the longer-ish version

i wrote in my previous posts about how all this began a couple of weeks ago with a trip to the hospital on saturday, december 5 and then how i had to call in sick on the following tuesday because i wasn’t feeling good.  well that thursday i started feeling really bad again, lots of pain in my lower back and abdomen on the right side, then around 1am i got sick and decided it was time to drive myself to the hospital since my husband was out of town on business.  the hospital is about a half an hour away so it was a rough drive because the roads were shitty and i was in so much pain.  when i got there i parked my car and started walking towards the door but didn’t make it all the way there before i started getting sick again which really sucked because it was windy so i was basically puking all over myself.  anyways, i could drag this story out forever but the gist of it is, i was in the hospital for five days with kidney stones, i had iv fluids being pumped into me the whole time to try and flush out whatever was/is in there as well as iv pain meds (dilaudid 8-10 times stronger than morphine), it has been the worst, most painful experience of my entire life.  on monday they did a surgery where they threaded a stint into my urethra up to my kidney to connect my kidney and bladder in order to make sure my kidney is draining properly and isn’t being blocked by any stones.  they didn’t see any stones when they did the surgery so i am really hoping they are gone BUT, the stint itself is incredibly uncomfortable and they won’t be removing it until the baby is born.  right now i don’t even know if i’m going to be able to go back to work because i still have a reasonable amount of pain and discomfort.  so, i’m feeling pretty discouraged, i have to be on norco which i feel terrible about as i’m concerned about how that is going to affect the baby.  i’m also freaked out that is we try and have more kids after this that the same thing is going to happen, blah, so that’s my story for now, i’m sure i’ll add more in future posts, and i’m not proof-reading this so if it sounds messed up i’m sorry!

another brief update

i was released from the hospital tuesday evening, i still don’t feel good enough to write a proper post but the baby is fine and i’m alive.  hopefully things will be getting better over the next few days.

very brief update

i’m going to make this short because i’m pretty effing groggy right now.  i ended up going back to the hospital on thursdsay at 1:30am and i’ve been here ever since (it’s now monday).  they have been trying to get my pain under control unsuccessfully, so in about an hour and a half i’m scheduled for surgery to have a stint pushed up my urethra into my kidney in hopes that his will help the kidney stone come out.  sounds fun huh? anyways, i’ll write more and catch up on blogs when i’m a little more with it.

i failed!

my glucose tolerance test that is.  i had a doctor’s appt yesterday, i saw the midwife again for some reason, she said a fail is anything over 140 and mine was 170, damnit.  i thought i was safe since i haven’t gained much weight, WRONG! so now i have to do the three-hour test, which means i have to fast, drink an even SWEETER liquid and sit in the lab for three hours!!! can you say boring?! she did say that she failed the one hour test with each one of her own pregnancies but always passed the three-hour so i am hoping that is the case with me as well.  oh well, it is a small price to pay for my sweet little louise… i can’t wait to see her!

blah

i missed work today because it appears that the kidney stones weren’t quite done with me.  i woke up at 2am AGAIN with pain in my back, spent the next few hours in and out of sleep and finally woke up for good at 5:30am.  i waited until my doctor’s office opened at 8:30 so i could call and talk to a nurse but i had to wait until they called me back because the phone nurses don’t get there until after 9! she talked to the doctor who said it’s probably kidney stones and told me to take some tylenol and rest and if the pain continued or got worse to go back to the hospital for iv pain meds.  luckily i’ve been able to manage it ok because my husband is in wisconsin on business and both my dad and step-mom are working so if i had needed to go to the hospital i would have been driving myself! i’m hoping that the pain continues to stay manageable because, well, who wants to be in pain, but also because we now have a winter storm warning and gale force wind warning until THURSDAY, so i definitely don’t want to be driving anywhere unless absolutely necessary! one of my friends told me today that she had kidney stones when she was eight months pregnant and that the pain was worse than labor, we’ll see about that in a couple of months!

