A few days ago I posted this –
Having Children: 50 Reasons Not To!
For some time, I’d wanted to talk
about the nightmare that was my pregnancy, but I was unsure how to go about it.
I didn’t really want to describe the horrific experience in details – not least
because I didn’t care to re-examine it that closely as I am about to embark on
round 2. The other reasons were because it’s not a story I usually share with
women who intend to, but have not yet had, children, due to its horrific
nature.
 |
| No joke... |
Many people took the list in the
way it was intended – light-heartedly highlighting the fact that pregnancy is
not as glowingly glamorous as some books would have us believe, that for some
of us, mere inconveniences pale by comparison, and it is, indeed, a cruel, hard
slog, and comes with some serious, sometimes life-threatening, and sometimes
life-changing, side-effects.
One person, however, apparently
taking the title literally, declared the post ‘idiotic’. For those who don’t
know, blog titles serve two purposes – to elicit interest, and for SEO. For
these reasons, they can’t always be taken at face value, and sometimes have
only a tenuous connection to the post.
I confess I found this declaration
distressing – my pregnancy was the most horrific experience of my life. For
those of you who read my guest post for @RachelintheOC, you know I survived an
emotionally torturous divorce from my first husband, who suffered from multiple
personalities, so to say my pregnancy topped that is, well, saying something!
This person stated to me that
‘none of those reasons is sufficient to not have children’. To clarify – I
wasn’t suggesting any one of them was enough to deter me. To be clear –
I had all these symptoms. Some of them are mere inconveniences – except
when lumped on top of the deadly 1-2 combo of symphisis pubis dysfunction and
pregnancy related carpal tunnel syndrome. Then they become extra straws loaded
on the camel’s back after that final straw that already broke it’s back.
It’s amazing how distressing it can be that one can’t wear one’s favourite
heels when one is already borderline pre-natal depression. It might seem silly
to the balanced mind – indeed it seems silly now – but at the time it wasn’t. I
even made my husband take our wedding photos down because I ‘didn’t know that
woman’ in them.
Secondly, this person stated she wouldn’t give up her child for anything. I’m not suggesting I would give up my daughter – because what is the only thing worse than suffering through the pregnancy from hell for a child?
Suffering through the pregnancy from hell – for nothing.
That may sound insensitive, but I say that in all emotional seriousness. My mental state was so bad towards the end of my pregnancy that I was afraid the baby would be stillborn or suffer some other deadly complication. I had suffered through so much, endured the unendurable because there was no alternative, and was at incredibly high risk of pre-natal depression, and therefore also post-natal depression, that the idea was insufferable. I also suffered from a condition that meant I had a lot of amniotic fluid – so while books were telling me I should feel the baby move at every specified interval, I could go days without feeling the baby move. No wonder I was anxious. If it had happened, I don’t know I would have had the strength to try again.
Secondly, this person stated she wouldn’t give up her child for anything. I’m not suggesting I would give up my daughter – because what is the only thing worse than suffering through the pregnancy from hell for a child?
Suffering through the pregnancy from hell – for nothing.
That may sound insensitive, but I say that in all emotional seriousness. My mental state was so bad towards the end of my pregnancy that I was afraid the baby would be stillborn or suffer some other deadly complication. I had suffered through so much, endured the unendurable because there was no alternative, and was at incredibly high risk of pre-natal depression, and therefore also post-natal depression, that the idea was insufferable. I also suffered from a condition that meant I had a lot of amniotic fluid – so while books were telling me I should feel the baby move at every specified interval, I could go days without feeling the baby move. No wonder I was anxious. If it had happened, I don’t know I would have had the strength to try again.
What my pregnancy did do, though,
was make my husband and I seriously reconsider whether we wanted anymore
children. My husband wanted 3, maybe 4, children – until about halfway through
my pregnancy when he revised down to 1. It is no exaggeration to say my
pregnancy put so much strain on my marriage that divorce was not outside the
realms of possibility. My first pregnancy was horrific – how could we survive a
second one - knowing what was coming?
You can say ‘every pregnancy is different’, but the reality is, some pregnancy conditions, once you have them once, are more likely to recur the second time. Symphisis pubis dysfunction (SPD) is one – my OB informed me I would almost certainly get it again, and earlier. The more pregnancies I have, the greater the probability the problems will become permanent. I might as well take this opportunity to announce I am pregnant – I’m 11 weeks pregnant, due 22nd March, and I already have early symptoms of SPD. I didn’t have this condition until 18 weeks last time, and this morning I felt the first touch of despair as I contemplated the next 29 weeks ahead of me.
