Once, I thought, this pregnancy thing is tough!
Once, I thought, it’s so frustrating that I can’t get up without help, eat normally, see my feet or tie my shoes, lie down without getting heartburn or short of breath, or getting the crap kicked out of me by an (always) amped up LB.
Now, I know better. That’s all nothing next the cursed PUPPs. Every centimeter of my skin, from neck to toe, is covered. I am become a walking mass of lumps, bumps and rashes. I feel like a disgusting reptilian leper.
All the formal literature seems to be clear on what we know about PUPPPs, a misleadingly cuddly acronym for basically a skin plague (Pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy):
It “usually” strikes women in their first pregnancies, in the 35th week, 70% of cases are in women carrying boys or multiples, the cause is unknown and generally won’t go away until delivery. It’s not supposed to be contagious, and shouldn’t affect the mother or baby long-term or after birth. I guess the fact that PiC hasn’t caught it is evidence that it’s not contagious.
Basically, it’s nearly all completely useless information. I’m glad it’s not contagious of course and even more importantly that it shouldn’t hurt LB but otherwise, who the hell cares if it normally strikes people carrying multiples if you get it and you’ve got a singlet? Or if it normally starts at 35 weeks and you get it much earlier? The more pressing thing is that which we have no answer for: what causes it and how to deal with it!
The very cynical part of me says there’s no formal research on this because it only affects women and has no mortality rate. Never you mind this occurs in 1 of 20 women and has driven those with severe cases to actually induce as early as is safe to seek relief, it’s not warranted a single published study that I could find.
So I’m left digging out forum after forum of anecdotal experiences which tell me that women are experiencing it when they carry girls, that some are afflicted as early as at 12 weeks all the way up to the “usual” 35 weeks, when they’re on their second, third, or fourth pregnancies, that it goes away after a week or two for some people and doesn’t until delivery for others. For still others, horrifyingly, it doesn’t go away for weeks after delivery and even more horrifyingly, some people are getting it after delivery and living with it for MONTHS.
I guess that last one mostly academically horrifies me because I’ve got it now. But as awful as this is now, my imagination is more than up to the task of envisiong being the one for whom delivery doesn’t clear it up and then add a helpless newborn to the mix when I myself am the next thing to useless.
Not so silent suffering
The itching is far more intense than chicken pox. I clearly recall being seven, left lying on the bed during the summer covered in lotion, and being sternly told NOT TO SCRATCH. I did NOT scratch. It was very uncomfortable but the lotion did help the itching, so of my “things that sucked” memories, it was just a crappy experience.
This has reached the level of Utter Despair. It’s comparable to those moments in my late teens where I was trying to get through college and working 100 hours a week. That in itself was crappy but it was the crippling pain in my hands that truly made it Hell.
For years, back then, I only slept a few hours a night because the pain prevented me from falling asleep or woke me from fitful sleeps. For an otherwise anti-emotion teen, more nights than I care to admit were watered by hot, angry tears, arms suspended above my head on ice packs in a futile effort to dull the pain.
At a mere 3, 4, and 5 days into the itch and pain dominated sleep deprivation, I found myself spiraling down that pit again.
ARGH.
My skin has became so sensitive that even air currents are uncomfortable. Most fabrics trigger the urge to scratch on contact, only the softest of cottons were tolerable, and skin to skin contact is the worst trigger of all so lathering the special soap and applying lotion is a special kind of teeth-gritting, do-it-anyway, torment.
Where there’s any skin to skin contact or pressure, say from natural weight from lying down, basically any place that starts to build up warmth at all, the rash flares up angrily. Basically sleep was out for a week while I figured out how to cope. One night, I resorted to standing outside during the storm trying to chill my entire body so that my skin would calm down.
Where LB’s weight presses down on my legs, those happy bumps have merged into MegaZord-sized masses that moved past itching to plain old pain. Minor consolation: it’s so bad that I’m not even tempted to scratch them.
I honestly look like I taunted a few hives of killer bees and hung around for their justice.
