Hi again.
I’m not really sure how to say all this so this might be a little scattered.
Basically, being pregnant has been hard. My first pregnancy was a failed pregnancy and made me extremely sick. I ended up losing 20% of my body weight in a month or so, was just short of bedridden (any movement or anything that required energy basically made me nauseous and very dizzy) and I eventually convinced my terrible doctors something was wrong and eventually they induced a miscarriage and literally the moment I took the medicine I felt better - I could eat again, my brain fog was gone (my memory of that time is a little hazy), etc.
4 years later, I have a new career that I enjoy which pays well, my husband and I had paid off all of our debt and bought a house so we decided to try again for kids.
It took us 7 months to get pregnant after we started trying. I could tell 2 weeks before the positive pregnancy test that I was pregnant. One of those ‘you just know’ sort if things I guess. Anyway, it took a week or so to get in to see my doc and get a pregnancy test and for that week, while I was starting to get sensitivity to smells, feeling more tired, shortness of breath (I was surprised to find this is a sign of early pregnancy and it was one of my first signs) and I needed to get a toothpaste that wasn’t as assertively minty, my husband was weary and didn’t want to accept that I might be pregnant. I don’t blame him… he took the loss of the first pregnancy pretty hard. It was frustrating though.
After I got the confirmation from doctors that I was indeed pregnant, my husband has been more supportive than ever. I got morning sickness about 6 weeks in. I had a lot of trouble eating or drinking much of anything for 2 months. I was certainly dehydrated. Had no energy. Always sick. If I was not in bed I was feeling ill. I ended up moving my work to the couch (I work from home thankfully) so I could take naps during my breaks.
The nausea medicine my initial doctor prescribed for nausea didn’t help in the slightest (reglan) and any time I would call to complain and see if there was anything else that would help, they just told me I need to struggle through it. I went to Urgent Care where I was told to take Unisom and B6 (diclegis basically) and that was my first sign of relief. I still had a long way to go though and eventually was transferred to a different hospital with a different OBGYN (I was determined to be high risk) who told me to take dramamine and finally! I could get through the day without being sick most days and now, in my 2nd trimester I still feel sick in the mornings but I can usually take Omeprazole (think Zantac type thing) in the morning and get through it and be fine for the rest of the day.
After 2 months of morning sickness I found it hard to walk. I think this was a combination of my Cerebral Palsy, being on the couch or in bed a lot and not being able to eat protein for most of the pregnancy up until that point. I still had/have shortness of breath which is likely exasperated by my blood pressure meds.
My husband helped me get up and around and moving again, slowly but surely, all the while taking care of all the housework after he’d finished his shifts, doing all the shopping and making sure we had lots of whatever I could stomach at any given time. I think it was around this point where I started feeling like I’m not doing enough.
I don’t like having such little energy. I don’t like having to walk slower because my legs still hurt and I am still fatigued. On top of that, when I get tired, the nausea comes back. It doesn’t take much to make me tired.
I started going on grocery trips again so I at least have that time to get some exercise. Sometimes we go look at baby stuff on the weekends.
I am glad my husband has stepped up like he has and basically kept our life in order when I wasn’t able to. Now, with nausea loosening it’s grip on me I feel like I should be doing more. Emptying and loading the dishwasher shouldn’t be that hard. Straightening up the house. But it is. I feel like my body can’t keep up with my mind. I want to be productive but I just can’t. I barely have the energy to take showers every few days or get dressed a lot of the time. Much less housework. And I feel bad because there has been zero intimacy in the relationship since I got pregnant because I just can’t.
The lack of energy is depressing. The lack of ability to do anything meaningful to help with adulting is depressing. The lack of energy to be intimate is depressing. My love language is physical touch, since I was abused as a kid I became one of those people who hated physical touching, it makes me flinch. My husband is the only person I trust to touch me, even if it’s just a hug. But now I have started flinching again because I’m no longer desensitized to touching anymore and that is something I’ve always felt bad about in the relationship and he had had to work with me over the years to for him to be able to hug me or whatever without me flinching. He even warns me that he is about to touch me and I still flinch half the time. But I digress.
I hate this. I’m glad I only have about 4 more months left of being pregnant. I want to be functional again.
