Last week, Nick was out of town for a few days. I wasn't really worried, he has made some trips before during the pregnancy and hell, I am an independent woman perfectly capable of taking care of myself and the little one. I mean, I created Henry's liver among other things, and am now solidifying his skeleton, so I figured a few days alone would be a piece of cake.
And it should have been. Except for the fact that a rather giant shitstorm decided to bear down on us that week and shockingly, I am not as well equipped to handle multiple stressors while six months pregnant as I thought I was. The week before Nick left, my dad was in hospital with some sort of blood infection that took them days to diagnose and a few more to figure out treatment for. Now, despite very well intentioned people telling me everything was going to be okay, this is MY DAD and it was his heart that was affected, and I was nearly two hundred miles away with no recourse and few opportunities to wrap my brain around the whole thing. It sucked. When they finally sent him home, he was assigned a four week treatment of serious intravenous antibiotics, making it very clear that while he was home, this little scare was far from over. Then I got sick. A weird, whooping cough like illness that knocked me on my ass while forcing me to hack up both my lungs. Then my cat escaped from the house for four hours only to return as a feral badass who wanted nothing more than to tear the face off her beloved litter mate sister and scare the hell out of me.
And to top it off, on the second day Nick was gone, I started bleeding.
Immediately, I called my mother. I admit, I probably should have just called my doctor, but my mom is a nurse and frankly, I needed some amount of compassion at this point, not just an answering service. My mother, being the smart one, told me to immediately get off the phone and call the doctor, who then told me to come in for an ultrasound and an exam. Some part of me knew that everything was fine: he was still kicking, I used the heart monitor and his little heartbeat was at 145, and the spotting wasn't all that heavy. But a smaller part of me, the completely irrational and hopelessly stressed part of me was terrified. I mean, a sort of raging panic that if I would have let out from the tiny cage I was keeping it in would have most certainly overwhelmed me, leaving me stunned and paralyzed as my crazy cats attempted to gnaw through the protective gates I had put up to separate them. Doesn't that sound like the best sitcom ever?
Anyway, I managed to keep the terror tide tamped down, drove myself to the hospital, and get checked in. I was good until the split second before they placed the ultrasound monitor on my belly, when at that point, everything slowed down and all I could think was "dear whatever powers control this universe, please make this okay" and fortunately, my plea was answering because a second later, his little heartrate popped up on the screen followed by an image of his cute little face. Each time I've seen him has of course been joyful, but I can honestly say this time was simply the best. After the ultrasound, the midwife examined me, let me know everything was fine and said I probably just moved funny causing my cervix to stretch weird and thus the spotting. I'm not really sure how it all works, and I pretty much stopped listening after she said you're fine.
I rested up for the next few days but as the cats continued to go crazy and my dad was admitted back into the hospital (all is well now, thankfully), I realized that life does not stop just because I am pregnant and despite my best efforts to protect my kid from the stress of it, I can't even do that while the poor thing is in utero. So we'll be working on coping skills while teaching him his ABCs and I'll just start financially prepping now for loads of therapy.
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