I’ve tried everything that the doctor recommended and everything eczema-experienced friends recommended; 3 kinds of antihistamines, 4 kinds of lotions, oatmeal baths, hydrocortisone, 3 showers a day using the anecdotally recommended pine tar soap. Even drinking V8 juice which I don’t like one bit because I don’t even know why that’s supposed to help.
None have brought actual relief, only the oatmeal lotion and Sensitive Skin Aveda lotion seem to keep the burning itch from getting worse. The hydrocortisone occasionally calms the worst on my hands, but can only be used sparingly and where my skin stays cool because it stays greasy and seems to conduct heat, exacerbating the discomfort. It also gets on everything since it doesn’t absorb. Because when everything up to my fingertips are affected, I really want to do a few extra loads of laundry!
My hands are afflicted with the smallest and most densely packed bumps so I’ve got quarter sized bump-clusters on the backs of my hands, on my fingers, between my fingers. This makes typing a hover-above-the-keyboard affair, exhausting to say the least.
The entire belly, Ground Zero for this nastiness, is of course thoroughly cloaked under bumps of all shapes and sizes, as is my back, so leaning on anything in any direction is strongly contraindicated. My legs flare up the most dramatically when they touch each other and that means always staying fully clothed, top to bottom.
Clothes! Another huge frustration. Everything has to be smooth soft cotton, fit but not tightly so it doesn’t shift but doesn’t constrict, no elastic waistbands since the indents from waistbands just provided new tracks for new rashes. I own exactly two shirts that suit and have been trying every pair of pants and shorts in the house to no great success.
COPING
After ten days of trial and error, amid increasing desperation, I’ve found that I can at least sleep if I keep flipping over to the opposite side every 15-30 minute like a rotisserie chicken and “baste” myself with ice packs, tucking them into the sides that have accumulated warmth since the last flip. It means very short naps rather than actual sleep but it’s still better than sleep madness of working and functioning on 1.5 hours of sleep a day.
During the day, I sit incredibly awkwardly on piles of blankets covered with cotton sheets to protect myself and the furniture and am VERY aware of how long I’ve been sitting because of the pressure issue. It stinks.
And of course the regular pain hasn’t let up so I get this great combination of itching+pain+fibro pain and swelling. If I thought I knew what feeling helpless and useless was like before? Sure didn’t.
PiC has had to help me with the most basic of life functions, not just cooking but sometimes feeding me when the swollen from pain and swollen from rash hands were particularly bad. He’s learned the art of applying lotion evenly and keeps me supplied with fresh icepacks day and night.
Normally, by the time I write up something like this, I’ve achieved some sort of sense of positivity but nope. Not this time. Doing the best we can but mostly just trying to get by and leaning way too much on PiC. Poor guy.
And unlike my teen years, cooking is now one of my favorite ways to unwind. Normally this is a win win and PiC benefits from the messes in the kitchen.
I don’t want to admit that I can’t keep up with everything but let’s just pretend, as an intellectual exercise and a nod to moderation, that cooking after delivering Little Bean is not super likely. I used to cook most nights, now I’m down to 1-3 nights a week. Add a potentially squalling, but definitely feeding every 2-3 hours newborn to the mix and I think we all know the real end of that equation.
But who wants to rely entirely on take-out or delivery? It’s a nice treat on occasion but I get tired of restaurant food faster than it takes to outspend the grocery budget.
Like squirrels, we’ve been stocking the cupboards with the basics: pasta, rice, quinoa, boxed broths, and KIND and Luna bars for days when I just can’t face a meal or just need an easy boost. Flour, sugar and brown sugar goes on sale a lot around the holidays so I’ll stock up on that for prep as well.
We don’t have much storage or a very big freezer unfortunately, so my plans to prep/precook some food that should be easy to throw together later have to be modest.
I’ll be:
Poaching chicken thighs and freezing them whole,
Poaching whole chickens and shredding it for use in soups, quesadillas, with rice, whatever. I tend to throw together really haphazard soups so we’ll just prep ahead whatever of the standard ingredients freezes well. I know onions do fine, but I’m not sure about carrots, potatos and celery yet. I know for darn sure I’m not going to be up to peeling and cutting up potatos, though.
