The not-so-golden second trimester

Or, next stop, bed rest

The first three months behind me, I entered the next three looking forward to the "golden second trimester" everyone kept telling me about. I was thrilled when I started feeling the first tiny flutters of movement, around 15 weeks. And then at 16 weeks we found out we were having a boy. Long before we were even ready to have children, we had chosen the name Caleb (which means strong-hearted) if we ever had a boy. In the Bible, Caleb served to remind God's people that the Lord was on their side, even in the face of overwhelming odds against them. Our little Caleb immediately began living up to his name.

Right around Easter, when I was about 18 weeks, the cramps I had been experiencing on and off turned into some full blown Braxton Hicks contractions. It woke me up in the middle of the night, and totally freaked me out. They went away after a few minutes, but I knew it was way too early for me to be even having a few of those. I called my doctor, asking if maybe the fibromyalgia was making me hypersensitive to movement in my uterus. The doctor said, no, fibromyalgia had nothing to do with it. He said I was definitely experiencing contractions, and that definitely wasn't normal.

This wasn't the news I wanted to hear. But I spent that weekend on the couch relaxing, and the contractions didn't return. So I thought, well maybe it was just a fluke.

At church that Sunday, I told my symptoms to a friend of mine, who had gone on bed rest at 30 weeks with her first baby, delivered him full term, and now was pregnant with her second child and due right around the same time as me. I asked her if what I was experiencing was normal, and she said she had experienced the same thing with both her kids, but that she definitely wasn't normal. I just felt better that someone else had experienced my symptoms, and didn't think in a million years that bed rest was in my future. I'm not sure why. I just didn't think it was going to be necessary for me.

Over the next several weeks, I started experiencing several bouts of contractions.  It was starting to worry me, mainly because we were planning to go to my brother-in-law's wedding in the Dominican Republic in early May, a couple weeks away, and I didn't want to be experiencing these kinds of contractions in a foreign country, let alone a developing country with limited medical services. I started praying, hard, that the contractions would go away, at least long enough for me to be able to go to the wedding.

My doctor said it was still too early in the pregnancy to go on anti-contraction medicine, but he suggested I take magnesium supplements, which are used to alleviate muscle cramping and can help ease contractions in pregnant women. I started taking them, and they seemed to help a little bit. I don't know if it was the magnesium, or the prayers, or both, but I hardly had any contractions in the Dominican, even when I came down with a nasty bout of food poisoning and was puking all night in the hotel room. It was a beautiful wedding, and a wonderful time to relax with family and friends. Had I known at the time what was around the corner, I would have appreciated even more the ability to soak up the sun and to enjoy being pregnant in paradise.

The week I returned home, the contractions returned in full force too. A friend of mine came to visit over the weekend, and she could tell something was wrong, so I told her what was going on. I was around 23 weeks pregnant at this point, and she asked if I was worried that I would lose the baby and then have spent 23 weeks pregnant for nothing. It was a legitimate question, because I'm sure that might be a pretty common emotion to have if you lose a child in your second or third trimester. But, as I told her, I had no regrets whatsoever, and whatever time I had with my baby, whether two weeks or 20 or a lifetime, was absolutely worth it.

My main fear was that my baby would be in pain, would die inside me, and there was nothing I could do about it. It hurt me to think of him going through that. I greatly empathize now with friends who have experienced miscarriages or still births, because even though I didn't end up miscarrying Caleb, I had a small taste of what that might be like. My only comfort was knowing that if, God forbid, something did happen, he would never have to suffer the pains that come with living in this world, would never have to experience anything but the womb of his mother and the arms of Jesus.

Three small but powerful letters: FFN

That next week, when I was at work, I started having contractions again, but they didn't go away after a few minutes like they always had done before. So I called the doctor and he said that I was far enough along at that point to have what's called an FFN (fetal fibronectin) test. Basically they do a swab of your cervix and can detect if you're secreting fetal fibronectin, which means that the amniotic sac is starting to separate from the uterus, and labor might be imminent. It's predictive by about two weeks from the time the test is taken. The thing about an FFN test is that a positive result isn't necessarily a good indicator of labor, because you still have about a 40 percent chance of not going into labor in the next two weeks. A negative result is much more predictive. About 99 percent of women who have a negative result do not go into labor in the next two weeks. Needless to say, we were praying for a negative result.

We were due to get the results the next morning. That night, I had the worst contractions yet. They were getting stronger. We called the on-duty nurse, and she told me to drink a ton of water and get in a warm bath. After the bath I laid down to rest, and the contractions ended up going away. We were SO relieved. The next morning, the doctor called us back, and the test was negative! We breathed a huge sigh of relief. I thought, "Okay, that buys us two weeks at least." I went to work the rest of that week, and the contractions came and went occasionally. We had planned to go camping in Montana that weekend, since it was Memorial Day, but with the contractions and everything,  I didn't feel comfortable camping in the wilderness, so we stuck close to home and I mainly stayed on the couch resting. I had no idea that couch was about to become my prison.

