Pride Goeth before the Fall

I'm 10+ weeks now, and the end is in sight. The end of the horrible part, I mean.  I hope. I had this exact thought (at 9 weeks) just after I wrote my last entry.  It was a Sunday afternoon and as I sat on the couch, I noticed two things.  First, I was sitting up in a totally non-slouchy manner, and second, I was hungry.  Not nauseated, but specifically hungry.  I hadn't had a non-nausea hunger "notice" from my body in a month. I was well!  The next day I walked to the end of the block (one house's worth) to a kids' lemonade stand.  I went downstairs to the basement to check on the comforter in the dryer, which my mom had put in the day before.  This kind of activity was unthinkable just the day before.  Hallelujia!  Thank God! And the next thing I thought was "pride goeth before the fall," or "over-confidence goeth before the public humiliation." Tuesday I went to my OB appointment and realized with fear and horror at 11:00 a.m., as I parked my puffy self in the only available waiting room chair, that I was hungry.  And I had nothing to eat.  I got worried.  Hunger pains (what before had been lying-down nausea pains) are followed quickly by light-headedness, nausea, and in this case, panic.  I tried to form a plan.  The office was in the hospital building, and if I could get downstairs and find the cafeteria, I could feed myself.  But would I pass out along the way?  Would I have to crawl?  Could I get halfway there and waive a $20 bill to passers-by, offering to let them keep the change if they could go get me ANYTHING to eat? I swiped a piece of hard candy off the receptionist's counter, and sucked on the hot cinnamon as if my life depended on it.  As I got weighed (2 pounds gained) and gave a urine sample, I got shakier and shakier.  By the time I was ushered into the examination room, I was very glad to get to lie down. But it wasn't enough.  The hunger had turned to severe nausea and I looked around at a potential receptacle.  The trash was overflowing, so I couldn't vomit into the trash can.  I made myself get up off the table and look in the cabinets to try to find a vomit pan or plastic bag or ANYTHING.  Nothing.  As the waves got stronger and more menacing, I opened the exam room door and asked the first person I saw, who happened to be my OB, whether they had something I could throw up in.  She suggested I go to the bathroom.  "But I'm not sure I am going to actually throw up.  I just need a safety net."  I looked down and saw a trash can right by the door.  I said, "I'll just use this," and ducked back into the room.  I put the can by the side of the table, lay down, and did deep breathing to try to keep from actually using it. And then the most unbearable part happened.  A conversation.  A man, the doctor whose trash can it was, came out into the hall and asked where his trash can was.  My OB responded that "she took it.  She was feeling nauseous."  He asked why I hadn't just gone to the bathroom.  She said she didn't know.  He asked why she gave me his trash can.  She replied that she hadn't; I'd just taken it.   I felt like the world's biggest idiot.  Stealing needed personal property in order to vomit in it instead of in the toilet like a normal person.  And then hearing them talk about me, hearing that I had caused him not just inconvenience but disbelief, and thinking that they SHOULD have known I could hear them... it was unbearable.  So I started sobbing.   Finally my OB was ready and came into the room.  When she saw me crying, she asked if it were nausea or pain.  I said nausea, but what it was was really panic and feeling so overwhelmed by the hunger.  She gave me a juice box of apple juice and as I drank it I instantly felt better.  I sat up and dangled my legs off the table, happy as a clam.  Happy as an infant who just got fed.  What a dork.  My mother reassured me that the OB is used to dealing with sick, hormonal women.  It was little consolation. For the rest of the appointment, she looked for heartbeats with the Doppler microphone, but couldn't find anything (not to worry; it might still be early) so she took me back to the ultra-old ultrasound to try to see them.  In the end, she saw both babies, stacked one on the other, each in a black sac about the size of the first two sections of my thumb.  What she determined was that they were both wiggling too much to hear the heart beats.  But wiggling babies have beating hearts, so we were all good. Before she sent me home, she told me never to go anywhere without some snacks and a drink in my bag.  Duh.  Yes, I got that lesson earlier in the visit. So well fed, and limiting my outside activities again, I decided that it was time to chronicle the "high points" of the first trimester.  That was a week ago.  I've kept adding high points to my list.  Or low points.  Here are some: - The time I threw up in my hand on the way to the bathroom (milk and banana), then squatted there with my dripping hand on one side of the toilet, vomiting into the remaining toilet opening.  As gobs and gobs of stuff came out of my stomach, I became aware of a strange, other sensation.  I realized what it was was that I was peeing in my pants on each heave.  Yep.  And not just a little.  I had a friend coming over any minute, so when I was done, I hurled my shorts and bathroom mat into the shower and hobbled upstairs, dripping, to get some more clothes.  