Attempting premaking pizza from scratch for freezing, toppings and all, and a lasagna recipe (also intended to be frozen). I always want lasagna and rarely make it so that’ll be really nice to have a few premade.
I’ve also written up a detailed list of our local restaurants that are good for either delivery or take out, including all our usual orders so that if it’s that dire, we don’t have to make any real decisions.
We tried Munchery.com for some real food delivery as we have mostly Asian take-out around here and most don’t deliver. They do more American style foods, though in smaller portions, but it’s a reasonable cost per meal with discounts so that’s on our list of go-to food choices.
This should be helpful to out of town visitors who might be here to help with LB too, they won’t have to ask or figure out what’s good that’s also nearby. While I’m at it, I’m including grocery stores as well. That bit’s purely for convenience.
Notes: I always crave cake and most especially cakes from Nothing Bundt Cakes. Failing that, (anyone who really loves me and wants me to be stocked up on cake, take note) we’ve discovered the Super Lemony Lemon Cake Bites from Trader Joe’s and I nearly demolished the whole package in one go. They’re not the absolutely most amazing thing ever, but they are close enough for me. Yes yes, I should be eating my veggies but I also need my cake, y’all.
All our “we should, someday” projects are coming home to roost.
Personally, and this approach with my clothes is all too often to my detriment, I usually wait til things are worn to a literal thread before replacing them. The Curse of the Broken Pants still holds because of this: every time I start a new job, I break another pair of pants. (Pretty sure it’s hilarious when it’s not happening to you.)
We’d put off most of it, inertia is a budget’s friend sometimes and overstuffed rooms give me claustrophobia, anyway. LB’s impending arrival has upended this complacency. All too soon, we’ll need every bit of organization and babyproofable furniture we can get to offset the chaos.
The “we should”s are turning into “holy crap, we should really do this now!”
PiC and I react to this totally in line with our usual styles of course: I mentally rank each new idea as a now or hold for later; for PiC, it all goes on the same list. Obviously, we’re now having a LOT of discussion about which are truly priorities and which are Nice to Have.
On hold:
That rattling vent that just sounds awful but works fine.
Our dream trough sink (guesstimate: $3000 for the sink and installation. And the inconvenience – I assume installation would be a huge pain).
The shower head (guesstimate: $200-300 for the replacement but installation also looks like a bear).
Do It Now:
Furniture is the biggest thing right now, literally, and of course the most expensive even with thrifty Craigslisting.
Minimalist or no, we will be adding a fair amount of stuff. Purging the place has been productive but getting things out the door can only make space for the somewhat inevitable pile of stuff, it doesn’t get us organized with the incoming baby stuff.
1. I need an actual workstation. My current workspace is open to the public and the mess is counterproductive.
2. LB has a bed now but we need decent storage for LB’s stuff: feeding, diapering and bathing supplies, clothes, books, a few toys. A car seat and stroller that I can manage. (It’s odd that such a small creature needs about six times more stuff than the enormous Seamus.)
3. The inefficiency of our closet. Meditating on the problem hasn’t brought on any genius so we’re resorting to The Container Store, that scary heaven, to provide some answers. PiC has gone there six times, I’m staying the heck out in case I buy everything. And some IKEA, that den of somewhat affordable home stuffs.
4. The tiny closet. PiC has organized the HECK out of it, managing to find a whole pile of things to sell. Defraying costs? YES PLEASE.
The funniest thing? PiC genuinely thought that he had 3 to 4 years before he had to worry about childproof furniture. I don’t think he’s been paying attention to how much a crawling or newly walking infant gets into, we’ll be lucky to be havoc-free for more than 10 months!
So, no more open-face furniture, doors on everything!
Our investments took a hit this month so interestingly, between that and our savings, we had exactly no change (except for, literally, some change) since last month.
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Since the addition of another unbudgeted mouth to feed and body to, well, not clothe, but to get up to medical snuff, all (meager) proceeds of the blog now go to fund Dog#2’s ongoing medical care. I’ve got some saved, but he may bid well to run right through all of it since this isn’t really your standard money-makin’ money blog 😉 We’re calling him Seamus now, Shamey for short when he transgresses, as he has done on occasion.
