Maybe I do need a little more rest…

I have been feeling still relatively okay, but a little bit worse and more complainy this week. We started the week with our trip to Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, and did have a nice time. We had a picnic by the lake, went on a short (1.2 km) hike, and Jeff went for a short swim. It took almost as long to get out there as we had time there once we arrived, so it was quite a long drive just for a day trip (over two and a half hours driving each way). But it was quite nice to get out and away from people and away from farms into a more natural landscape.

I have been more tired so I used a crutch instead of a cane or hiking stick even for our short hike – a crutch provides a bit more stability. I also had to stop and rest along the way, which I would say is not typical for such a short walk. It is certainly a combination of all the extra weight I am carrying plus this cough that won't go away.

On Tuesday I went back to the doctor because my cough had gotten worse. The doctor suggested that at this point it was worth trying antibiotics, so I have been on antibiotics since Tuesday and it seems to be having no effect. So chances are it is just a virus, but now my lungs are so irritated that my coughing fits are becoming more violent. We had an appointment with the obstetrician late last week, and she suggested that I might need a steroid inhaler to deal with inflammation. She said this kind of thing is not uncommon in pregnant women whose lungs are being squished from below. I thought I would give the antibiotics a few more days, which it has now been, so I'm going to call about the possibility of getting that inhaler prescribed. When I search for this condition on the Internet, I see some doctors and some studies that say you just have to wait it out and that no intervention is likely to help, but others suggest that in their clinical experience a steroid inhaler is helpful. At this point my lungs feel so raw and irritated that anything that might help seems like a good idea. I am not as positive about this virus as I was a week ago :-)

Also this week my feet once again swelled up to an unnatural size. It seemed relatively unprovoked, but the obstetrician said perhaps it was somehow related to changes in barometric pressure, because she had seen a lot of it this week. So I wore my compression socks for three days, exercised, drank lots of water, and things did improve.

At the same time, I figured out that my wedding band was stuck on my finger. I was hoping it was just due to swelling, but when the swelling went down it was still stuck. It was getting to the point of being quite uncomfortable, and I realized that if I didn't get it off it may soon start to cut off circulation to my finger. In all the pregnancy books and apps that I have, not one of them made it clear that it was really necessary to take your rings off every day to make sure that they did not get stuck. So if there is anyone reading this who has not been pregnant before and will be pregnant in the future, be vigilant about your rings. I tried many tricks including making my finger slipperier with moisturizer and cooking oil, icing my finger to make it shrink, and spraying glass cleaner on it (I did not think this would work, but other people on the Internet said they were skeptical but it turned out to be the only thing that helped). None of these things worked; the ring was still stubbornly stuck.

So as a last resort I tried something that seemed a bit barbaric, but better than having the ring cut off. It involves using dental floss to squish a little bit of your finger at a time just above the ring, then moving the ring up to that squished spot, unraveling the dental floss, and moving up slightly. At first it seemed hopeless, but slowly I did make progress. I continued to ice my finger throughout this process, partly because it helped keep it small, and partly because I had heard that this method can result in quite a bit of bruising. Eventually I was able to slide my ring off, but it was a fairly painful process. However, I am realizing that the ring had been digging into my skin for a while and it feels much better having it off. This is a picture of my hand, taken today, twenty-four hours after I took my ring off, and you can see on my ring finger that there is still an indentation from where the ring was.

So as much as it was a somewhat unpleasant process to remove the ring, it really does feel much better now.

I think the lesson this week is that right now I really do have to slow down whether I want to or not. With the level of fatigue I felt on our short walk on Monday, my cough, my swollen feet, etc., I am finding I have no choice but to rest a bit more. Yesterday the son of one of our colleagues had his bar mitzvah, and I went to the (long boring) part in the morning (the actual bar mitzvah as part of the Shabbat service), but was so tired that I had to stay home from the fun part (the evening reception with a buffet dinner held at the science center, complete with a demonstration about how to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen). Jeff went, and won a mug and a CD for his air guitar skills, and it sounded like a great time. However, there was just no way I would have held up being anywhere but on the couch in my pajamas.

I was expecting this, and the planning for this, but somehow have been feeling so good that I thought maybe the fatigue would never hit. And maybe once I kick this cough I will go back to feeling pretty good, or maybe this is just a sign that the end of pregnancy is nigh…