Hyperemesis Gravidarum: what NOT to say!

Irony of ironies, I have barely been able to post the myriad of things I have wanted to, including wrapping the editing of the post where I announce my pregnancy, because I have been too sick.

So, by the way, I'm pregnant.  Yay!

I have always said I was a princess, but man, Hyperemesis Gravidarum just wasn't the thing I wanted to check off in that box as proof.  Not only to Duchess Kate and I hypothetically bond over illness, but this same illness is the reason we publicly announce our pregnancies.  HA!

It is hard to talk about HG when you are actively in the throws of it.  Go figure, talking about puking is hard when that is all you can do.  So I'll not tell you much right now about how I am doing or what this journey has been for me personally, but I will.  Just when I am better.  Presently I am 14 weeks and the clouds are lifting enough that I find this post possible, a few weeks ago it simply wasn't.

This is part hormonal, nauseated, angry rant with a dash of begging and education thrown in for good measure.  And lots of GIFs because they make me happy.

In no particular order because anyone of these if grounds for me aiming at you when I get sick for the 100th time today ...

1. "Oh I had morning sickness too!"

Morning sickness is crummy, I make no bones about it.  But HG is not morning sickness, though by medical definition it is often referred to as "severe morning sickness."  Let me put it this way, if you can count the number of times a day you get/got ill this is NOT the thing to say to me.

2. "Have you tried crackers/ginger/Preggie Pops/Seabands/some-weird-wives-tale/etc.?"

If one more person suggests ginger in any form {typing paused because I actually had to gag and dry heave over this} ... in a word, yes.  Yes.  I have tried all of that.  Desperately. Repeatedly.

3. "Oh my gawd, this one time when I was pregnant I threw up in...."

Do not talk about up-chuck in any form.  Not only do I not care, because that requires energy I do not have, I also cannot take hearing it.  Its also pretty freaking weird but for some reason people seem compelled to tell me.  I have managed to christen every receptacle typical for catching illness and many never intended for acts so vile.  We can swap horror stories some other day, for now please just shhhh.

4. "Have you tried just forcing yourself to eat or drink?"

Seriously?  I am trying not to drop F-bombs here but this one is hard not to reply with a good ol' "eff you" too.  Scientific question: what would happen if you tried to spray a garden hose UP Niagara Falls?  Same dif here.

5.  "But doesn't taking medicine while your pregnant make you nervous?  What if your kid has like a third eye because of that?!"

You're asking the wrong questions.  What if my child is so malnourished that s/he doesn't make it?  What if I am so malnourished or dehydrated that I go into preterm labor or miscarry?  What if both my baby and I don't make it, because that happens with HG?  I hate taking medicine, but without them I wouldn't have gotten this far.  It scares me, but not taking them scares me a lot more.

6. "Oh I understand!  When I was pregnant I would hurl the second I even saw *insert food item here* much less smelled it!"

I am sure that was awful, and I say that without too much snark.  I had that in prior pregnancies and it sucked then.  But here's the thing, I don't vomit because of seeing or smelling food, though that is a sure fire way to make me sick. I am sick no matter what.  Sometimes I can't even talk because the act of opening my mouth and activating my vocal chords does it for me.  I cannot swallow my spit half the time.

7. "I gained 30 lbs when I was pregnant, you're lucky to be losing some!"

Or anything like this.  Anything that comments on my weight loss as though it is some kind of GIFT makes you an undisputed asshole.

8. "Well you haven't lost that much weight."

Seriously, if you were an asshole on #7 this makes it even worse.

If you are looking at me and thinking I haven't lost that much weight chances are you are seeing how puffy and bloated the medication I am taking has made me.  Or even better, and way more TMI but you -- special snowflake that you are -- deserve it: Maybe my tummy is so large because the medication that they have pumped me full of makes it utterly impossible to poop.  Yup.  I am so damned constipated that my entire GI track is as backed up as a LA free way at 5 PM on a weekday.  What I manage to get down may never come out again!  So my tummy IS huge and I AM maintaining weight temporarily, but its not a good thing either.

