Friday, July 11, 2014

7 Quick Takes: Oddities from this Week Edition


Oh what a week!  I had a few posts planned but in the roller coaster days that followed Mae eating a bagel, things have been a little too busy to sit down and type.  So today will be mini updates (I hope... I'm so bad at writing mini-anythings... too much rambling goes on when I start to type), to hopefully combine all those posts that I almost wrote, or that I started that are now half finished in my draft bin (posts rarely, rarely make it out of the draft bin around here!):


As we roll on into the third trimester this month I had my last second trimester doctor's appointment this last week.  It was a pretty average appointment, just checking in to make sure things are going along smoothly.  I told the doctor that I thought this baby felt bigger than Patch or Mae at the same stage (only because Patch and Mae never really felt crowded to me and Sadie did, and they were both slightly smaller at 9 lbs 1 oz and 8 lbs 12 oz, whereas this baby to me feels considerably bigger already).  He's told me in the past that studies show that mother's who have had more than one baby tend to be very accurate when predicting birth weight.

Baby is measuring big on the measuring tape, so I guess we'll see if he'll actually surpass his biggest sisters record as our heaviest baby, or if he's going to continue the pattern of each baby being just a little bit smaller than the previous one (or if he'll be somewhere in the middle).


Patch, the transverse baby.
I guess he could be feeling gigantic at this point because he seems to spend a good deal of his time transverse, occasionally flipping to the breach position before flipping back over.  While I was pregnant with Patch (who had something like 14 ultrasounds before he was born) I got pretty good at figuring out babies position before they would bring it up on the screen and this baby definitely likes to flip.  He seems to be stretching out sideways and then following his brother's footsteps by turning breach (that head under the ribs with little feet kicking straight down is a pretty distinct feeling) before flipping back into his favorite sideways position.

With the section it doesn't really matter what position he's in and transverse has yet to become the most annoying position I can think of since baby still has a lot of growing to do, but I do find myself wondering if baby is going to spent the majority of the next few months kicking me in the side just like his big brother (Patch was transverse when he was delivered).


Okay this might be a quick take to skip if your at all squemish about things like c-sections and scars and c-section scars doing things that make the doctor say "if that happens again go straight to labor and delivery."

So... a few weeks ago something happened and I didn't write about or even mention it to my mom when I called her that night on the phone because... well, it took my brain a while to process it and I really sort of pushed it out of my thoughts in a "well that was scary... let's not think about it again... maybe you're just being dramatic?" sort of way.

One Friday evening Paul and I were loading the kids in the car after finishing up an outing.  I'd just picked up someone (I think all 25 lbs of Patch) from where he was standing and stood him on the edge of the inside of the car so he could climb into his seat, when I felt the worst, worst feeling I could have imagined.  It was like the pain of oh... maybe transition?  I yelled.  Paul took the kids and I somehow made it into my seat.  I waited for it to pass.  And it hurt and hurt and hurt... a sort of stabby, sort of contraction-y, sort of being torn in two sort of pain that had Paul racing to get the kids into their seats to take me to the ER.

Now I've tended to have fairly painful contractions, on and off, through the last three pregnancies, and while this was considerably more painful than average, that fact made me slightly less panicked than I would have otherwise been.  Then it stopped.  Totally and completely.  After five minutes I felt normal.  I told Paul to drive us home.  I lay down for a while, while he got the kids into bed.  Baby kept on kicking and moving and I figured it was just some weird fluke and I went on with my day, folding laundry and cleaning and sewing once it passed.

Fast forward back to the doctor's appointment when, just as it was ending I remembered and said "oh, I forgot, something weird happened..." and related the story, noticing that my doctor did not seem to think it was quite as unimportant as I did when I was telling it.  After the telling and rechecking my bump he said that while it could have been a cyst rupturing he thinks that part of my c-section scar on the uterus had adhered to something else inside my body and it sounds like it tore away from whatever it was attached to... and if it happens again, especially with bleeding, just go straight to labor and delivery to get checked.

So... here's hoping it doesn't happen again, because I'm pretty sure if it does I will completely panic, knowing what the doctor thinks it could be (and also because, incisions tearing from anything just doesn't sound like something that should be happening).


I think Quick Take #3 is a classic example of how I can never make it through 7 Quick Takes without making one way, way too long.  Hopefully #4 makes up for it.  Here's a picture Maggie made in therapy by gluing together fish that she requested from her therapist (she's a big fan of gluing):



As some of you know from my plea for advice on the facebook page, Maggie ate 3/4 of a gluten filled bagel this week.  I pretty much freaked out and did everything I could to minimize the effects.  I gave her a double dose of digestive enzymes, along with magnesium and her prescription laxative.  I sent Paul to the store and gave her a dose of activiated charcoal.  Then I sat around feeling helpless and watching as she stopped using words and bounced off the walls for therapy that day.  It happened so fast.

In the afternoon, when she was a mix of not feeling well and still super hyper I gave her an antihistamine, hoping that maybe that would stop whatever was taking place, since we don't really know what exactly it is about wheat that makes her so sick (allergy?  celiacs?  gluteo-morphine reaction?).

The week that's followed has been a bit of a roller coaster.  It hasn't been as bad as it has in the past. I'm not sure if that's because she has gained tools for managing the pain and communicating what's going on, or because some part of the various supplements I threw together actually worked.

Mornings have bee good.  She didn't lose her words after the second day or grind her teeth nearly as much.  The afternoons have been harder.  She tends to get sick (and feel like she has a fever) in the afternoons.  One night was still spent sobbing and screaming (which is always the worst part of what happens post-gluten).

I'm hoping she's through the worst of it and relatively hopeful that it might not take as long to recover this time, since she definitely doesn't seem to have regressed in the same way she has in the past.

Thank you to everyone who prayed for us this week!  We definitely felt those prayers!


Sadie and I have been entering a "win a free trip to Disney World" photo contest.  She's pretty enthusiastic about it... so I thought I'd share the photo we entered this week here.  The theme had to do with Happy from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and here are the poses she came up with:



If you're on facebook you may have already seen this but I had to share it here too.  Before the gluten incident Mae was sitting at the table coloring.  She told me "mermaid!  Mermaid!" while she drew, indicating that she was drawing a mermaid.  And she did.  I was ridiculously proud of her, since so far most of her drawings are shapes and lines and I just had to share it on the blog itself:


For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad it wasn't so bad this time. Activated charcoal is meant to deal with poisons so I'm not sure how it would work gluten. Have you had her checked for celiac's? I know you said she's the only one without a wheat allergy. Supposedly celiac's causes your stomach to hurt awful and makes you really constipated. Unfortunately the only way they can check for it is to have her eat gluten. If you have celiac's your body produces something that it wouldn't ordinarily do. So they test for that.

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