Iron Poisoning & Morning Sickness

Once I knew I had a bun in the oven, I decided to be a responsible mom-to-be and immediately went to the local natural foods store and purchased some prenatal vitamins.

This I will never do again.

One thing I have since learned is that there are no regulations on what can be termed "prenatal" vitamins.  So, whatever amounts of various vitamins the manufacturers care to include, they can and do.

Within a week of beginning to take these vitamins, I moved the first stage of my belongings to Andrew's apartment--and I forgot to bring my special vitamins.  So, I went out and bought some more of a different brand, also from the all-natural section of the store.  A day or so later, I was having serious pains in my digestive tract.  We weren't sure of the cause at first, but it seemed like it might be a passing thing, so we continued on our 2+ hour journey to collect more of my horde of items from my old apartment.  After arriving there, we learned that it may have been related to constipation, so we got some laxatives.

Pain was constant and intense.  Several doses of laxatives later, and about 48 hours into the pain with no relief, we decided to go to the ER.  I had no health insurance.

At first, everything seemed to go well.  The medical professionals wanted to run tests to try and ascertain the status of the baby.  (We did not yet know the vitamins were the cause of my pain.)  An inept almost-nurse stabbed me several times over trying to take a blood sample.  Then I was catheterized.  They reverse-filled my bladder with water so that an ultrasound image could show my uterus.  [I was later billed $50 for a pharmacy item, which turned out to be that bag of water!]

Then I got to see Jackson for the first time!  He was so, so tiny, having only gestated about 5 weeks at that point.  Just the tiniest little flicker on a black and white monitor showed Andrew and I our little darling's heartbeat and a body smaller than the tip of my pinky finger.

Shortly afterward, the catheter was removed without the little air bubble that held it in fully deflated (youch!  hurt to pee for weeks!).  A doctor appeared for the first time and probed my belly for a few seconds, then left without introducing himself or even offering a diagnosis.  I was ejected from the hospital with no clue as to the origin of my problem and forced to sign papers swearing that I would pay the bills they would send me.

They handed me a prescription for more laxatives and sent me out the door.

The next day I was due to start a new job near my new home.  I had to call and delay my job start.  The second day, I decided I still needed treatment.  I was rejected from the health department pending paperwork, then I was rejected from a walk-in clinic after they finally realized that I was pregnant.  "We don't serve your kind here."

Finally, I ended up back at another ER.  I waited for triage in a filthy room while a pair of hookers fought to get their drunk pimp allowed to stay inside with them.

After a few hours waiting at the ER, I finally got a nurse (a very competent man with a good sense of humor) and then my favorite person of the month:  Dr. Prabhu.  The doc was a young man with thinning hair, but he really knew his stuff.  He explained to us about the 3 types of iron used in vitamin pills, why I was in so much pain (my stomach lining was missing much of its mucous), and then he helped me out.  I was so dehydrated from being barely able to ingest anything for days, plus all the laxatives, so they stuck me on a saline drip.  He gave me Maalox and some directions for other relief, and I finally started to feel better.

Nervous about the prospect of losing my new job, I tried to work right away.  This was abig  mistake, as I began morning sickness that day and still was exhausted and in pain.  My new employer and I quickly agreed that I was in no condition to work and that a replacement was best found.  The next 8 weeks I spent on bed rest, for the most part.

The oddest part of the whole experience (besides the doubt everyone expressed that iron could be so unforgiving) was the reaction Andrew and I had towards Dr. Prabhu.  For whatever reason, we both agreed that if we were zombies, his head would look extremely tasty--a delicacy of sorts.

The first ER visit was more like something out of a sitcom.  My mother had been present, at my request, as she was the only one outside of Andrew who knew about my pregnancy yet.  With Andrew on my left and Mom on my right, we expressed our sincere amazement at how I had been impregnated so easily in the first place.  My brave fiance then declared that it was my fault, telling my mother that I should have listened to him.  After all, "I told her not to swallow!"

"I'm What?!?"

Let's rewind.

March 24th, 2007, Andrew and I went to a party.  We had a disagreement on the way home, but we made up.  We made up very, very well.  VERY well.  Ahem.

So, we finally went to sleep a little after 3am, and yet before 10am even rolled around, I woke up feeling happier and more complete than I could ever remember feeling.  Lately I had been thinking a lot about a story my mother had told me.  Apparently when she woke up the morning after I was conceived, she rolled over and told my father she was pregnant.  I was the second child, so I thought it was reasonable enough that she would remember, since it had then only been 9 months since she'd given birth to my older sister.

