Category Archives: Words Words Words

Light Bed Rest: First Impressions

1. Everyone panics. It is amusing, then not so amusing to explain the “no, neither I nor the baby are currently in medical danger, this is a preventative thing” over and over.

2. Everyone offers to come by to entertain me or somehow make things easier, because I must be bored or unable to handle household stuff. I am someone who suffers from social stress, so again, this is amusing on one level, not so amusing on another because I have to keep turning people down. This social stress is partly an introvert thing, partly a fibro thing: dealing with people takes energy, something I have in short supply on a normal basis. (Jan calls this kind of social energy “teaspoons,” a variant on the spoon theory allegory of spoons representing the finite amount of available energy to someone with FM/CFS. I love the term; it combines the idea of social interaction with the basic allegory.) Also, I’ve got lots to keep me busy, namely work, which for various reasons like finances and deadlines can’t be dropped. And household stuff is already minimised.

3. Lying in bed/on the chesterfield is dull. Luckily, as Paze pointed out, most of my hobbies are rest-compatible: reading, spinning, knitting, and eventually weaving (although that last one is actually the most intensive of them all, and I will have to break it down to very basic, brief units). And there’s always work, which has never been an issue, because I don’t commute and make my own hours.

4. I am actually capable of getting myself drinks, snacks, making meals, doing light laundry, walking to the corner to meet the boy’s bus, brief cello sessions, and so forth. It’s not like when they chained me to an IV stand at the hospital last time and told me I couldn’t get out of bed for two months after stopping labour halfway through the process. By prescribing light bed rest, my doctor is looking to further reduce the amount of energy I’m expending in order to shunt as much as possible to the Owlet. What I am not allowed to do is go out and do, well, most stuff. Orchestra will be on a week-to-week basis, and I will be taking Wednesdays extra easy to save up energy for it. HRH will be driving the boy and I to cello lessons, which is ideal, because driving is one of the things that totally drains my energy and stresses me when I have two cello lessons back to back at which to pay attention.

5. After bbqing and watching kids run about yesterday with friends, which was very pleasant, I put myself on 24 hours of full bed rest to recover, because things were getting twingy at the end of the day. In bed at six o’clock! Awake at three o’clock, because my body said, “Well, we’ve been in bed for nine hours, that’s normal, so it must be time to get up!” Just for the record, body, that is not on. The 24 hours of full bed rest today was, alas, down(up?)graded to light rest again, though, because poor HRH got violently ill in the wee smas, with what I suspect is an HRH-sized version of the 24-hour tummy bug the poor boy had on Saturday. So I was up with the boy this morning after all and handling all of the morning stuff instead of the half I usually do.

All in all I’m doing very well so far. The clinic called me to go in to pick up two prescriptions and a requisition form for follow-up tests in two weeks the day after my last hospital appointment, which was ironic seeing as how it’s a 45-minute trip both ways and they obviously hadn’t yet gotten the news that I was on light bed rest. It can take a few days for info to trickle between the hospital and the clinic, I have discovered. This should no longer be a problem as I’m being followed at the hospital from hereon, though. Which means, alas, no more free clinic wi-fi while I wait hours past my appointment time. Sigh.

General Update

Last Saturday my husband made his stage debut as the bassist of the band known as Invisible, now in their seventh year, and the show was wonderful. I am terribly, terribly proud of him, and of all the guys. It was also really nice to get out and actually see people for the first time since early February.

Today I had my second let’s-keep-an-eye-on-your-body-for-signs-of-premature-labour ultrasound. It demonstrated that yay, my body is carrying on with the Stupendous Work it is doing in not showing signs of premature labour this time around: everything is perfectly normal. Go body! I have awesome BP, great results from my last blood test and the glucose challenge, and everything of that sort.

