Flotsam

Just to clarify, in case there was any confusion, I do not mind being huge. In fact, I am fond of my rapidly burgeoning belly, and it reassures me that the babies are indeed growing, despite my still sub-optimal weight gain (12 pounds). I am even beginning to like my new bellybutton, suspicious of it as I was when it first emerged a week or so ago looking vaguely obscene, like a small protuberant creature you might find if you turned over a mossy rock in a damp part of the forest. Not that I spend a great deal of time in forests, you understand, but I would imagine there are all kinds of pale, soft things there under stones and such. Or maybe I should stick to what I know and say instead that it reminds me somehow of the tip of a penis. Anyway, it is growing on me, my bellybutton, and when I am brave enough to pet it I am always surprised by how soft it is.
Pleased as I am with my belly, I could do without my breasts at the moment. They are vast, sporting sexxxy new stretch marks, and so leaky that I am going to have to start wearing a bra to bed, which sounds about as appealing as sleeping in a girdle. Before I can start sleeping in a bra, however, I will have to buy a new one—I moved up a bra size around nine weeks but haven’t bought new bras since, despite the fact that mine are currently functioning more as pasties than anything else due to their laughably insufficient capacity. Frankly, I am scared to go up to the next size, because I am not even strictly certain what that size would be (what comes after DD? E? DDD?) and I don’t know whether I should buy some sort of special maternity bra (I have heard vague mentionings of underwire being bad if you want to breastfeed, and am clinging to this notion as it sounds so damned comfortable), and also it would be nice to find a bra with thicker straps than those I have currently, and if I am going to wear it to sleep it can’t be too strangly, as tight bras tend to give me heartburn, and there is a whole subcategory of bras that doesn’t fit me, the kind with a sort of sock of extra fabric in the cup, because my breasts are round rather than long, if you know what I mean, and I think I should just stop this part of the post right now. The point is, please feel free to share your bra recommendations in the comments. And…moving on.

I spent another fun-filled evening in Labor & Delivery last night, and did not care for my nurse this time, not one bit. During the day I had noticed that the tight seize-y feeling I get on workday afternoons when rising from a sitting position was accompanied by general pelvic cramping and a lower backache, eventually progressing to the point that I was in a considerable amount of pain. At 2:00 in the afternoon I left work and settled on my couch, calling my peri’s office to see what they thought of all this. They told me to drink eleventy ounces of water and recline on my left side for an hour and asked that I call them back after that with a status report. I did, and based on the fact that I was still having what felt like menstrual cramps and a backache they asked that I pop over to L&D to be checked out.
First of all, the nurse could find neither of the babies’ heartbeats with the doppler, even after I told her where they were likely to be found (A in the bathhouse down and on my right; B smoking behind the A&P higher up left of my belly button). I can usually find their heartbeats with a doppler in a mere quiver of a lamb’s tail, so this concerned me. Eventually they brought in a doctor with an ultrasound machine, and I tried not to hyperventilate in a way that would disrupt the exam. When Baby A flashed onto the screen, seemingly still, I squeaked out a query about whether there was a heartbeat, but before the doctor could reply Baby A moved his hand and all was well. Baby B, as usual, proved more difficult to find, but eventually we came upon a pair of feet attached to very bony legs, and after mashing the transducer about managed to see the rest of the body, which was jumping around in a way that inspired the doctor to issue the comment that Baby B gets in variation from every doctor at every ultrasound: “That one’s going to be trouble.”
After the ultrasound I was hooked up to the monitors, which showed nothing except a bit of irritability that the nurse dismissed as Insignificant and Possibly Caused By Breathing, which was a new one to me, and then she went on to say that if I were having cramps the monitor would be showing them, which is all very well and good but led to a strange gaslight sort of moment where I suddenly felt ashamed and as if I had been making the whole thing up, even as I lay there cramping away. I said something jokingly about how I really was feeling something, which caused her to smile insincerely and tell me it was Probably My Bowels, which for some reason made me want to kick her. I am funny like that this trimester—look at me the wrong way and I will start crying or slap you with my glove, depending on the hour.
Next she wanted to manually check my cervix, and I asked whether one could tell the length that way, and she reminded me again in a suppressive tone that the monitors hadn’t picked up anything, and launched into a rather patronizing speech about preterm labor detection. I decided that spreading my legs was the fastest way out of a disappointing evening (and who among us hasn’t come to that conclusion at one point or another) and assumed the position.

