January 9, 2010

Hooligan. This can be defined multiple ways including bully, cruel and brutal fellow, a tough and aggressive or violent youth. This little parasite is posed to become a hooligan with the havoc it's wreaking on my previously content little being.

Alright kids. Here we go on this journey into the blessing that is motherhood. Truthfully, it hasn't been so much of a blessing thus far, but I have faith that it'll turn the corner soon. At least it better or I don't know if I can put up with 32 more weeks of this business, let alone do it again in a year or so. Did you ever notice that when you say it in weeks, it doesn't seem as long as if you say 8 months, by the way? This is guaranteed to be long-winded and to be way too much information than you really needed to know. But as no one will be reading this except people who know me very well, they wouldn't expect anything different. Also, a shout out to my chica Kat who gave me this idea, told me about this site and who I'm shamelessly copying pretty much on every front. Love you Gata!

Anywho, as a physician who discusses pregnancy, delivery, motherhood, child rearing and all that jazz with multiple women day in and day out, I find that things are a little different when it actually is happening to YOU. For instance, learning and hearing about morning sickness, does not do this ailment justice. There's nothing 'morning' about it unless it was supposed to be called 'mourning,' as I'm mourning all my old favorite foods that mock me from the fridge now. I like to call my particular brand 'anytime sickness.' Nothing can be described and no empathy given until you're walking down the hallway to see a patient and, literally, two seconds later you're thinking to yourself, "Yep, I'm going to ralph all over this carpet...right now." Not to mention that even if you don't feel like vomiting, there is general unrest in all things related to the gastrointestinal system (think the mouth through the other end) so that you're starving every second of every day, but when you try to eat even the smallest, blandest meal, you're back to the toilet hugging fun.

Never again will I dismiss a preggers morning sickness as 'it happens to everyone' or 'it should get better after the first trimester' or 'here's some medicine that may help' or 'frequent small meals will help." These are all pearls of wisdom that are true and that we learn in medical school and when my medically inclined friends repeat them to me, I want to smack them. I literally have been contemplating becoming addicted to drugs. Not the get you high kind, but the kind that supposedly keep you from vomiting constantly and are legal prescriptions provided by your handy dandy PCP. FYI, I am a huge fan of run on sentences, so if this is something you find highly offensive, you should not return to this site.

So, to catch everyone up, we (Baby Daddy aka John, my husband and I) found out we were with child on December 18th. This is the day that my also-preggers friend called to brag... I mean let me know that she was having a girl. I took a test just because I had one lying around and sort of didn't believe it when that faint pink line showed up. It hadn't been there 2 days before so I really wasn't expecting much. As an aside, there was a funny story about that too. I don't read urine pregnany tests in my clinic. The nurses do. So, I wasn't entirely sure what the test meant as I'd never seen a positive one, so I had to have the nurse double-check my work to assure me that there was something going on in there.

I had the first ultrasound to confirm this unbelievable fact on December 23rd. Nothing says Happy 30th birthday like a transvaginal ultrasound done by someone you work with day in and out. I still blush and avoid this person in the hall at work as they've seen 'the delicates,' as my friend Ann calls them. I continued my ultrasonic stalking of my parasite 10 days later to confirm the gestational age (aka how far along are we) and based on this ridiculously early ultrasound, the official EDC (estimated date of confinement aka the date I will be in immense pain) is August 20, 2010. The last ultrasound we did was today, 8 weeks and 1 day, so that John and Will could see the heartbeat. Needless to say, the 6-year-old big brother-to-be was somewhat underwhelmed by the fuzzy lump in the water balloon in mama's belly that flickered a little bit. Don't worry little guy, it'll be all too real when the baby is here and NEVER STOPS CRYING.

Will has placed his order, by the way. He wants a boy and he wants it to be named Levi, Nick, or Tristan. We've tried to convince him it may be a girl and that the chances of any of those names making the cut is just as high as us naming it Seymore Butts, but I think he senses our feeling that it's probably a boy so he's not too worried. I'm pretty sure John is convinced that because of the evidence of Y-shooting that makes us giggle everyday (Will), that we're in for another blue room and future skateboarder. I'm not going to lie, I would love love love a girl. But, I really just want a healthy baby. And I have no qualms about boys in pink anyway...dems jokes.

So, off we go, down this road, on this journey, blah, blah, blah. Can I just tell you that the worst thing you can give a pregnant woman is open access at any time, day or night, to an ultrasound machine. I'm glad that no harm comes from ultrasound because I'm pretty sure I'm going to have enough chronological pictures to make a motion-picture flip book.