28 Weeks Pregnant – What I’ve Been Up To

What a quiet, abandoned little blog.

Except it’s not abandoned – I swear!  And believe it or not, I’ve been writing in it semi-regularly… it’s just that I haven’t been publishing any of the words I’ve been writing. There’s a reason for that:

Dude, lately all I have left in me is whining.

On the one hand, I’m missing out on documenting what it’s like being pregnant with twins. On the other hand, maybe that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

 

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See, it takes a certain amount of energy to be able to present bad things in a funny light, and I gotta say:  energy is not something I have in abundance these days.   Aarene from over at Haiku Farm wrote a piece about her many-spooned days (if you have no idea what I’m talking about when I reference spoons, there’s a place to click inside her post).  I was reading it the other day and I realized how very, very few spoons I have nowadays.  If I’m going by Aarene’s description, I’m getting by on about 15 spoons a day.

Basically, I’ve become a giant lump on my couch… and that’s okay.  That’s what my body is telling me it needs, in order to grow two people at once to (hopefully) full term.  Over the years of living with Rheumatoid Arthritis I’ve learned to respect my body when it tells me to SLOW DOWN, so I’m doing it…

But it’s kind of depressing to do nothing but go to work, cook dinner for the boys, and sit on my couch.  Writing is one thing I can do while I permanently indent the couch cushion with the imprint of my behind, so I do write occasionally… but when I go back and read what I write, it seems like all I do is complain.

And when the twins stumble upon this blog many, many years from now, I kind of don’t want them to read post after post of me complaining about them.

 

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I mean, when they go see their therapists over how I’ve ruined their lives, I’d like it to be for something good, you know?

Anyways, now you know why I’ve been quiet.  There are quite a few blog posts in my drafts folder that I might clean up and post at some point, and quite a few more that I’ll probably just toss, but that all seems like a lot of work right now, especially since up until recently I’ve been sick.  Right after Christmas we all seemed to catch that lovely cold/flu combo that’s been going around.  Mine ran its normal course and seemed to be getting better…. but right when I was about to deem myself healthy, the virus (or whatever) returned with a vengeance and decided to take up residence in my lungs.

Let me tell you, you don’t know fun until you’ve been hacking your lungs out while pregnant with twins.  The other day (yesterday?  The day before?  I dunno, it’s all started running together) I started a coughing fit. Again.  And even though I had JUST finished going to the bathroom, and even though I was crossing my legs while coughing (trust me, it helps), I coughed so hard I peed my pants.  Again.  Even though I was wearing super-duper triple duty giant kotex to try to prevent that.

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Luckily I was at home so I just sighed, stripped down, and hopped in the shower. Besides, the steam would probably help the cough, so I could kill two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, even though I was maxed out on Robitussins and Vicks Vapor Rub (yes, I put it on the soles of my feet, too), I just couldn’t seem to quit coughing.  The good news is that the shower steam helped my cough be productive.

The bad news is that my super annoying body felt the phlegm coming up and thought, “Oh!  Oh!  I know what to do when stuff comes up your throat!” and I started puking.

Puking in the shower seems like it would be a good thing, but it’s not. Without the toilet water to prevent splash back your tub ends up looking like a deranged Jackson Pollock painting, and it takes forever to go down the drain, and it’s just gross, okay?

The icing on the cake was that between coughing fits and vomiting my nose was like, “Yeah, you’ve abused me too much for one day” and started to bleed. In case you’er curious, trying to stop a nosebleed in the shower is an exercise in futility – the warmth keeps it from clotting.

So there I was, standing in my own vomit and phlegm and pee and blood, and I thought.. “Man, not again.  What is this… the second time this week? Third?”

And at that point I did start to laugh a little bit, which I’m sure would have looked psychotic to anyone who might have wandered in at that exact point, but it just kind of struck me as funny that I wasn’t phased by it, and that my first thought was “not again”.  I mean, what if this was my super power? Some people get super strength or super invulnerability.  I just got super….fluids?

I don’t think they’ll be making a Saturday morning cartoon of me any time soon.

“No…. no… don’t put up the signal!!!…. Crap. Too late. Heeeeeeey, there, Super BioFluid Girl. We’re, uh… We’re good. We’ve got everything under control. You can go home, it’s okay.”

 

I think the cough has mostly run its course and now my body is just coughing for the sake of coughing.  It’s pretty normal during the day, but then nighttime hits and I cough.  And cough.  And cough.  AND COUGH AND COUGH AND COUGH AND COUGH.  After several days of only getting 2-3 hours of sleep, and not in a row, I broke down and begged my doctor for some meds.  For the record, I gotta tell you: Tessalon Perles are the BOMB. They’re these little tiny pills which make all the coughing go away.  I’m telling you, they’re amazing.  They make me believe in magic again.

I took some last night and crashed about 8pm.  I woke up to go pee and/or change positions in bed every two hours on the dot until just shy of 4 am… which would normally sound like a bad night’s sleep, but when 4 am rolled around I realized I felt so rested I might as well just get up for the day.  It felt amazing to get that much sleep. I know it’ll be different with twins, but I just can’t wait to actually give birth.  I’ve always found that I sleep better with a newborn than I do during those last few weeks of pregnancy.  At least if I’m awake I’m awake with a purpose, you know?

So now you know what I’ve been up to: gestating and sitting on my couch.  I haven’t seen Caspian for…. for weeks, honestly.  I’ve learned I have to go early in the day, instead of late at night. I prefer to go to the barn around 7 or 8, because then all the other boarders are gone and it can just be me and my horse… but lately, by the time 7 or 8 rolls around I’m too tired to do anything except be overwhelmed with how much I want to go to bed. I made plans to go spend an entire evening with him awhile back, but we had freak flooding that day.

The next time I decided I was going to go, regardless of how tired I felt, we had a freak wind storm.

I told The Bean I was going to go on Christmas Eve, come hell or high water….. and it snowed.  Hell or high water I could handle – icy roads and snow seemed like too much to take on without snow tires or chains.

Then I got sick, and I can’t in good conscious go and infect everyone at the barn. The barn owner’s husband is over 70 years old and susceptible to lung sicknesses, so I need to stay home until I can keep the hacking and coughing to a minimum.

The good news is that I know he’s okay – there’s a reason I’m paying more for a barn that’s further away, and that’s because I trust them to take better care of him than I can.

The bad news is… Caspian?  He’s a horse, right? I think he’s…. he’s grey-colored, right? Cross your fingers I get to see him on Saturday – that’s my goal.  I think we’re (knock on wood) running out of natural disasters to prevent me from seeing him.

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28 weeks pregnant with boy/girl twins: I’ve been taking weekly pictures so I couldn’t NOT take a pic this week, but man, I just had no smile left in me that day.

3 thoughts on “28 Weeks Pregnant – What I’ve Been Up To

  1. So, there’s a story we used to tell in my karate dojo about how you could tell what rank a student was without looking at the belt color:

    * When a white belt breaks a finger,s/he cries, whimpers, moans, and leaves class immediately to go to the hospital to get it set and get some pain meds.
    * When a green belt breaks a finger, s/he cries, whimpers, and moans, but waits until class is finished to go to the hospital.
    * When a brown belt breaks a finger,s/he finishes the exercise, and sets the finger himself after class, and takes whatever pain meds are left over from the last injury.
    * When a black belt breaks a finger, s/he says, “Shit. Not again.”

    (The last time I broke a finger, the first words out of my mouth were, “Shit. Not again.” I kid you not.)

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