All’s Fair in Love & Pregnancy
…. A preggo tells herself, halfway through a hearty cry over ordering a regular soy mocha when in her head she wanted a small soy mocha OBVIOUSLY FFS
There are a few distinct moments in one’s life that stand out as clear gateways to chapters in this existential journey. After a lifetime of mum/dad/public disapproval at cigarettes, comes the moment when your friend offers you a drag. You never thought it would come to this. You never thought YOU, safety knowing, sensible you would be in a situation where you’d have to say yes or no to a smoke and the answer wouldn’t so easily shoot out of your mouth. But here you are, living in this very defining moment of teenage hood, being inducted into the ways of the world. A world where everything you have been taught is being challenged. Secrets have been kept from you, you realise, as you wean yourself off this diet of black and white “truths” starting with this moment. Cigarettes have warning labels on them but wait until you enter the grey zone of making out and bases and need to decide which base is okay.
I remember being very cross at the world after knowing about “the deed” and looking at all adults as lascivious perverts and most of all, offended at how this escaped me. The audacity of this sneaky world. Like, who could even imagine? How many other things was I going to learn about that had no clues in cartoons or picture books?
A few months ago, I went to my first regular GP appointment in a long time.
There wasn’t a specific problem but my regular PMS symptoms were overwhelming and seemed to always start 15–20 days before Aunt Flo was due, often making me question whether this was all purely hormonal or if I had to seriously check my behaviour. Can I say that any woman reading this is nodding to this spell of self doubt and worry that takes over every time you’re acting up and there’s no period in sight? Speaking of lady Flo, I was a week late but not like I had always been regular. I was sure I had a hormonal imbalance and walked in expecting to be diagnosed with PCOS or having a low haemoglobin count.
The first thing I was told to do was take a pregnancy test. Had the possibility crossed my mind? Sort of, in the way that you know its a possibility but you purposefully ignore it, daring it to reveal itself through more outlandish symptoms. I also had a blood test done to test for anaemia and thyroid levels. Those results were going to take a while but the preggo test was going to reveal results in a few minutes.
I tried psyching myself out that my life could change forever but I was mostly thinking about my over delivery with the urine sample. I got called in pretty quick. Not enough time to msg my partner in real time about my thoughts. The pathologist, a kind old lady, very sweetly with a look of deep understanding told me that it was a negative. She then asked me if that’s what I wanted, if it was good or bad news. I was truly at a loss for words and nodded enthusiastically when she offered that it was probably neither.
That walk back home goes down as a defining, sobering moment of adulthood.
Something about how gently and sympathetically she had revealed that I was not pregnant, had opened my eyes to a feeling that I couldn’t articulate just yet. Was it disappointment? That was silly because we hadn’t been actively ‘trying’. I had to acknowledge that I’d always thought very naively of pregnancy as something that would ‘just happen’. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind that I might have to track my periods or take supplements. The term TTC (trying to conceive) was alien to me, as was their existence online. Like a teen discovering sex, I experienced the familiar feeling of being kept in the dark about a world of adult truths. That this wouldn’t necessarily be easy. It wouldn’t be a happy accident. There was a very real possibility that we might not have any “good news” to share for months and possibly not know exactly why we weren’t able to do so. And this was before even having a conversation about fertility.
You don’t enter this world until you do. And when you do, you discover that there are single, childless couples who are more woke than you are but it hasn’t come to your notice because … they keep that research to themselves..? As tempting as it is to whinge on about the lack of openness in a lot of my female friendships, I’m grateful for the boundless perspectives and information that the internet allows me to access. It opened me up to numerous stories of infertility, IVF, miscarriages and everything that no-one “close to you” wants to share. I hear some of you saying that it is their choice to keep this experience private and I wonder then if this age of communication has brought us closer or allowed us to construct boundaries at will. I hope that in my willingness to share through my blog, someone feels like they can be vulnerable with me or at least that I am real and vulnerable.
About five days earlier, a friend of mine I’d known since high school had sent me a message that she was expecting a baby with her partner. At the time I was overjoyed for her and genuinely wished them the best. I didn’t ask if it was planned (a super common response to preggo announcements, turns out). I had nodded along when she said that it was something they’d just started talking about… That this would probably be the year that they focused their efforts that way. She had more or less implied that it had just all aligned. And I guess for some people it happens that way but five days later, my feelings about this news were somehow more in line with how couples who try for ages might feel after hearing a pregnancy announcement. Irrational as it may be, it feels like a personal insult. It feels like they’re bragging. It feels unfair that something so profound happens so easily for people who claim they weren’t even trying while you and your partner are on your fifth visit to the third fertility doctor in the city, unable to diagnose the problem.
And that was what the moment during my walk was about — realising that problems in adult life are not only unfair, but they are far more isolating.
I will never ever say that my pregnancy just happened. It happened after the very sobering realisation that being a mother the traditional way was not something that was a given. It happened only after I had spent weeks imagining the pain of such damning rejection. How it must feel so dead end, how confronting it is to know that your body might not be able to do this thing that everyone says ‘just happens’ and you need to love it despite this blip with no-one telling you it’s okay, its normal and more than anything, that it is to be expected. Because even if your friends aren’t discussing it, statistics say that one in seven couples may deal with conceiving issues (NHS, UK). There’s similar statistics available for other developed countries but no-one knows in more conservative societies that probably remain hush hush and don’t even study this or fund research in this regard. My point is that it is far more common than we think it is.
To become pregnant, to have a pregnancy without complications, to deliver a mentally and physically able child… Every single one of those things is by no means guaranteed. And that is all just in relation to the child. As a woman, there is no telling how this will impact you emotionally, mentally and physically.