It seems like every time I say a cervical exam is the most painful I have experienced another one comes along to trump it, so I won’t say that about this particular instance. Instead I will say that after a few minutes of VERY enthusiastic digging on the part of the nurse and the deployment of a full arsenal of yogic breathing techniques by me, my ass actually ROSE UP OFF THE BED and the nurse stopped and snapped off her gloves while I lay there, panting.
“Well?” I asked.
It turns out she never found it. “It was hard to get IN,” she said peevishly, leaving the room to report to the doctor. I put my hand between my legs and was shocked to withdraw it blood free. I shook as Scott helped me back into my underwear. FIE, FIE on you, wherever you are, hurty-fingered nurse.

Eventually Nurse Scissorhands returned and said my urine had come back clean and I could go home without a cervical check, seeing as how (everyone together now) THERE WAS NOTHING ON THE MONITOR. And so I did.

Perhaps at some point I will wrap my mind around the idea that everything could be fine—maybe the other shoe won’t drop after all. It gets a little easier to believe with every week that passes, but I’m not quite there yet. The babies have first names, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to use them. They can have them if they behave and make it to viability, I tell them, but I find myself calling them by their names in my head. Never aloud, though.

Well! It has been an eventful few days. “Eventful,” you will understand, being a euphemism for “Godawful.” Let’s begin!

Monday morning I got a phone call from my peri’s office. While my urine culture came back negative, my, er, vaginal culture came back positive for an infection. I was to start treatment right away, as this infection can cause cervical changes and preterm labor. Google was discomfiting, largely because the search results all seemed to say things about preterm birth, neonatal sepsis, and death! destruction! despair!

That afternoon I took my one-hour glucose tolerance test. My peri wanted me to have it earlier than the usual 24-28 weeks to see whether I needed to remain on the Metformin (I went off the Met for the day before the test). An hour after I returned home the clinic called: my level was 174 (they wanted it below 135). I was instructed to come in the next morning for the three-hour test, which must be done after fasting.

I had no sooner hung up the phone when it rang again—another call from my peri’s office, this time informing me that my hemoglobin was low and I need to start taking iron supplements. And, presumably, kiss goodbye any hope of ever again having a normal bowel movement.

At this point I considered turning the ringer off the phone simply to avoid getting more bad news.

The next morning I woke up for my three-hour test and immediately threw up. Fasting doesn’t agree with me under the best of circumstances, and these days even eating in the middle of the night doesn’t always stave off the morning retching, so I wasn’t particularly surprised. I took a Zofran and then wobbled my way to the clinic to drink the Glucola, willing it to stay down. I was sitting in a cozy little room in the back of the clinic when fire alarms started going off and a voice droned “CODE RED” over an intercom. I heard a few nurses talking and divined that this was probably a drill, so when someone came by and shut my door, not noticing the room was occupied, I stayed put and stayed quiet, listening to the other patients trooping down the halls to the exits. I’ll be damned if I was going to drag my sick, shaky, pregnant ass outside in subzero weather for a practice fire. I curled up on the couch and promised myself that if I smelled smoke or heard sirens I would exit post-haste. Eventually the beeping and flashing lights and “CODE RED” stopped and everyone tromped back through the hall. A nurse opened my door and started when she saw me there.
“We…You’re…We just had a fire drill, you know,” she said, wrinkling her forehead, “Didn’t you hear the alarms?” I was saved from answering by another nurse who bustled in to tell me they needed the room, and I would have to while away the remaining hours in the lobby.
The lobby was full of women who were much more pregnant than I, and I felt unpleasantly like an imposter. Perhaps that explains my upcoming stupidity: a few minutes after settling in—about half an hour after drinking the Glucola—I realized I was going to faint. I have fainted many times in the past, and am all too familiar with the sudden strange brightening of the lights and the sick clamminess that overtakes you. I was determined not to pass out in front of the other pregnants, so instead of staying safely in my chair with my head between my legs, I decided to walk to the nurses’ station and ask to lie down. The nurses’ station is located down a long hallway, a hallway that seemed even longer than I remembered when I started down it, one woozy step at a time.

When I reached the end, I couldn’t seem to talk properly to tell the nurse I was feeling faint, but I managed to mumble something while I held onto the wall, and then I was whisked onto a bed and everyone was flapping around cooing at me sympathetically (I love the nurses at my peri’s office) and bringing me cold washcloths, which was good because I was burning up and stripped down to a tank top. I did not move one muscle for the next half hour until my blood draw, because I was fairly certain that any movement would kill me. Instead I lay very still and tried to concentrate on not puking, as I was equally certain I would be unable to raise my head towards the emesis basin if I did. I was a pitiful sight, I tell you. And no wonder: my one hour glucose, which ought to be under 190, came back at 233. The next two hours were better, as I could feel my blood sugar gradually returning to normal, but in the end I failed the three hour test and have now been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.