9. "Oh I bet you are so sick because you're having a boy/girl this time!"

I admit, I have always joked (as a mother of only boys) to my girl friends who have had girls and are uncomfy through their pregnancies that it has to be that they are having a girl causing their misery.  "After all," I tell them, "two women can never occupy a confined space in peace!" so they MUST be having a girl. I swear, I will never say this again.

I have been assured I am having a girl this go-round because of my pathetic state more times than I can count.  Wives tales and gut feelings aside, HG has no known cause, cure, or even a sure-fire treatment plan.  The gender of my child is not what is making me so ill, even if it winds up coincidentally matching your theory.

10.  "Bet this will be your last baby now, eh?"  

I admit, now is NOT the time for me to discuss ever being knocked up again.  But I find any questions like this rude and nauseating when I am not in my current state, why are you inquiring about this at all you nosy weirdo?

Because actually screaming would mean
I have to open my mouth ...

Between the sickness, and the resulting exhaustion and weakness I have experienced as a result, I have not been up to a whole lot.  Sitting up at the computer is actually a challenge.  So whether you found this because YOU are going through HG (hugs and sympathy!) or because a loved one is, hang in there.  My thoughts and prayers are with you.

They're getting to me!

I've made no secret about my being out numbered by males in my clan. Usually it's a source of bemusement, annoyance, and occasional disgust or frustration. Today? No, today it was something much darker, more horrific.

You see, they're getting to me. Like some kind of gross-boy-cooties-water-boarding, they're wearing me down.

I was gonna tell you the whole story with a bunch of justifying and pleading, but the truth of the matter is that I just can't. There's no defense ... beyond, perhaps, understanding the psychological need for developing coping mechanisms.

To the point, today I actually said the following. Don't judge, you can't know my pain.

Oh my gawd, after the last three days 

I could squat and shit on the kitchen table 

and I'd still be doing better than you!

All I will offer up in my defense is this: no child heard me and Paul Bunyan nearly peed his pants laughing at how the mighty (me) have fallen.

Maybe there is still hope for me?

Damn, guess not.

IK4T: fireplaces & mantles

Okay so it has been a while.  Like a pathetically long while, so I am going to go with an installment of I'd Kill 4 That that we all are faced with every major holiday, particularly the one that recently past that I am not the biggest fan of anyway.  Humbug, y'all.

Fireplaces -- such cozy inviting things that complete a room and fill it with an ambiance nothing else can.  A simple Pintercrack search for "fireplace" yields some really stunning places with an astounding fireplace as a focal point.  For the purposes of this rant, er, I mean post we shall focus only on those that are indoors.  We will tackle enviable outdoor spaces in another rant.  Post, I mean post.

So here we have this lovely little bright pop of color ...

Lets ignore that I envy how anyone can use color like that without it feeling like a kider-classroom or just visual vomit.  I guess it is the restrained use of color, *nose up in the air* but seriously, it is awesome.  If it were my house, that much white would be covered in hand prints and boogers.

Moving on ...

Don't you just want to sit down with a book and a cup of something warm with your woolly socks and Snuggie?  No? Just me?  Okay.  (For the record, I would like it noted I do not own a Snuggie.)

One of my fave blogs to read had this how-to on it and I totally heart it.  I want the mantle, the candles, oh and her plank wall.  I desperately want that plank wall in my house somewhere but that is entirely not the point of this post.

For those people out there who are actually festive -- unlike yours truly who wants to be but is simply too lazy -- you can do some awesomey things with fireplaces and mantles round holiday time.  For example, werk the cute-yet-spoooooky factor like this:

Or pine cone and foliage it up!

Or these icicles, this one might actually make me less of a Scrooge ... 

That one and this next one both made me think "Narnia" though I am not totally sure why ...

I love this one with the corner thing its got going.

And then there is this, maybe my favoritest of them all ... sigh ...

But then I saw some like these next to, and my inner geek actually gasped out loud ...

... oh my gawd ...