our first trip to the hospital

well, i had to go to the hospital yesterday.  i woke up at 2am friday night with some stomach cramps, they lasted all night and into saturday.  finally at about 8:00 last night i decided to call the doctor and he thought it would be best if i went in for some monitoring to make sure i wasn’t contracting.  we had my husband’s daughter so she had to go with us.  once we got there we found out that they are not allowing anyone under the age of 16 on the ob floor due to flu season, so my husband had to stay in the waiting room with his daughter and i went to ob alone:(.  they got me on the monitor right away, i wasn’t contracting but the baby’s heart rate was a little high (180), they had me drink a big glass of water which helped to bring it down.  the pain in my abdomen and my right lower back started to get really bad right about the time they were wheeling me to ultrasound to look at the baby so the ultrasound was pure hell, i couldn’t even really pay attention enough to look at her on the monitor.  when the tech was finally done i got up to use the bathroom and immediately threw up all over the place (not really, it wasn’t that bad, i just got a little on the toilet seat).  they brought me back up to ob and at that point told me that i might be there for a while since i got sick so i had my dad come and pick carl’s daughter up so that he could come and be with me.  they did some labs but everything came back normal, i have NO IDEA what was wrong with me, but it was terrible! they said it might have been a kidney stone since i was having so much pain in my kidney area but my white blood cells weren’t elevated which is common with kidney stones, so we were all left scratching our heads, very frustrating to be that sick and not know why! once they determined that i wasn’t contracting and the baby was fine and all my tests were normal they let me go, we got home at about 2am, i went to bed with some tylenol and a hot bad and immediately fell asleep.  today i am feeling much better, but i do wish i knew what was going on!

ggt & rhogam

yesterday was my glucose tolerance test, how gross is that stuff they make you drink? it’s like koolaid with not enough water only worse.  i plugged my nose which eliminated the flavor, but i could still feel the sweetness of it, so i just drank it down as fast as possible to get it over with.  then we sat there for an hour until blood draw time.  after that we headed to a different area of the hospital where i got my rhogam shot, it HURT.  most shots only deliver a couple ml of fluid but the rhogam shot delivers over a teaspoon, there are FIVE ml in a teaspoon! i moved my arm around a whole bunch after the shot which helped A LOT, because today my arm barely hurts at all.

work stuff is going well, they FINALLY made my casual status position part-time, so now i can resign from my other lower paying part-time position, yea!! i work 40 hours (9:30-6 m-f) a week but it’s a combination of one part-time job and one casual job (which is stupid, i’ve been working the same hours for that “casual” job for the past year).  the part-time position is a less technical lower paying job, but if i were to quit that job and just keep my casual job there would be no guarantee it would still be there when i got back from maternity leave, casual positions warrant zero benefits.  now i will be able to go from working 40 hours/week to working 24 hours/week very soon (about a month), then go on maternity leave for a few months and still have a job when it’s over, woohoo! have i throughly confused everyone???

blankets and houses

we ordered the baby’s blanket yesterday, it should be ready in about two weeks, i can’t wait to see the finished product! i thought we would end up ordering from the website but weirdness of all weirdness the blanket was cheaper at the baby boutique downtown than it was directly from the website, $59 vs. $75 plus shipping.  we also ordered the rocking chair yesterday, actually we ordered it last week but we had to go change the color of the fabric based on the blanket that we ordered.  the baby furniture came in about two weeks ago, it’s sitting in boxes in our storage unit because…

we put an offer in on a house about 2 1/2 months ago.  it was a huge fiasco because this is the house that we originally wanted, but when we started looking again it was under contract so we made an offer on a different house.  about two days after our offer was accepted of the second house the first house came back on the market, so we pulled our offer on the second house and put one in on the first house.  then the sellers of the second house started threatening litigation even though there’s a clause in the contract stating that we are free to pull our offer with no consequences within a certain time period.  we had to see a lawyer and there’s still a chance they could come after us after the house sells, but we are hoping not, it’s so stupid, what the hell is the contract for if it doesn’t protect you??? anyways, house number one that we have the offer in on is a short sale so we have been waiting and waiting to get any news, like i said, it’s been about 2 1/2 months now so we are hoping to hear something very soon.  like yesterday.  i would really like to get in there and get the baby’s room painted and set up since she is due in just over 11 weeks!

tomorrow we are going in for my glucose tolerance test, i’m not too worried about it, i don’t think that i have gestational diabetes, i AM a little worried about drinking the gross sugar stuff but hopefully i can get it down.  i’m also having my rhogam shot tomorrow since i’m rh negative and my husband is positive, although i think they give it to everyone that’s negative regardless of their husband being negative or positive.

so that’s about it for now i guess, i hope everyone had a nice holiday, ours was quiet and small, my husband made dinner (as usual, i don’t cook), he deep fried a turkey this year which i’ve never had before, it was good but not much different from turkey in the oven, i guess i like it all.  his sister and daughter were here so it was just us plus two, it was very nice.