Never forget in the dark what God showed you in the light

John travels a lot for work, and he was due to go on a trip for several days that following week. Since the test was negative and my contractions hadn't been too bad, we thought it would be okay for him to leave.

That night, I awoke around midnight with bad contractions again. I didn't have John there to get me water and draw a bath, so I got up and did it myself. I sat in that tub, drinking ice water and rubbing my belly, and tried to keep calm. I was more scared than I had ever been in my life. What if I did go into labor? How was I going to get to the hospital? What if I lost the baby and was by myself, either in this house or in the hospital, if I was somehow able to get there? It was just me, Caleb, and my dog, Bauer, who had parked himself on the cool tile floor next to the tub. I laid back and stared at my stomach, sitting above the water like a little iceberg, thought about the tiny baby within it, and scooped warm water over him again and again, praying and praying and praying. "Please stay put, baby. Please stay put. Mommy loves you. God, help us."

By 2:30 a.m. the contractions weren't going away, so I got in bed and called the nurse. After I told her my FFN was negative, she tried to reassure me that I very likely wasn't going to go into labor that night, and told me to try to go to sleep and to call the doctor immediately the next morning. I called John, freaking the poor guy out by waking him up and telling him I was having contractions again. He tried to reassure me, but was fuzzy with sleep and not much help so I told him to go back to sleep and I'd call him in the morning. About an hour later the contractions finally subsided and I went to sleep.

The next morning I called the doctor and he told me to come in. After examining me, he said, "Well, you have the most irritable uterus I have ever seen." It contracted at even his slightest touch, or my smallest movement. (For more information about irritable uteri, visit here). The doctor then checked my cervix, and it had gotten a little shorter, which meant that these weren't just false labor contractions. They were, in his words, "the real deal," as in preterm labor. So he told me that even with my FFN being negative for now, the safest course of action for the long term would be for me to go on bed rest. By this point I knew that bed rest was probably in my future, but I still couldn't really believe it. I was only 25 weeks. I had a whole trimester left, an entire summer, and I was going to spend it in bed! I would have to go on early maternity leave, cancel our vacation plans, arrange for people to come over and help me, etc. I was kind of shell shocked by it all. But the overarching concern was for Caleb. I would do anything, anything, to make sure he was safe. So it wasn't even a question really. I was going to stay horizontal for as long as it took, hopefully the next 15 weeks until his due date.

That first day on the couch I checked work emails, updated our baby registry, and read some books. I thought, well if this is as bad as it gets it will be okay. It's a good thing I didn't know what lay ahead. Because it was going to be a long, terrifying three months.

These two songs, "Overcome," by Jeremy Camp, and "Still," by Hillsong, were the ones I played most during those first few weeks on bed rest. They helped me to focus on the fact that as daunting as our circumstances seemed, Caleb and I were being taken care of by a Savior who had overcome death itself and would carry us through this storm.

The first trimester

Or, the *relative* calm before the storm

In my previous post I shared how we found out I was pregnant with Caleb. I want to say before I continue with the story that after my last post, I started thinking about it and I want to make sure to emphasize something. Yes, my journey to having a child was longer than some, but it was also much shorter than others. I know couples who have struggled for years to have a child, either biologically or through adoption or both, and I wouldn't ever want to leave the impression that I've been in that same boat and know what it's like. We all have our own paths to walk through life, and mine has included its share of hills and valleys, but it hasn't taken me through the anguish of infertility, and I feel tremendously for those who have dealt with that particular trial.

Okay, that being said, now I'll get back to the story. It was a good thing I took time that first night to just enjoy the good news and let it sink in, because later that week, we had our first of what turned out to be many big scares during the course of the pregnancy.

Friday morning of that week, I woke up with bad cramps. I knew it wasn't my period, but that's what the cramps felt like. I immediately freaked out and called the doctor. He had already ordered a blood test to confirm the pregnancy, which I had taken, but my office visit and ultrasound weren't scheduled for several more weeks. After I told the nurse my symptoms, she immediately ordered the ultrasound and told me to head down to the medical center to get it done. They wanted to rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage. On the drive down, John tried to assure me that everything would be okay, but I clutched my stomach the whole way there, and couldn't help thinking that this might be the end, so soon after it had begun.

We were understandably nervous when the tech turned on the screen, not knowing what we'd find. She could see the worry on our faces, and tried to comfort us by saying that it was still very early so we might not be able to detect a heartbeat yet, and that the main thing was to make sure the fetus was in the correct place in the uterus. She moved the wand around. We held our breath. And then...there he was. A little jelly bean. A beating heart. The tech said he was exactly six weeks old, and estimated our due date at Sept. 7. And then it all became very real.  We had a baby. We were parents. No matter what was to come, we had seen our child, had his picture as proof, and life would never be the same.