Yes! YES! YESSS! (totally said like an Herbal Essence commercial!)

So now that you have all those breathtaking images in your corneas, let me smack you with a dose of reality. My fireplace and mantle ... which I, of course, decorate faithfully to match every season and holiday with perfect Martha-esk skill ...

Oh, wait, that's right!  My fire place and mantle are about as real as those decorations.  I don;t have one!  None at all, not really something you need or miss in a desert climate, but still.  Makes me sad.  Especially now that I realize I could be stashing books in there too!

So yet again, drat you Pintercrack for making me have the sadz and being all full of envy!

I want a halfsies kid

No one actually thinks they have a halfsies kid, but I want one.

We can all label other people's children as halfsies, or easy kids.  The kids who don't have to charge like a knight into a joust into everything they do.  Kids who only kinda get sick.  Or only kinda have sleep problems.  Or only kinda have temper tantrums.

Okay, maybe they don't actually exist, maybe the idea of a child who is easy is just a figment of the imagination and wishes of parents the world over.  If one of those kids do exist, maybe they grow up to be the Hannibal Lecter's of the world and we should just be cool with our needy little poor sleepers with attitudes and feeding issues.

Sigh.

That said, we all know that while we'd gladly run into a burning buildings after soaking in gasoline for our children, we do not have to like them all the time.  Honest truth, love my kids blindly.  Don't happen to always like them.  Would do anything for them, but would give a kidney for a five second break most days.  I mean, I can't even remember the last time I went to the bathroom without a resounding applause and "mommy potty!" just before I flushed.

So, the Beans is sick.  Being that he is not a halfsies kid, AT ALL, he went full boar.  Why have ONE ear infection, man, when you have two ears?  What's the point of having a fever and making mom search for the damned thermometer if you can't yield a number greater than 101?  Who needs a cough when you can choke on phlegm?   And, of course, why the heck would you just have a runny nose when you can make your family wish they had hip waders to better navigate the rivers of your snot with?

But while I was feeling nothing but pity and sympathy on day one and two, I began wallowing in my own pathetic misery by day three. So by day four and a half when Beans was on the slight upswing I realized something.

There is something much worse than a sick child.  The child who is finally starting to feel better after days of infirmary is much, much worse.

Beans would oscillate between the utterly male/baby conviction that no one in the history of suffering had ever suffered as much as he was and then would swing to the other end of the pendulum and was like a squirrel on a crack-speed cocktail.  Running around like a madman, laughing in a manic way ... then coughing like a three-pack-a-day-habit while crying and choking on his own snot while moaning "mama" and wanting nothing more than me holding him.


Hold him, I did.  Whilst praying fervently that the misery would pass, and the copious amounts of hand sanitizer I was requiring everyone to use in addition to the bleach cleaning wipes that rarely left my side were doing their job and preventing the plague from spreading.

But today I woke up and I sound like Louis Armstrong.  Fingers, toes and eyes crossed that I am the only marked one in the house.  Again, I am reminded about the main difficulty in living with men.  It has nothing to do with toilet seats in the wrong position, fart jokes, or never owning breakables or white items.  No, it is the dreaded man cold.

So the point of this post was, in summary: whine, vent, complain, pray!

a devil lives in my garage door opener

Lets not mince words: there is a testosterone sensor in my remote garage door opener.

Don't laugh, I'm dead serious.

For weeks it has been on the fritz, missing no opportunity to piss me off, gradually becoming less and less reliable. But not enough to make me KNOW it was untrustworthy, just enough to make me hold my breath and pray like hell whenever I pushed the button and hoped to gain entry to my home.

Exhibit A: the Demon Opener

Being the logical person I was a week and a half ago about this whole situation, I mentioned to my husband that I think I need a new battery. Then a few more days of squeeze and pray passed and suddenly the day came where it wasn't enough.  Of course this day was one where I was running late, had a very pissed off Beans, bags upon bags of groceries to carry in and it was hotter than the warm section of hell.  So I snapped (my temper can be a tad infamous) and decided that squeeze and pray wasn't enough, maybe throw the mother fawker would be.

