The prologue

Or, a brief medical history

Or, my life as a "lemon"

Welcome to the first blog post of my first blog! I created this blog to tell the story of our son, Caleb, since I was unable to write about my pregnancy as it was happening, thanks to being on bed rest, or as I like to call it, bed prison. I am better able to express my thoughts and emotions through writing, and I'm choosing to write on the interwebs instead of in a journal for a few reasons. 1.) People have asked to hear the full story and I'm happy to tell it. 2.) I want to publicly give credit where, or more accurately, to whom, I think it is due. God deserves all glory and praise for the work He has done, and continues to do, in my family's life. 3.) Reading the blogs of other women who had gone through similar pregnancy experiences helped me immensely while I was going through it, so I hope sharing my story will do the same for others.

For now, the sole purpose of this blog is to recount the journey we've been on and to share some things I learned along the way. I will state at the outset that although I'm a writer, this will not be my best work. Life with a baby is all-consuming, so I don't have time or energy to cross every "t" and dot every "i" as I normally would. But, as I'm learning in a number of areas of my life these days, perfection shouldn't always be the goal. So, here goes!

To fully explain what happened during the pregnancy, it would help to give background info on my preexisting medical conditions (and hope no insurance companies are reading this, haha, just kidding...sort of). Since around middle school, I've had a series of things go wrong with my body: tendonitis in my shoulders, chondro malatia (Google it) in my knees, TMJ disorder, foot problems, Reynaud's syndrom in my hands and feet, etc. The dots started to connect shortly after I got married in 2007, when my doctor diagnosed me as hypermobile (my joints are too flexible) and as having fibromyalgia (or what I have come to believe is a catch-all diagnosis for pain disorders the medical community doesn't fully understand, or sometimes even validate).

For the past several years, the series of unfortunate medical events seemed to pick up steam: I tore my Achilles tendon, had surgery to remove an inflamed nerve in my foot, had my TMJ disorder get so bad that my jaw locked up and has never fully opened again, carpal tunnel in my wrists, a problem called internal resorption in my tooth (and a case of it so rare that, I'm not kidding, the dentist offered to pull it for free when the time came because he wanted to take it to a medical conference for further study). The list goes on. But basically the unifying factor, if there is one, is that most of them can be connected to autoimmune issues. 

There have been dark days during these various health crises. I often feel as though I'm a 30-year-old with the body of an 80-year-old. I get frustrated with doctor appointments that produce more questions than answers, grow tired of dealing with chronic pain, and fight feelings of guilt over being a drain on my husband and those around me. A friend of mine, trying to make a joke, once said to me, "Wow, I bet John didn't realize he bought a lemon when he married you!" I know she didn't mean to hurt my feelings, but the words cut like a knife. Because that's exactly how I saw myself. A lemon. Someone who looked fine on the outside but was completely broken on the inside, not worth the investment required to keep her running properly, or running at all. It's a terrible feeling.

And yet, after every health crisis, I had always been able to bounce back eventually, to establish a new "normal" and to press on from there. I'm nothing if not determined and persistent, and so I determined to persist, even if some days it felt as if it required too much effort to continue putting one foot in front of the other.

A lot to stomach

But then in August 2011, I encountered a new health problem that seemed as if it might be insurmountable. I started having bad heartburn, which I've never dealt with before. We tried a bunch of different acid reflux medicines, but none of them helped much. I ended up getting an endoscopy of my stomach, which revealed gastritis (inflamed stomach lining) and an ulcer. I then had what's called a stomach-emptying study, which measures how quickly your stomach digests food. Well guess what, my stomach had decided to stop digesting. At this point I was thinking, well sure, that was one organ that was still functioning correctly, so why wouldn't it start acting up, too? The condition is called gastroparesis and it has no cure. It might sound like no big deal, but trust me, it is really painful to feel full all the time, like post-Thanksgiving dinner full, even after only eating a few bites of food. I started losing a lot of weight, had zero energy, and was sleeping on a huge, uncomfortable wedge pillow to try to keep the heartburn under control.