ahhhhhh thanksgiving

it’s such a strange tradition.  while i eat turkey with my family every year it doesn’t feel quite right since thanksgiving represents the beginning of an attempted genocide.  i know, debbie downer, right? but i just had to put it out there before i talk about being thankful.

last year on this day i had a laparoscopy which revealed stage III endometriosis.  the next few months after surgery were some of the hardest of my life.  i was supressed with lupron for three months and af didn’t return for an additional two months after that.  i was completely hopeless but i think it was the not knowing that really drove me crazy, no one could say yes, you will get pregnant it’s just going to take x amount of months, or no, you will never have kids.

this year, exactly one year later i am in a completely different place.  today i am seven months pregnant.  i am quite sure i have never been more thankful of anything in my entire life.

ok, on that note, i had an ob appt today.  my doctor is on maternity leave and i have to meet everyone in the practice anyways, so today i met the midwife.  she was very nice and said things are looking good.  she said we must have a cooperative baby as her head is all ready down, which is great, but she better not be planning on coming anytime soon! she’s still got twelve more weeks of growing to do! it’s funny that she said that though because in the last couple of weeks i have definitely noticed that i am being kicked in a different way, it feels like i’m getting more jabs in the cervix area.  i am officially in the third trimester and i will be having regular appts every two weeks now instead of every four weeks.  i can’t believe we’ve made it this far, where does the time go and why isn’t it february yet???

i also have to tell everyone about these FABULOUS baby blankets that i found, they are  made here in michigan, a baby boutique where i live has them, you MUST check out the website because they are GORGEOUS you even get to pick the fabric.  today i found out the size i want is only $75, i would have gladly forked over $150 for one of these blankets.

oh my gosh…

so, i was super excited about the new job possibility and i knew it was pretty much mine if i wanted it, it’s basically the job i’ve been wanting since i started working at that hospital, 32 hours a week at the inpatient pharmacy, it tends to be three days on and two days off, that alone sounded so awesome to me.  i put my application in on friday, it’s a technicality, i all ready work for the hospital, but you still have to apply for new positions, then, over the weekend, i came to the harsh realization that this is the job i would have fallen all over myself for BEFORE i got pregnant.  when i applied for the job the little voice in the back of my head was saying “there is no effing way you are going to want to work 32 hours a week after the baby comes,” but i stifled it and i applied anyways.  on monday i had to call my boss and withdraw my application.  it’s a bummer because the work at the  inpatient pharmacy is quite a bit more technical and therefore more interesting, but i am pretty sure that i will not want to work more than twenty hours a week after the baby comes.  i worked awfully hard to get her, it is hard for me to imagine sending her off to daycare for 45 hours a week when she’s just a little baby.  i talked to my mom about it and we both agreed that if she lived here in michigan and could take the baby while i worked that i would be able to do it, but she doesn’t live here and i just can’t bear the thought of her being in daycare that much.  so, it’s back to plan a, which is hopefully going to be that i’ll be cutting back my hours soon (my feet are KILLING me) to 9-1 monday-friday , i’ll be taking three months off after baby a is born and then hopefully going back to that same 9-1 monday-friday schedule.  we’re also hoping that my husband will be getting a promotion soon, and then if i don’t want to work i probably won’t have to because we think that if he does get promoted his new salary will be more than his current salary and my current full time salary put together.  we’ll see though, i might still want to work a couple of days a week anyways.

we are thinking of naming the baby louise after my husband’s mother who died about 11 years ago, so from here on out i will probably refer to her as baby louise.  my husband wants to meet her before we decide on anything to make sure that louise suits her.  in any case baby louise found a new way to kick me yesterday.  i’m not sure if her poistion shifted or what, but it feels like she is kicking down, into the va-jay-jay area, it is a little unpleasant but not too bad, of course right now she only weighs bout two pounds, i can’t imagine what that’s going to feel like in a couple of months!!!

p.s. i just read some terrible news on allison’s blog, sometime over the last week she lost all of her amniotic fluid, tomorrow she will have to deliver at just 18 weeks and say good-bye to her baby.  please visit her at one of her blogs and show her some love…

my journey with endometriosis
charlotte days

everything i said in this post seems so petty now, who cares about that stupid job.  last year this was a pretty devastating time for us, i had a laparoscopy the day before thanksgiving and we didn’t know if we would ever be able to have kids.  this year on thanksgiving i will be seven months pregnant, if there has ever been a year for me to be thankful, this is it.