Is Your Blood Pressure Low?

This past week has been really trying at both the hospital and home. What started as an innocent foot rash, caused by cardboard in a pair of ballet flats, grew inflamed when the AC in our bedroom blew only hot air inside with the 100+ temperature outside.

I started itching, thinking it was the heat and having heat stroke. I couldn't sleep because of the furnace I was carrying around inside me. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, I cried uncle and didn't go to work. I took it easy and waddled around the house - only to find the itch spreading to my hands.

My husband's colleague, a nurse, identified this as the early signs of a condition that starts in the 36th week of pregnancy: obstetric cholestasis, where the rash was not just a skin issue but my liver releasing bile salt into my blood. There were scary words thrown around: still birth, inducing delivery. All of this at the end of a pregnancy when there had been literally no complications.

The hospital has been no help as no two doctors will tell you the same thing. The first test we took said the salt level was high (165) but not so high (in the 1000s) as to cause poison to the placenta and thus the fetus.

So I'm scratching away and hoping that they are right; it's not to a level to be concerned. We'll hopefully find out more on Sunday at the next appointment.

Prickly Heat

For the past 8.5 months, pregnancy has been really good to me. Other than having to wake up early to go to the bathroom and the occasional leg cramp (which are a frightening window into labor) I have fared well compared to the stories I read, hear, and imagined.

Then, this weekend.

Thursday morning I could tell from the sweat beading lightly across me as the sun peeked into our bedroom that the air conditioning was out (again). Every ten weeks or so, the filters get clogged (only in our room) and then we have a few days of stale air. Up until now, the temperatures in our desert state stayed below 40 degree Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) so this was not too huge an inconvenience.

But now that it is summer and I'm carrying around my own heater wherever I go with 34 week old baby boy, the air not being on was not a good option.

I was in a hurry to work and thought that I could get the maintenance guys to come on Saturday - Friday being the Muslim holiday - so only one more night.

Needless to say on Thursday night when I still hadn't fallen asleep by 6 a.m., right next to my blissfully snoring husband (who would want me to say gently, barely snoring) I was kicking myself for not having made the time.

Saturday came and went with the guards on the compound who deliver all the information to the work crews and like to keep tabs on our lives shaking their heads at us. After nearly three weeks of visits by the water crew to fix our water heater, we now had even more problems? They had that South Asian disbelief my parents raised us with when we said we had a headache or had been in a car accident.

Why? You could almost hear the question forming on his lips.

I stayed home from work on Sunday after a second sleepless night; waiting for the maintenance crew. Luckily I used the time to do what many would refer to as 'nesting'. Having another crew of carpenters in to assemble the Pack 'n' Play, move furniture, get the nanny's room ready, move the crib upstairs.

Still no sign of the crew.

I wrote 2,000 words for a manuscript long over due.

No air conditioning guys.

I dropped my car in the industrial area (a separate city from where the rest of us live) and came home.

Nobody but the busy carpenters, hanging shelves in the nanny's room. Why couldn't they fix the air?

I took a nap downstairs where the air was working, on one of the sofas. And then the doorbell rang.

At 6:00 p.m. they came.

And said they would come back today to double check it was working (it isn't) and they didn't.

Additionally because of the heat, I have a strange itchiness on my feet from flats I bought that apparently made my feet sweat. The open toe shoes or the mostly leather ones I've been wearing my adult life were too high for this late in the pregnancy. Though people say there is no way to avoid the leg cramps, I was all for trying.

Instead I now have a strange heat rash that the nurse at my husband's work says is 'prickly heat'. Bless him, he's swabbed my swollen toes with rubbing alcohol (which a friend was promptly worried about getting into my blood stream and into the placenta).

We bought some powder today and calamine lotion.

Hoping it will work (the powder has taken away some of the burning already but I feel it starting again as I type0.

The air hopefully is much cooler now than it was the last few nights.

And so it continues, marching towards the end of this journey -- which is only the beginning of our little one coming into the world.

No one said it would be easy. And I know most people would not consider this hard.

I felt proud of myself today when someone came into the office for a meeting and said:

"I thought you'd be much bigger. You're okay."

I repeated my Facebook status to her that I had up a few days ago.

"We don't care what you think about us."

And that's true. I haven't actually embraced being pregnant until this last month. And the truth is there: we don't care. We are too busy with powder on our feet, sleepless nights, and leg cramps.

And this is before the baby shows up!

