Pregnancy

I really didn’t enjoy being pregnant. I just never felt 100% well and I didn’t ever feel like myself. I certainly don’t miss my bump. Someone with my lack of spacial awareness is pretty dangerous with a baby bump – no door frame or wall was safe. I didn’t even have any interesting cravings. The only thing pregnancy was good for was getting other people to do everything for you. When you’re pregnant you can just huff and puff about how “everything’s just so hard” and someone will do it for you. Being pregnant also got me a seat at a sweltering, jam-packed Barcelona train station, for which I’ll forever be grateful.

As well as the ailments (see previous post), there’s the tiredness. No one can describe this tiredness to you and you can’t be prepared for it. It’s completely different to sleep deprivation once the baby’s here. It’s fatigue. Exhaustion. You feel like you hit a wall and just cannot go on any more. Mine was nothing to do with lack of sleep as I generally slept OK throughout; I just turned into a zombie at 4pm every day (no good for anyone working 10:45am – 7pm five days a week). I kept bringing my maternity leave date forward as this exhaustion got to me more and more.

Then there’s the bladder weakness. “Wear a pantyliner for that,” my Mum said. Nope, I needed full on Always Super sanitary towels. I couldn’t laugh, sneeze or go for more than hour without wetting myself. Thankfully it did just disappear post-partum without me ever finding out where my pelvic floor was – I just squeezed and hoped for the best.

Then there’s the appointments. My diary was full. I started maternity leave on the 28th November and lost fifteen hours of work in November because of appointments. I had consultant-led care and extra growth scans, as well as a glucose tolerance test. Then there were Parentcraft classes (so lovely to attend that first one – entitled Labour – and sob my heart out as soon as I walked through my front door because “I couldn’t do it”. Thanks Whiston Hospital, nothing like throwing you in at the deep end). I had the usual midwife appointments, monthly consultant appointments plus saw the consultant after each of my four scans.

Ah, scans. Wonderful, magical experiences where you get to see your baby for the first time. They are truly amazing. You can see the baby moving, hear its heartbeat, find out the sex (we didn’t) and get your little photo to take home. What isn’t so magical is that you have to attend these scans with a full bladder so the baby is pushed up and the sonographer can get a better view. I’ve already spoken about the bladder weakness. I haven’t mentioned that sonographers always run late. At my 20 week scan they were running so late I genuinely thought I was going to die of bladder explosion. In the end I had to go to the toilet or I would have come a cropper. I asked a sonographer’s permission first; “Can you just let a bit out?” she asked. A bit??? This lady had clearly never been pregnant because there is no such level of bladder control as ‘letting a bit out’. So I just weed and, funnily enough, they could still see the baby.

What was honestly the best scan experience of all was the HD scan we opted to have privately. We went to Take A Peek in St Helens and I could not recommend them enough. We wanted to keep the baby’s sex a surprise and our sonographer, Nikki, was great. She didn’t even look herself and called the baby ‘Shim’ throughout. If you’re unfamiliar with HD scans the premise is you can pay for a scan any time you like (I think I was 31 weeks) and you get a half hour appointment, family are welcome, and the baby is shown on a screen in HD quality so you can watch them messing about, find out the sex if you wish, cry a lot about how amazing it is then take home photos or a DVD afterwards. Nikki was amazing, talking us through what the baby was up to, showing us him from different angles, encouraging him to move and giving us estimated weights and measurements. And it was enjoyable because a full bladder was not required! We chose to get all our photos on a USB stick and here you can see just how true to life the HD scan turned out to be:

As my due date approached, I got more and more irritable. Mostly with other people. If I ever receive another text that just says “Any sign? X” I think I will throw my mobile phone in the canal. I genuinely considered Google imaging a show and sending it with the message “well, this just came out of my lady bits”, they wouldn’t be so interested in any signs then, would they? I got more tired, less able to move and more hormonal. He was 15 days overdue so the phrase “fed up” doesn’t even come close. I felt like I was pregnant for 42 years not 42 weeks and so, no, I do not miss pregnancy one bit.