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2007-06-24 - 11.35pm��previous entry��next entry
6 weeks, 6 days - IBS and dreams and stuff
It's late, so I really MUST keep this short, but I just wanted to update again! :)
I will be 7 weeks pregnant tomorrow!! Yay! The time is going pretty fast, which is great because I feel soooo sick all the time. I pretty much have it from waking to, well, waking again! If I'm asleep then I don't know about it, but I am queasy when Matthew wakes me in the night. Oh well. It will pass!
I am having to try different things to eat all the time because what makes my nausea way better one day does not work at all the next. I'm noticing that many of the helpful things are a bit junky this time around. Sipping coke from the same can (kept in the fridge door) until it's pretty much flat (yuck, but helpful it seems!) has been a GREAT help this week. It has not worked for me yesterday or today though, it just makes me feel more gross than ever. So, bye-bye to that option, just as we FILLED the fridge with cans of coke, haha!
Yesterday we went to the farm for Joshua's birthday party. I stayed right away from sheep and goats, and washed my hands and stuff. There was a big sign outside the barn with lambs in that said pregnant women must not touch the lambs or sheep. There was a cartoon of a pregnant lady with a big red cross through her!! ;) Arthur stroked a sheep (not in the lamb barn, in the field) and I didn't have contact with his little hands till I found a washing station and washed both our hands.
I nibbled queasily the whole time. Apples help a lot (but not all times of the day) so one of those did a great job for my nausea while we were there. But right before we left, we were washing our hands outside the little cafe thingy, and I saw a man carry out a paper plate of chips. Suddenly I had to have some of those chips! So I went in and bought just a plate of chips, and put tomato sauce on them. I NEVER tasted anything so divine in all my life! I wished I had bought more sachets of ketchup, and that I had slathered them in salt and vinegar. I never do that to chips, but I sooooo wished I had this time. We took them out to the car and drove the 20 minutes home, and I was still eating them (slowly) when we got home! They were sooooooo good. I was amazed at how fast they made me feel COMPLETELY nausea-free! So nice! I know I won't be able to find chips like that again, because if something helps my morning sickness, it has to be the EXACT precise thing, not some other brand of chips, or my homemade version, etc. I really hope they don't become a craving or I will be in trouble!
These last few days, my main "help" has been digestive biscuits (Graham crackers for those Stateside). I was so horribly nauseous one evening that I just didn't know if I could even put anything to my lips, let alone chew and swallow, without being sick or something. Neil fetched me a digestive biscuit (since the thought didn't totally repel me at the time) and I tried to nibble it, but couldn't bear to. I put it down next to me, and after a minute I tried again. After the first nibble I had to pause again, and the whole thing took a while to eat, but when I had finished it I felt SO much better! I ate another (faster!) and felt better still. So now I am using those when I feel really sick, which is generally during the evening (though today and yesterday it has been bad during the rest of the day too). I just ate two now so that I could update here! :)
Also satsumas are helping, and apples, but not always. Sometimes I'll eat one and think, "Urrrrghhh" but other times just a quarter of the way through eating one, I feel soooo much better already. And they are so refreshing to eat. And they have fluid in them. I am really struggling to get fluids in. Coke does not help because it further dehydrates, not the opposite, as you'd expect a fluid to! Coke isn't a friendly substance to put in a body, actually. But I will take it if it eases my morning sickness! Which it now doesn't, so never mind all that!
Drinking water is really hard. I tried making a batch of ice cubes this week and having iced water instead, but it didn't really help. It's hard to tolerate the taste in my mouth, but the main thing is that any fluids I drink feel HORRIBLE in my stomach after about 3 sips. Like I am just sloshing about with tooooo much fluid in there, and it makes me feel so sick until I guess it digests a bit and there's not so much in there. But I don't know why my body is over-exaggerating its reaction, thinking that there's tons of water in there when there's hardly any. Very inconvenient! Yesterday evening Neil bought fresh orange juice at the supermarket, and I discovered that if I mix water and OJ half-and-half, and add 4 ice cubes, I can drink it all! So long as I sip or take 3 normal-sized swallows maximum, and then wait for a while. This afternoon the same thing helped, and I'm on another glass this evening, but it isn't going down so well. I left my glass alone (half left) about an hour ago and I still feel like I'm sloshing about with orangey water, which does NOT feel nice. Hmmm.
I need to speed this entry up. It's nearly midnight, and tomorrow is Monday and thus the start of another long week with the little boys and no-one around with me in the day times. I hope the week doesn't suck, especially for my boys.
I had another gender dream two nights ago - it was a girl :) It was soooo vivid! Neil and I were in a waiting room somewhere and it was full of expectant couples. I had a nice bump and was obviously somewhere near my 3rd trimester. The boys weren't with us. We were chatting to another couple, who asked us if we knew what we were having. I stroked my bump fondly and said, "Yes, it's a girl!" I was so smiley! They said congratulations, but I couldn't help emphasizing to them, "Our first daughter after two boys!" So that one was quite clear!