What is concerning my doctor is that the Owlet is very small. She’s about three weeks behind where they’d like her to be measurement-wise, and weighs about a kilo at 29 weeks, which means that out of 100 kids at this gestational age she’d only be 13th from the bottom. (If you’re wondering, the boy weighed 3lbs14oz at 31 weeks, which is also on the lower end for that point of gestational age, apparently, so I am not overly concerned about this.) My doctor is taking the facts that (a) it is a girl and (b) I am very petite into account, but even so, she’s not entirely sanguine. So my care has been transferred from the regular OB clinic to the high-risk clinic in the hospital, where they can evaluate me with machines and ultrasounds every two weeks to track the baby’s weight.

As a result of this weight issue, I have finally been officially put on what my doctor describes as Light Bed Rest. This is not the “eek things are scary” kind of bed rest, as nothing has changed from yesterday, or last week, or my last appointment two weeks ago. I am not in imminent danger of preterm labour. It’s just that if it should happen for some reason, a low birthweight baby has a worse chance of survival, and my doctor’s not taking any chances. She’d have put me on bed rest three months ago if I worked outside the home, but I don’t so she didn’t, and my work situation hasn’t altered. She has formally told me to avoid any activity that is stressful, or entails me travelling a lot in a day, or being on my feet for extended periods. I can continue to do quiet sedentary stuff like my freelance work; it’s just that instead of working at my desk in my home office I get to do it on a laptop from the couch, which is simply a step down from how we’ve been handling it all along because I already reduced physical activity three months ago at her recommendation. Now I have to avoid things like grocery shopping, and unfortunately it also means that presenting my keynote address at the Gaia conference this weekend is off the menu. You should have seen my doctor’s face when I ran that past her this morning. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” she said dryly, which was essentially very polite shorthand for, “Am I going to have to call your husband and tell him to lock you up on Saturday?”

If there was such a term as Further Reduced Activity, that’s what I’ll be doing; it’s the next step down from the Reduced Activity in which I have already been engaged. Because hey, yay me, I’ve been keeping my body from slipping into preterm labour signs, did I mention that? Huge victory there, and my doctor is very, very pleased about how I’ve been handling that. And the Light Bed Rest thing is going to be reevaluated every two weeks, although in all likelihood this is the way it’s going to be till the Owlet is born.

So there you have it. Everything is going very well, and staying even more quiet than I have been will help keep it that way. We just need to fatten the Owlet up a bit. HRH is writing me a prescription for More Ice Cream, which I think is an excellent idea.

An Aside

The boy put his ear to my belly yesterday and said, “She says she wants to come out now.”

NO SHE DOESN’T. This is not a one-upmanship thing, where my children compete to see who can be born the earliest. I forbid it. 28 weeks is NOT ON. She’s in there till at least 36 weeks or she’s grounded forever.

Mother’s Day Roundup And Other Mothery Stuff

This morning the boy picked up his bow and bowed his fingering exercise. He’d been playing it pizzicato till now, saying that no no no, the bow would be too hard. Today he decided to do it all on his own. I am learning so much about the way he learns by working through his practices with him. And we share experiences, too, like today when we were talking about pivots to cross strings, and he said, “I kept my right wrist really, really still Mama.” I agreed, and said, “You know how your teacher said grown-up cellists still have problems with not moving their bow hand wrists and letting their right elbows direct the movement instead? Mama still has lots and lots of trouble with that.” (Mama was also taught to use her wrist and keep it loose in order to economize energy, as was our current teacher, so we’re both working on remembering otherwise; you can see how teaching and playing styles change over the years.) “Really?” he said. “I won’t! When I grow up, I won’t move my wrist at all!”

I love that we share this together. I love that I can hear him humming bits of my recital pieces when I work on them, both during my lesson and when I practice at home, and even at random times when he’s building with Lego or playing with action figures. I love that he’ll play an exercise for me without announcing it and then ask me impishly if I can identify it, and he’s so chuffed when I do. He counts his practice stickers every morning before putting another one on, and it looks like we may hit 100 right around recital time (very exciting!).

