Bliss of Life

Out of the Woods and into the World

If there is a corner to turn on this crazy and wonderful ostrich ride that is pregnancy, I think the ostrich and I are turning it. All the problems I had getting and keeping food in my system last week are becoming a memory. My husband literally swooped in from Brazil, with bags of groceries and started making gobs of food for me. (He had a taxi cab take him from the airport, to the grocery store and then to our house.) I was free to lay in bed, sleeping and moaning. If I even peeped my head up, he was right there, wanting to know what he could do for me. I have never felt like such royalty! And he wasn’t the only one who helped out. My friend Liz came by with a big pot of mung beans and rice for us, so we would have something to eat just in case Ben was jet lagged and needed to sleep too. All in all, week 14 had a much more pleasant start than the previous one.

I always prefer to have my husband home with me, rather than on the road or in the air, but this time when he came home it was different. It felt like our little family was whole and safe, but there were other reasons for me to feel secure. Since the first couple weeks of my pregnancy, I’ve been taking compounded progesterone because my progesterone levels were low, too low. The doctor gave me the option of taking a synthetic progesterone that our insurance would cover or going to Peoples Pharmacy and taking compounded progesterone. I chose the compounded progesterone, because it wasn’t supposed to have the same side effects. Unfortunately, no one told my body that. The progesterone made me feel exactly like I do when my blood sugar drops, like I took an antihistamine and drank a glass of wine.

My intuition told me that my body would take a couple of weeks to get used to the progesterone, which it did. At that same time, the low blood sugar symptoms emerged with the same icky feeling. I was pretty sure that the progesterone was somehow interfering with my body’s natural insulin secretion, but I wasn’t about to stop taking it. My midwife wanted me to take it through the first 13 weeks, when most miscarriages occur, just to be certain that my body would hold the pregnancy. So with the ending of week 13, I celebrated being out of the woods. I already felt like this baby was here to stay, but it’s nice to be past the mile marker.

And just as I suspected, as soon as I stopped taking the progesterone supplements my blood sugar began to stabilize! I feel like I’ve come out of hiding. Also, my energy is coming back in spurts. I’m like one of those windup toys kids used to play with back before toys were covered in lead paint and coma-inducing plastics. I surprised the heck out of my husband when I called him from the grocery store the other day, talking a mile a minute, saying something like, “I just wanted to tell you that I feel good, really, really good. I’m picking up some almond butter and orange juice, and then I’m going to go home and eat lunch, and take the dogs for a walk, and do laundry, and finish knitting the blanket I’m working on, and I feel really good, and not the kind of good that I pretend to feel, so I won’t be so annoying to be around. This is an honest good.”

I did eat and take the dogs for a walk, but then it was nap time. I am pregnant.

Pushing Through Murky Waters

I’ve fallen behind on my blog. My intention was to make at least one entry after every week, but that isn’t the case. In my attempt to catch up, it’s tempting to just skip over week 13, because so far in my pregnancy, it was the most challenging week. But after procrastinating writing anything for a week and a half, I’ve decided to include it, because in life we don’t get to fast forward over the crunchy parts. So at the risk of sounding like a broken record, here it goes.

My blood sugar is still unstable. I’m still feeling that icky drunk sensation when my blood sugar drops too low. I still have to eat something every hour and a half to two hours. Sometimes I have to eat a lot before the shakes go away, and sometimes it doesn’t matter how much I eat, so I resort to drinking a glass of orange juice or lemonade. Until this week, I managed to get myself fed with the help of my husband. Unfortunately, Ben had to go out of town for the week. But before he left, I came down with another case of food poisoning, which I attribute to eating out so frequently. And because sometimes life just needs to keep me on my toes, I also got a sore throat, cough, and one of those fevers that feels like a fever to myself and anyone who puts a hand on my forehead, but the thermometer doesn’t agree. I wish I were exaggerating, because it’s almost too pathetic to be believable.