With my own feelings on waking that morning most likely (says my hindsight) in a cloud of excessive oxytocin production, I rolled over and told Andrew I was pregnant.  He was too exhausted to share my cheerful exuberance, nor did he remember this statement.  I let him sleep for a few more hours, and in the interim, I made an effusively loving entry about Andrew in my diary.  It's sickeningly dripping with adoration, and I reread it now and again.  (I still feel the same way, really, but I have to be careful not to fluff his ego TOO much.)

Fast forward 4 weeks.  My period was late.  Only 4 days late, mind you, but late all the same.  My previous period had been 13 days late, which was abnormal for me, and in the end it just came down to me stressing too much over the possibility of being pregnant.  So, I told myself I was just going to take a pregnancy test to resolve the issue so I could stop worrying.

By this time, I had been feeling really fatigued and had just explained it away with a variety of excuses.  My cheese crackers tasted funny, all of a sudden, and so did my apple juice.  At first I thought perhaps a power outage had caused the drastic flavor changes, but that seemed ridiculous when I considered the crackers.  Strangely enough, I had also been craving sappy old movies and musicals, and it was a rare thing for me to watch a movie (I haven't owned a TV in 7 years; don't miss it a bit!), so I was watching DVDs every night on my PC.

All those abnormalities were forgotten by the time I was taking this test, quite casually, by myself before preparing to go to a Pampered Chef party at the same house as 4 weeks prior.  I looked at the result.  Then I looked at it again.  "I'm what?!?"

Without panicking, I quickly fired off a text message to Andrew to go outside at work and call me.  He did, and in the most serious and skeptical manner, my darling Andrew whom I love and adore said, "Go take another test, and call me back."

Well, I didn't have a chance until after the party, and we agreed not to discuss it with anyone else until we were sure.  My mom became the exception, as she was the one to attend the party with me, and Andrew and I were currently unmarried and traveling 2+ hours each weekend for our "dates".  We had also only been dating for 4 months at the time of discovery.

I finally did take another pregnancy test at Andrew's insistence, making a late-night run to the pharmacy.  It confirmed things.  (I still have these dear little mementos--my Jackson "piss sticks"--stored away, though I don't really know why.)

Now what?  Luckily Andrew and I were in the process of having me move in with him, and I had already secured full-time employment in town and begun to tell all my clients (being then self-employed in a variety of capacities; see About Me) that a replacement would need to be found.  This did not help resolve my feelings of panic about the idea of moving away from all my relatives just when I was about to sprout a family of my own.

There is a happy continuation (eventually) to this story, but for now, I will leave you.

Life in the Cheerios Garden

Jackson is my son, and therefore he is brilliant.    This is the assumption of many if not most parents about their own children, and like many others, I regularly seek proof of this truth.

He is a scientist at heart.  Clearly he takes after his father, my scientifically-minded husband Andrew whom I cloned inadvertently.  Oh, sure, there are hints of my own aspect in Jackson, but these appear only fleetingly and usually only when he's being somewhat unphotogenic.  (At such times, Andrew claims Jackson looks like Tom Jones; I have photographic proof that he is actually close to the mark on that one.)  However, most of the time, my darling son spends his days experimenting with whatever he finds.

Jackson is quite mechanically minded.  He loves to take things apart and look inside them to see how they work.  Thankfully he has shown more interest in zoology than in biology so far.  Electronic devices are his greatest joy.  The only thing that comes close is his burgeoning love of what I can only assume is botany.

You see, Jackson is 12 months old, and he is trying to grow a garden.  Indoors.  On the carpet.  So far, his experiments in gardening are not particularly fruitful--other than spurring me to finally break out the vacuum.  He works very hard to make sure that a decent scattering of Cheerios (a.k.a. seeds) are distributed throughout the carpet in the combined living room/dining room area.  Any that fail to pass muster he collects and ingests.  Others he spreads around and later waters by shaking his sippy cup exuberantly.

His plan is a good one, really, because we do make use of a great deal of natural light through our sliding glass doors.  Sadly, however, I am still having to go to the grocery store to purchase Cheerios as our garden has not borne any sprouts.  Perhaps they need fertilizer.  Jackson's 2 large stuffed dogs, Rufus (German shepherd) and Petey (mixed breed) are not producing much other than random tufts of faux fur.

Still, not all experiments are successful.  Even renowned physicist Richard Feynman has failed to produce results or complete all of his attempted experiments.  And Einstein was always doubting himself.  So there is still plenty of hope for Jackson.  In the meantime, I suppose I have to stop making excuses for not vacuuming often enough.