So if you have to purchase from Amazon and wouldn’t mind using one of my links in the sidebar there, Seamus and we would be most grateful. Every penny really does count!
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I finally secured a CPA to get started on our much-delayed 2013 taxes – wazoo! Once that’s filed, we can get started on the 2014 tax planning; we’ll have a few things to do there.
I have gotten a few recommendations on an estate planning lawyer, so I think that’s my September goal: Get our paperwork nailed down.
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Having had no retirement plan through my employer for a while, I really ought to have done this before but I’m just now getting myself in order on that front. I did manage to fully contribute to a 2013 IRA and will do so again for 2014, while quietly kicking myself for not dealing with this much earlier. I think between income, married filing jointly, and having one spouse have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, we won’t actually be able to take a deduction on it but whatever. Saving is the key here.
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Reflecting: You’d think I wouldn’t have to squeeze every penny and point program to fund everyday life. ‘Where the hell did all our money go??‘ pops up an awful lot in my head since we do make a decent income between the two of us, after all! I keep finding myself thinking it’s time to create more income and/or get a second job. But seriously…
Reality Check. We’re still paying for two households, four adults, and two dogs. The Bay Area isn’t cheap by any means, even as frugally as I try to keep our home. And we would like to be in a house that we can reasonably afford to pay off and maintain, someday, so I’m still aggressively saving our cash. And there’s really only so much health/energy I have for THIS life, forget one that includes yet more work.
On Life
We will manage a vacation this year. A semi-actual vacation where I take a few days off instead of just going off to some place and just work while we’re there late into the night and play during the day and come home and collapse.
I’d be excited about this but I’m still in “prep and take care of everything” mode.
This isn’t a tutorial on saving since the champagne’s a cheat but I pick the bubbly at home. I’m not just frugal, I’m seriously lazy.
We had friends in town recently. The default MO when this happens is we go out to brunch, lunch or dinner before they leave, depending on their travel plans. With some friends (ahem, his), it’s a fight over who pays the bill, with them snagging it more often than we can. This means we end up in a bill-war, vying to pay for the next round, every time we go out. It’s exhausting and a pain in the budget.
At the core, the problem is one of culture. For PiC, eating out is part of his family bonding culture; for me, cooking together and eating at home is part of my family bonding culture. Up til now, we have heavily favored his but it’s time to start observing mine when we’re here at home.
We’ve slashed this year’s food, entertainment and travel budget by 20% because we spent WAY too much in those areas last year. Anything approaching five figures for only two people (and for entertaining) is outrageous, IMO, and I really don’t know how the others do it considering they eat out at least twice as much as we do on their own.
We may not be able to cancel the bill-pay arms race but we’re sure as shootin’ going to approach Quality Time differently.
We’re off to a fine start hosting a champagne brunch where we focused on a couple stars for the meal: the champagne and the best bacon ever. We’re finally cracking open one of two bottles of Korbel that were gifts; they’ve been sitting untouched with only the two of us to drink it. With guests coming, I squeezed grapefruit to make orange and grapefruit mimosas.
And bacon. Oh the bacon! I’ve always been a fan of bacon but most of it’s been run-of-the-mill variety. I hadn’t know real bacon until my friend ruined me forever with a gift of Zingerman’s bacon for our wedding. Now THAT is applewood smoked bacon: aromatic even in the shipping container, cut so thickly that diced for pasta you get big chunks of smoky meatiness, with hardly any fat to trim. Swoonworthy bacon. The only catch is it normally runs $12 a lb. So it’s the special occasion bacon, even if I could easily find (make up) a reason to pop half a pound into every recipe.
The rest of the meal was simple: scrambled eggs with green onions, whole wheat pancakes with maple syrup, and almond croissants.