The Shoes that Were Lost and Then Found

Imagine my sheer delight when digging through the closet, hoping to find a sweater I was fairly sure I had given away to charity after years of use, I found the missing Aldo shoes instead!

The ones I thought I had left in the parking lot because of sheer exhaustion that Friday at the mall.

Tears came to my eyes, partly because I knew that my brain, while a strange rabbit warren of a place these days, had not yet betrayed me to that limit.

I don't know if it's nesting, or if the fact that my body is getting larger by the day is prompting me that this is really happening. I am really about to have a baby and bring someone else into the world. I'm reading my fourth or so book about pregnancy - a non-medical, email exchange between two expectant mothers, and convinced that I could write something just as good. It's no accident that as a writer I'm more interested in narratives about motherhood than what doctors want you to do.

When I first announced that I was having a baby over the summer, our management was slightly out of wack - though they said all the right things - about how I could be replaced. My maternity leave and how the work would get done was a constant subject of conversation which didn't really help me come to grips with what was happening to my life. I felt pressure to behave as though everything was fine: more than that, because I hadn't had any complications, I did feel more or less fine (other than getting slightly rotound). But that was six months ago and we've managed to hire three new people (to offset the work I was doing for the last 10 months).

The new people, the fact I saw us all through the launch phase, and have generally been the same have tempered the reactions of but-what-will-we-do-when-you-are-gone that plagued me the second trimester.

Now it's the middle of June and I have two more weeks of 'work'; work outside the home anyway. The idea of two months away from work yawned before me in April/May but now I realize the time is going to fly by. I will have my mother here and the nanny, then my aunt and my brother. Plus: The baby!

So two months will actually be short, as everyone is warning me.

For the first time in my life, I find myself getting up from work voluntarily, coming home and sleeping. Not because I am depressed, as slightly happened to me in 2006 when I made the switch from an American univeristy to a national one. But because my body actually wants that much sleep. The entire drive home, all I could was yawn. Yawn and try to steer the car in the right direction.

The office is going to be different without me. That isn't me having a big ego but a fact because of the ten or so people there, I hired 7 of them, and worked with them as the sole manager for the past 6 months. Art from our home hangs on the walls (that were bare when we set up shop) and most of the policies and procedures that we've established have been because I was the sole offical employee for a long time. I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish over the last year and a half.

I also think this baby is well timed. While I'm out for two months the team will have a chance to get to know the new people who are coming on board and also the new Managing Director who has just moved to the country.

I am a big personality and with me stepping out for a few months, he will have the change to make his own impression. And quite frankly, because of our space crunch, they need my desk! I'm sure there will a slight tussle over who can use it first.

I'm not at the point where I can say that I want to stay at home forever. But I am looking forward to the break like a first year college student for summer.

And wondering what that moment will be like: when we drive to the hospital.

It would be good to have a bag packed...

I'm Pregnant Not Handicapped

But I have been using the handicapped bathrooms and parking spaces (with negative consequences). It's a toss up here where people are much more lenient with pregnant people than in western countries. I haven't used it at work but it's in my personal life I would like a little more leeway.

I was at the mall with a friend and though I should have gone before leaving the conference we were both attending: I didn't. We started laughing so hard I knew I had to go to the bathroom before it looked like my water had broken. I dashed to the bathroom without any of my belongings in the effort to get there faster. And before I came to the one with the stalls, I saw a female handicapped one. And I ducked inside. I may not have been in a wheelchair but I was pregnant and my body in an altered state from what it normally was.

Imagine my relief turning to dismay when, after washing my hands, the lock wouldn't turn in the tumbler. I panicked because the person I was with didn't know where I was - I didn't have my phone or my purse in my rush to get to the bathroom.

There was I was: in a foreign country, at the mall, locked in a bathroom. If I hadn't been worried I'd spend all night in there, I would have laughed. Instead I started pounding on the door, unsure how I would communicate with the passerby that I was stuck, reviewing my Arabic, hoping someone would hear me over the noise, as twenty minutes went by and my heart beat threatened to floor me.

And amazingly, someone did. A woman's voice, in Arabic, not sure what my problem was, but telling me she would help.

I wasn't so lucky with the police officer who gave me a ticket for parking in the handicapped spot even after 30 minutes of trying to find a parking space at the mall (without success).

Am going to take my belly into the station and see what happens.

Where is....

my memory?

They say that there is no such thing as baby brain. But in the past week I have misplaced my engagement ring which was hooked onto a watch and two other rings I had been wearing that day. I searched the trash, I moved furniture, I even went into the street in front of our house because around the time I remembered removing it, I went outside to say hello to a friend.