He was so excited about Mother’s Day that I got my school artwork on Thursday when he brought it home, a construction paper daffodil and two heart-shaped cards. I was awoken on Saturday morning at 5:45 by a gentle pat and a whispered “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” because he couldn’t wait for that, either. On Sunday morning at 7:00 I got another drawing of a heart, and then a silver tray with a cup of tea and a small bouquet of tulips and daffodils from the garden. We’d invited HRH’s parents over for lunch, so I made that lovely cinnamon loaf and a quiche, and my mother-in-law contributed salad and crudités, and fruit to go with the cinnamon loaf for dessert. The food was all lovely, and we sat outside afterwards as the weather was spectacular. I managed to get sun, as the freckles testify. HRH and his dad (who is looking really, really fantastic and recovering well from his bout of very bad health) got to wander around upstairs and bounce ideas for finishing the attic off one another, and ended up on a recon mission to the Home Depot three blocks down that resulted in two perfect windows being brought home, much to everyone’s surprise.

Monday was a ped day. What? You say you thought the boy just had several? So did we. It was marked as conditional on the school calendar, which I didn’t check till this weekend, and I didn’t get an announcement or confirmation from the school beforehand so I went ahead and assumed it was happening. As I’d already put off my second round of blood tests and the glucose challenge test once from last week when I had the dizzy spells, instead of rescheduling it yet again the boy came with me to the hospital yesterday, and his mission was to take care of me. He was very interested in the cold orange drink I was given and asked what it tasted like. I said, “Like melted orange popsicles, with a bit of fizzy to it” and he made a face. We hung out in the snack bar for the hour it took for the glucose test, where he nibbled on the carrots and snow peas we’d brought, and we read a bunch of books. Then we went back to the lab and he held my hand very importantly while they took the blood so that I wouldn’t be afraid. The technicians thought he was adorable for patting my arm and telling me that it wouldn’t hurt and it would be over in just a moment. We came home and had a picnic lunch in the backyard.

I’m starting to feel a little weird. I’m at 27 weeks, and at the hospital they gave me a test to be done at home at 35 weeks. I had my first baby at 31 weeks, six years ago; I don’t know what happens normally after that, what tests are done, when appointments are scheduled. I missed two-thirds of my final trimester, so I have no idea what to expect from it. I’m in the weird position of having experienced labour and delivery, but not in the way I’d expected in the hospital I’d worked with up till that point; I never got to pack a bag or plan out what to do to keep my mind busy in labour, or anything like that. I’ve never even had a hospital tour. I’ve never had my brand new infant in my hospital room with me, or got to take it home with me when I left. It’s all new for me from hereon in till the baby arrives home, at which point I’m back in familiar territory. (I have plenty of experience in dealing with NICU, though, and pumping exclusively for a month to supply my baby with breastmilk, and in dealing with hospital staff and schedules of all kinds.) It’s just a really odd feeling to have this lacuna ahead of me between the two sections of pregnancy/new mum stuff that I know about. I sometimes feel like an imposter when first-time-pregnant women of my acquaintance ask me about the last trimester and new babies. My experience is so different from the norm.

Speaking of this baby, she is really working the kickboxing routine these days. I can’t find a comfortable position for my very adjustable desk chair and the yoga ball I got somehow manages to stress my lower back more rather than less, both of which make for a challenging work sessions. I may ask HRH to get the kneeling chair out of storage; that might work.

Friday Photos!

With an art theme.

This morning’s book report (in kindergarten, they draw their favourite part of the book; it’s a comprehension thing):

This week’s letter sound was Q. “Mama, I want to draw a quail for the letter Q!” he announced. What? A what? Where did you see/hear/encounter a quail? Whatever. Let me tell you, I have plenty of reference material, having just finished writing a book on birds. We looked at the photos and sketches I have of quails, and he did it from memory at school. While the general shape is, um, odd for a quail, which usually looks kind of like a softball with a tail, you can totally tell this is a quail because of the comma-shaped feather on the top of the head. Also, I love the look on this bird’s face. This is one cheerful quail.

And finally, these are a few of his favourite things: trees, owls, and bunnies:

Picking Up

The first couple of days after driving toward a major book deadline are always odd. There’s a simultaneous sense of complete freedom after a number of months, but also of fatigue and the inability to focus on much at all. And then there’s the weirdness of trying to settle back into a regular life again after being deadline-focused and working overtime for a while.

