Monday, December 27, 2010

A better day, 6w4d

Last night I vomited so violently that my esophagus felt like a raw wound the whole night.  I was pleased to sleep a further 12 hours, not that I needed it, after having slept about 10 hours of daytime as well.  I practically slept my way through this Christmas holiday.  

Imagine my shock when I woke up feeling NORMAL.  No tiredness, no nausea, no vomiting.  How weird is that?  No rumbling stomach.  Afraid not to upset the pregnancy demons, I started out timidly, by eating two carrots for breakfast.  Carrots for some reason don't upset my stomach, and are pretty hard to regurgitate, so I eat them in industrial quantities as my main source of nutrition.  So far so good, still not sick.  I went out for a chai tea latte at Starbucks to celebrate feeling well, and I kept that one down well.  I even went for a 5 km walk on the indoor track, where I ran into my obstetrician (small town) and told him that I don't think I am pregnant anymore.  Really, I feel so NORMAL, it is hard to describe the huge contrast between the time spent as a half dead beached whale on my bed, and the full of life albeit a little pale and gaunt-faced woman that I was today.  

Too bad that I can't enjoy my brief time out of prison because I am too worried that something is going wrong.  Although now, towards the evening, the nausea is coming back in reassuring waves.  I hope it won't interfere with the Danish Butter Cookies that I had planned for my little tea party later on. 

Having finished Mad Men, I am now engrossed into a new show, called Nip/Tuck.  It is a about two plastic surgeons.  One of them is married to a woman who wanted to go to medical school, but had to give up her plans because she fell pregnant and had two children, who were now teenagers.  In the movie, she returns to school as an adult student, and of course falls pregnant again.  (If only my time in school were the miracle fertility drug that it seems to be for others, I would have had a whole litter by now).  In this pregnancy however she is diagnosed with incompetent cervix (don't know how) at 8 weeks, and is told that she needs to get a cerclage and spend the rest of her pregnancy on modified bedrest.   She tells the obstetrician that she does not think she can do it, for seven months, and he replies:  "You'd be surprised at what you can achieve if you want something badly enough".   She does not want this pregnancy badly enough though, so she goes to school to write a midterm, and miscarries.  (She gets a good grade in the midterm however).  

Aside from the obvious mistakes made with regards to the incompetent cervix (the early miscarriage at 8 weeks, and the weird diagnosis made based on nothing), the movie does remind me that lying in bed for so long is a difficult task.  It was hard enough to be bedridden for three days during the weekend, I felt like I became sick of my bed, sick of my body, sick of the computer, and nauseated even looking at my own blog page (that's just a temporary association, but I might have to change the background if it continues), it is going to be seriously hard to do it for five months (from 18 weeks on).  However, as the OB in the movie said, if you want it badly enough...and that is not even a question.  I would be bedridden for a year or two if it guaranteed me a baby.  Perhaps this past year, as full of tortures as it was, was necessary to make me amass enough desire to want this badly enough in order to be able to stay in bed for such a prolonged period of time.  In the end, despite the fact that there are other things to do with my body and time, nothing seems as important as the task of gestating carefully.  

2 comments:

  1. glad you are having a better day. but i know it's probably too hard to fully appreciate those days considering everything you have been through. i think/pray for you daily. btw, i used to love nip/tuck. but then it took a really weird turn, so i stopped watching. ♥

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  2. I certainly hope you don't have to stay bedridden for this baby! If only it were as easy to get pregnant again IRL as it is on TV.

    Wishing you health and a healthy baby.

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