Diary of a Preggo Introduction

Diary of a Preggo Introduction: Finding out you’re pregnant and why first trimester sucks

I’m in my second trimester of pregnancy! Now that I’m feeling better, I’ll be blogging about my experience. Sorry, it’s not all pretty. But it will be honest. And hopefully funny at times.

Holy Crap.

It worked? Is there really a baby in there?

In a nutshell, those were pretty much my first thoughts when seeing the faint positive sign on the test. 

Granted, it was a happy “holy crap.” I mean, I’d been waiting for that test to finally become positive for what seemed like forever. But soon, that happy holy crap quickly turned into a holy crap, holy crap.

Let me be more specific: It doesn’t matter how long you try to have a baby or how long you’ve discussed names and dreamed of decorating nurseries, the moment you find out you are actually pregnant, the next moment involves a minor freak out.

How am I going to pay for this?
How am I going to be off work for three months?
How am I going to give my baby to daycare strangers and go back to work?
What if I have a miscarriage or genetically abnormal baby?
What if my husband decides to leave me?
What if I get fat? 

What if I’ll be a terrible mother?
Will I ever get to have any fun anymore?

And that is just a small percentage of some of the crazy things that start whirling around in your head. If you’re like me you get over these thoughts pretty quickly and move on to the acceptance and excitement phase.

If you’re like my husband, you go into instant denial and think a faint-line-is-not-really-a-line, so you’ll make sure by waiting for the blood test. But then again the way men deal with pregnancy is a whole different blog that I’m definitely not qualified to write. J (FYI, now he is very excited and even installed a “dad app” on his phone to track my pregnancy!)

Soon after your freak-out moments and subsequent mental bliss, you then hit the reality of the physical and mental issues that are the first trimester. (Picture the words “first trimester”’ spoken by a loud, deep, booming voice like that of a scary movie trailer announcer. That is because I’ve been through it and it really was like a scary movie.)

Women always talk about being sick to their stomach. That is literally the only thing I had heard about in regards to first trimester side effects. But in reality there is so much more.

There is the insane tiredness that is not just sleepy tiredness, but also a constant fatigue that makes you want to become one with the couch all day long and makes any small task seem incredibly stressful and insurmountable. For me, it truly felt like a mental and physical depression.

Forget motivation of any sort, forget things that used to be easy like cleaning or painting your toenails or putting on eyeliner. Nope. Too hard, don’t care. Exercise? Psshht. Walking up a flight of stairs? Didn’t matter that I’ve ran triathlons, I was out of breath at the top.

There is the incredibly embarrassing acne that you can do “nothing” for, according to my doctor.  

There is being ridiculously cold all the time.

The insane boob pain. Seriously...I could not even accidentally rub against the armchair of the couch. Searing pain.

The bloating. The dry mouth. The constant dizziness and lightheadedness and, if you get it bad like I did, the possibility of blacking out and fainting in public.

Waking up at 4 a.m. for no reason with a painful kind of hunger/nauseous feeling in your stomach – two feelings that really don’t go together. 

The crazy cramps and other painful twinges that you get as your uterus grows. The smells that make you want to puke on everyone for daring to bring that nasty smell near you (fish, body odor, cleaning fluids, etc.).

Don’t forget about the lower back pain that hurt so bad it prevented me from bending over to pick something off the floor or grab something from the bottom of the fridge.

Oh and the jackpot - the greasy hair that hit me in month two that regular shampoo would not wash out no matter what I did. (the answer – Dawn dishsoap. Thank God for pregnancy advice forums).

 Last but definitely not least, you get these fabulous pregnancy hormones that make you feel incredibly sensitive and vulnerable so you cry for no reason.

Add to all of that the fact that even though all of these things are on your mind constantly, you can talk to NO ONE about what you are going through because you aren’t telling people until the second trimester (if you’re like me and have miscarried before), and that makes you become seriously anti-social.

 Also if you get sick (like of course I did) you cannot take medicine for any colds, sleeplessness, or aches and pains. Plus you have no obvious baby bump so you get sympathy from no one and everyone at work probably thinks you are a forgetful lazy slob who stopped putting eyeliner on.

And then you have those women who tell you how perfectly fine they were in their pregnancies. No, no, they were never sick to their stomach, and they ran five miles a day up until nine months …. acne? Haha, they laugh, of course not. Oh, and they only gained 12 pounds even though the recommended amount is 30-35 pounds.

Trust me, these women will make you want to punch them.

I absolutely love it when someone says to me, “I was sick my ENTIRE pregnancy,” because it makes me feel more normal. I've had people tell me they missed tons of work in their first trimester, and that makes me feel better too. I may have been late a few times, but I never called in sick purely because of pregnancy symptoms.

Now, my disclaimer here is that pregnancy is different for everyone. So apparently some women really are fine in their first trimester. But a lot of women aren’t. So this is my story. And it can be summed up in one sentence: I was not myself.

Now that I’m in the second trimester and am feeling better every day, I still look back and think I have no idea who that person was. It was like I was just in survival mode, walking around in a fog. I kept saying I hoped I had twins because we are only having two and I did not want to be pregnant ever again. Thankfully, I discovered ginger pills which took away a large majority of the nausea early on.

Some things haven’t gone away though. 

The wild hormones, for example, pop up randomly here and there in the form of a short temper or grumpiness or this weird laugh-cry thing I do when something is funny (but not that funny to warrant crying). But it’s not constant. Sometimes I have good, happy, energetic days -- more like my old self.

The tiredness still plagues me. If I’m busy or running all day or if it’s past 7 p.m., I can fall asleep like nothing. In fact it’s tough to do anything after 7-8 p.m. because all I do is yawn and think about being in bed. Sometimes I take a mid-day nap on a weekend if I can’t fight it anymore. (I was not a napper pre-pregnancy). 

However, the horribly lack of energy, motivation, and constant fatigue has dissipated. So has the majority of the acne J

And that is my sob story. Apparently my hair and nails are about to get amazing, and the second trimester is about to be the “best part of my pregnancy.”

Let’s hope those stories are true!