I finally settled on the couch, calm again, and Aimee came over.  She brought food, which was good because, as it turned out, I was feeling pretty empty. - I thought the peeing in my pants thing was a one-time high-light.  But it has become a habit.  James does not recall my having ever done this in the past, and uh, yeah!  It's because I didn't!  I think that, even so early in the pregnancy process, there is a special relationship between the uterus and the bladder.  And any time anything happens in the abdomen, the two organs hug.  And that's how pee is made.  Most recently I had the ironic honor of vomiting dry heaves but still peeing quite a lot onto the rug.  What am I?  A puppy?  I should have just sat on the toilet and vomited nothing into the air.  But hindsight is 20/20. - After the dry heaves/wet peeing incident -- which happened at 5:00 a.m. the other morning when my hungry belly rejected the apple sauce I had just eaten, and the milk that I'd drunk to supplement it -- I made it back to bed wet.  I was shaking and involuntarily whimpering.  I went back to sleep and woke up a bit later when I felt moisture on my hand.  My nose was bleeding.  Apparently I burst a blood vessel in my nose when I fake-threw-up.  Nice. - Several days after the OB visit, when I had a misguided resurgence of confidence, I decided I needed a bra.  I had rarely worn one for the last six weeks in bed, and once I had to go to the doctor I realized that I had grown out of the last one to fit.  So I went to Target to get a bigger bra, among other things.  I didn't wear a bra to the store, because I couldn't squeeze into any comfortably.  I just wore a t-shirt: the kind that has a little logo on the chest on the front, and a big picture on the back.  The trip went well, except that I had to abandon some of my merchandise (plastic bins) in the middle of the aisle when my "helpful" sales associate failed to come back with any lids for them.  I paced back and forth, got hungry and (smartly) ate a granola bar I'd brought.  I squatted on the floor.  I put my head down.  Eventually I saw a display of ottomans across the aisle.  I pulled one down and sat on it for a while.  And just before I completely melted down, I left the bins on the ottoman in the middle of the aisle, bought my bra, and went home.  Late that night I realized that my shirt was on backwards.  To think: all my braless righteous indignation in the store, all that pacing and sighing, was done with my shirt on backwards.  Lovely. - I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but I had one task that I absolutely had to do in the professional world, no matter how I was doing physically.  This was when I was still really sick.  I had to write a fundraising plan for an NGO that I've helped found, which encourages DC high school kids to go to college.  But I couldn't even think, much less sit at the computer.  So after racking my brain, I remembered my mother, the person from whom I get my writing and making-stuff-up skills.  I lay on three pillows on the hallway floor and she sat at the computer in the little office, and the two of us brainstormed everything we had to write in the fundraising plan.  She put in the topic sentences, made everything organized and logical, and in the end I was able to send it off to the other board members... only about 3 weeks late.  Oh, what would I have done without her?  How nice that I can outsource my brain activity sometimes, and just get to lie on a pallet on the floor instead. - For the heyday of my sickness, I was too exhausted to wash my hair.  I could sit in the bathtub and slowly rub some soap on my body, but I couldn't imagine the effort it would take to raise my hands over my head and move them around while shampooing.  So for a few weeks James had to wash my hair.  I would sit naked in the empty tub, slumped over like a little rag doll, and he would wet my hair with the shower head that comes off the hook and has a cord attached to it.  He'd lather me up, rinse, condition, rinse, and all I had to do was keep my eyes closed and hold my breath at the appropriate moment.  Then I'd get up and he'd dry me off and I'd go to bed.  What would I do without James?  Yeah, that's the question that runs throughout this whole process.  Maybe it should be, "What would James have done if I hadn't washed my hair in a month?"  - The last thing I can think of is really unimpressive, highlight wise.  It's what made James, about 6 weeks ago, say that he hoped I was still keeping my journal because he would hate for us to forget these things.  As soon as I got my BFP, I switched from progesterone shots to progesterone suppositories.  I put them in twice a day, and after a few hours, when the hard pill had dissolved, it would release a wet goo that I could feel "leave the building."  I got in the habit of announcing, "Oops, I'm leaking," and running to the bathroom.  Little did James know, but that was just the beginning. But it's the end of this entry.  The upshot: my trips out are for absolute necessities only, I never travel (even upstairs) without a snack and a plastic vomit bag, and with all these thrills, I'm pretty sure I'm still pregnant.  Pregnant and infantile.  Babies and mother are one.   I wouldn't have it any other way. And to my frends who are still in the thick of the infertility fight, don't give up.  If I can throw up, so can you.  Just hang in there, and know that I keep thinking of you.