My husband, memory of an elephant for unflattering moments, kept asking me if I had left it at work when I washed my hands. This because once I ordered a McFlurry and got upset when the woman gave me an M and M one when I thought I had ordered and Oreo (turns out I hadn't and he was there to witness this through the ages). This was in my non pregnant life and I have never failed to live this moment down as proof of my faulty memory in the four plus years since.

We went to bed, wondering if we had renewed the insurance on the ring, wishing I had lost the wedding bands which were no longer wearable because they were too small - tucked safely in the jewelry box (they were cheaper he said) not knowing where the hooked rings and watch were. I woke up in the morning and went downstairs in my tank top and underwear, looking around the house with fresh eyes.

I was drawn to a book out of place on the bookshelf behind where my dearest had been studying for hours for a big test on Sunday. I picked up the book and thought: Right, I was holding this around the time there was someone at the door and I thought I had walked over to the entry way table. The ring is here somewhere. Being too short to put it on top of the book case, I looked around at the surrounding shelves. Thank God: There it was. Ten steps from where he sat in his chair at the dining table.

And there's something wrong with my memory? What about his eyes?
He maintains that this was my problem which I am now trying to turn back on him.



On Sunday morning we had a fly epidemic in the house - unexplained and early enough in the morning that I slept through it while my husband spread Piff Paff (a powdery version of Raid) underneath the kitchen and front doors. I came downstairs hours later to find the remains of 100s of their wingless bodies. That day I wore the tan pair with a blue jean dress. A new maternity outfit despite having only two months left because I cannot be bothered with bending down to put on pants anymore.

Now my favorite black shoes (the ones wide enough for my pregnancy feet and yet somewhat stylish) are missing. Today I put on my the trustworthy black dress - the one a friend convinced me to buy along with a pile of maternity clothes left by a pregnant expat woman who left Qatar in a hurry - that I have been wearing weekly to work. And looked for the black shoes.

Missing. I asked the man who lives here with me if he had seen them. Surprise. He hadn't. So I'll have to figure this out.

The Name Dilemma

I headed a translation conference last week and I was listening to the plenary speakers, I realized I had a wealth of intelligent minds to help us with the dilemma of naming our child.

This is what they came up with:

Farid (Fred, Fried)
Rami
Karim
Raoui
Nadim
Raja
Nader
Sinan
Murad
Munir
Firas
Malik

Frankenstein

Last week I went to have the extended glucose tolerance test in order to assess if I have gestational diabetes. Having to schedule the test and being given advice by a midwife ‘to be really good 24 hours before’ made me realize how much sugar I do intake on a daily basis. I’ve always had a sweet tooth but since the pregnancy, the occasional Coke, ice cream, cookie, or piece of chocolate has different consequences than it used to. While I haven’t yet found out the results, and I have relaxed into mini cokes and small doses of ice cream, the cramp in my style and my growing girth are reminders that I am in my last trimester.

This morning after about a month break (or longer – can’t really say I’ve kept track) I panted from the 20 minutes of floor work on the pre-natal yoga video. A stern reminder that my arms could not handle the 30 pounds I’d put on in the past seven months and that they were severely underworked from my 8 hours a day (plus at least 3 or 4 in the evening) of my desk job.

The good news is the sciatic back pain that had plagued me the first few months has abated. Whether because I’m more active or have more padding to shield the nerves: not sure, but grateful in either case.

I am starting to play with the idea of being pregnant as a excuse for getting out of things I wouldn’t want to do normally anyway. For example, during a meeting at the week’s end, I declined someone’s offer of tea because of the caffeine, referring to my pregnancy.

“I’m in the home stretch,” I said, “I can’t wait until this child is on the outside.”
Everyone at the table looked surprised.
“Well, things will be different,” two of the men at the meeting said. “Your whole life will change.”

This hit me in a different way than all the other times people have said it to me. Because my life has already changed. I’m a chronic sleeper, I’m a water drinker, I’m easily irritable and that’s all just in the seventh month of this journey.
I’ve been focusing on the things that I will be able to do again after the baby without guilt: Eat as many sweets as I want, drink all the carbonated beverages there are in the world, attending spinning classes, and use the time that I am now sleeping to write or catch up with friends.

But for the first time yesterday, I had a small notion of the things I would now start doing. Not that I could focus on them close up – breast feeding, changing diapers – but the reality of a child not being inside me anymore but on the outside is starting to dawn on me.