Bacon: $6
Pancakes and syrup: $3
Eggs, green onions: $3
Almond croissants: $2
Juices: $1
Even paying for and making the whole meal we’re paying less to feed 4 than we would for the two of us at the local diner so that’s nice. The drawbacks, of course, if you don’t like to cook is that you’re cooking and cleaning, and the guests are getting what we choose to make. Sorry, guys. 🙂
On the bright side, we’ll soon be taking advantage of a new wafflemaker to expand our repertoire. Chocolate chip bacon waffles, here we come!
Other breakfast ideas: I may relieve my friends of their smoked salmon (which they’ve been trying to get rid of) to try making eemusing’s potato cakes with salmon and eggs.
I’m good at making dinners but my breakfast/brunch cooking is pretty limited. If you’ve got any delicious and easy brunch suggestions, throw them my way.
As we pass the 2nd anniversary of Mom’s passing, I’ve been sitting with a good friend who has recently lost her mother, discussing grief and the process of grieving.
In some ways, it’s not a simple thing, not an easy progression of steps, nor a checklist you can tick off one bit at a time and arrive at an end.
In other ways, it really is quite simple to understand the gauntlet once you’ve gone through it.
“I was fine at her memorial. I was smiling and talking to people. It didn’t look like her. It didn’t feel like she was gone.”
Yes. I remember that feeling of surreal unreality.
“I’ve cried every day since burying her. I still can’t go into the same stores that I used to shop.”
Me neither. I’d run, crying, out of a grocery store because the memories were just too much. It wasn’t even one that we visited together. It was the visceral memory of a childhood habit that gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go.
“I keep asking myself why I didn’t take her to X, why did I choose to do Y instead of Z? Why didn’t I ..”
I’ve second guessed every decision I made in the last twelve years. Constantly. I’m convinced that I was the worst daughter ever because the end, ultimate, result was that she died, never having recovered from her illness.
You could float on the sea of “if onlys” and “what ifs” that we create, in our grief, treading and retreading our memories.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.
But is it really? Is it really so much clearer now that events have irrevocably transpired?
A truth I’ve had to learn is that the other choice always seems like it would have been better only because I already know the outcome of the choices I did make. I have no idea what would have happened had I gone somewhere else for undergrad, if I had pursued a Masters or Doctorate. Maybe I would have had to drop out and be even less prepared to do the basics of supporting the family.
There’s a song by Little Texas that gets me EVERY time I hear it.
That knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling bone-deep regret for not pursuing a white collar profession where I could have earned enough to buy her health insurance outright (even though that would have taken years), or for being angry with her, not just her disease, as she became more ill and less mentally competent. I couldn’t take the step back at the time, it was easier to be angry than to accept and understand that I was losing her.
What might have been
In the aftermath, even after nominally accepting that I, mostly, did the best I could, and failed, I wonder what could have been done differently. And I wonder how much of my choices, and non-choices, affected this family.
Before carrying me to term, Mom had a few miscarriages.
What would have happened if I hadn’t been the one to make it?
What if my brother had a brother like he wanted?
Or what if he had grown up as an only child, with all the attention he clearly needed, without a “weak” (but meaner than a pit of crocs) little sister to take care of and be bitten for his efforts?
What if he hadn’t had me to practice his machinations and manipulations on?
What if he didn’t have a “follower” sibling with my personality and strong inclinations to academic achievement to contend with and push against in his attempts to lead me? Would he have actually reached to do something with his abilities instead of playing the comparison game and not even trying?
It’s part of the family lore that after a few days (or weeks, I forget) of getting to know me, my sibling picked me up and suggested they return to the hospital to trade me in for a better model. Unfortunately for him, hospitals didn’t accept returns at the time or I’m sure he would have just taken me himself. Kids feel that sort of thing all the time, but I wonder whether they all really would have been better off without me?
Without an extra mouth to feed, a second child to clothe, educate and worry about, would my parents have been less stressed, and more able to save? Did their circumstances dictate the outcome, or would their actions have been much the same?
Would my sibling have been the productive citizen and son that my parents prayed for? Would he have learned to use his copious people skills and talents towards a job or career, would he have felt the unbearable weight of responsibility that I grew up with, or would that still have eluded him?