It wasn't.

Amazingly, however, it didn't kerslpode into a million pieces revealing instantaneously to my husband that I had gotten a bit frustrated.  So I scooped the damn thing up as I got my stuff and my now screaming kid and brought them all inside.  I put it on the counter so as to *ahem* subtly remind my husband that I needed that battery he said he had.  This was a Friday.  Generally, I don't drive my car on the weekends, the Jolly Green Giant I married does not comfortably fit in my Corolla.  So after the exceptionally busy weekend passes us by, and a few other "hey can you fix my garage door opener"s are uttered, I stupidly assume in all the random crap he did that my usually very considerate husband took care of the opener.

Wrong.

He could reorganize his garage, build a paper towel holder because he wanted to, decide that my car needed cleaned out (no idea why), BUT he couldn't change the battery.

So when I put it back in my car, ran my errands, and went to push the lifeless button ... I did refrain from throwing it again.  Go ahead, applaud.

When Bunyan came home I held it up and asked him if he'd fixed it.  A confused (yet panicked cuz he could see I was displeased) look crossed his face as he said,

"But ... but, nothing is wrong with it."

Exhibit B: Only the smart ones.

After I insisted there was, and he insisted that it worked fine for him I asked him to show me.  And he did.  And that damn door opened with NO problem.

So again, I put it in my car, perplexed but figuring whatever it is it is okay now.

Next day, again when my stress level was pretty high and my time management was at a low, I pushed the button with a mental "Open Sesame" ... and nothing happened.

When Paul Bunyan came home we both went out front with the evil little clicker in tow.  Every time he pressed it the damn thing opened.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Me?  Not once.

Of course he had to be all condescending male on me for a moment "oh well you need to hold it down ... you need to push it in this way ... are you sure you're pressing the right button?"

End result, we traded openers.  That dumb thing is working FINE for him.  Absolutely fine!  Seriously, WTF?  I am telling you, there is without a doubt, a testosterone sensor in the damn thing.

"Fat Ass" to "Bad Ass"

So I have been really hard on myself lately.  If you have read here for a bit you might be thinking that seems fairly in character, but this is different.  Here on the blog generally I laugh while sharing failures with cooking, or stupid mistakes I make while trying to recreate some crafty thing.  That is one thing, I can laugh at me there.  It is a safe thing.

But there are other things that are harder to laugh about.

For example, I hate my body.  Okay, hate is such a strong word.  I don't hate my body.

My body has borne two children into this world, carried another two for a short time before they earned wings and went to heaven.  My body takes me through my long day, half sleeping nights.  It picks a kiddo up from school, facilitates homework, makes meals, cleans a house, plays with a baby, walks dogs, and does a million other things.  It keeps this house sanitary (though not impecible), manages a million things at a time, and makes some of it look easy.  While not the fittest body in the world, it is still hanging in there okay and my health is nothing I can complain about having had moments of much poorer health already in my life, and many more to come surely.  My body is pretty amazing when I really think about all I ask it to endure, and how little I give it in return.

But I still have such a love hate relationship with it.

While I can DO all those things, there is stuff that my body can't do too.  Like fit into the jeans I want.

In the scheme of things this whole jean fitting thing is pretty minimal.  But it matters to me.

To my husband, my body is a John Mayer song.  He is more than happy with me as I am, tells my I am beautiful, attractive and other stuff I'd just rather not share even on my semi anonymous blog.

But I know that even he'd be just fine with my body with a little less sag, flab and padding.  He'd never say it,  but we can be honest here.

So I have been wanting for a long long long time to get in to better shape.  Not for anyone other than myself. Because I want to look in the mirror and be okay with the reflection rather than say stuff like "holy shit I have an extra chin in the works."  I do not want to be a twig, I do not want to fit into my high school jeans, I do not have some burning desire to rock a bikini next summer ... those things may be nice and all but I have no desire for it.  Well the bikini would kick ass, but that isn't my point.

