Anyway

Those not inter­ested in preg­nancy-related mus­ings should skip this post…

I’m recov­er­ing well from the birth, and my feet are finally back to their nor­mal size. So I thought I’d bore every­one who has­n’t been, or isn’t likely to become, preg­nant mut­ter­ing about vari­ous preg­nancy-related ail­ments and how I tried to cope. Not that I’m com­plain­ing about hav­ing been preg­nant, of course, since hav­ing a baby makes it all worth­while, but some of the symp­toms are less than pleasant.

Unlike when I was preg­nant with my first child, I had no morn­ing sick­ness. One or two days of feel­ing vaguely queasy, but that was it! So much for the old wives’ tale about hav­ing more morn­ing sick­ness with girls than boys; I had 5 months with my son and had to take dic­lectin to stop los­ing weight and not one day with my daughter.

To make up for that, in the third tri­mester I had reflux. At first diet kept it under con­trol, then I took Gav­is­con, by the end of the preg­nancy I was on Zantac 75 every day and still hav­ing to watch what I ate and sleep with my head propped up on mul­tiple pil­lows. For­tu­nately Zantac is com­pletely safe (at least in late preg­nancy). The reflux dis­ap­peared imme­di­ately after the birth.

As in the first preg­nancy, I had edema. At least this time it was­n’t related to pre-eclamp­sia. I man­aged to keep the swell­ing more or less under con­trol with pren­at­al mas­sage and keep­ing my feet up when pos­sible until about week 36 when things went hay­wire. First the feet, then the ankles, swelled up, no mat­ter how much I res­ted. By the time I had the baby, the swell­ing had reached my back, and was mak­ing walk­ing dif­fi­cult. I tried the vari­ous sug­ges­tions I found on the web (tak­ing flax­seed, soak­ing the feet, drink­ing lots of water), but none of them worked. It took almost two weeks after the baby was born to lose all that flu­id again.

And, of course, the big belly. I tend to stick straight out in front when I’m preg­nant ( pho­to­graph­ic evid­ence), and giv­en the size of this baby (9.5 lb) I stuck out an awful lot. Since I’ve been doing Pil­ates for a couple of years, my back and stom­ach muscles are much stronger than before and I had no more than a couple of twinges of lower back pain. I did find that wrap­ping a strong cloth around the belly to sup­port it helped, as did rest­ing (a lot!). I also had to be care­ful walk­ing down stairs since my centre of grav­ity shif­ted so much and I had a tend­ency to tip for­ward. The Pil­ates stu­dio I attend (up till about week 35, when I got too tired and could­n’t do more than half my sim­pli­fied pro­gram) helped a lot with my pos­ture, help­ing me fig­ure out how to stand and sit to min­im­ize the strain on vari­ous muscles and avoid over-com­pens­at­ing. I’d recom­mend doing Pil­ates to any­one think­ing of get­ting pregnant.

Those were my major con­cerns; I had a very healthy preg­nancy in all and these issues were minor com­pared to what a lot of oth­er women go through. Now the baby is here, and all of this will shortly be for­got­ten in the dim mists of sleep-depriva­tion. Nature is some­times kind.