Sorry to leave you all hanging with my last update being entirely butt-centered. Definitely not my intention.
It has been a rough few weeks, friends. Between Babs leaving (we actually had her leave a few days before her initially determined final day, because she was being a mopey baby around the office and ain’t no one got time for that) and my having to fix a lot of her mistakes/do damage control with the young people she worked with, and my carpel tunnel becoming basically intolerably bad, and just generally starting to feel the burn of the third trimester, I have been less than chipper.
The big issue has been the sheer number of hours I’m working, trying to do my own job (which is already a solidly busy 40 hours of work under the best of circumstances), do Babs’ job (at least the stuff that really needs to happen), hire an interim person and on-board them, and help out with the federal funding application process. For the last few weeks, I go in and work a full day and then usually come home, eat dinner, and work another 3 hours or so – meeting with youth, writing some narrative, prepping trainings. All of this was even more wretched because my hands hurt so badly and my ability was compromised by needing to stop and shake my hands out every few minutes. God bless my boss and operations manager who ordered me dragon voice recognition software and a headset, which, while full of its own complexities, does at least allow me to limit the amount of typing I’m doing.
The icing on my crap cake this week is that La is out of town – left on Monday at the ass crack of dawn (guess who got to drive her to the airport in one of Colorado’s only ugly snowstorm’s this season?) Which means both not having my boo (who loves and supports me and lets me whine) and single parenting the menagerie, which maybe wouldn’t be so tough if, again, I wasn’t working crazy hours and trying to balance an extra load at work.
It’s not all doom and gloom! Last weekend we flew to Indy for a very quick trip and a baby shower. It was really lovely – all mustache and bow tie themed – and nice to catch up with folks we often only see over Xmas. And we weren’t there long enough to have any real drama emerge, which is the most awesome! Here are a couple of shots from Baby shower 2.0:

When I saw that last picture, I asked La if my nose had gotten bigger. She admitted it had. Did you know this is a thing?! Really, it’s true! Apparently estrogen can actually make your nose get bigger during pregnancy. WTF? The feet I was expecting, but a bigger nose?
But, my final update is also a less than stellar one. Yesterday, about halfway through the afternoon training I was giving, I developed a throbbing headache. I made it through the training, and then came home and took my contacts out and laid down. That didn’t seem to help, so I took two tylenol and drank some water, laid down again. Still nothing. I ate food, drank more water. No dice. By this point I was going on 6 hours of throbbing headache with 0 relief. Aside from beginning to feel crazy, I was nervous something else was up, since headaches that don’t respond to pain meds can be a sign of pre-eclampsia. So, I called my mom and had her take me down to the OB screening room to get checked.
We arrived and they hooked me up to the fetal monitors, BP cuff and oxygen monitoring. Seafoam sounded great – strong, loud, consistent galloping! They tracked all of this for a while, and found that Seafoam was doing well, and I wasn’t having regular contractions, but my BP was ranging from quite high to low-high (from about 149/97 to 140/85) and the headache wasn’t responding to compazine. They took blood and urine, and found no protein and normal liver levels – but the BP continued to be high. They finally gave me an oxycodone for the headache – finally relief! But, I now fully qualify for the gestational hypertension diagnosis. A bummer, but better to have it at 34 weeks, rather than so much earlier.
I didn’t get home until well after 2am, so I decided to take the day off. Also, based on the recommendation of the doctors, I am limiting my schedule – and so cancelled a training for tomorrow, and my trip to Durango (about 8 hours by car, 1 hour by plane) to meet with a partner next week. I have a lot of intense guilt about this, but ultimately I don’t think the extra work will do anything but hurt my BP, and I can’t bear the thought of being so far away from home and potentially having another problem. Not to mention the restriction on flying that is now in place due to the hypertension.
I slept for hours today – woke up at 10, then took a nap from 1-3, then another from 5-6. It was glorious, and so so needed. Sleep has been a bit elusive the last few weeks, and with the stress and travel, my tank has been running low.
Today’s good news; my BFF and his wife had their baby boy! One day past his due date, a nice and easy 7 and a half pounds!
hours to make sure