Bed rest and Beyond

I am still holding on to this little one!! It’s almost a miracle that I’ve made it this far, or it certainly feels that way anyway. To me.

I am starting to feel like everyone else around me has reached the point of “Have the fucking baby already! Or at least stop talking about it!” And frankly, it’s not helping my mood that I feel this way…

It’s become time for me to accept that I am depressed. I hate it, because I am so happy to be pregnant. I really and truly am! But with everything that has happened since almost 10 weeks ago, I am defeated, broken and just completely exhausted.

Last night, I ended up at the hospital again after dinner. I was putting kiddo to bed for the first time in weeks, and ended up with some really strong contractions that took my breath away, and left me clutching the railing of her bed. Anthony drove me up to the hospital while a neighbor hung out in our house listening out for Alena. The monitor strip showed really strong contractions. The doctor did a fetal fibronectin and then sent me home.

All night I had strong contractions. I’ve had two in the last half hour. One would think I would be back at the hospital with a positive fetal fibronectin… but it’s negative. Again.

So, why am I feeling all down on myself and broken?? Maybe because I can’t trust my own body. Maybe because I don’t know what is going on and the people who constantly assure me that they’re the best ones in the world to deliver my baby, can’t tell me what is happening and treat me like a crazy person. Maybe because my own husband wouldn’t even wait for thirty extra seconds to find out if I was just going to call him back home anyway.

My awesome husband who has taken on so much in the last few weeks, and to whom I will eternally be indebted… The only person who has consistently been able to care for Alena, himself and me while I’ve been rendered utterly useless…

…

Yeah… it’s going to be one of those days… probably a few of those days…

(Preface: The baby and I are physically okay… mentally, I’m in a rough place.)

I am currently 29 weeks pregnant. This past week, I had a meeting with my OB that left me feeling very upset, vulnerable and completely exposed.

I was told that I am not having contractions, or bleeding, and that I was put on bed rest so doctors would have something to tell me to do.  Which is confusing, because that hospital stay, the pad changes and the pain felt incredibly real to me… Not to mention the whole, stuck in bed for almost 6 weeks with no reason thing…

The phrases “anxiety” and “panic attack”  were thrown around a lot.

So when I was visibly upset, and then furious, I went into my own head and tried to figure out how to explain my anxiety and panic attacks to the very people using these things to treat me as though I were a child.

I have had 8 miscarriages. That’s not a small number, and the medical professionals who see that number always verify to make sure it’s the number I mean. The most recent wasn’t even a year ago. It is my only miscarriage that ended with a D&C, because nothing was happening. I wasn’t cramping, heavily bleeding or anything.

For me; cramping,  vaginal bleeding and a feeling of something being very wrong, means the end of my pregnancy. Somehow that point doesn’t come across to my doctor, my husband, or even my friends. I’ve been told to make peace with it. I’ve been told to move on. I’ve even been told (loudly and angrily) to get over myself…

Thing is, dear readers, getting over the loss of a pregnancy, isn’t something that one just “gets over, moves past or makes peace with”. I can not imagine someone telling a woman who gives birth to a stillborn child to just get over it… even a year later.

Grief is a very real thing. As is PTSD. And frankly, I believe I have a form of pregnancy and pregnancy loss related PTSD. Being 29 weeks pregnant with a baby now, isn’t 100% joyous for me. It can’t be, and I am trying very hard to be okay with that.

But I’m not.

I feel heartbroken by the fact that I can’t entirely relax. I am angry that I can’t make my point clearer to my family, friends and doctors. (Though I’ve come up with an awesome analogy that may or may not help…) I am furious that I am “not allowed” to talk about my past pregnancy history because it upsets people…

So right now, approaching the 1 year anniversary of my latest miscarriage, I find that I am uncontrollably angry for no reason. I am upset and tender and miserable all at the same time. I want someone to hold me and let me sob, but at the same time, I want to be left completely alone.

I am not okay, and I know this, but I also know that treating a woman who has suffered this much loss like she is diseased, dirty or a case to be pawned off onto drugs or therapy isn’t the answer either.

Someone needs to come up with a much better way of helping those of us who have suffered these kinds of loss. Because 1 miscarriage or 50, we are hurting, and we’re not okay.

I am still pregnant, now 29 weeks, and the baby is looking amazing! My OB and I butted heads pretty severely on Thursday, and it was sort of a bad day for us.  I hate crying in public, but even more so when I am unable to make my point because of it. So I ended up sobbing like a toddler, Anthony didn’t know how to make me feel better, and my doctor called me crazy. (Like I said, not a good visit.)