My point is that I have been trying to exercise with any regularity and it really seems like fate is just content with my ass being this size rather than the one I want.  Everything feels like it works against me.  If wanting to lose weight, and sucking at it, were enough to have a rockin' bod I would be set.

Take yesterday for example.

After repeated failures at going for a jog or walk, after not being able to use any of the exercise equipment at my mom's house (a whole blog post in which I nearly set off her alarm and had the popo called on me), and many other failures too frustrating to even list I decided to enlist the help of the Wii Fit we bought forever ago.

And the fun really began.

First, I had to find the controller, and the little step-on-me thingy.  Once found, I set them up, and tried to turn everything on.  The batteries in the Wii controller had been pilfered for something else in requirement of a couple double A's.


So I did the only thing reasonable at that moment since I had no spares, I stole some from a kid toy -- seems fitting they contribute since I only started gaining weight because of them! -- and I was ready to go.

Or so I thought.

The batteries in the thingy you stand on were there, but dead as door nails.  So the tally of stolen batteries is now up to six.  Feeling like I have now waisted a massive and precious twenty minutes hunting batteries I got started and discovered that I have in fact gained 2.6 lbs since the last time I used this beast.  Oh joy.  By the time I was done taking my "tests" and updating from ages ago when we last drug this thing out of the corner, the Beans was aware I was doing something for me and promptly began screaming his adorable head off like he'd severed a limb.

If you count my mad dash back to his room, while envisioning the severe yet completely imagined trauma his shrieks implied, I probably burned a total of 27 calories.

Yeah, that is like licking a doughnut.  Gargling a Dr. Pepper, then spitting it out. It certainly has no impact on !@#$ing jean size, hotness, flat tummies, or imagined bikinis.

So here I sit feeling very frustrated and dejected and needing to vent.  Because I know when my husband comes home he will have some stupid-man-line ready like "oh you don't need to exercise" or "why don't you just get the Beans busy doing something and then work out if you really want to?"  Well gee wiz Einstein, why did I not think of that?!  Bleeding brilliant piece of goods, you are.

How do other mom's exercise?  Gym isn't in the budget and my eating options are actually quite healthy an balanced.  I just need something in my home, cheap, and fairly easy that I can do.  If it is an exercise with your kids thing I don't know how to keep a very active and wanting to run one year old in place very long.  He likes to run, but not long enough to make an impact on my waistline.

Any suggestions? Please?

it is called perspective

This morning I woke up after a rough night with the baby, tired and worn out.  I got up and was doing my usual morning jobs of getting things ready when I realized what time it was and that my husband wasn't up yet.  I went in to wake him.  Twice.  He groaned some whiny thing at me each time, he is sick and has been soldiering through for the past few days and I guess today was his day to have a pity party and drag himself out of bed with amazing slowness while I muttered angrily about his man cold.

Unfortunately, his pity party came without any prior warning, so I had to throw on some sunglasses to cover the make-up-free face I was sporting, dress the Beans, load up the car and get the Meatball to school.  Of course only when I got in the car did I remember that yesterday I bought a smoothie at a drive through and the lid wasn't on properly, so it coated most of my front seat and gear shift in fruity yogurty sugary nasties.  I had wiped it up yesterday, but clearly my seats and floor mats need cleaned.  So when I got in he car to that lovely smell which had all night in a hot garage to ferment ... oh lovely.

And my gear shift sticks.

Got Meatball to school with no major incident.  But, on the way home, the Beans exploded.  How can a body so small hold so much vomit and launch it with the force of 20 grenades?  So the front seat is day old smoothie, the back seat is carrot baby vomit.  I suppose it is what I get for uttering the phrase "nothing could smell worse than this!" when I first got  in the car.  Touche, karma.

Long story made longer, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself this morning.  A bit unappreciated, a bit screwed.  A lot worn out.

After wiping up the kiddo and the car, I sat down to snuggle with the Beans, who by the way is feeling fabulous now that he'd emptied the full contents of his stomach, and was looking through my blog roll.  I haven't read much in quite a few days so I had some catching up to do.

