Diary of a Preggo: Weird Symptom Day

Weird Symptom #1: Feeling like everyone wants to murder the hell out of me.

(Because sometimes pregnancy symptoms are so strange, they need further explanation.)

Okay. So I choose to believe this symptom is not just a side effect of my crazy self, but instead my elevated maternal brain that is now wired to keep my infant safe. I don’t know, but it is definitely a huge difference from my former somewhat rebellious/fearless self.

So here’s one example. When I’m in a parking lot, daytime or night, I’m pretty sure any person that comes near me or any person surreptitiously sitting in a running car -- male, female, teenager, whatever -- is planning on stabbing me to death and/or dousing me with a bucket of acid (yes, I read too much weird Yahoo news).

I used to be scared of men in parking lots raping me, and now I’ve jazzed it up a notch because I don’t seem to be too worried about rape. Nope, I am pretty sure they all want to kill me. Don’t they dare even hold my stare too long or I’m about to start running in the other direction. Or hurt them with my pepper spray or pointed metal thing attached to my key ring … or blow the really loud whistle also attached to my keyring and embarrass myself when they were just an innocent walking person.

Then there are those scary public places with lots of people. When I’m in a movie theater, or mall, or high school, or pretty much any place where there have been mass shootings, I think one is going to happen when I’m there. I look for the exits and think of spots that I will dive for cover. I ponder the thought in my mind: If I am face-to-face with a gunman, will I tell him I’m pregnant and beg for my life, or will that make it worse and make him want to kill me more since he is obviously trying to create enough destruction to make him famous?

Yes, I’ve played out that not helpful scenario in my head more than once.

Also, if I am anywhere near a driving car – it could be like 500 meters down the road – I am pretty sure it is going to run me over, maybe even purposefully. I look at a car and hesitate like a million times before I cross a road or busy traffic area. They probably just think I’m nuts since I’m not visibly pregnant. But regardless, I am pretty sure everyone on the road is a drunk and/or reckless driver who wants to kill me.

One time, very early in pregnancy, I almost had a major anxiety breakdown because a speeding driver ran through a red light two cars in front of me and my husband (a few more seconds and it would have barreled into us!!), and then it ran into a light pole and careened into a building. The light pole fell, and a sparking fire fountain like the fourth of July replaced it. Now, I was a little shook up but doing okay because it wasn’t very close to me. All we had to do was proceed through the intersection and keep going, since it was to the right of us and a little down the road.

No problem, right? That is what any normal person would do – get away from the accident.

 NO.

All of the sudden my hubby, against my very stringent and pleading advice, decided he was going to TURN RIGHT and DRIVE in the DIRECTION of the ACCIDENT and FIRE, because “someone might need help.”

Well good Lord I needed help after that. I thought HE was trying to kill me. I freaked out on him so hard, I was shaking and screaming at him to turn around until he finally pulled into a parking lot across the street and got out of the car to walk over to the accident. 

No, thank you very much, I did not feel like hanging out near a car that might explode. Nor did I think it was a good idea in my nauseous state to see some mangled bloody body crawling out of a car.

“Now is NOT the time to be a hero!” I told him. “Someone else will help them! Do not drive towards accidents and fire with your pregnant wife in the car!”

Now, maybe I was being selfish, I don’t know. Hormones don’t always make for sane behavior.

 But I do know I felt like I was going to puke and cry for the next two hours and it was on Thanksgiving and that was not fun.

Funny note, later on the news it said that the driver of that vehicle was pregnant, transporting a man with an urgent medical situation to the hospital. (Miraculously, they were okay.)

Who does that, anyway? Not this pregnant lady. Too dangerous. You better call an ambulance with your injured self!

Diary of a Preggo: A snapshot of daily life

December 19, 2012 (7 weeks, 4 days)

I jotted down these notes in my paper journal in December, so I thought it would be funny to share them here as a snippet of an “average day” of my first trimester. Enjoy J

•  Woke up @ 5:50 a.m. for no reason.
• Refused to get up that early and instead watched hubby get ready and leave for gym.
•  Attempted to fall back asleep for another 20 minutes.
• Failed.
• Got up feeling queasy and hungry at the same time so immediately downed a glass of milk with carnation instant breakfast powder and a hostess donut stick (damn hubby for buying those things!)
•   Got back in bed and fell into a weird half-asleep state for another half hour.
•   Got up and put dirty hair in a ponytail to run to campus and get in line for some football team signature tickets hubby wanted. Drank decaf coffee in the cold pretending it was caffeinated.
•   Got tickets @ approx 8:15 a.m.
•   Hungry again so went through McDonald’s drive through to get an egg McMuffin.
• Went back home and ate it with orange juice.
•  Took a hot shower because I was so incredibly cold.
•  The hot shower made me incredibly tired and so I got back in bed with wet hair and a robe on and fell back into a fitful sleep for approximately another half hour.
•  Woke up. Gave in and slammed a cup of Earl Gray tea because I needed some sort of caffeine just to get moving.
•  Got ready for work.
• Worked in a fog-like state from 10:30-7:45.
•  Ready for a nap @ 4p.m. Stared listlessly at internet instead.
•   Went home exhausted and went to bed at 9:30 p.m.

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!