Today is my husband’s grandmother’s 90th birthday. Wow, right??? I do not think I have ever been to a nonagenarian’s birthday party before!!! Tonight should be exciting! I am going, because it’s in a restaurant and I can sit down most of the time.

Today is also the day a very awesome friend hired someone to come and clean my house! This woman is amazing! She’s been here for two hours so far, and I am seriously considering kidnapping her, and never letting her leave! She organized my playroom in under an hour!!! We’re currently in conversation about having her come back either once or twice a week for the forseeable future! I can’t believe how much she got done in the time she was here. It is honestly, incredibly shocking, plus, I feel better, knowing that my house is no longer a disaster zone!

And for the second birthday up there in the title… it’s mine! On Monday, I officially turn 30 years old! It’s both scary and awesome for me. I always used to say that I would never have kids in my 30s. I wanted to be done having kids by 29. So this will be an interesting experience for me. I’m not upset about it, just sometimes stunned by how much life actually changes us.

Annie, over at PhD in parenting made a phenomenal post about happiness.

These days, happiness has been a huge part of my thought processes lately. I’m in bed, my daughter needs me. My baby needs me. My husband needs me. My friends, family, pets, neighbors and it sometimes feels like everyone else around me needs me.

So right now, I’m not overwhelmingly happy. I’m actually pretty depressed most of the time, and I know it has a lot to do with my current situation. Being in bed and not allowed to do all of the things I need or want to do before my baby comes makes for a very frustrating pregnancy and life.

This weekend, things were going great, so I cheated on my bed rest. I went to my friend’s birthday party. I sat on his couch instead of mine, and I actually conversed with other adults for a while. Adults who love and care for my family. And you know what, in those precious few hours that I was technically breaking the rules of my bed rest, I was so incredibly happy.

It’s a lesson I learned a few years ago while trying to be everything for my daughter. I was trying to do all of the therapy I was waiting for her to qualify for. I was her mom, her therapists, her dad, her grandparents and her entire extended family.  It really shouldn’t surprise anyone when I say that I burned out entirely.  Badly. I ended up having Alena sent to a respite home for two weeks because I just couldn’t function anymore.

When she came home, I was so overjoyed to see her, and she was completely ambivalent towards me. It very nearly broke me all over again.

Shortly after this, I started antidepressants. It was a hard thing for me to admit to, but I really did need the help they provided. But they made it easier to get through day to day life.

I take the moments I can of being happy. My wedding day? TOTALLY blissful! The day we saw the baby’s heartbeat on the ultrasound? Amazing!! Feeling the baby kick all the time? Mini-moments of awesomeness.

So here’s the question: Does being blissfully happy for two hours while visiting friends make up for a solid month of being lonely and miserable? Do the seconds of bliss when I feel the babe wiggle or hiccup or kick make up for the terror of the contractions or the bleeding? How about the days my daughter shows amazingly huge progress in reading or social skills or when she tells me she loves me spontaneously override the times that she spends hours screaming uncontrollably or destroying books, toys and electronics?

OF COURSE THEY DON’T!!! However, to me, they’re even more amazing because of the things I went through to get those moments of happiness. I have a theory that because we have hard times, the good times are a million times more amazing.

So my moments of happiness are even more precious to me.

But I also think that no one is capable of being 100% happy at all times. It would get old. All of the heartbreak and hell we go through, even just the normal, boring days of sitting on the couch watching your belly grow, make those happy moments all the more amazing.

My new plan is to stop trying to be happy all the time, and just try to be the best person I can be and to teach my kids how to cope with every day things. Because in the end, isn’t that what life is truly about?

Today Alena and I were playing around on the couch. She was pretending to be a dinosaur or a tiger or a dinotiger, I’m not sure which… and kept pretend biting my face. She would open her mouth really wide and then take fake chomps out of my forehead while I killed myself laughing.

Until I stopped laughing.

One of her rear molars has almost entirely eroded away. I called our dentist, and he’s going to see her Tuesday, but it reminded me just how different my kiddo really is sometimes.

See, she doesn’t react to pain the same way other kids do. It’s almost like she doesn’t notice it. Seriously. This is the kid who broke her arm and didn’t cry. She continued to insist we go to the park. This is the kid who has to be given pain medication on a schedule because she’ll never ask for it or show signs of hurting.

So her tooth could have been hurting her for months, and I will never have known, but it still makes me feel like a giant ass-hat.

This dentist here in town was WAY nicer than the last dentist I took Alena to, who told me that her oral care doesn’t matter and she wouldn’t even notice if she had no teeth anyway. This was shortly after a major dental surgery to fix broken teeth thanks to a seizure with a rock in her mouth… (I’m really plugging myself as a great mom here, aren’t I???)  Since then, I haven’t been able to find her a dentist that will take a special needs child who is non-verbal and unco-operative. So we’ve been waiting for another dental appointment at Sick Kids.