Meanwhile, after running some tests for my stomach, they discovered that I was also borderline for Sjogren's disease and lupus (two of the many autoimmune diseases from which my mom suffers). So at that point I was seeing a gastro specialist, a rheumatologist, and a nutritionist. The one person I wasn't seeing, and probably should have been, was a shrink. I was down to drinking cans of Ensure and eating a few bites of baby food, because pureed stuff was easier to digest, and then feeling full and having to stop. In November, after I fainted while giving a guest lecture at the university where I worked, my boss and I decided that I would take some time off, a few hours a day, for medical leave during the month of January after the fall semester ended, to try to get rest and hopefully recharge my batteries a little. I wondered if I would ever get better, or if I would never be able to eat normally again for the rest of my life.

The doctor prescribed a medicine called domperidone that is supposed to help the stomach digest properly. It isn't FDA approved, so I had to get it from Canada, and hoped it would be my silver bullet. It wasn't. And instead, it had a terrible side effect. You see, before all this stomach business started, we had decided to start trying to have a baby. I wasn't sure if we would be able to conceive, given all my health issues and the fact that my sister had dealt with infertility for years. And now the doctor was telling me that if I didn't gain weight, my chances of getting pregnant were slim (hey, a pun!) But how could I gain weight when I couldn't eat anything? And meanwhile, I had lost my period. Apparently a side effect of domperidone (which I didn't know when I started taking it) was that it can increase the level of a hormone called prolactin (this will also come into play later on in Caleb's story, which is why I'm explaining the science behind all this). Prolactin is the hormone that causes women to lactate and suppresses ovulation, which is why you often don't get your period while you're breastfeeding. I wasn't lactating, but I had lost my period (sorry, TMI, I know, but so is basically the entirety of this blog, so get used to it), which meant the drug had made me stop ovulating. Basically, the one medicine that could help me was also the one medicine that could halt my dreams of having a baby.

So now I faced a choice. I could discontinue the medicine, hope that my stomach got better and that I got pregnant on my own, or continue the medication, which wasn't really helping anyway, and not have any chance of getting pregnant anytime soon. My doctor recommended the latter; I chose the former. I stopped the medicine in December, and prayed that my hormones would go back to normal and my stomach would get better on its own.

Acupuncture

For some time, John had been suggesting that I try acupuncture. Through his work, he knew of a woman in our city who is an acupuncturist who specializes in fertility. Through doing research I discovered that for some people with gastroparesis, acupuncture has been shown to work. Typically I eschew "hocus pocus" treatments like acupuncture and chiropractors, etc., in favor of traditional Western medicine. But the Western world was failing me, and in the words of a friend of mine who has suffered from similar weird health problems, I was "ready to try the crazy sh**."

So I went to see the acupuncturist, and it was the craziest thing. A couple minutes after she stuck the needles in, my stomach started rumbling! For someone whose stomach has lain dormant for months, it was like in that instance the heavens opened up and I could hear the angels singing, showering gastronomical blessings upon my head. The relief only lasted for that day, but it was enough progress for me to be an acupuncture convert.

The acupuncturist was also treating me for fertility. (I'm not sure how all this works. Something to do with aligning my meridians and getting my chi in harmony with the universe or some such thing, but basically it is supposed to help your ovaries release good eggs). I hadn't gotten my period back yet, but I was hopeful that if the acupuncture could help my stomach, maybe it could get my hormones back in balance, too.

Well, as this post is a mile long, now's a good time to pause and take a break. In the next post I will share how I got the biggest surprise of my life in the bathroom of that acupuncturist's office.

In the mean time, I've decided that at the end of each post I will share a song that held particular meaning for me at that time in my life. For this post, I'm including a song from an album called "The Story," in which each song is sung from the perspective of a character in the Bible. "Broken Praise," the song sung from Job's perspective, was one I played on repeat during this time in my life. I realize that I have come nowhere near the sufferings of Job, or of probably the majority of people on this planet, but it really spoke to me and what I was going through at the time. So I'm sharing it now in case it does the same for anyone reading this blog.