Was it my fault, my existing, that played a key role in his failure to thrive? Is his failure to find a niche where he would excel attributable to my combative and competitive nature?
These are intertwined but I can’t help but realize that, like the butterfly flapping its wings, my very existence changed things.
Was it for the better?
I can’t know. I do know that as the surviving fetus, as the kid who did come along second, eventually, whatever ill my coming boded, I always felt a pressing weight. I knew fairly early on about Mom’s miscarriages. I know about the bigger than usual gap in years between my sibling and myself. Where other kids were two years apart like clockwork, we were about 3 years apart and, oh, the strength of will it must have taken for her not to smother me mid-scream in the first nine months I spent crying my lungs out.
It always seemed like I lost the genetic lottery: as the scrawny, untalented (no eye for art, terrible ear for music, only Doggle matches my astounding level of clumsiness), not terribly smart, really a bit of drifter with no dreams, youngest child, I only knew that I had to compensate and overcompensate to justify having made it.
The ghosts of those other babies, the ones my parents never met, haunted me a little. What could they have done with the gift of life? Would they have had the talent? Would they have inherited Mom’s gift with numbers, Dad’s ability to dream for the future? Would he or she, or they, have been the charmers, able to mingle and make friends everywhere they went? I certainly didn’t get any of that, so was that lost with them, leaving me with only remnants of determination and a strange love of containers to work with?
Sometimes it feels like all I have are questions, a sense of those nearly siblings’ unfulfilled potential, the uncomfortable prickles of something like guilt.
Without dwelling on the macabre, there are some studies that suggest that the influence of a sibling, past a certain point in life, is a stronger force in the development of an individual than even that of a parent. Anecdotally, I could see this. I learned from my parents, authoritatively, but I viscerally reacted to my sibling. At a much deeper level, I absorbed what I know of human nature from my interactions with him, by growing up next to him, and observing his experiences. By following my big brother. And I can’t know how my existence, my following, and my watching affected him. A bit like Schrodinger’s Cat, I guess.
Having made it this far, it feels like it’s my job to make good, to redeem the family name. I can’t change the past, I can only work toward the future.
I try not to think about
What might have been
‘Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can’t go back again
There’s no use giving in
And there’s no way to know
What might have been
Our favorite guesting ritual is cooking a meal for our hosts.
There’s always a bit of shuffling figuring out what to make and cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen but cooking a nice meal for hardworking (often parent) friends and cleaning up for them’s a nice way to give them a bit of a break and thank them at the same time.
For our new parent friends especially, going out is not so much the fun and easy time that it used to be. Depending on the age of the kids, and the parenting style, they’re generally on the hook for crying, projectile food, running, screaming… all ingredients for a good time, right? It’s just easier to eat at home and weird as it is, PiC and I always enjoy a good ramble through the grocery stores wherever we travel.
Grocery shopping in Hawaii was one hell of an eye-opener.
The ingredients for a basic taco night for four adults and 1 child, which probably would have cost about $30 even here in the Bay Area, was a shocking $60. Granted, I wasn’t buying on sale cycles like normal, and didn’t have any coupons either but still, I’m certain we could manage turkey tacos for less than that on the mainland.
That included: 2 lbs of ground turkey, taco seasoning, hard taco shells, tortillas, onions, 5 avocados for guacamole, 2 limes, 1 bag of chips, a few tomatos, and shredded cheese.
I walked the rest of the produce section and aisles to get a feel for the rest of the store and it was equally scary.
Milk is consistently expensive, running between $9-10 per gallon; kale cost 3x more than I would normally pay (between $1-2 per bundle on the mainland; $5 on the island); bananas that are usually between 29-79 cents per pound were $2.49/lb. Apples were nearly $4/lb; and cereal ran $7-9/box.
We often joke that we can’t afford to feed another mouth around here, PiC snacks enough for three and meals that would serve 4-6 don’t last past the first sitdown, so paradisiacal as Hawaii is, we couldn’t even afford to feed ourselves there!
We’re so spoiled by how reasonable food prices are, even in the Bay Area, and especially in Southern California.
