My blood pressure seems to finally be responding to the calcium channel blocker! (Really: consistently 120/78 -- not great diastolic, but better than 108, which it was about 10 days ago.)
I may get a ruddy complexion for an hour after I take the pill in the morning, but it's a small price to pay. Better, the medication is about $3/month.
For many women with preeclampsia, giving birth cures the condition. And by six weeks, the vast majority of women with preeclampsia find their blood pressures have returned to pre-pregnancy levels.
You see where this is going.
At my 6 week appointment (yesterday), my blood pressure was 130/96. Not good, especially since we're going on 7 weeks of this. (Let me tell you, when I tried to run last week...it wasn't pleasant. I had to stop after a few minutes because my head was just pounding.)
I did know that some women who have underlying propensities for hypertension can have normal BPs and then, when they get preeclampsia, it triggers the underlying condition -- well, I learned that from one of the perinatalogists when I was in the hospital. And there's a strong, strong family history of hypertension (even my youngest brother, at 23, has high blood pressure). But... it's disconcerting.*
My perinatalogist had put me on a calcium channel blocker a few weeks ago, but it hasn't done much for me, except turn my cheeks really red for a couple of hours after I take it in the morning. She's not a woman to be gainsaid, and so when she recommended I see a nefrologist, I said OK. (Actually, I would have said OK except that she was already making the call to the appropriate department -- I'm still up at OHSU for all of this -- to find out which tests she could get going to save time before my appointment.)
When Eden** and I left the hospital yesterday, I'd at least gotten the blood and urine samples done; Monday I have an EKG and a kidney ultrasound, and I'll be fitted with a 24-hour blood pressure monitor. The appointment with the nefrologist will be the following week.
Fun stuff.
*About as disconcerting as waiting until September to be tested for antiphospholipid syndrome (APS).
**Matthew really hates "Ed" as her nickname, even if just for the blog...so, out it goes. I'm still pulling for Edie, though.
Normally, I can't stand being confined -- to a room, to a house, to a role. In the hospital, I spent all of my time in one room at a time: the first room in labor and delivery for monitoring, the first room in mother/baby for bedrest, the second labor and delivery room*, the second room in mother/baby. It was really, really odd to never know what the hallways outside the rooms looked like, to just make trips to the bathroom (when I was allowed to walk on my own) and then back to bed. You'd think this would have driven me insane, but I was too out of it to care.
Now that we're at home, I spend most of my time upstairs (which was true before) and most of that in the bedroom, next to Ed's bassinet. I'm trying to get the swelling in my ankles down, and I'm obviously (easily) tired, so it makes some sense. The thing is...I don't want to go anywhere. I really just want to keep hanging out in bed next to the bassinet, reading, and resting when I can. I didn't even open the blinds today (the bedroom has two large windows, and the natural light is ordinarily wonderful), which adds to the sort of timeless quality of it all.
I am still so tired, and feel guilty that I just drop my dishes off in the sink and climb back upstairs. The house is an absolute disaster. I put a (small) load of laundry in the washer and feel incredibly proud of myself. (My sister, bless her, has been doing all of Ed's laundry, which is substantial.)
Interesting. I'm sure that in time I'll go stir-crazy and have to get out of here. I'm just a long way from that right now.
*I was really out of it on all sorts of drugs when I was in this room, and it's very strange -- to me, it was four different rooms: the room when I was waiting to be induced, the room when I was initially given the magnesium sulfate, pitocin, foley bulb (to manually dilate my cervix -- as fun as it sounds) and epidural, the room when I suffered the effects of the magnesium that night and the next day, and the room I delivered Ed in.
Matthew is down and out with an honest-to-god A-type influenza. I haven't seen him like this in years (too sick to sit at a computer).
I am living in fear that I am next, flu shot or no shot, so I am trying to kick ass today to get as much done as possible. (Unfortunately, there's a long list.) It would help if I wasn't in excessive amounts of pain from sciatica, probably about as bad as I've had since law school (all of those damn uncomfortable chairs that were not built for someone 5'1). I even had dreams about stretching and spending time in child's pose (not sure if that's even all that possible right now, but I'll give it a shot).
My body is starting to betray me. I know it's just temporary, but it's frustrating. Last week was a busy week: lots of more-than-full days with lots of different tasks. But heck, I can handle it, right? I have the luxury of working at home (at night) when I need to, right?
Only if my body lets me, anyway.
I got the big things done. But between the pregnancy and the remnants of the sinus infection/ongoing allergies, I can't push myself, or I crash. It's maddening. I'm slowly settling cases and finding new attorneys for my remaining dom/rel clients, which is helping: I can concentrate on my other work. But there's still so much to do. I went from having to make one court appearance last week to three. Sigh.
And let's just say that after six months of easy pregnancy, things have gotten a bit harder. On the irrationality scale, my hormones are whacked. I can't remember a time (since, say, 15) when I was this on edge.
Friday was the worst: I was extraordinarily uncomfortable (imagine having two bowling balls in your stomach rolling around and around and putting pressure on all of your other organs) and had to work my ass off to get something done in time for the courier to pick up and file in a neighboring county. I called the department in the neighboring county to make sure there was not going to be any additional fee for filing the documents, and was assured there was not.
Needless to say, I was not happy when I came home Friday night (around 7) and learned from voicemail that the department didn't accept the filings because there was no additional fee accompanying the documents. This isn't fatal (it's not like it's federal court) and it's not even that much of a big deal because it's easily remediable. But it was the end of a long, draining week and I had no reserves left. I threw the headset across the room. (It broke. I fixed it with superglue.)
This is probably why I spent most of Saturday sleeping (that and the benedryl I had to take in order to breathe -- and the fact I had to sleep sitting up on Friday, on the couch, in order to keep breathing all night). And that Saturday slothfulness is why I spent most of Sunday being superwoman - gardening, organizing, cleaning - and why I'm so freaking tired right now.
Gemini is in a growth spurt, which isn't helping: in the last four or so days, I've gained three or four pounds. This would shock me, except that back when my mother was speaking to me, she mentioned she tended to gain very little weight except for one month of each pregnancy, when she would gain ten. The doctors would freak out each time, but that was just the way it worked.
To add insult to injury, Matthew is home with either food poisoning or some other intestinal woe -- and after feeling a bit smug that I'd escaped it, I'm starting to sense that I haven't. Nice. I guess I'll be exercising that work-from-home thing today, too.
For those of you who prayed or thought good thoughts for my little brother Phil when he was serving in Iraq, please spare another prayer or good thought for him now: he's off to Afghanistan, though not for very long this time. I hope. It just about broke my heart to put the family-member-in-service flag back up in my window this weekend.
Today I woke up feeling almost normal -- thank you amoxicillin.*
(I knew it was a sinus infection a while back, but I'd been hoping that if I remained patient, stayed hydrated, and kept rinsing my sinuses that it would clear up on its own. Er...right. The big clue this wasn't working was when I put 60cc of saline in one nostril and it never came back -- so urgent care it was. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to working a full day without going through a box of Kleenex.)
I just realized that If I posted this topic on a pregnancy board, a dozen or more women would respond with poorly-spelled diatribes against antibiotics during pregnancy and how my baby will suffer untold traumas for the rest of her life as a result. If they had any idea how long my med list remains, even during pregnancy, I'm sure they'd firebomb my house.
This is part of the growing public "ownership" interest in my body and my baby. If I were less hormonal, I might find it funny, but...I'm not and it's not. It's just annoying. There is a lot of pressure in the great, granola-eating northwest to have "natural" childbirth experiences and "natural" pregnancies. Home births are common, and I've no doubt mammary gorillas breastfeed until kindergarten. If I see another white, upper-middle-class woman with a toddler attached via brightly-colored sling while perusing organic produce at New Seasons, I'll retch on her Birks and call it hyperemesis gravidarum.
Well, probably not. It would be OK if they did their thing and left me alone to do mine. But no -- there is the inevitable questioning. After the usual when-are-you-due niceties, it goes something like this:
Nosy Do-Gooder: Are you going to have a home birth?
Shelley: No. Actually, hell no.
NDG: [shocked] Why not?
S: Because I want to be as close as possible to a whole blood supply.
NDG: [splutters] Hospitals...evil....male doctors...should have a midwife...at least a doula
S: Do you have any idea how many women used to bleed out during childbirth?
NDG: It's just not NATURAL.
S: Um, that would be my point.
I have a degree in history. I know what used to happen to women in childbirth. Women were rightly terrified of each new pregnancy, because they all had a mother or a sister or a friend who had died from complications, whether bleeding out quickly or from vile, painful, lingering infections. Infant mortality was high. I don't care how quickly the ambulance can get to my house -- it wouldn't be fast enough.
Part of the rationale behind the natural thing, I think, is the Dr. Sears mythos a lot of women bought into (I would have infinitely more respect for Dr. Sears if he was the one who borne and nursed the eight kids, instead of his faithful and trusty sidekick wife, Martha). Hundreds of years after Rousseau, people still believe in the myth of the noble savage and that if if it's good enough for the Yanomami, it's good enough for us (well, except for the cannibalism and not having SUVs, I suppose). It doesn't mean it's valid behaviorism.
(For whatever it's worth to Dr. Sears and Co., I think the idea of co-sleeping is a good one, but I'm not going to risk the kid's life by putting her in bed with us -- she can be right next to us in her own safe little bed.)
But I also suspect part of the objection from these women, the unstated part, is that if they accept establishment medicine for something as completely female-oriented as pregnancy, then they're somehow giving into the vast male conspiracy against women. And that if I choose to go the traditional medicine route, then I've betrayed my sex in some way.
I've tried, but my second-generation feminist self just doesn't get it. At all. I get sexism -- well, at least I experience sexism all the time. Some of it is fine -- this germophobe is happy not touching door handles, and I find being underestimated to be very, very useful in my work -- and some of it is not. "Not" includes just about everything that happened to me at the Deathstar and the patronizing I continue to get as a small, youngish looking female lawyer. (There is an attorney in Washington County who has called me "little lady." I would be offended, but it speaks volumes about him and not so much about me.) But heck, even the patronizing is helpful at times (see "underestimating," above).
I'm just having a hard time grasping the connection between feminism, sexism, and giving birth in a hospital. How does going up to OHSU to have a baby make me less of a feminist?
*I drafted a long post yesterday about my encounter with PP, Patronizing Physician from urgent care who wrote the script, but it just didn't work.
Who knows? Who cares? All I know is that it's a very long time from now until my acupuncture appointment at 2:15.
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