Lani

Well, it appears that I was slightly premature in my assertion that I was ready to get back to blogging. This has been a very hard year for so many people in so many ways, and while we've been priviledged to be only minorly inconvenience by coronavirus, we've been weathering our own personal ups and downs. We are desperately hoping to be coming to the end of the most intense difficulties, and we are so ready to move on to the good parts. 

So what are these difficulties and good parts, you ask? Well, I will tell you. Starting with the most amazing thing ever.

We are having a baby girl, and her name is Lani, and she is so loved already. 

This is Lani, happily sucking her thumb and enthusiastically kicking my bladder, at our 20 week ultrasound on 18 November. Everthing looks healthy and she is right on target for all her growth and development.

22 weeks and I don't understand how I'm going to keep getting bigger, as it already feels like everything is stretched beyond capacity! Our bodies are amazing.

So, good news:
~ We have wanted a baby for a long time, and we're finally getting one!

~ Everyone at both of our jobs has been very supportive.

~ We have wonderful friends here who are nearly as excited as we are about Lani, and who will be fabulous (and much needed) sources of help and support as we learn to be parents.

~ My children at work are completely in love with Lani (and have mostly forgiven me for not naming her Spiderman like they wanted me to) and going on this journey with them is incredible.

~ We are slowly aquiring what we need for Lani through community trading sites and are all set up with cloth nappies (diapers), so her childhood will be as gentle on the earth as we can make it.
~ I can finally feel Lani's kicks (and I think punches as well) and it's amazing! She has been very active in both ultrasounds, so I expect lots more movement as she gets bigger. She's kicking me as I'm typing this - maybe she knows I'm writing about her?

And bad news:
~ I was horribly unwell with a rather severe case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from May-August. I missed months of work and struggled mentally as well as physically, and it was a real battle to get back on my feet (literally, as I was often too weak to stand). I could go on and on about this, but I won't - I want to forget it, if possible.

~ Just as I was finally feeling better, I started nearly passing out from intense abdominal cramps. Upon seeking guidance from the doctor, we found out that I was pregnant, and had exactly 2 seconds to be excited about this before realizing that the level of cramping I was experiencing likely meant something was wrong - the doctor suspected an ectopic pregnancy and sent us for an immediate ultrasound to find out. The first was inconclusive, but after a stressful (and painful) two-week wait, the second confirmed that the blob of cells that would eventually be Lani was just where they should be. The cramping calmed down soon after, but by then...

~ I had hyperemesis gravidarum and was suddenly overwhelmed by intense nauseau, which soon developed into horrible vomiting. From about week 7 to week 18 of pregnancy, I was nauseaous almost constantly, and could only keep food down when the anti-vomiting meds kicked in. Unfortunately, the most effective medicine I found can only be taken three times/day and only keep me from vomiting everything up for 6 hours per dose. You may have noticed that that leaves 6 hours per day uncontrolled. So did my body. Given that I couldn't be running to the bathroom every hour or so at work, this tended to mean that I was up every hour through the night, painfully dryheaving once there was nothing left to bring up. I also needed to take a 24 hour break from meds every 5 days to avoid building up a tolerance, and those days of endless vomiting are some of the worst I can remember in my entire life. I would end up sobbing from fatigue, pain, and misery, knowing that the sobs made me even more likely to vomit again, but unable to find the energy to calm them.

~ I tried to stay positive, but found it very hard to see the positives through the nauseau, vomiting, and fatigue. I started to stress about how I was going to make it through the work day on almost no sleep, and about being bad at my job because I was just trying to stay upright, rather than actually teaching my amazing children. Every day felt like an insurmountable task, from the moment I woke up and realized I'd have to try brushing my teeth again, even though it almost always made me vomit, all the way through to when I collapsed thankfully into bed, only to remember that being horizontal increased my already forceful nausea. There was no respite.

~ I worried a lot about getting the right nutrition to make sure the baby had everything needed for healthy development. I have been a healthy eater my whole life, and was horrified that at the one time that it was most vital to get a balanced diet, I found myself limited to just a few foods that my stomach could manage, when I could keep down anything at all. I read too many articles about healthy pregnancy diets listing the millions of different foods you "must" eat to care for your baby. Then, inevitably, the last paragraph would say something like, "But don't worry if morning sickness limits what you can eat, your baby will still be fine." How could that be true? How could you absolutely require 5 servings of leafy vegetables but also be completely fine on just the half glass of milk and three potato chips you managed to keep down? What does that even mean? (For real, if you know the answer, tell me. I don't understand.)

~ Around 15 weeks, 3 weeks after the magical 12 week shift to the second trimester, when everyone had told me the nausea would calm down (but it did not), my mental health took a serious turn for the worse. I was barely hanging on physically, and was running out of the ability to remind myself that this would be over "soon" and I would not always be so miserable. I was horrified to discover that as I'd tried to separate my misery from my thoughts of the baby, I had actually dissassociated from the baby entirely, and couldn't find all those loving, "I want a baby" feelings within me anymore. In fact, I didn't want anything except to stop feeling so awful all the time, which was the one thing I couldn't manage. My very helpful midwife referred me for perinatal counselling, and I think it helped some, but it was still a rough time. I still don't know how much of it was hormonal and how much was a direct result of nearly 3 months of physical misery, but it was definitely the biggest mental health crisis of my life.

~ Note: I do not apologize to those of you who think that is too much information or oversharing, as women all over the world have to deal with this stuff, as well as many other awful symptoms of pregnancy, and we should damn well talk about it!

More good news:

~ J has been spectacularly supportive, comforting, helpful, kind, and understanding. I don't think he could have imagined that he would go from having a happy, competent, loving partner to being married to a nonfunctional mess of a human being who was incapable of brushing her own teeth or having a simple conversation about daily events without bursting into tears. It would have been understandable if he'd been fairly upset about this (and I believe he was, on the inside) but he found stores of patience and energy somewhere, and stepped up to take care of me in every way. I repayed him with tears, grumpiness, criticism and despair, and he still came through with positivity, empathy, and lots of creative attempts to find things that I could maybe eat. I believe that his discovery that I could sometimes keep milk down when water caused immediate vomiting may have saved Lani's and my life.

~ To J's occassional worries about being a good dad, I can now respond with utter confidence. If he could keep me from self-destructing during those months, he can raise any child, no problem.

~ Lani and I are now at 21 weeks, and while I am still nauseaous almost all the time, I have only vomited once in the last two weeks, and can eat most foods without too much discomfort. I even have days when the nausea is mild enough that I can push it out of my mind for a while and focus on more positive things.

~ Knowing that Lani is a girl, and starting to call her by her name (which has been picked out for years, just waiting for her) has made her finally feel like a real member of the family. She and J bonded at the ultrasound (like a switch just flipped in his heart) and now the hardest thing is having to wait so much longer to meet her! Her due date is the 7th of April, and it feels like it will take ages to get there! The first half of the pregnancy felt like it lasted for years, but hopefully now that I'm feeling better, the rest will go by more quickly. We're both very busy at work, so perhaps that will help.

Random things I feel I should share:
~ Pregnancy has confused my body, such that it no longer understands how things are connected. For example, on my med-free vomiting days, I would often snatch up my bucket in preparation for the surge of vomit that was clearly coming, only to produce a mighty sneeze instead. I lived in perpetual fear that one of these times I was going to do both at once, but fortunately this never occurred.
~ I learned that some pregnancy hormones are powerful, but not particularly specific, resulting in bizarre things such as an overabundance of earwax. As in, get up in the middle of the night to clean your ears or it will drip onto your pillow. That level of earwax. (To be fair, I was probably already up vomiting, so I didn't find this as hard to manage).

~ People talk about pregnant women having a stronger sense of smell, but I did not realize that this could blur the (already faint) line between smell and taste. For several weeks, I could taste the smell of soap. And my helpful body would even produce the slippery sensation within my mouth as well, to achieve total revulsion. Washing my hair was the worst, as I was inondated with the smell. I genuinely thought I'd somehow lost the ability to wash my hair without getting soap in my mouth until it started happening when I washed my hands as well.
~ My brain has not fully noticed that my belly sticks out now, and I keep bumping it on things, especially the table when I go to sit down. Fortunately it's always been gently, but I need to sort that out before I hurt poor Lani in there!

Sometime soon (but I make no promises, as sleep is always my first priority these days) I would like to write a post about maternity care in NZ, which is amazing. In case you were wondering, we have done no travelling or adventuring of any kind, so you have not missed out on anything while I was unable to write. NZ is doing incredibly well in terms of coronavirus, so we are very grateful not to have to worry about that, especially while my body is busy growing a small person, and does not need to be getting sick.