a little help

Me looking cute with my bump on Saturday afternoon, before everything went to hell.

This past weekend was a very difficult one for me. While neither the baby nor myself was ever in any danger, for the past week I’ve been dealing with a very painful pregnancy complication. I actually took last Friday off because of it because I was hoping some extra time to relax would help, but unfortunately over the weekend it continued to worsen. It got so bad on Saturday night that I went to the emergency room to try to get some help. I thought I would be okay but about an hour after I got home the pain returned, worse than ever. I actually woke everyone up at 3:30 in the morning sobbing, it was terrible. After staying up the rest of the night crying on the couch (I insisted Taylor take the bedroom so he could get at least some sleep since I knew he’d be looking after Gwen all day) I went back to the hospital on Sunday morning. To give you an idea of what kind of shape I was in, after examining me the ER doctor offered me morphine, which is not a thing ER doctors at downtown hospitals generally do (I declined it). My first visit I was only there about an hour, hour and a half but this second visit was much longer. I had to speak to two different surgeons about the possibility of having surgery, which meant waiting around (in a very cold exam room with a very uncomfortable examination table!) for 4 or 5 hours.

In the end they deemed the surgery too risky for both myself and the baby, so they sent me home with a prescription for painkillers & patience. Basically I just have to hope that this problem goes away on its own, which pretty much sucks. It was so unbearable yesterday, I think I cried more in twelve hours than in the last twelve years. Like just sobbing in pain, for hours. I also had a lot of anxiety and guilt about my prescribed medication; I don’t even like taking Tylenol when pregnant, let alone stronger painkillers like these. Thankfully I have some great and supportive friends online who helped me to work through my feelings and I was able to calm down enough to actually take them. This relieved the pain enough that I was able to get a decent amount of sleep last night, and as I took today off of work as well I’ve been able to relax more and I’m finally starting to feel a little better. The complication hasn’t actually resolved, nor do I expect it to fully, which means things are gonna be rough for the next two months. But I’m confident that with the support & help of my awesome friends and amazing family (the level to which Taylor, Sym and even Gwen stepped up to help me is almost overwhelming in how wonderful they’ve been) I will be able to get through it.