Stealing Fire From the Gods!

Every time I go into my OB's sonogram room, I am confronted by this poster of women giving birth in a water tub, au natural. And every time I freaking see it, it renews my determination to have as unnatural a birth as humanly possible.

Seriously, tell me those women look happy. Go ahead. Tell me they look like they're really gung ho about the fact that they're floating in a tub, without pain killers, feeling like that alien baby from alien is about to burst from their stomach. Because I don't think they look happy, you guys. They freak me right the heck out.

So. When I left off the absolutely stimulating tale of the first month of my pregnancy yesterday, I had just gone on Prometrium. The date is October 28th, 2010. A phone conversation between my doctor and I had established that I would prefer to take the oral medication rather than the vaginal suppository. The drug was called into my local pharmacy, and Sandy picked it up on his way home from work, and by 5:10 p.m. I'd popped at least one of those down my gullet and then I started, for lack of a better word, praying. To pretty much anyone who would listen, really. Any god willing to lend a hand would be welcome. I offered incense and candy to my little brass Ganesha, asking that he remove the obstacles between my fetus and good health.

Dr. G had scheduled an ultrasound for November 3rd - one week away. I just had to wait until then to know if the drugs were working - raising my progesterone level high enough to keep the pregnancy going. Just 6 days. I'd like to point out, however; that a week is a long, drawn-out empty wasteland of hell under circumstances like these. I spent the whole week wondering if the tiny, orangey-pink BB of salvation that I was swallowing three times a day was actually helping, or if this pregnancy too was doomed.

At first, I cracked jokes about the Prometrium, because that's how I handle really stressful situations. I called up my sister in law and said, "You know, I can't tell if this drug is supposed to help me hang onto this pregnancy...or if it's supposed to help me steal fire from the gods."

I could hear crickets chirping on the other end of the line. Damn my 6+ years of Latin studies!

Having already established the baseline humor behind the joke with Sandy, I quipped after a totally unexpected cat nap brought on by the drug, "Hah! Feeling like this, San, the only god I'd be able to steal fire from is Morpheus!!!"

Crickets again. Seriously, what the hell do they teach kids in school these days?

In no time at all, the Prometrium was making its presence in my system KNOWN. During my first pregnancy, abortive though it was, I felt freaking FANTASTIC. My skin glowed, I've never looked so pretty, I felt energized and happy and all Mother Earthy and I was elbow deep in my vegetable garden transplanting sprouts etc etc.

This pregnancy, I'd been less glowy and gorgeous etc, but up until I started taking the Prometrium, I hadn't felt sick, per se. Dr. G had told me, when he offered me the choice between the suppository, *shudder*, and the oral dosage, that "some women find there are more side effects to the oral medication." I decided that I wasn't going to be one of those women because the alternative, (my first experience with a suppository of any sort), was totally not happening. Ugh.

Yeah, well, as it turned out, I WAS one of those women. I was practically their President. The Prometrium immediately transformed me from a pregnant but fairly healthy and rational young woman into this. Seriously. That's what I looked like. Looking back on it now, it all seems like a bad dream. But I know it wasn't. It was real, you guys. I really looked like that. It's hard to describe how it made me feel. I will try to be as succinct as possible.

I felt like maybe, just maybe, it would be better to die than to keep living and taking the Prometrium. That's how bad it was. I got EVERY SINGLE SYMPTOM of early pregnancy you can get. As bad as you can get it. And I had no idea how very many symptoms there are, until I started taking the Prometrium. Here's a quick and dirty list. Stephanie J - for the sake of your potential future children, do not read this:

Nausea: First of all, I want to take whoever is responsible for the term "morning sickness" and put their face through a brick wall. I didn't have "morning sickness." I had "all f*ing day sickness" - and "long into the night sickness." I was lucky - I never actually vomited. I dry heaved a whole lot though, and once, I gagged on a mouthful of mashed potatoes and nearly spit them across the kitchen table onto Sandy. That was exciting.

It wasn't just scents that set me off, it was specific food textures. Especially things pureed or mashed. I tried to eat creamed spinach at one point and nearly redecorated my mother-in-law's dining room for her. It was like B.O.B. was saying, "look, I know I'm going to have to eat that sh*t for any number of years once I'm out there breathing oxygen like the rest of you - I'm not f*ing eating it while I'm in utero, okay? Pass the bread basket." Bread was the ONLY thing B.O.B. was enthusiastic about. Butter was acceptable, but only if it was on bread. It's like I'd misbehaved in prison and they'd stuck me in solitary on a bread and water diet. Sugar? Absof*inglutely not. B.O.B. hates desserts and sugar. Sandy, in an effort to be a loving and supportive husband, kept bringing home tubs of ice cream for me. (Hollywood has trained all men to believe that pregnant women desire vast quantities of ice cream and pickles - regardless of what his wife actually tells him, that is what a man will bring home). He didn't understand why I nearly upended the fifth tub onto his head.

But scents ALSO set off the nausea. Scented soaps, scented candles, cologne, deodorant - you name it, it made me want to yack. It was freaking awful. Everything made me sick. In fact the only thing that made the nausea bearable was the fact that I was rarely awake long enough to really feel miserable about it.