I guess I’m feeling guilty as sin, because I am usually the one who brushes her teeth, and lately, Anthony has been doing it because I can’t get up the stairs to do it for her. I am very much NOT blaming him, I just wonder how in the hell neither of us saw this, or if her tooth broke in the last 48 hours.

I hate mommy guilt. It is so ingrained in us to feel bad for the things that happen to our kids, and it really really sucks. I can’t control this. I can’t stop it. I also can’t make things go faster appointment wise. But I feel more guilty about it than ever.

How do you deal with the mommy guilt?

I am still pregnant, and still hanging out on the couch.

I was sent home from the hospital, and am basically just waiting  for labor to start. While I wait, I’m trying to prepare myself for having a teeny baby.

Right now, the baby weighs about 2lbs 6oz or so.  The ultrasound on Friday showed the baby’s weight at 2lbs 3oz. I’m trying to think positively about the baby’s weight and prognosis.

Though it is getting harder and harder to give up my birth plan and what I was expecting. I know that I need to be flexible, but it’s difficult.

Yesterday, I was busier than I had been in a long while. I had to get the infusion sets for my insulin pump, which meant a half hour drive first thing in the morning. Then, after attempting to nap before Alena came home, she and I went to the big store for a few last minute ingredients for a meal that never got made.

While in the aisles of Walmart, between women’s clothing and crafts, I had a doozy of a contraction. We needed one more thing, so I waited for it to pass, grabbed the last item and we checked out and headed home. When we arrived, I sat down on the steps for Alena to play with her new ball in the driveway for a few minutes. I figured I was safe because I was sitting.

My super awesome neighbor and her adorable son came over for a visit, which made it even more tempting to stay on the steps in the chilly afternoon for a while longer.  Then I had another contraction in my driveway.

I laughed as it passed and joked that my body obviously wanted me to go lay down again, and she agreed. After a quick goodbye, I went inside and immediately had to pee. Which where everything went wrong.

I am bleeding through my underpants and into the toilet. Sheer panic grips me. I call Anthony and tell him to come home now. I call my mom and tell her to find a way to our town, now. Then I holler across the street at my neighbor to see if she can drive us to the hospital.

She takes Alena and I to the birthing suite in amazing time and keeps me from completely melting down on the way. The nurses get me hooked up to an electronic fetal monitor really quickly and we find the baby’s heartbeat rather fast. I breathe slightly.

The  doctor came in and did a quick exam, including a fetal fibronectin test. This test tells you if there’s a chance you will go into labor in the next two weeks. Then we wait. Because test results take forever to come back. I am a fan neither of waiting or this doctor who keeps informing me everything is just fine and I shouldn’t worry.Those words are the fastest way to ensure that I am freaking out.

My husband came home on the train for 7:30, and my  super amazing neighbor takes Alena to pick him up and drop him back off at the hospital. We manage about twenty minutes of calm before our world came crashing in on us.

The doctor pulled back the curtain while I was having a bite of dinner, and said, “Your test was positive. You’re being admitted and will be having this baby in two weeks.”

I don’t remember if I actually swallowed that bite of sandwich or if I actually spit it back out… Anthony took on the look of a deer caught in the headlights.  I remember sobbing and asking what we do now, and then getting enraged when people started telling me not to worry.

The way my brain works is, by telling me not to worry, you’re telling me that you know something I don’t. I asked for survival odds of a fetus at 27 weeks gestation and they said “He’ll be fine,”. No, no, that’s not what I needed. I need you to tell me numbers and statistics and what is actually going to happen when this baby comes.

Suddenly our little curtained cubicle was really really empty. Alena was trying to crawl under someone else’s curtain, Anthony was still looking stunned, and I was sobbing and trying to wrap my head around what I’ve done wrong.

So for now, I am sitting in a hospital room, a very nice one at that, in bed, with a plethora of wires attached to me very frequently. I’m having irregular, but frequent contractions and despite all of this, they’re now talking of sending me home tomorrow afternoon, because I may not be going in to labor after all.

This odd calm I’m feeling now, the one that’s allowing me to type all of this out, was brought to you by the letter Ativan.

My daughter is having a hard time with me being stuck on the couch all the time. We’ve been trying to cope, but mostly she is just upset. Between watching the first half of Shrek over and over (she fast forwards through the second half and then watches the credits and then restarts the movie) and playing on Anthony’s computer, we mostly just bide our time until Anthony’s train gets to town.

