Last night was not my favorite.
We’d spent the evening at David’s parents house as we always do on Sundays. Dinner was delicious and the company was delightful as always. Our post-dinner entertainment consisted of watching this video and several like this, as well as a few of our nephew James that David’s sister had sent his mom. Oh, and David and Liz and Ben went on a scorpion hunt. (8 fatalities, 1 wounded, who knows how many more out there.) Then everyone placed bets on when the baby would come, how much she would weigh, and how long she’d be. The soonest guess is May 21st, the latest is May 28th. As David says, the time is far spent; there is little remaining.
Anyway, all of that made for a lovely and relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable evening. It was the night time that turned out to be none of those things. Just before we went to sleep, I got a weird pain in my abdomen. It felt exactly like a side-ache–sharp and strong–except it was just to the right of my belly button and ran almost from my ribs clear down into my leg.
Thinking it was a pulled muscle or something, I tried some gentle stretches and rubbed at it in hopes that it would relax and stop hurting. No dice. So I got as comfy as I could and decided to just sleep. Surely it would be better in the morning, and if it wasn’t, I’d call my midwives.
I woke up to use the bathroom a couple hours later (as I frequently do at night) and it still hurt. A lot. I got up and took a Tylenol and tried to walk around a little to make it stop. Still nothing. On top of that, the rest of my belly was hard hard hard. Like when I have practice contractions, only the hardness didn’t go away after a minute or so.
That’s about the time my brain started running through worst case scenarios. By about 1 AM I had fully convinced myself that the placenta was detaching and that when I called my midwives in the morning, they’d have me come in so they could check on the baby but they wouldn’t be able to detect a heartbeat, and then I’d have to have an emergency c-section all by myself because David wouldn’t be able to get back from work in time.
You’ve probably figured out that everything is fine, otherwise I wouldn’t be blogging about it so casually this morning. My belly still hurts a little, but I really do think it was just a pulled muscle or round ligament pain or something. The baby is writhing around as usual, so we can safely assume she is doing fine. And while I am having quite a few more contractions this morning than I do most days, they’re mild and hardly worth mentioning. All is well.
I really should not think about things in the middle of the night. Ever.
You know what they always say, "better safe than sorry"
I understand this feeling–well not the exact feeling but you know what I mean. I often find myself in the middle of the night thinking that for some reason one of my limbs will fall off and that I'll wake up the next morning next to my detached arm. Because, you know, things like that happen.
So I think I know what your pain was–I forget the name of the nerve (I'm thinking occipital?) but basically when the baby's head pushes on it, it gives you this horrible knife-like pain down your leg. My doctor describes it as feeling like someone just plunged a knife into you. I had it once or twice with Abigail, and CONSTANTLY with Luke…as in it never, ever, ever went away the last three weeks. Major part of why I decided to go ahead with the water-breaking, since I was literally falling to the floor all day when it would happen and I'd be walking along.
It will probably get worse before it gets better–but if it's what I think it is, it's sadly very normal. 🙁
Laurie: True.
Emily: For reals. What is with the weird night paranoia?
Rach: That sounds miserable. This was more in my belly than my leg, but it definitely reached down that way if I moved a certain way. At any rate, it's entirely gone now. Probably just something getting stretched out too fast by my fat-and-getting-fatter baby.