Fatigue: Isn't that a nice word? Fatigue. It makes it sound like every so often I had a little episode of feminine weakness, where perhaps I reclined daintily on a divan with my cheek resting gently on the back of one hand, and my eyelids fluttered.

Yeah. The reality was that I would go to bed at 8 at night, (get up 700 times in the middle of the night to pee), get up at 8 in the morning, feed the dogs, cats and attempt to eat something B.O.B.-approved, and then pass out again. Until 2 in the afternoon. Try and eat lunch because the nausea got way worse past 4 o'clock and if I didn't eat lunch there was little hope of eating dinner, then sleep again until 7 p.m. Get up, try and eat something, and then go right back to bed. I wasn't always sleeping - but I wasn't able to be a functional human being. Mostly I just lay there, trying to deal with a pounding headache, drinking Jamaican Ginger Beer because it actually has real ginger in it and helped to settle my stomach a little, (those schweppes bastards are total liars with their "ginger ale"). I would fall asleep in new and interesting places around the house: the floor in the breakfast room, for example - the bed in the guest bedroom - the couch. I'd stay in one position for so long I'd start to wonder if I was building up lividity on the lower side of my body. But rolling around was uncomfortable, due to the next symptom...

The Arrival of the Tit Fairy: My entire life, I have been a, well - if not proud, at least resigned - member of the Itty Bitty Titty Club. Three weeks into pregnancy all of a sudden my breasts finally deserved to be called breasts. And holy mother of god, they HURT!!! You know when you watch boxers warming up on those tiny bags hanging from a ceiling that they punch with great rapidity and the thing flops around wildly but the boxer is always right there to punch it again? I believe they are termed "speed punching bags." I felt like Mohammed Ali had had mine for a long weekend of training. I went on the Mayo Clinic's preggo website, and they managed to terrify me into strapping those suckers down with a sports bra for all activities except showering, because the Mayo Clinic said that if you don't keep them supported with sophisticated cantilevers and scaffolding, etc, by the time you're finished breast feeding you'll be able to use your breasts as knee warmers without having to bend over.

Ah. Pregnancy is positively magical, isn't it?

Dizziness: Thanks to a serious uptick in blood production during pregnancy, (evidently we wind up with 30% more blood circulating through our systems during pregnancy, like giant blood-engorged ticks), I occasionally felt dizzy when changing positions, getting out of bed to use the restroom, breathing, or sitting perfectly still. Your heart has to beat harder and faster to move all that extra blood around. Since I'm an unathletic lazy piece of lard, my heart is experiencing the equivalent of finding itself transported inexplicably from a sunny beach in the tropics to a Marine bootcamp run by a particularly evil-minded drill sergeant.

Frequent Urination: That phrase really doesn't do justice to the phenomena. One minute, you're capable of carrying on a normal conversation, and maybe driving to the grocery store, without having to use the restroom three times. The next minute, you've got a fetus using your bladder for a trampoline, and you don't trust yourself to travel more than 10 feet from a usable toilet facility. Thanks also to this, your sleep cycle is completely screwed up, because you wake up every hour on the hour without fail, to use the restroom. Sometimes you're able to fall back asleep again, sometimes you're not.

Fuzzy Eyesight: "Surely not!" you cry. How could pregnancy make your eyeballs all wonky? But you guys - it DOES. I started getting headaches from trying to watch tv or read a book, because my eyes were all f*ed up. I didn't understand why, but the Mayo Clinic provided the explanation. The freaking Prometrium made my corneas thicker, and and decreased my interocular pressure by about 10%. I don't know what this means, except that I couldn't watch tv or read a book during all that downtime when I also couldn't do anything else. I vegetated, y'all.

And in addition to all of the above, I also gained:

An Assortment of Unexplained Cramps, Ligament Twinges, Gas Pains, Bloating, Diarrhea, Constipation and Sudden Stabbing Pains in the Groin.

The doctor said that since I was essentially dosing myself with extra hormones, it wasn't surprising that I would get a lot of the typical pregnancy symptoms, and possibly more severely than I would if my pregnancy was occurring all on its own, without help. By the end of the first week on the Prometrium, I was feeling pretty low. A visit to Dr. G for another blood test and an ultrasound to check on B.O.B. was at least more positive - my progesterone was back up to 20, thanks to the Prometrium, and B.O.B. appeared to be developing at the normal rate. Since, at this point, I was now 6 weeks pregnant, the "normal rate" meant that B.O.B. now looked like a fuzzy barber pole.

I asked if it was normal for the Prometrium to make me feel, as I put it, "like warm ass on toast," and Dr. G confirmed that it was. "Especially," he reminded me, "since you are taking the oral medication, and not the suppository..."

There it was again. I was starting to feel like he was pushing the vaginal suppository on me, like a drug dealer on a corner. But even as miserable and ill as I felt, you guys, I wasn't ready to cave. Not yet. I just couldn't do it.

"Oh," I said. "I'm okay. I'm going to stick it out." Dr. G replied in his soothing way, "of course, whatever you want to do is fine." That was November 3rd.

I lasted 4 more days before I called him and asked him to switch me to the suppository.