Has everyone realized that pregnancy takes up almost a year of your life?! People say it's 9 months but the actual 40 weeks of pregnancy sounds more like ten months to me. Being an elementary teacher and doing the math, there typically are 4 weeks in a month and 4 times 10 equals 40 all equating to a 10 month pregnancy! Since there are only 12 months in a year this event really is time consuming and significant. Throughout the pregnancy, I often wondered what I was like physically before. How was my health? Was it normal for me to feel constipated or nauseous or have a headache? I thought I would never remember! The funny thing is now that I have been un-pregnant for a week, I'm starting to feel like my old self again...slowly of course but the pain in my ribs from the baby's head and the pain in my back from the rib cage expanding has been gone and that helps me to feel a little more normal each day.
Overall I don't think my pregnancy was too bad although there were plenty of days it wasn't easy. I consider myself lucky bypassing much sickness and other symptoms. Things didn't get really hard until about the third trimester when little JAG's head felt stuck in my ribs causing lots of pain to sit at my desk all day, etc. Let's be honest, because of this, I spent most days working on my laptop from my bed as I am an online teacher who works from home. In addition to not having much to complain about, I also missed the fun stuff! The one thing I always dreamed about being pregnant was to have cravings! I was so excited to see what interesting things I would want to eat. I even looked forward to desiring "pickles and ice cream" but sadly I had no cravings. For a lot of the time I just wanted mashed potatoes, how boring! My husband says I already order the weirdest thing on the menu every time we go out, so there really wasn't much room for me to get any more adventurous cravings than my normal eating habits.
Fast forward to 36 weeks pregnant. At 36 weeks pregnant, I went to the doctor to be told that she thought my baby was still breech (hence that head in my ribs) and made me schedule an ultrasound to know for sure. She then told me if the baby was indeed breech, which it was, I would need a c-section. Whenever my husband and I had talked about writing a birth plan, I told him I really was ok with whatever the doctors wanted to do as long as I didn't need a c-section and all within an instant, the one thing I wanted was no longer an option. Only 5% of babies are still breech at 36 weeks. The doctors offered me the option to have a version where they physically try and turn the baby from the outside. They also told me this was a painful procedure, could lead to an emergency c-section if the baby's heart rate is affected, works better if it's not a first pregnancy, and my placenta was in the front allowing even more room for risk. All in all I had a 50% chance of this working. I cried on the way home from the doctor's that day not knowing what to do. My husband and I talked and decided the risks and the pains from the version procedure were not worth a 50-50 chance and so we scheduled the c-section for 39 weeks. This may have been the most emotional week of the pregnancy although I did get to skip labor and pushing and this whole thing turned out to be a great decision for our family after all. Obviously it was most important that we got our Joaquin in the safest way possible.
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