The thing about food poisoning is that what goes in goes out, and the thing about really low blood sugar is that you need to have a steady supply of something going in. And all this is complicated by being sick and pregnant and needing rest. Because of the food poisoning, I had to eat in very small quantities, which meant that my blood sugar was constantly low. When my blood sugar starts to drop too much, I feel desperate and then I become weepy. If I chose to rest, I would wake up feeling worse then I did when I laid down. But I needed rest. So at least once a day I would find myself in the kitchen, hungry and crying, trying to make food for myself. Throw in the fact that I’m barefoot (We don’t wear our shoes in the house.) and pregnant, and it’s almost too cliche for words. Despite my predicament, the humor of the situation was not lost on me at the time.

One thing that got me through the week was the reopening of Mother’s Cafe. It’s close to my house and so far, I have never gotten food poisoning from there. (Pause for me to cross my fingers and toes.) Even with food and orange juice, there were a few days that nothing seemed to help my blood sugar levels, so I resorted to eating an apple danish from Quack’s Bakery. That did the trick. Sugar as medicine. Who knew pregnancy would resort to this?

I kept wanting to ask friends to bring me food, so I could rest and not have to worry about my meals. But it’s hard to ask for help. Really, really hard. My husband hated not being here, but he made himself available by phone, which wasn’t the easiest thing for him to do considering he was with a client in Brazil. And I did have some support here. There were good friends who listened and offered moral support, and my friends Liz and Jeremy came by and emptied out the litter box.

So yes, the week was challenging, but I lived through it. And I’d do the whole week over again, if it meant that I get to carry this child inside me, who I love and adore so much already. But it wasn’t all white knuckles and tears.  There was this little lotus moment in the middle of my murky week when I let myself have a really good cry on the couch.  Afterwards I noticed Godiva, my little brown dog, was curled up my lap. It felt like the closest thing to a hug she could offer.  She stayed on me or next to me for the rest of that day and that night. Never in our eight year history together has Godiva slept next to me when Ben was out of town, except for that night — some friends don’t wait for you to ask for help.

Patterns

Pregnancy is bringing an awareness to all sorts of patterns in my life, like how my incredibly vivid imagination likes to superimpose my need to rest and preserve my energy onto future areas of my life. It’s as if I have a strange and undiscovered form of amnesia that allows me to forget that I haven’t always felt this way. I wish I could say that this is a completely new mental quirk, but it isn’t.

It started up a few years ago when I having some health problems that were kind hard to put your finger on. At first I gave myself lots of time to rest and heal. I was full of hope that each new treatment, doctor or regiment I tried would restore my health. Then after a year or so, I decided to get on with the business of living. But in order for me to do that, I had to be realistic about what I could take on. Extra stress put a strain on my health and would set me back. What I did was look at the way I had felt for the past week or two and use that as my guide for how much I could take on in the next month or so. It worked. I went back to school and earned an English degree and continued teaching yoga classes. My life grew, but so did a pattern.

I’ve been healthy for about a year and half, and yet, I still find myself doing this. Only now, I get a little carried away with it. The other day I was on the couch nursing a headache and eating something for the umpteenth time that day with the hope that my blood sugar would rise, when I found myself trying to figure out how in the world I would manage to actually birth this baby with plunging blood sugar, needing to eat every two hours, and feeling like I am swimming through lead. I started to worry that I wouldn’t have the strength.

The absurdity of this is not lost on me. Here I am, coming out of the first trimester, crossing my fingers and holding my breath, because I know that any minute, and I mean any minute now, I am going to start feeling a whole lot better. But there goes the negative mind, putting in its two cents. But what if you don’t? What are you going to do then? It’s like a marathon runner who takes a spill and sprains an ankle, and in that same week she insists on trying to strategically figure out how she is going to manage to make it through her next marathon, which is still months and months away. There’s no logic to it, but for awhile, that type of thinking actually did serve me.

Just to be clear, this is different than thinking this is never going to change. This is not a situation where I need to be reminded that this too shall pass. I know it will pass, if not sooner, then sometime around May 12th (my due date). What I keep having to remind myself is that this roller coaster I’m on is going to have an upswing soon — any minute now…