In January my pregnancy had a bad turn. Pain. Bleeding. An ultrasound showed that there was a tear in the placenta. At seventeen weeks the fetus wasn’t viable yet and the tear (also called a placental abruption) was a very bad development. If it continued to tear it could lead to the prenatal defects or hemorrhage and miscarriage. It was too early to be hospitalized or induce labor. The only option we had was to wait.
But it wasn’t simple waiting. I was on bed rest, and not a working bed rest, but strict bed rest. I could go to the bathroom. I could take a bath but not a shower. And that was it. When we first got the news, we said something along the lines of okay, I’ll cut back on cooking and maybe C can do some more cleaning. The doctor paused and said “What I’d like you to do is get a cooler to put by your bed and put drinks and food in it so you don’t have to leave the bed at all.” For some reason it was the cooler suggestion that struck me—it made me realize how serious the prescription was. Bed rest isn’t what people mean when they say take it easy. It's not a benign thing to consign someone to bed for weeks on end. I was in for a lounge arrest: I had to minimize gravity and stay horizontal.
And I did, for six weeks. I developed an elaborate routine of rotating books, music playlists, podcasts, knitting, The Sopranos and the highlight of my day, a bath. Anything I ate or drank had to be brought to me. My world, as you can imagine, shrank incredibly. I began to envy my cats because they had the ability to frolic a couple of times a day. My hips and back ached. A headache settled in and never really left. I have to say though, everyone around me was fantastic and I got such an outpouring of love that it was, frankly, an embarrassment of riches.
The side effect of bed rest that I didn’t expect was a dramatic turn inward. My impulse to document, to blog, photograph, put some aspect of private life into the public (albeit, I know, a very small public) just vanished. I wanted to get through each day without thinking of the larger world that I couldn’t be a part of. It was, I’m sure, some survival mechanism of the brain. But its hard to explain why, exactly, with all the free time I had that I didn’t spend it typing away about all the ups and downs of bed rest.
After all, it was during this time that I first started feeling the kicks. Baby moves around constantly now but I remember the first nudge: I was reading a book, resting it partially on my stomach when the book moved up and down, jolted by baby power. It was a sweet moment, one I’d normally share but that time it felt like it was just for me. Because bed rest is all reduced back to body—is your body complying? Rebelling? Working properly? Healed? Complicated? Incompetent?—it seems only fair that the moments that mitigate the anxiety and frustration come from your body as well. The only explanation that feels right is that it was all intensely private; it took a lot of psychic energy, leaving me with very little inclination to examine the larger issues at hand.
I know how very lucky I was to have such loving people around to care for me and that being on bed rest didn’t spell financial doom. So many women are not in a position to catch complications early and correct them before they get really bad. I was on strict bed rest for six weeks and it did the trick. The placenta reattached and the baby is healthy. In the end, I felt that documenting my bed rest would be an exercise in self-pity. True, I still can’t be as active as I’d like, but at least I can move around and go outside when I want to stretch my legs. That’s a damn sight better than before.
Coming off bed rest isn’t easy either. It’s not an immediate dance party. After six weeks of lying down, just about every major system in the body changed. I had no stamina and sitting upright for more than twenty minutes made me dizzy and faint. Normally, if you’re recovering from something, you can push yourself hard and if you’re tired the next day you just rest. I didn’t have that luxury. I’m still at a higher risk for placental abruption and have strict instructions not to lift too much or exercise too hard. What is too much or too hard? Your guess is as good as mine. So I don’t push the envelope, the risks are just too high.
As I continue to take steps back to normality it seems only right that I try to tackle the subject, however poorly, so that I can move on and write and think about other things. Just eleven ten weeks until the baby’s here . . . .
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