I did search back in my diary to look for other entries with the term "gender dream". I only found a few entries, so I tried "dream" instead, which took forever to sift through, because it brought up zillions of entries! But I discovered that I had my first baby dream at 8 weeks with Arthur's pregnancy, two of them actually, and both times the baby was a girl. Those were my only two gender dreams that I recorded (so probably the only two, as I recorded everything here) until one at 18 weeks or something like that. That time, the baby was a boy. The early girl dreams actually convinced me that he was a girl (along with other hunchy type feelings) so from that time on, I referred to him as "she"!! So I will take these early gender dreams with a large pinch of salt, and wait till I'm further along to pay them any attention! I had a boy gender dream with Arthur at 18 weeks, like I said, and one with Matthew (my first gender dream??) at 17 weeks. I KNEW Matthew was a boy once I had that 17 weeks boy dream. I started calling him Matthew pretty much from then on. So I'm glad to know that early dreams seem to have no meaning, as I can ignore them for a while yet! :)
I had the most HIDEOUS IBS today. Neil's brother was over helping us clean up the house a bit for (eventually!) getting to the point of selling it, and I felt sick all day. I needed to watch the boys a lot so Neil and Ian could do stuff to the house, but I just didn't want to! How awful. I just wanted my weekend to be as restful as possible, and I just longed to go and lie down and not have to "do kiddie duty" when I have to do that all week with no choice. I feel so awful and selfish writing that. I LOVE my boys and I also love spending time with them. I wouldn't want anybody else to do my job for me during the week! I actually love it. But it's hard at the moment when I am so physically pooped and nauseous all the time. I am desperate for weekends so I can recharge a little, or even get a break from my normal "work". Anyway. It went okay. Neil was around and he did help when I asked and so it wasn't really like a normal weekday at all. I just soooo wanted to be in bed resting for some reason.
Mid-afternoon I started to get the crampy tummy that occasionally tells me I am in for some serious pain for as long as it takes my body to cramp itself to diarrhoea. How nice. I HATE when it starts, I actually find it frightening, because I know it's soooo painful and could last a while and I will find it hard to bear. The pain scares me because I don't know how to handle it. I know I've given birth twice! But it's awful.
So I went to bed and hoped it would ease off. It lasted an HOUR with no relief. I have no relief from these attacks till I get the diarrhoea and I just have no choice but to wait for that. It took a long time today, and I got to the point where I could not deal with the pain at all, and was shaking and sweating, and urrrrgh. Neil was anxious because to him it looked like labour. The cramps come at fairly regular intervals, and pretty close together, and I act as I do when I'm in the harder stages of labour, needing to breathe but the freaking out because it's not helping and I can't manage the pain, etc. The length of the cramps were THANKFULLY way shorter than contractions, and I could count to 20 and the worst would be over. But oh my gosh it was so horrible. I get more of these attacks when I am pregnant, every time - especially in my first trimester. I only get a few a year otherwise. I will take permanent constipation (which my sweet IBS blesses me with) over the crampy/diarrhoea type ANY DAY. Ugh. Anyway. In the end, Neil laid his hand on my back (I was lying face down) and prayed, and I had to dash to the loo not 30 seconds later :) Thank you God!
I mention the whole thing in such attractive detail (!) because one thing that worried me a lot is that I was on the loo a lot during the hour plus of pain, and after the first half hour I started to get a LOT of EWCM which was brown/blood-stained. Not red at all, just brown again, like before. If I wiped, there it was. About 15 minutes after I first noticed it when I was there again and wiped once more, I actually got worried that it was my mucus plug, because it was like thick EWCM and lots of it. And brown spotting. Sorry for the TMI (not that I'm a fan of such a thing as TMI but I know some might not like allll my detail here!) but as always, I like to record everything here for my own benefit. And maybe, who knows, the benefit of someone a way down the line who has the same symptoms and googles and finds this, where (hopefully) everything turns out alright.
I have still got EWCM this evening, but not so blood-stained and less of it. I'm a bit nervous. I seemed less nauseous than usual this evening which worried me more, as the evening is my worst time - I don't have ANY good evenings, or even so-so ones! But it has kicked in again now, so... I want to go back to my doctor tomorrow, but Neil seems to think I'm being paranoid/silly. Not that he has actually SAID that, but... I know I'm probably being silly. I feel sick, I have had spotting before, maybe there's a good and normal reason why the stuff I went through this afternoon could have caused the spotting/EWCM, but I still feel nervous and would prefer to have reassurance.
I don't know. Maybe I will go. I think I would like to.
I haven't been on the computer much lately. I check messages and stuff each day, but that's it. It makes me feel too sick. I have been spending my evenings lying on the sofa watching Pride and Prejudice (the long 1995 BBC version) - I LOVE that version!! I can't count the number of times I have watched it, and now that I've finished it again, I could just wind it back and start again tomorrow evening. I feel way less bothered by my nausea when I lie back and relax and sip my drink and watch something enjoyable. It's sooooo much more relaxing than being online too. I love doing it. I think I would gladly just do that kind of thing, or read during the evenings, for the rest of my pregnancy or at least the first trimester till this nausea passes, but then I would lose touch with everything I keep up with online, and I wouldn't get my diaries updated. Which is too important to me.
I'm sure I have more to say, but it's after midnight now and I'm exhausted and feeling rather queasy so I think I will eat something and go to bed. I will try to check in again soon. I want to keep my diaries updated as well as I can! Thanks so much for the supportive and interesting messages! They always brighten my day so much! I check for them daily. Please keep them coming, even if I get boring!!! Thank you!! :)
ETA: I knew there was something I meant to write! All carbohydrate foods leave my tongue coated in a horribly bitter taste! An entry from Matthew's pregnancy at 7 weeks said the EXACT same thing for the past few days. Maybe this is going to be another fairly identical pregnancy and thus another boy?? Although, the bitterness seems to be part of my morning sickness for me (it makes my mouth water horribly, and the taste stays for HOURS after eating even a biscuit, and thus I get more queasy than ever), and Katie said to me yesterday that her morning sickness was exactly the same for her two pregnancies - she had a boy and a girl. We'll just have to see. But for now, YUCK. I hate the bitter thing! It won't scrub off my tongue or anything. Ugh.
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