Despite being on my highest dose of Zofran, I am throwing up more than I did during the first trimester, and now I will be faced with the additional challenge of cutting carbs, when carbs are among the few things I can always eat. The antibiotics I am on for the infection are not helping the nausea. And being on increased Zofran is not helping the other end of things, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). I am spending a lot of time worrying about missing work, and dragged myself into the office this morning after being up at four a.m. to vomit bile. Worst of all, my anxiety disorder, which has been remarkably well-controlled all pregnancy, seems to be resurging, probably as a result of feeling so ill, and I am finding myself weepy and overwhelmed and then ashamed of myself for being weepy and overwhelmed. I worry that feeling this way means that I am not cut out for motherhood, and my mood is fragile, to say the least. Probably I am mildly dehydrated, which can addle a girl’s brain, and hormones surely play a role. I am even wondering whether yesterday’s blood sugar antics could still be affecting me, because I am just a hot mess today, what with the crying and the panic and the persistent nausea.
I am hoping this squall will blow over soon; after all, five days ago I was on top of the world. I think just one vomit-free day would do wonders for my morale. Still, I am tired of things going wrong, and being diagnosed with an infection that can lead to preterm labor and gestational diabetes—a condition that causes delayed lung maturity and requires the babies to stay in as long as possible—in the same 24 hour period seems like a bit much, don’t you think?

Many of you were curious about how, exactly, a piece of Saltine made its way into my underpants. Life is full of little mysteries like this, things that make your head hurt if you think about them too hard: what is nothingness? Is existence a property or predicate? Do all Cartesian worldviews lead inevitably to solipsism? How did that fragment of cracker bypass the dual outcroppings of my bosom and belly? Did I maybe eat a Saltine on the toilet during one of my wee-hour ramblings? What would that say about my hygiene? Just how long has it been since I cleaned the bathroom?
I urge you not to torment yourselves with these questions, as there are some things we simply cannot know—and really, if according to Gettier knowledge requires more than true belief, can we really know anything at all? Now that my days as a philosophy major are behind me and I am no longer required to torture my wheezing synapses for school credit, I have found the most satisfactory way of dealing with a question to which there is no ready answer is to shrug and trundle off to the kitchen for a piece of shortbread. Feel free to co-opt my methodology on that one.

Tomorrow is my much anticipated perinatology appointment. I will be seventeen weeks, and they will be giving me an ultrasound anyway, so I am hoping for a peak at the sexes. Perhaps even Baby B will give up the goods, thereby making up for its uncooperative behavior at previous scans. I have heard that it is helpful to ingest something sugary prior to the ultrasound to ensure active and exhibitionist babies, so for lunch tomorrow I will have a donut or two sprinkled with crack cocaine. I don’t know why I am so wild with excitement at the idea of seeing my children’s genitalia, as we will be delighted with any sex combination and I am not planning to decorate the Other Room in a gender-specific way, but I honestly am counting the hours (just under 22 1/2, in case you were wondering). Adding to my delirium is the fact that we haven’t had a long look at the babies for over a month. Of course tempering my delirium is the fear that begins to snake through my chest in a constricty sort of way prior to an ultrasound, but that is to be expected.
I will post the news (if there is any) as soon as I get home from the appointment, so feel free to speculate in the meantime. Personally, I suspect I am having two white rats, as I have heard that the mother’s dream images of her babies are often accurate, and the one dream I have had that featured me post-birth centered around the (difficult) task of keeping twin rats calm, cared for, and in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on them (I used a broom for this last part).
Of course the real purpose of tomorrow’s appointment is to meet my new doctor, ask about work restrictions and preterm labor symptoms, and take a gander at my cervix, but I’ll be damned if I can think about anything besides tiny penises and/or labia. And the fact that, according to the Internet, the babies now look like this. Just like grown up babies, except shorter and spindlier. And apparently if you stretched them out from their customary and creatively-named “fetal position” they would be nine inches each from head to toe. Nine inches! Why, if you laid them end to end, that would be a full foot and a half of baby! They are now too big to carry in an evening bag, not that I was planning to carry them in one of my nice clutches where they could soil the lining, but still—nine inches.