Dec
18

Next Time She Loses The Hand.

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.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |