For those of you who do not know, my pregnancy was mildly eventful! I had a relatively standard 5 months of severe morning sickness. Once those days had passed, I thought the worst was over. In some ways...it was the worst and it was over! Nausea is a force to be reckoned with. It is overwhelmingly awful and unbearable. If you know me well, you know I am a throw up phob... so this + morning (disclaimer: ALL DAY) sickness is a problem.
Around month 6, I ended up in labor & delivery having what I might have guessed was preterm labor. Instead it was just kidney stones...thank God. I never thought I would be so grateful for such an agonizingly painful experience, but alas...I was. When they sent me home with my little granular friends, I had no idea what to expect. What came to be was 6 days of bouts of pain and no pain. What I have come to understand about the kidneys is that they are attached to your ureter and when you put a stone into your ureter, it is painful because the stone is irregular shaped and doesn't typically fit in the narrow ureter very nicely. In addition, the ureter has three points in which it is extremely narrow and typically the stone hurts the most in those three areas. SO the first day of pain consisted of 5 hours of agonizing discomfort. Its not so much pain, it is discomfort like you would not believe. You cannot sit still, you cannot lay down, you cannot talk, you cannot think. I would just pace around the house and suck down Tylenol with codeine which is REAL effective (not so much). Then as soon as the horrific pain comes on, it is gone and you think you are free. Until about 48 hours later when the stone gets caught in the second narrowing and you are dying again for 5 hours. Break. Repeat.
Finally on the last cycle of biting pain, it broke free and I peed it out about an hour later. The pain was gone, I felt like a survivor. My stone was approximately 5mm. This makes me a champion in the kidney stone world. The end.
Months 6ish-7ish were great. No sickness, no kidney stones, I was still relatively small (belly) and I was feeling good. I went back to work in the fall and was trucking along toward my due date nicely, when suddenly...the swelling began. Yikes. This wasn't pretty. Overnight practically, I had Miss Piggy's legs and face and it continued to worsen over the next few weeks. By the end of what I call "the great swelling", I was unable to fit in any type of shoe or sandal. I had to wear size 9.5 slippers or be barefoot. One other thing, my blood pressure was SKY high. It kept slowly ticking up, up and up. I did not have any protein in my urine at my OB appointments so as far as the medical experts were concerned, I was just a fat, pregnant woman! Eventually (around October 1, 2012) my blood pressure got high enough that my OBGYN didn't feel comfortable with me returning to work. I fought him, tooth and nail. He won and I stayed home...sort of. I spent some time running errands and working around the house. Finally, Monday-October 8th rolled around and I went for what would be my final OB appointment.
Part 2-Next Post
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