The First Trimester
Gina - Pregnancy is Puketastic!
I was about 5 weeks pregnant when I found out the news and I thought then that I was feeling crappy. Little did I know what the next nine weeks had in store.
Instead of gaining a few pounds like many women do in the first trimester, I lost about 8. The constant nausea really took a toll. So much that I was given a prescription for Zofran and told to take as often as every 6 hours. Even the dissolvable medication made me sick. For those few weeks, the only thing I wanted to eat were grapes and peanut butter english muffins. I also craved Icee's. I know that's not a healthy option, but I was to the point that I needed to eat or drink anything that sounded good, just to take in the extra calories.
During my 9th week, something very scary happened. I was rear-ended while I was at a complete stop by someone who was going about 45MPH. My car was pushed over the median and into oncoming traffic on a busy highway during rush hour. Somehow I managed avoid hitting anyone coming towards me. All I could think after the hit was, "Oh crap, my baby!" Fortunately, my airbag did not go off. I had lots of burning on my abdomen from my seatbelt and headed to the hospital to get checked out. Thankfully everything turned out just fine. The doc said the baby was so well protected in my pelvis and that it was a good thing I wasn't further along. The only thing I had to deal with was a crappy rental car and some bruising on my belly. I thank my lucky stars it all came out ok.
At 12 weeks, I had to head back to the ER to get IV fluids, because I was so dehydrated. I learned pregnancy wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be. Poor Charlie! Poor me!
The one good thing about this stage of my pregnancy is that Charlie and I finally got to hear the heartbeat of our little one. It was such a reassuring sound and made my heart melt. In fact, it made every crappy day and every morning spent in front of the toilet completely worth it. Check it out for yourself... How amazing is that?!
I keep hearing that I'll start to feel better in the 2nd trimester. I really hope so, because 6 more months feeling like this would be miserable for me, Charlie and everyone else that has to be around me. My poor co-workers have dealt with me puking in doggie poop bags long enough!
Jillian - Fearful Mama-to-be with a very busy schedule...
In the first several weeks of my pregnancy, I was a very busy bee. I took a trip with my college girlfriends to North Carolina, said goodbye to downtown Minneapolis and moved out of the condo we had owned for 6 years. We moved in with my parents for 3 weeks and I also celebrated my 31st birthday before we closed on our new home in South Minneapolis and started settling into our first "house."
Needless to say, it was a whirlwind of events. In the early days, I was feeling pretty good (besides my extremely sore boobs). I suffered from nausea pretty much the entire first trimester, but I never actually threw up. It was around 9 weeks that I first started spotting. We were at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre catching a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and I'll never forget the fear that swept over me when I went to the bathroom and realized there was blood in the toilet.
The bleeding was contributed to a Subchorionic Hemorrhage that around 20% of pregnant women are diagnosed with. A much lower number experience the type of spotting and bleeding that I had, but luckily most of these hemorrhages are absorbed by the body as the pregnancy progresses. My spotting/blood continued for the next 6 weeks on nearly a daily basis. The 4th of July was an especially scary day for me and I will spare you the gory details. I had an almost paralyzing fear of miscarriage in the first trimester and this prevented me from really "embracing" the fact that I was pregnant and also prevented Eric and I from telling anyone outside of our close inner circle about the baby. My OB/GYN was great and I ended up having 3 ultrasounds in the first trimester and I also went in 3 different times besides that for fetal heart tone monitoring. Each time I heard that sweet little heartbeat it was such a great relief!
At my 14 wk appointment, I finally got to see this sweet profile that actually LOOKED like a baby!! :) It put everything into perspective and made the crappy first trimester totally worth it! One down.... 2 to go!!!!
Jillian and Gina - Welcome!
Thanks for reading our blog! We are both so excited to share with you our completely opposite and quite funny stories of being pregnant. Jillian is due on January 19, 2014 and Gina is due February 19, 2014. We are best friends who grew up together, roomed together in college and are now going to become mamas together. We hope you find this blog informational, reassuring and most importantly, entertaining. Here it goes...
Gina - What the What?!
So, my story and my BFF's story about how we became pregnant are totally the opposite! Keep in mind while reading my posts, that I am extremely excited to have a baby and it's something Charlie (my fiance and the guy who knocked me up) and I are really looking forward to. Happy reading....
It all started when I started feeling sick to my stomach. I had diarrhea and didn't have an appetite for a few weeks, yet I was SO bloated! I decided I probably needed to make an appointment with my doc to see what was up.
It was Friday, and I scheduled my appointment for the following Thursday. In the meantime, my boobs were feeling really sore and I was EXHAUSTED! About 4 weeks prior to this, I decided to go off the birth control pill. I had been on it for about 15 years straight and we both knew we wanted to try to have kids right after our honeymoon scheduled for November, so we decided to go off the pill and be careful around my fertile time. It was our hope that having been off the pill for a few months would help us have an easier time conceiving.
Thanks to the advice of my BFF, I downloaded the P-tracker app for my phone. It tracked when I would get my period and when my fertile days were. I wanted to avoid having sex around my fertile days for the obvious reason of not conceiving a baby. I didn't realize that I should have regular cycles before relying on this app. Instead, I just calculated that last date of my period and didn't think anything of it...until all my symptoms starting coming together.
Before I went to my doctor, I decided to take a test, totally thinking it would be negative. I mean, there was no way I could be pregnant, right? WRONG! 4 positive pregnancy tests later, we learned we were going to have a baby. It also was the day I learned I was going to be a 5 1/2 month pregnant bride. OMG! All the questions started running through my head. What will our parents think? Will my wedding dress fit? Should we postpone our wedding? Am I ready for this? Is Charlie ready for this? And a million more...
Jillian - Timing is Everything!
Opposite is right! :)
My husband, Eric, and I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. We weren't in a hurry to start a family for the first few years. We wanted to make sure we had spent plenty of time together as a couple and that we had everything planned out. My type A personality figured that as soon as we started tying to conceive, we would make it happen!
A year long lesson in patience followed... I learned a lot more than I has anticipated, like how to track my ovulation, pee on sticks to find out my #1 and 2 most fertile days during the month, eat the right foods, stand on my head, etc. :)
I set up a fertility appointment with my doctor last October. I underwent blood draws, a procedure to check if my fallopian tubes were clear (one side was blocked, but they were able to unblock it during the painful procedure) and finally started on my prescription for Clomid. Clomid is a fertility drug that forces you to ovulate every month, therefore increasing your chances of conception.
4 more months of negative pregnancy tests and surprise periods followed. At the end of February, my doctor doubled my dose of clomid and the next week Eric and I were off on a week-long vacation to Florida. I figured the relaxation, sunshine and care-free days would most surely produce the baby we were longing for. I was feeling very confident this time. I thought I felt different as the date of my period approached. Fast forward to the PINK concert that I attended with my sister, cousin and close friend for my sister's birthday at the end of March... We were singing, dancing and then I ran off for a quick bathroom break and came back doubled over in tears. My period was a week early and it was HEAVY. It felt like a complete blow to my confidence (and bloated gut). I set up an appointment the very next week with my OBGYN to discuss my options. She told me I had one more round of clomid to go until they would no longer allow me to take it (it is not safe to take this medication for more than 6 months) and if it was her, she would try Artifical Insemination along with this last dose of clomid and give it all we had.
I'm happy to report that we took her advice and the next month brought tears of joy, not failures. :)