One of the people I read often is the esteemable and flat out awesome Mary Tyler Mom.  I haven't been to her site in ages, and I thought to myself "this is just what I need."

Well, I got that right.

After reading about their heartbreaking initial steps of their current adoption journey I was reminded that this family has already been through hell, their daughter Donna's story is linked at the top of her blog.   For September last year Mary Tyler Mom documented each of Donna's 31 months of cancer treatment.  I had actually never read it. So I did.

Tears streaming, I wiped my face and snuggled that much harder with the beautiful boy who coated my car in carrot puke this morning.  The grace and grit of the little girl in this story was more inspiring than anything else in this world, and in a close second is her amazing mother's grace and persistence in the telling.  I can do it no justice, you would have to read the story yourself, if you are able.

It is so easy to get caught up in the moments of life, especially the bad ones.  To feel that some cosmic being is having fun at our expense, and to whine about how when it rains it pours.  I often joke that if it wasn't for bad luck I'd have none at all ... but good lord, I couldn't be more wrong.

When the Beans was born he was grey in some places, purple in others.  He eventually developed a massive case of jaundice and when we finally brought him home he had weird vomiting episodes and breathing issues.  My darling little baby was only two and a half weeks old the first time he stopped breathing.  I cannot tell you how many times it happened after that, its not a tally I wanted to keep.  His skin also turned completely raw in most places, he spent the first 8 months of his life with his hands bandaged so that he wouldn't cause himself more harm than his body already was.  He tore out chunks of his hair if I wasn't fast enough in those moments where we let his little hands air out.  Eventually he was diagnosed with a variety of things that contributed to the fun we'd been having -- GERD, MPI, chronic eczema (made worse by the MPI), and tracheomalacia.  With diagnosis came ways to treat, it was a long and arduous road.  But now at nearly 16 months old he is doing freaking awesome.  We never needed surgery, he is off most of the medicine, and his trachea is righting itself with time, much faster than we had dared to hope.  A great many of my stories here involve tales of the Beans being an exhausting ball of adorable energy, and he is.

But what could have been?

When you really stop and think about it, there is always someone who has it "worse" than you.  This is because "worse" is a matter of perspective and what is hell on earth to one person is a manageable sentence to another.  If the worst thing that happens to me today is that my car is coated in nasty smelling goo that I need to scrub out ... well, shit, I have had worse days.  And right now, someone, somewhere, is having a much much worse day than me.

We do not, in our darkest moments, tend to have time for pity parties because we are too busy surviving.

So I am now very grateful for my pity party earlier.  I was upset at my husband for being him, he's always like this when he is sick but fortunately that isn't often.  I was frustrated at my kids for ... well, being kids.  I was frustrated at myself and my situation for a million various, and all of them stupid and beyond my control things.  I am grateful that I could be so dumb, so selfish.  Because if things were really bad I wouldn't have the time for that crap.

It's called perspective ... and now I have it.

baby toys, round one

So after the massive and pathetic pity party I threw myself the other day I have been trying to knock the sorry-for-myself crap off.  I have always been a fixer and a do-er, so this mopey stuff just isn't me.

Sometimes ya gotta let yourself wallow a bit, just a bit.  I think finances can be something that truly overwhelms you if you let it.  I feel like I do it all wrong sometimes in terms of how I allocate budget monies for food especially.  I don't know how these lunatics can supposedly get $100 worth of groceries for $5.37 because they coupon the shit out of their purchases.  Reality is, I think, that those people are merely stocking the crapity crap up and merely visit their bunker house for the zombie apocalypse when they grocery shop.  I could be wrong, but it makes me feel better for the time being, so its the plan we are going with.

We did have a birthday party for the Beans, and I managed to do it on the cheap.  I am also making him some "toys" I found on Pintercrack ... but in true me-fashion it ain't goin' like I planned ... for example DIY plastic bottle bowling pins that I saw on another blog.  So she has these beautiful bottles that look all pretty like this ...

And me?

Yeah, I so nailed it.

So I will be trying that again, soonish.