I think the biggest problem has been Ontario’s winter. It’s currently bright and sunny outside, and she just wants to play in the mud filled yard. Sadly, I have no way to let her out and trust that she won’t try to climb into the emptied pool or roll around in a giant mud puddle. I also have no way to rest outside properly, because everything is wet or muddy.

So today I’m trying something different. I’m going to bring down her building blocks from the playroom, and we’re going to play with them on the floor beside the couch. Hopefully the endless stacking and knocking down of wooden blocks will keep us from going insane today.

In other news: I am 27 weeks pregnant today !!!

Today is Family Day, and for the first time in a long time, my daughter and husband are home on a Monday.

So, why do I feel like I want to run screaming into the night?

Is it because my husband wants to get the house clean, and I can’t do a darn thing to help him? Is it because my daughter was up and down all night and just wants to snuggle and be on top of me? Or is it because I feel so useless when the two of them are home that it reminds me just how frustrating bed rest really is?

Anthony has been completely amazing lately. If I need a drink, he’ll get it. He’s making dinner, lunch and most breakfasts on his own and normally these are things I do automatically. I love to cook, and while he’s a good cook, watching him from my perch on the couch is nothing short of torture. He is very meticulous, so something that takes me twenty minutes to throw together could very well take him an hour. This only works out when it’s the two of us. I have no idea how he’s going to handle it when Alena decides that she’s starving and needs food RIGHT NOW!!!

Alena on the other hand, just does not understand why mommy can’t come upstairs with her to play with our rainy day swing (a door frame mounted hammock) or why we can’t go out for a walk or to the “big store” (Walmart) to talk to everyone at the pharmacy. Most of my doctor’s appointments have been during the day while she’s at school, so she doesn’t get to come with me to those very often. I really don’t know how to explain this to her either. Mostly we’ve been reading stories and watching movies. This coming week, assuming my bed rest continues, I’m going to add Wii games and possibly crafts to our repertoire.

In the meantime, my feet and legs are seriously cramping up from lack of use. It’s amazing to me how much I’m NOT doing anymore, and how much it’s physically and mentally affecting me.

Mentally, I range from being mostly okay (worried and scared for my baby, but not a basket case) to sobbing like a toddler because I can’t reach the phone without getting up and I’ve already had a contraction in the last forty-five minutes. There’s also the overwhelming feeling of being alone all the time, despite my family being close by. Perhaps this is from their inability to experience just how frustrating this can be, and perhaps it’s my own frustrations being projected on everyone else.

The other major frustration for me, and most likely everyone around me, is my temper. Because I’m stuck on my couch, I have noticed that I’m really angry almost all the time. The slightest thing sets me of, and it’s harder than ever to calm myself back down. Between hormones and my new inability to do anything, I’m finding it really hard to control my emotions.

Physically, there are a lot of things going on that hadn’t been happening before bed rest started. For instance, because I’m lying down so much, I have a lot of heartburn. Sadly, sitting up to eat doesn’t lessen this, because I’m supposed to be lying down as much as possible. Tums are my new best friend.

I think the symptom that has shocked me the most are the foot and leg cramps. They’re quite intense, ranging from a small annoyance up to moderate pain. Often, nothing I do stops the ache, but I’ve found that elevating my feet helps a little.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting by. Today, I’ve already had three contractions, and am currently feeling my temper rise while watching my husband try to find an envelope he’s misplaced. I want to get up and help him look to end his annoyance and to keep me from going insane while he walks back and forth between the same two locations, but I know I really shouldn’t. So I’ll silently fume and  hope that I don’t implode before May 24th (my official due date).

It’s been a long while since I’ve considered seriously writing a blog. However, circumstances have left me with a lot of time on my hands, and a lot to say, so I’ve decided that it wouldn’t hurt!!

Right now, I am 26 weeks pregnant with my second child. I am also currently working on my second week of bed rest. Hence the extra time. I’ve been having contractions and cramping off and on since the end of my 24th week. The bed rest has been the only thing that keeps them from coming regularly.

In my normal life, I’m the mom of an almost 9 year old daughter and the wife of a busy technical writer. We’re a fairly busy family with two dogs and two cats. Our daughter has a few special needs, which keeps us both incredibly busy and active. She’s a great kid, and despite all of the challenges she faces is very friendly, smiley and snugly.

While my husband is at work all day, I am home doing the cooking and cleaning and child care, though there are great disputes about my house cleaning skills. (They’re  mostly non-existent.) I’m an on-again/off-again writer, who mostly plans out novels, but has yet to publish them. I’m also an activist, feminist, and learner of everything I can find that interests me.

But for now, for the safety of my unborn kiddo, I sit. Welcome to my life for, hopefully, the next 13 weeks. And then things will get REALLY crazy.