The Weirdest Shiz.

This is my second pregnancy, so you’d think I’d be prepared for a lot of the inexplicable ‘side-effects’ that come along with the miracle of giving life.  I had a pot load of crazy crap happen during my pregnancy with John Blue; swelling, preggo nose (that’s a thing, google it), dreams, break outs, my hair turned black…well it turned brown which is the same thing in my book (and for the record it did go back to dirty blonde eventually), and countless moments of uncontrollable, emotional outbursts ranging from ‘weepy’ to ‘sarcastic’ to ‘someone call her mother she has lost her last damn marble’.  But what happened last night was something I’ve never experienced before.

Big Red and I love to watch a smidge of reality t.v. together; we act like commentators and analyze the goings-on as well as make predictions about future drama while taking sides and arguing our cases to one another.  It is so much fun and one of the millions of reasons why I am so in love with my husband.  Imagine a huge dude, hulked out on the couch eating and drinking protein of all kinds passionately arguing Melissa v Teresa (RHONJ, and he is all about team Melissa while I try to explain to him how women work and why she is the devil and THEN Teresa goes and gets blamed for everything…it was not a good night for me).   I digress. Shortly after we put our debate into recess til next Sunday I told Red I was having contractions, uh-gain.  His response to all-things-pregnancy is the same every time; blank stare, mumble something inaudible and change the subject.  It sounds something like this:

Me – “Baby, holy balls, I am having a contraction dude…right here on this side…honey, crap on a crawfish it hurts…(insert panting and a slight arm extension in his direction as if asking for help or a hug or something).”

Red – “(Blank stare) Grent flarb verting floob, cough cough.  Your Cowboys sucked today, they can’t win for shit.”

AAAAAND Scene.

In his defense I have gone into detail many times about panty liners, stool softener, nursing pads and the need for fiber supplementation so it could be that I am responsible for his defense mechanism of ‘deflect and redirect’.  I take responsibility.  I tell him everything I’m going through because if I have to be the one in our marriage who carries and squirts out our babies he’s for damn sure gonna be as big a part of it as I can make him.  I just love him that much.

Ok, so back to contractions.  These little bitches, they are NOT a painless tightening of your mid-section Mr. Braxton-Hicks, they hurt dammit.  They might not be debilitating, I’m not gonna flop to the ground and writhe in agony (anymore) but they are not like a sneeze or something routine such as a foofie or accidentally biting your tongue.  It hurts dude.  Like very little, but very real, lightening bolts with swords on the ends.  I’ve been getting them more and more often since around week 26 or so.  Tangent:  I have no idea what week this is in my pregnancy, I can’t keep track to save my life, so I’m going with week 73 because that’s what it feels like.  They got a little more pronounced as I was putting on my nightgown/muumuu and washing my face.  I went to lay down in the bed next to Johnny and Big Red (yes, John has been sleeping with us lately…I know y’all got opinions but I have more than you and I think he’s going through something with the new baby coming so I’m all for snuggling up to him and Red every night and John is perfectly fine with waking up to my nose on his nose and me smiling at him like an idiot because he’s so cute) and I couldn’t get comfortable.  Every position I tried just hurt with these contractions and now I was starting to feel a dull pain in my lower back as well.  Can’t lay on my right side because I have a torn rotator cuff that’s never bothered me until I got pregnant and the hormone relaxin started to loosen all my joints making what was once a very forgettable High School Volleyball injury a now ever present annoyance.  Can’t lay on my back because I have amazon boobs and a man-child that constrict my diaphragm and lung capacity to nearly zero.  Tried my trusty left side and found comfort for a brief moment before a wave a nausea came over me and gave me ‘confused-swollen-preggo-face’.  Ok, so now I am feeling these contractions ripping my mid-section in half   coming on a bit stronger, my back aches and I may ralph up dinner at any possible second….”Don’t move.”  I told myself.  “Just stay very still and all of this will go away…”  When I was a kid, if I got scared at night because I thought there was a monster or Ted Nugent in my room I would pretend like I was asleep because THAT would make whoever wanted to kill me go away, right?  Same thought process here.

For over an hour I laid like a statue trying to will away wave after wave of contraction followed by the desire to hork-up everything in my tummy.  Red was of no help. We’ve touched on this before I believe but he’s one of those blessed individuals who falls asleep as his head is falling toward the pillow…in mid-flight.  And Red doesn’t sleep like normal people, he digs down to a level of repose known only to the undead and has to be ‘awakened’ should I need him in the middle of the night.  So I grabbed my phone and texted Lil Sista, it was around midnight and she has two small children, but I didn’t care at that point I was just trying to tap out for help before I ruined my phone with vom (short for vomit and commonly used in my house because I usually puke before I can get the whole word out).  She said a prayer for me, which was sweet, but I was expecting more of a reaction out of her like yelling at me to go to the hospital or something.  I decided if things didn’t stop in 15 minutes I would raise Red from the deep and we’d go to triage at the hospital where I would have to come up with a good excuse to tell girlfriend so she wouldn’t think I was a panicky-preggo.  And then, suddenly, relief.  It all just stopped.  Except Beau, he never stops moving.  But everything else subsided.  It must have been the prayer cause I know for damn sure the tums and fake-sleeping didn’t pan out like I was hoping.

So what was that?!?!  Has anyone experienced this kind of thing before?  Here’s what is scaring the hell out of me; either it’s signs of pre-term labor (which I don’t want because I prefer to cook my babies until the last possible second) or it’s just something I’ll have to deal with until Beau is born.  I’m only 73 weeks, I have at least 97 weeks left so the idea of this becoming ‘a thing’ for me is unacceptable.  I don’t get morning sickness and I manage to steer clear of a lot of the sickly-maladies pregnancy can bring on so perhaps this is my comeuppance?  It sucks.  I couldn’t manage to sleep the rest of the night for fear it would come back (that and my mind wouldn’t shut down from thinking of something being wrong).  I went to three different Starbucks looking for my refresher (I finally found it), it just wasn’t a tea kind of morning for this momma.

It couldn’t be my body’s reaction to the Real Housewives, could it?