Nervous Nelly

That's what you could call me these days.  I am a walking ball of nerves.  All the time.  Seriously.  I am doing my very best to hold it together and act like it doesn't feel like my entire world is falling apart around me, but inside my brain, that's exactly what it feels like.  I guess I never expected this to be this hard emotionally.  I knew that pregnancy would be hard physically.  It was last time and I expected it to be this time.  But what I didn't expect was that every single plan that I made would somehow fall apart and I would be left floundering around in a world that is so far from the one I had planned.

I am an anal retentive virgo and I pre-plan for pretty much everything in my life.  I plan ahead at all times.  I don't like surprises and I am most definitely NOT a "go with the flow" kind of girl.  I am probably painting a pretty ugly picture of myself here, but it is what works for me.  When I decided to get pregnant with my second child, it was NOT on a whim.  I planned for almost a year before I decided to actually try and get pregnant.  I planned how I would financially take care of myself and the baby, I planned how I would pay for and manage maternity leave, I planned for future benefits for myself and my child, and I even planned the birth around my work schedule (The Boy was born in January; NOT a good month for a bookkeeper to have a child).  And even in the planning stages I would think of what might work and then "throw it out to the universe" and tell myself if it is meant to happen, it will.  If it isn't meant to happen then it won't.  I did that with finding a donor, I did that once I met the donor and wasn't sure how exactly reliable he would be to show up at just that perfect time of the month.  I did it with the time of the year.  I even did it to some extent with my clients and finances.  I needed to give myself a significant raise to afford my new adventure and this meant telling some clients that either they would pay a higher rate or lose me.  In all of those instances, and many others, things just fell into place.  It all worked into this perfect master plan that I had created.  I was almost smug about it.  This must mean that I am MEANT to have another child.  The universe is telling me so...

Fast forward to two weeks ago when things started to fall OUT of plan.  Bed rest at 29 weeks pregnant.  Certainly NOT part of the plan.  Financial stability; out the window.  Healthy baby; perhaps not in the cards.  All of these really scary things began to fuck up my perfect plan and frankly I am not sure how to deal with all of that.  I would like to say that I am putting everything back out into the universe and trusting that it is all going to end up okay.  I would love to walk around with that kind of security.  But I don't.  I am petrified.  And it shakes me to my very core.

Every Friday I have my weekly doctors appointment.  So here I sit on a Thursday night quite literally shaking in my boots.  Two Fridays ago my blood pressure was through the roof and I was put on bed rest.  Then last Friday I was checked into the hospital for what was supposed to be routine monitoring but turned out to be anything but that.  What is tomorrow going to bring?  I am so scared to find out.  All week long I have been walking around with one hand on the phone ready to call my doctor over things I am worried about, only to ultimately decide NOT to make the phone call because I somehow convince myself I am being paranoid.  But with an actual, real doctors appointment tomorrow all of my fears could be confirmed.  Or I could walk out of there with a pat on the back and a nice "See you next week."  I have no clue.

My biggest fear is one that every expectant mother probably has, but it's a fear that one doesn't even want to say out loud.  But I am going to tackle my fear and say it.  I am afraid that this baby isn't healthy.  There.  I said it.  I am absolutely frantic with this fear.  And the reason for it?  This baby doesn't move as much as I think it should.  I remember The Boy moving all the time and feeling him subtly and not-so-subtly move throughout the entire day.  The Girl doesn't do that.  She moves around maybe 4 or 5 times a day.  And that's it.  And that is counting the three times that she gets the hiccups.  There aren't the constant little rolls and shifts of movement.  All day long I think about how long it has been since she last moved, and if I have perhaps done something wrong to not give her enough oxygen, or to cut off her blood supply, or...ten thousand other things.  Then it gets to a point where it has been like 4 hours since I felt anything and I finally reach for that phone to call my doctor when I will feel a little shift in movement.  Does that tiny shift negate the past 4 hours of non-movement?  Is that enough?  Does that "count?"  Do I reset the internal clock inside of my head?

And the thing is that I know that if I call the doctor they have to bring me in.  Most likely send me directly to labor and delivery.  I know they can't get a phone call from a patient that says I am concerned about reduced fetal movement and just respond with, "Oh, I am sure you are just being paranoid...your daughter is great.  Don't worry at all."  And that is really what I want to hear.  But I swear, if I called the doctor every time I was freaked out about this, I would NEVER leave the hospital.  So then I talk myself down off the bridge and decide that all babies are different and that I am being over paranoid and that she is probably just fine.  But as soon as those thoughts exit my head, the fear takes over again.  It is an evil cycle and one that I go through literally every single moment of every single day.  Add to that the flashes of light and halos that I am still seeing (I know, sign of preeclampsia, but I take my blood pressure and it is fine...), and the menstrual cramps that come on and off and the tightening of my belly and I am just a walking ball of nerves.  Nervous Nelly.  That's me.

So tomorrow at 10:00am I go back for my next checkup.  I am so nervous I could puke.  Will I make it through?  Will I get sent to the hospital?  Will I have to have the baby?  Will my daughter be born this early and have to live in the NICU for the first two months of her life?  Will I be able to do ANY part of this pregnancy successfully?  Because right now, I sorta feel like I am failing at all of it.  Failing to make a healthy baby, failing to take care of my already-born family, failing to finish out my work, and failing to keep my sanity.  The good news is that apparently to the outside observer I seem like I am keeping my shit together quite nicely.  The Boy doesn't see any breakdowns, my clients seem to think I am on top of everything, and all the wonderful people around me tell me how impressed they are that I am handling everything so well.  On the contrary people...if you only knew what was going on inside of my brain...

I will update after my appointment tomorrow.

I need to add a thanks to all the wonderful comments and emails I have received.  For the past three years when I just read blogs and didn't have one of my own I would read posts where people talked about how much it meant to have the support of their silent friends on the internet.  Now that I am in this position it really is amazing to realize that there are so many people out there who have gone through similar situations and MUCH worse situations than mine and when those people take the time out to send a kind word, it really does mean more than I could ever explain.  So thanks for that.