Pregnancy symptoms and emotional drain

Ok forget the leg cramp connection. I did it again this morning and I don’t remember dreaming. I’m feeling miserable lately from emotional issues that began last week when a close friend/coworker of mine had a miscarriage to some crappy pregnancy symptoms that are either, coming back or getting worse as I enter the third trimester.

My nosebleeds are back again. I think they were gone for a total of six weeks. I forgot to mention them (along with the fact that I felt like I breathing through a respirator) on my post about my first trimester symptoms because it’s not really that big a deal. It isn’t like gushing – I have to pinch my nose and tilt my head down – actual nosebleeds. It’s just when I have to blow my nose, which in my first trimester was all the time, blood does come out. The closest I came to an actual bloody nose was the three days I spent at a conference in Vegas the first week of last month. I woke up one morning with a stuffy nose so I went to blow my nose and the only thing that came out was blood. I used three tissues – I mention it because I know you live for such details.

The other pregnancy symptom I’m battling is relatively new. I think I’ve had it for about two weeks now, but it truly jumped on my nerves in the past two or three days. I have this almost constant tickle in my throat that feels like there is something stuck. This doesn’t happen merely along with meals and doesn’t get better with fluids – as a matter a fact it can start two or more hours after eating. It feels like I can get rid of it by belching, but that doesn’t actually work. The feeling is worse when I go to bed because laying down causes me to cough and in turn loose sleep.

My emotions from the past week’s events aren’t helping my sleep either though. I keep thinking back to the miscarriage I had nine years ago. I didn’t have a job at the time so I was on state insurance (WIC?). At eight weeks I started spotting and of course went to see the doctor. They told me that it was probably just my body trying to have a period at the same time it would have normally or something like that. I didn’t believe them and so they did a stupid urine test. Of course the hormones still registered because I hadn’t miscarried – I was just spotting. But they didn’t bother doing anything else for me and sent me off on my merry little way. The spotting only lasted for three days and was very very light. Two weeks later I was sitting in my computer operating systems class, and I felt a very cold feeling come over me. I wasn’t actually cold nor was my skin cold to the touch – it was a cold feeling similar to walking into a creepy old house. That night I started cramping up. It was Monday July 13th 1998. At around ten that night I was alternating between lying on the floor and sitting on the toilet waiting for it to come out. Aloud I kept saying, “If it’s going to happen just make it happen.” The “if” was me trying to hang on to the last bit of hope that it wasn’t what I thought. By 11 it had passed in one solid unidentifiable mass into the toilet about two inches in diameter and six inches in length. It doesn’t seem right that my baby had the same burial that many give to a goldfish, but I still wouldn’t know what else to do. I bled for the about the next two weeks.

Everyone at work knew my friend and I are close and that she didn’t want anyone to mention her miscarriage at work, so they came to me on the days that she was gone to give their condolences. That was fine but a few made the comment of, “well she’s still young”. I know they didn’t mean anything hurtful by the comment but to me it’s about as appropriate as commenting at a funeral, “well grandma was old after all”. It’s as if there is no real reason to mourn. Nine years later it still hurts and I still think about what my eight year old daughter would be like. I didn’t actually know the gender I just feel like it was probably a girl. Her name would have been Mikah Jenelle and her due date was February 14, 1999.