirely different story. 

Please tell me I'm not crazy?! Actually, if I am crazy, I may not want to know.

People tell me that frequent nighttime waking can be nature's way of preparing the pregnant for the many millions of sleepless nights to come. 

However, I'd prefer to get a good night's rest now and bank some energy for when I'll need it most. 

Hey nature - can't I just have that? 

You won't let me sleep on my stomach anymore. Lying on my back stops my breathing. And, if the body pillow weren't in existence I wouldn't know what to do with myself at all.

Give me this one thing? Please? Are you listening??

Something tells me my complaints are falling on deaf ears.

We did not need that information

About a year ago, my husband and I were in Philadelphia, PA visiting a few friends who live in the city and slightly beyond. One of them is a pediatrician, who was earning a PhD in public health at a prestigious US university.

Smart guy.

Out at dinner one night, over octopus at a local Chinese restaurant, four of us - the doctor, my husband, myself and one of my closest friends- got into a bit of an argument largely spurred by my ignorance of various topics.

One of them was breast self exams and how this at-home test for cancer was causing more harm than personal and public good by forcing doctors to perform expensive, invasive, anxiety-inducing testing over every tiny lump a would-be patient comes across after only a few seconds of feeling around.

My hotheaded position: all information is good, the more the better. And if excessive testing can find that tiny risk factor, or possibly save a life, then it's all for the best - even if 99 per cent of the time the testing is useless and proves nothing was wrong in the first place. 

The doctor's astute position: forget all the testing. 99 per cent of the time it only amounts to patient stress, not useful information.

Now, one year and one frightening ordeal later, I see his point.

When my husband and I walked out of our second ultrasound we were handed a report as per hospital protocol. We were expected to deliver it to my Ob/Gyn to save the administrative hassle, I believe, for the hospital. If something was wrong, a doctor would have stopped us on our way home that day to talk to us about it. Nobody did.

But while doctors weren't concerned by what the report contained, my husband and I became terribly upset by what we read.

We are two panicky parents-to-be with little understanding of medical concepts (despite being well educated and having lots of doctors in the immediate family), but that tiny piece of information, like finding a lump under my arm, was enough to make us absolutely nuts for several days.

We scoured the Internet for information. Sought countless professional opinions. Agonized over what we later found out was truly nothing. And still we worry. A lot.

We didn't need to know what was on that sheet. That information lead us down an awful, needless path.

So why was did the hospital give it to us??

Decisions decisions....

Salami has never seemed that nefarious a food to me, but according to myriad so called "pregnancy experts" it's pure evil. Aside from the fat - something about salami which I happen to enjoy - it contains all manner of "nitrites" (I feel smart when I use that word but don't know what it means). And, it could contain bad bacteria, which could do other really bad things to the fetus apparently.

But after my doctor gave me the green light to eat anything I like in moderation (key word here - doctor said that bingeing on salami sandwhiches is not prudent), I felt good about buying some nice cured genoa salami.

So I did.

And, I ate a few slices. Something seemed off, but then, everything seems a bit off lately (I still have a meat aversion, but can sometimes convince myself that salami and bolognaise sauce are not actually meat).

I didn't think much of it until that evening when waves of pain started washing across my stomach. They continued throughout the entire next day.

Normally, I wouldn't bat an eyelash at that kind of pain. But this time, I didn't quite know what to do.

Do I just ignore it like I normally would? Or freak out and call the doctor?

I chose to freak out. So my husband and I shleped ourselves to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The nurses looked at me: "you really want to spend four hours here?" one asked.

"No," I said. "Not really."

"Any blood?" another asked. 

"No," I said.

"So why you here?" the first one asked again.

"Uhm, am I a bad mother if I don't sit here all night just to find out nothing's really wrong with me? Is it going to hurt the baby if I'm sick?"

At that point, about three nurses gathered around me. "If you feel fine, you're fine," they said, practically un unison. "You can always call 911 or come back if you feel you need to."

I made an executive decision and went home. Turns out, I'm fine.   But what if I wasn't?

Something tells me I'll be faced with many such decisions (and way way harder ones) in the months.... years... to come.

Stupid meat!

Is it just me or does the entire city smell like meat?

Okay. I know. It's just me.

I have a meat aversion that I wish I could get rid of. Not only because I used to be a rabid carnivore and would like once again to delight in the wolfing down of animal flesh, but because the smell is making me crazy  (more than usual!).

This week my doctor told me to "start eating" because I need to gain more weight.

It's just hard to shovel it in when I'm forced to leave out an entire food group. Ya know?

On the upside, this same doctor told me I could eat anything I want - in moderation. Even sushi.

That's the best news I've heard all month!

Sleep? No thank you!

Total exhaustion.

As I write this entry, I worry that it will be typo-laden and ridiculous-sounding because, it seems, my brain stops working about six hours earlier in the day than it did BL - before the Lentil.

And forget 8 hours of sleep. I need around 12. That doesn't leave a heck of a lot of waking, productive hours. 

So, what to do?

I wrench myself out of bed in the morning and keep myself awake late into the evening - fatigue be damned, I say!

I keep trying that strategy and it keeps on not working.  For instance, earlier this week I took a 45 minute spinning class. No sweat in my non-pregnancy days. But this time, I was forced into a four-hour post workout nap.

So much for trying to ignore my body.

Everyone keeps saying I'll get my energy back - do I believe them?

Let me sleep on it!