Side effect of pregnancy #20 + another couple of things

The very slight taste of fish sticks in the back of my mouth.

Seriously.

This has happened occasionally throughout this pregnancy, where I taste something (just barely) even though I haven’t had it in ever. Happens to be fish sticks this time. And now it’s gone.

The baby is due tomorrow. Today is my last day of work for now, and tonight we have dinner with friends. It’s our usual Thursday dinner with the couple with the now 9-month-old baby, moved back a day because they were out of town yesterday. I now understand how quickly babies grow, as we’ve watched her go from unable to sit up on her own to pulling herself up with the help of the furniture. I wonder if she’s taken any steps yet? She hadn’t as of last week.

Something I forgot to post on Wednesday: after you hit 37 weeks, the midwives want to see you weekly. If you want them to, or if everything isn’t going perfectly, they’ll check your cervix for effacement and dilation. They use their fingers for this, which is uncomfortable and fairly painful, especially if your cervix is still kind of toward the back (in early pregnancy, the uterus tilts and your cervix moves toward your back, staying there until the last few weeks. Mine hasn’t quite got with the program yet; I’m guessing that means Kaelie is going to be fairly late, though I have no evidence for that).

Anyway, in the middle of this uncomfortableness and pain, the baby gave what seemed to me a different sort of kick. The midwife had touched her head through my cervix or uterus, and I think she was startled. Not that I blame her — this would be the first time she’d ever felt something like that. Can you imagine hanging out in your little cocoon of water, surrounded on all sides by soft warm wetness, just chilling…and then something harder than you’ve ever felt before pokes you in the top of the head! What the fuck was that!

Just wait till the birth, kiddo.

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Side Effect of Pregnancy #19

Numb belly. I can only guess that the nerves in my belly skin have spread out to the point where relatively large sections of my belly simply do not have nerves. About a half-inch area around my belly button is completely lacking in sensation. In addition, and I think this is related, a large portion of the front of my belly feels a little tingly instead of itchy. Well, it still gets itchy, but when it’s not itchy it tingles a bit.

Three days till she’s due; four till I get to start complaining that she’s late.

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A few side effects of pregnancy

In rough chronological order. Most of these (starting around #6) began after month 7. #12 and above are from just the last two weeks or so.

1. Messiness, particularly relating to food and drink.
2. General clumsiness and lack of balance.
3. Brain no workie.
4. Heartburn as appetite suppressant.
5. Cravings for foods:
   …that I haven’t had since I was a teenager.
   …that have zero nutritional value.
   …that I don’t even like.
   …that are only available 150 to 1500 miles away.
6. Inability to turn over at night without waking up.
7. Possibly related to #5: tiredness; for me this translates into antisocial-ness.
8. Round ligament pain.
9. Hip pain.
10. Pubic bone pain.
11. Inability to get up off the floor without turning over to kneel first.
12. Constant itching within a two-inch radius of my belly button.
13. Sudden, desperate need to pee RIGHT NOW…that turns out to be only a trickle.
14. The discovery that pregnancy can cause stretch marks four inches above my belly button.
15. Feet so swollen that I’ve given up on shoes entirely.
16. The need to sit down for ten minutes after unpacking a single box.
17. Heartburn due to leaning forward. Come on now.
18. Near-daily inhalation of my own spit.

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Here’s a milestone…

On the subject of things no one tells you about pregnancy…Well, one person did tell me this, probably in large part because nobody told her but it happened to her. Our doula explained in one of the childbirth classes how a woman’s pelvis widens and adjusts to let the baby through. One of the places where it does this is the pubic bone, which is actually two bones that meet in the front middle of your pelvis with cartilage in between.

During pregnancy, particularly toward the end, a woman’s body produces a hormone called relaxin which loosens the joints a bit. This includes all the connections between bones in the pelvis, so that it can expand to let the baby through, and that, of course, includes the pubic bone.

This is painful.

Last night, I got up twice to go to the bathroom. The second time, around sunrise, I had a soreness that felt like a bruise in/on my pubic bone in addition to the common soreness in my hips from not putting a pillow between my knees (which I find annoying whenever I try to turn over, and it doesn’t help that much anyway). It persisted, off and on, until I’d been awake for an hour or so.

So far, the pain is only annoying, but I’m not looking forward to it getting worse. Our doula said hers got so bad she had to walk her hands down the bed for support when she started trying to move around in the morning. But our mattress is on the floor…

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