Yesterday I handled e-mail and stuff, and let the copyediting team know I was available again after delivering the long-term project that had taken me off the roster. I cleaned up my desk and shelved the stack of bird books that I’d had next to me for reference throughout the writing of the book. I made bread. I read some more of the new Charles Todd book, A Lonely Death. I napped out of necessity. I spun some more of the Wensleydale I got in my three-month subscription to Northbound Knitting’s fibre club last fall. (I think I’m making a heavy laceweight single, because it’s very pretty as-is and I don’t want to halve its yardage by plying it with itself.) I’m glad I have a fibre stash, because I’m certainly not buying anything new for a long time what with finances being very, very tight for the next six to eight weeks as we are a single-income household now until I receive my cheque for delivering the book. (I am seriously glad the welcome tax finally landed, because the huge chunk of money I had set aside for it was starting to get impatient, but my presently-empty bank account is sad and lonely now.)

I was supposed to go in to the blood lab at the hospital today for my second round of blood tests and the oh-so-exciting-sounding-but-actually-boring glucose challenge test, but I came home early from orchestra last night after experiencing a couple of dizzy spells. I figure fasting and then driving through rush hour morning traffic for a blood draw after a set of dizzy spells might not be the best thing right now, so I’ve pushed that to Monday. (Huh. I just checked the website, and apparently the blood lab is open till 3:00 now instead of 11:00, and I could have sworn it was only open Monday through Thursday but the site says nothing about that.) It was also up in the air because the boy woke up with an asthma attack yesterday and a nasty cold announcing its presence, and by dinner last night he had no appetite and a fever of 100.5, so he might have been staying home today. He woke up with just the cold, though, and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so I sent him off to school after a dose of decongestant.

Today, gentle readers, is tax stuff. Yes, we are late, for only the second time ever (ironically, the last time was also when we were expecting a baby) because I had so much work to do in the past two months that I couldn’t spare any to sort out all my freelancer stuff and make lists. Today I pull out my folder of receipts etcetera and make piles of different categories to add up, check up on much we paid in utilities, and make that list of questions to ask our most excellent tax guy. There are a tonne of unknowns this year, you see. We bought a house, and I have no idea what that does to my freelancer claims (do I claim part of the mortgage payments the way I claimed part of our rent? what about city taxes?), or what proof we need to claim first-time homebuyer stuff, or even what we can write off or what tax rebates are available to new homeowners. This year is really complicated. And no, despite the Canada Action Plan ads, there’s not a hell of a lot of info available online either federally or provincially regarding it; this is why we have a Most Excellent Tax Guy who knows all this stuff and can tell us about it. To each his or her own area of expertise!

So there you have it. I have said it on the Internet, and so it must be true: Today is devoted to tax stuff. There’s other stuff I have to do, like update my pro site with info about the upcoming book and the Gaia Gathering conference I’m speaking at this month, but I’m going to let that slide till tomorrow because I’m really tired. If I can accomplish one major thing a day for the next few days, I think I’m good. In the last week before deadline I borrowed energy from future days, something fibro folk do out of necessity sometimes, but the penalty is always a long recovery.

I think I shall sort the receipts and bills, then nap, then add them up. Doing both in a row without a rest is just asking for horrendous errors. And I ought to eat lunch in there, too.

Bird Book Done: Check

The bird book has been handed in to my editor. I always forget how long checking bibliographies takes.

I wish I had more energy to be enthused. I feel rather run over, partly from contorting myself and the material to deal with the imposed changes and cuts in the last six weeks, partly from dealing with the election. I wish I had a better sense of what this book was like, because it feels very fragmented to me. Not a surprise, perhaps, since three-quarters of it consists of brief reference entries on birds, so my usual sense of flow and evolution doesn’t apply here.

I’m going to break for lunch and possibly a brief nap, then start typing out the introduction for the companion journal. Yesterday afternoon was technically the deadline for both the book and intro, but my editor gave me a couple of days’ leeway due to her workload, bless her.

ETA: And the intro for the companion journal and the edit of the sample record sheet is also done and handed in. Now I get to pass out for half an hour before I go meet the boy’s bus.