gambled i would lose

sleepin. ur doin it wrong.

 ok so the big deal this month is i have to learn to sleep on my side.  and not just any side, either!  the left one.  any other position for sleeping will, like, suffocate the baby in the womb.  very bad things.  restricted blood flow to the uterus and all that.

i am a natural back-sleeper.  actually, to be more specific, i usually fall asleep on my back, with my arms up over my head and my hands under the pillow.  apparently this looks uncomfortable but i assure you, it isn't.  and i wake up - grudgingly and never before the alarm goes off - still on my back.

since we've switched sides of the bed for later when the cosleeper is over there, now being on my left side means i'm facing in, which is even more unnatural for me, but i'm not going to switch again.

anyway so these days i'm sleeping with 4 pillows.  three big and one little.  i try different combinations every night in the hopes of find the One True Position.  and i've taken to sticking a rolled-up sock between my sleep shirt (which is tight and stretchy enough to pull this off) and my back.  that way if i roll onto my back, it's at least vaguely uncomfortable.  i may need to sew a tennis ball into a t-shirt, though, because i'm getting sadly used to sleeping on a sock.

i'm not sure how much is related to the new sleep position efforts and how much is just regular pregnancy-related, but i'm sleeping a lot worse these days.  i wake up several times a night - not to pee, like a normal pregnant lady, but just to flop around and be uncomfortable and too hot and too cold and mess with the covers.  also, i have vivid and bizarre dreams that i think make my sleep less restful.

sunday i will be 16 weeks along.  i'll round up a bit and say 4 months.  16 to 20 weeks is when most women feel the first movements, according to dr. google.  since i am neither a wee skinny thing nor have i been pregnant before, i can expect later rather that sooner - but does that stop me from wondering whether every little gas bubble and twinge is actually the little tatertot tapdancing on my uterine walls?  no, it doesn't.

(was that it?  oh, no, that was a muscle twitching in my shoulder.)

i really hope i feel movement early - and not just because, hey, proof the baby's still alive in there.  also because i want to prove the two women wrong who, at the Big Gay Pregnancy Group meeting, kind of laughed at me when i mentioned waiting to feel movement and said there was no way i'd feel it before 20 weeks.  grrrr.  i'll show you, you condescending nay-sayers who say nay!

breast gig ever

my favorite gig to do in the whole world is the Race For The Cure, which was this past weekend.  if the pros outweigh getting up at 5:30 am on a saturday, you know it's good... and it is.  basically, we show up before the runners start and set up on the mall near the end of the race.  we start playing when the first runner comes up the road and we try not to stop for the next two hours until the street sweepers pass.  (last year, we had to endure the disappointment of hundreds - maybe thousands - of runners while the emergency medical team ministered to a runner who had fainted directly in front of our tent.  apparently paramedics do not enjoy the sweet, sweet pan music while they are working.)

and for the whole two hours, i don't think my huge goofy grin leaves my face.  the population of a small city runs by, dressed in pink, with signs and t-shirts and hats and stickers telling everyone who they are running for.  the first few are concentrating on winning, but the rest wave and smile and give thumbs-up signs and shout "thanks!"  some people stop and dance, or stop and take pictures, or just stop and listen for a while.  friends wave or stop by to say hi to us as they pass.  people recognize us on the metro afterwards - i even got stopped on the street in silver spring later.  the whole city seems to be teeming with pink-clad people being all friendly to each other.  it's just so ridiculously uplifting and poignant.

this year was especially meaningful to me.  most people reading this know that in march, just a week before we found out we were pregnant, my mom was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma: breast cancer. 

the good news: it was a small tumor that she couldn't feel even after the mammogram found it, and it was the sort that hormone therapy can be used on.  but there was also bad news: the biopsy also indicated that it was a fast growing, disorganized type of cancer - grade 3, the highest.  aggressive.  breast cancer tends to be more aggressive in general in younger women and pre- or peri-menopausal women.  there was also some confusion over the exact size, with the MRI (supposedly more accurate) giving a much larger estimate than the ultrasound had.  the larger estimate was still beneath the cutoff for stage 2 going on size alone (2 cm) but it was far closer and meant there was a much greater chance that it could have already spread to her lymph nodes, which would up-stage her anyway and vastly impact her prognosis.

we had a terrifying wait as information trickled in and we waited for her surgery.  another "area of interest" was identified and biopsied and found to be nothing.  i learned more about breast cancer than i ever wanted to know.

she decided to have a lumpectomy with radiation to follow.  the surgery went extremely well - they got all of it in the first try, the tumor was closer to the small estimate than the large (it was 1 cm), and her nodes were clear.   this meant she was definitely stage 1, with an excellent prognosis even with the "strikes" against her of age (my mom is pretty young to get breast cancer) and grade.

unfortunately, we weren't quite done with the bad news.  while evaluating how chemotherapy might benefit her, we got a different result about the hormone receptor status, indicating that there were no adjuvant therapy options other than chemo open to her.  she was probably going to have to do it anyway, but that sealed the deal. 

she's now in the midst of her chemo regimen, and she still has radiation to look forward to.  it's taken a lot of her energy away - and her hair, of course.  she has to avoid people at certain times and take medication for pain and nausea.  it's been hard for me not being there - i have only seen her once in the 3 months since the diagnosis.  i know that she has wonderful friends and the whole rest of the family, but i am her daughter and she needs me.  i've taken the roles of research assistant and exercise haranguer (hey mom, did you go for a walk today?), and i knit her some chemo caps, of course - 2 that she already has, and one more in the works.  we talked frequently before - we talk even more now.  but i just want to be there the whole time, for all of it, in person.

i'm just so grateful that she took care of herself enough to have yearly mammograms, because if there's one thing i have learned it's that the largest single factor in her prognosis was how very early it was caught.  with a cancer this aggressive, it wouldn't have taken long - maybe even just one year skipped - for the picture to be very, very different.  and just thinking about that makes me cry.

the purge has begun

so i have a bit of a "baby bump" now.  for the past two weeks or so, i've only been able to hold up my jeans with a hairband stretched between the button and the buttonhole.  note:  this is not especially good at keeping the zipper zipped.  i had gotten some shirts but no pants a while back, so i finally ordered some old navy maternity stuff.  and boy does it feel nice to wear clothes that fit. 

elastic-band-waisted jeans, by the way, are a win.  why mess with zippers and buttons?

last night i went through the closet and took out anything that is too small or too short or will be very soon.  it's all going in a big tupperware and up in the attic.  goodbye, pre-pregnancy clothes!  i will miss my very favorite jeans most of all - my Lucky's.  unfortunately Lucky does not make short-inseamed maternity jeans, and i hate hemmed jeans.

p.s. i now own nursing bras, two of them.  fun!  i measured myself to really know what size i ought to get, and the results were... shocking.  i will not reveal them here.  let's just say i never Did imagine i'D buy one in that Distinct cup size.  pregnancy is AWESOME.