You probably don’t know what SPD is or what it means in real terms, so I will explain now, in more detail, the crippling, debilitating nature of my pregnancy. If you are a childless woman planning to have children in the future, you might like to stop reading now. If you are a childless woman never intending to have children, you might like to keep reading – there’s probably something in here you can use as vindication to the people who question your decision!
Sufferers of SPD experience pain in the lower back, hips, groin, lower abdomen, and legs. The severity of the pain can range from mild discomfort to extreme and prolonged suffering, and I was at the extreme and prolonged end of this scale. It becomes difficult to climb stairs because of the severity of the pain – it’s not pain you can push through. The body responds defensively, and either recoils from the pain, or the hips just collapse under the pressure. Either way, you’re likely to fall, and once you start falling, you can’t recover, because the hips can’t respond. Our house was only accessible by stairs and some days I couldn’t leave the house if my husband wasn’t there to help me. SPD sufferers also have pain when carrying out weight bearing activities (think about that in the context of pregnancy…), difficulties carrying out everyday activities, and difficulties standing. In a nutshell, it hurts to stand, sit, lie and walk. It hurts a lot.
 |
| She looks like her back sure hurts... |
The SPD was bad enough, but then I developed pregnancy-related carpal tunnel. Essentially I had excessive fluid retention (my total weight increased by 50% of my pre-pregnancy weight), including in my arms, which put pressure on my carpal tunnel nerve, producing carpal tunnel syndrome. This creates numbness and tingling in the hands and fingers, sometimes pain, and general weakness. I couldn’t feel my thumb or forefinger, and I had persistent pain in my last two fingers. I lacked strength – I couldn’t even cut meat, turn a doorknob, or carry a glass of water one handed. Or, you guessed it, haul myself out of bed using my hands. I no longer recall how I did get out of bed. Sometimes I didn’t; I was stuck there until my husband could help me.
I worked through my entire pregnancy. I didn’t have a
choice. I am the primary breadwinner for my family. If I didn’t work, we’d have
nowhere to live. It’s crippling enough for our finances that I must take 6
months off work following the birth of the baby; there’s no way I could
contemplate stopping work early. Quite apart from that, by the time I did go on
maternity leave, 3 weeks before my due date, I was in such bad shape, physically,
that literally all I could do was watch TV – and work. Thanks to my unorthodox
typing style, typing was the one thing that made my hands feel better (although
the mouse was a bitch). I couldn’t read, because the fixed position of holding
a book open caused my hands to cramp and seize painfully. I could write (by
typing) but didn’t because of my near-depression.
By the last quarter of my pregnancy, it is almost fair to
say if I wasn’t shouting and angry, I was crying. For every second of every
minute of every hour of every day for at least 6 months I was in severe to
extreme pain and discomfort from which there was no relief.
So that’s my pregnancy,
summarised. There is more, of course – reflux, and preeclampsia, and suspected
deep vein thrombosis, and anything else I listed in the last post (and probably
more I’ve forgotten) but those issues merely added misery on top of an
impossibly high pile of misery.
Unless you’ve suffered through a pregnancy like mine, you have no idea what I suffered. The exceptions are if you watched a very close loved one suffer it (a wife, a daughter), or if you fell pregnant after fertility treatments, because that is its own brand of physical and emotional hell, or perhaps if you are a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy. That may sound dramatic, but in all seriousness, the only person I met during my last pregnancy who could relate to how I felt was a chemotherapy patient. That should be some indication of just how debilitating the pregnancy was.
The people who watched me soldier
through that pregnancy often said ‘I don’t know how you do it’ and the short
answer was ‘Because I have no choice’. Quite apart from the fact that I would
never have aborted a baby for any of the reasons listed in my last post, I was
well past the time when that was a choice anyway.
Those same people are now saying
to me ‘I can’t believe you are doing it again, you are so brave’.
Well, there’s always another possibility.
I may just be stupid.
Not so stupid that I’ll be doing this a third time.
If you missed it, check out my post on the mythical origins of werewolves.
If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to check out my previous posts if you haven't already. If you're finding yourself here often, you might as well join as a member, sign up to the blog through RSS or email, or sign up for the newsletter.
Don't forget to share the love and spread the word on Twitter, Facebook or StumbleUpon (or other social networking site of your choice) if you know other people who might also enjoy this.
Thanks for stopping by and visiting with us!