A week later, I was notified that my results didn’t point at PCOS and my iron levels were fine.
Life went on and around the same time a month later, I was hit with PMS symptoms that felt way out of proportion again. A particularly windy weekend was spent at the park and I got home to not one, not two but about 9–10 mouth ulcers. In all fairness, I’m an ulcer gal. I’ve always had them as a classic PMS symptom but the sheer number and severity this time was shocking. It was accompanied by flu like symptoms and swollen lymph nodes, which can happen when it’s that many ulcers. A trip to the same GP got me a COVID-19 test referral, because we were at that time where you enter a clinic with anything affecting the throat and you had to get tested even if that wasn’t your main issue. I tested negative for the virus and other tests related to oral infections. The final diagnosis was that I probably had “some other” form of virus. A heavily numbing mouthwash and the legendary kenalogbase, an ulcer cream that is the only foolproof remedy I have found so far, are finally what led to that situation slowly getting better.
That following week I was late again and this time, a home pregnancy test confirmed the reason for delay. How do I say this…. Life had entered my womb, and how!
My pregnancy symptoms therefore were severe mouth ulcers, and a general dip in the immune system due to the crazy fluctuating hormones, which caused those flu like symptoms.
A theory of mine that was affirmed by the GP. I say this because 99% of forums online do not talk about bloody mouth ulcers being anything but a sign of herpes.
The second baffling thing came along around a month after. It was a sudden literal pain in the butt. It had started after a particularly long jog and I was sure it was because of my bad shoes or lack of dynamic stretches. Runners forums led me to think I had a flared up piriformis and I spent weeks in pigeon and butterfly pose for the temporary relief. Even after a week or two of rest, the pain wouldn’t go away and showed up intermittently. I was trying hard to follow through on my COVID safe workout plan, which was now just strength training, but soon the pain was creeping around this area of activity as well. Around the 12th week of my pregnancy, after a gym session that involved walking lunges, goblet squats and another completely pregnancy safe exercise, my husband and I went to the mall. About an hour in, I was hit with this pain in my groin that felt like someone had whacked it with a kettlebell. I had never experienced something like this especially post a workout and along with that nagging butt pain this was rendering me immobile.
Googling led me to the conclusion that I might have something known as SPD or PGP, which in simple terms is pelvic instability.
This whole time I had thought it was my walking/running technique when in reality, it was my ligaments stretching to accommodate upcoming bodily changes. I went to a physio who explained that it was purely hormonal. Some bodies secrete more of the hormone relaxin (the annoying cause of pretty much every bodily change in pregnancy) than others and that was the case here. My left pelvis had a lot more give upon examining and this was not just the reason for the groin pain but also the butt pain as they’re all part of the pelvis! It works as one unit to provide us stability and that stop’s being the case when relaxin enters the picture.
After the relief at knowing the exact problem wore off, I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer walk or sit cross legged without painful consequences. Running was out of the question. I had to break up with a month old walking buddy and stopped attending community yoga classes. This affected my meditation practice that had been painfully reinstated for the 67th time. I reached out to other preggos and new mums, including my own mum, and no-one had experienced pelvic pain. Literally no-one. I only had internet mums to validate this pain as normal. And even then, there wasn’t a blog post with a story like mine, definitely not someone who had this start in their first trimester. Even my GP thought it was odd to have this sort of discomfort so early. A pelvic belt was recommended but I couldn’t bring myself to get one, when I wasn’t even showing!
And then came the tears and the second hand feeling of physical disability. Because there was a possibility that this might continue after delivery. Another sobering truth about bringing life into this world is that it can change your physical body forever. Not talking post partum weight but actual disability. I cried in the shower for all the times I had thought less of my body for not looking a particular way, for being impatient at that last bit of flab, for not celebrating it enough for sheer ability. The guilt was so real.
I say second hand feeling of disability because in this time and age I’m not sure if it is politically correct to call yourself disabled unless you meet the criteria that God knows who sets. I don’t use crutches yet (although severe SPD can result in that) and I don’t take up a handicapped parking spot. However, I have had to make changes in the way I live my life. My mobility has been severely compromised. I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy or anything that triggers an imbalance in weight with my body (and there I was doing lunges haha). I have slowly been learning my new body and testing what works and what doesn’t. Swimming works, cold environments don’t. Glad to be unemployed at a time like this and also learning to completely ignore any instagram posts about pregnancy fitness because it totally doesn’t include people like me. I have gotten more comfortable with a pelvic belt. I’ve also got a pregnancy body pillow and no, it is not making me want to replace my husband with it. Right now it mostly comes in the way of me trying to get out of bed with my legs tightly together as I urgently need to pee. Speaking of, I’ve invested some time and effort in kegels and dare I say that it is strengthening my pelvic floor and helping that dreaded groin pain. Would be great if it also stopped the leaking that now sometimes accompanies my violent sneezes (I know no other way) but all in due time, I suppose.
The emotional stress of having a physical disability comes from not comparing your situation to anyone else’s and trying not to complain too much.
At the end of the day, no-one can understand your pain except you and I’ve come to stop expecting people to get it. I have focused all my energy on accepting that every single day is different and one day might require me to be give up movement for hours together while other days might allow for 1 or 2 consecutive hours on my feet, walking around a mall.
What I’m trying to say in this ridiculously long blog post is that pregnancy is a process that can be isolating, at any point. As much as we try to find community during this phase, it is equally important to embrace it for the unique experience that it is. Being comfortable in its uniqueness paves the way for a lifetime of nurturing the uniqueness in a whole new soul ❤
