Friday, June 18, 2010

6w 1d...

...and the hormones are kicking my ass.

I've been feeling a lot of nausea -- some days I'm ok, but some days, eating anything (or just standing up and moving around) makes me feel really sick and miserable. I can't figure out any pattern to what foods cause it, and I'm so sick of feeling this way that on bad days I'm reluctant to eat anything except really plain foods like rice and pretzels. These foods get a little bit boring after a while.

Partly because this is stressful, partly because of low blood sugar (well, it's hard to meet all your caloric needs when you're living on rice), and I think largely because of hormones, I haven't been very pleasant company the last few days. I'm crabby and moody; sometimes I wake up in a boiling rage, and the other night I ended up crying bitterly for some reason I can't even remember now. It's like PMS, only I haven't had PMS like this since I was 15.

In other words, I'm a stereotypical pregnant woman. All I'm missing is a desperate longing for some obscure food.

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In other news, I've been looking through my options for medical care. This has been awfully confusing, as it's hard to find out exactly what the different types of care are like, and what my insurance will cover. Eventually I figured out that I can't really afford private care, so it was between semi-private and public. I was all set to go semi-private, because regular hospital care in Ireland is the stuff of nightmares* and I was afraid I'd have to wait a day to be admitted and then give birth on a trolley in a corridor, attended by some frazzled nurse at the end of a 72-hour shift. But I talked to my sisters, who've all given birth several times, and they said the maternity hospitals are different and not nearly as bad as the regular ones. (Although apparently the hospital staff are disturbingly polite if you go private.) So, I've decided to go public after all. I'm still nervous (maternity care here is still not without its share of terrifying scandals -- you may want to skip these links if you're actually pregnant, they're fairly upsetting). But my sisters have put most of my fears at rest, and I'm reasonably happy with this choice.

What it means, in practical terms, is that I'll be seen entirely by midwives, and the birth will be attended only by midwives, unless there's a problem (I'll be right in the hospital, so there'll be doctors around if I need one). I'm fine with that. And the money we're saving will buy a lot of nappies.

 *For the record, I'm very pro-public healthcare in principle. I spent three years in England and got great care on the NHS -- I had the best GP I've ever known, had a great physiotherapist when I needed one, and received prompt treatment in a clean and quiet A&E department on a Friday night, which is just not something that happens in Dublin. So yeah, public healthcare can work really well; it just happens to be terrible where I live.

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