6/16

I went to the OB-GYN today and had a fun shock....apparently my blood pressure has spiked. I knew all the stress and heat wasn't good for me, but I had no idea that it could such a sudden rise in the all-important blood pressure numbers (Sidebar: one theme that you might notice in this blog is the importance of numbers. Pregnancy seems to be measured by numbers: the baby's heart beat, my stomach circumference, my weight, blood pressure, number of contractions in an hour, and the amount of time between each contraction. For a "natural" process, modern medicine has quantified the experience by numbers, tape measures, and scales.)

So, what has this spike in blood pressure earned me, you might be asking? Oh, yeah, my greatest worry: bed rest. At least three days isn't three months, in which case I would be pulling out my hair and complaining bitterly on my blog every day. I can do three days of being house bound. Heck, some people might even look at this as a vacation. My doctor actually looked at my chart and said, "Well, I see that you don't have any other children and you live at home with your parents (I'm not making this up)...you should rest all weekend and take it easy."

I also have another confession: I've been using alka-seltzer almost every night to cure my upset stomach and heart burn. I personally think that the gods themselves created alka-seltzer and bestowed it on pregnant women to comfort them late at night when wimpy-ass tums and maalox fails. With my head held low, I had to confess to my OB-GYN about my nightly addiction to substance that was once marketed with the slogan, "Pop,pop, fizz, fizz...Oh what a relief it is!" The 500mg of aspirin was my downfall. As an anticoagulant, aspirin can encourage bleeding and could possibly rupture my placenta. This is what the woman that sticks her hand up inside me once a week, pronouncing my cervix closed and high, told me at least. It's not that I don't believe her: I do - I promise, it's just that I think she's exaggerating.

Ruptured placenta on the one hand.....getting to sleep before three a.m. on the other Tough call. I wish I wasn't so responsible. If it wasn't for the baby, I'd be doing more alka-seltzer than a Wall Street lawywer did coke back in the '80s.