Caleb's first picture, at six weeks in utero.

We were definitely relieved after that ultrasound appointment, but I continued to have cramps intermittently over the next several weeks, which was very unsettling to me. So I did some research on the internet. (I know, I know, looking for medical answers on the internet is like shaking a Magic 8 ball in which all the faces on the die turn up with, "You have cancer." But Dr. Google has proved right on more than one occasion for me, so I continue to see him occasionally.) I read that sometimes cramping in early pregnancy can be the result of low progesterone. A friend of mine told me that she had suffered a miscarriage due to low progesterone, and that she had experienced similar cramping. I talked to the nurse about it, and she talked to the doctor, and he went ahead and ordered a blood test to check my progesterone levels. They came back pretty low. But the doctor refused to do anything about it, or to even take the time to discuss it with me, because he said that it was too early to try to do anything to prevent a miscarriage.

I had already grown pretty fed up with this doctor's office, for a variety of reasons, so I switched doctors at that point to someone John knew and respected through his work. The doctor wasn't normally taking new patients, but he agreed to take me on. Given what ended up happening during my pregnancy, I believe that switching to this doctor was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and might have even saved Caleb's life.

The acupuncturist, who couldn't believe my previous doctor hadn't done anything about my progesterone, gave me some topical progesterone cream to use, in case that would help at all. My new doctor reviewed my case and all my blood work and ordered another progesterone test. It came back a little higher than the previous one, so he told me to continue using the progesterone cream because it appeared to be helping. He also performed another ultrasound in his office during my first visit (yes, he did it himself right then and there! One of the reasons I love him) just to make sure everything was going okay.

His main concern at this point was my weight. He said it wasn't super important during the first trimester because a lot of women actually lose weight during the first trimester due to morning sickness. Thankfully, I hadn't been suffering from too much morning sickness (other than the time I came home early from work because I felt too nauseated, then realized I didn't have house keys and ended up puking in the front yard...classy), which was a huge blessing because I couldn't afford to be throwing up what little food I was able to eat at that point. But he said if my weight didn't pick up during the second trimester, we'd have to explore other options, like a feeding tube, etc.

Besides the cramps, the main symptom I had during that first trimester was fatigue. Thanks to the fibromyalgia, I was used to being tired, but this was on a whole different level. Those who have experienced extreme fatigue during their pregnancies will sympathize. But still, I thought, hey, if being exhausted is the worst thing that happens during this pregnancy, I'll take it!

Another little miracle

And then another miracle happened. It probably happened gradually, but the first time I really noticed it was on Valentine's Day. John took me out to dinner at a fancy restaurant (with treatment like that, I could get used to being his baby mama!), and I decided to throw caution to the wind and order a steak. Red meat had been a no-no for me, because it's difficult to digest, but I was pregnant and I wanted to eat steak, dang it! As I took bite after bite, I kept waiting for the uncomfortable full feeling to set in. It never did. I polished off my steak, and even had room for dessert. And my stomach didn't feel like it was going to explode afterward.

My digestion continued to improve over the next few weeks, to the point where I didn't even have to sleep on the wedge to keep the heartburn at bay. My doctors didn't know what to make of it. I asked the gastro specialist, who deals with gastroparesis all the time because he's the best GI doc in town, what happens to his patients after the pregnancy when it seems that pregnancy has temporarily cured their condition. He said he had no idea, because he had never seen this happen before. I was used to being told by doctors that I'm an anomaly, but never in a good sense! My OB said he had never seen this happen before either, but that we would keep our fingers crossed because my weight was starting to improve.

So I decided to just enjoy each day that God gave me a functioning stomach, and continually thanked Him for once again choosing to work a miracle in my body. One trimester down, two to go. And boy did they turn out to be doozies.

I know I normally post a song at the end of each post, but during this time in my life I didn't have any songs that particularly spoke to me. So instead I'll just include a picture of me at the end of the first trimester, with a tiny Caleb-sized bump.

Caleb's story begins

Or, how I found out we had made a Proffitt

I left off my previous post talking about my dabble into acupuncture, both to try to fix my stomach and to try to help my fertility. Before each session, the acupuncturist had me take a pregnancy test, because she wouldn't do the same treatment for me if I was pregnant as she would for trying to help me get pregnant. (Again, no idea how this works. I just laid there and tried to find a happy place while needles were being stuck into my toes, ears, and chest.) She said our first goal was for me to get my period back, because that meant my hormones were back on track, and then we would focus on getting pregnant.

By the third session, in early January 2012, I still hadn't had my period yet, and was wondering if the treatments were working or just a waste of time and money. I was used to the drill, so I headed to the bathroom to pee on a stick before going into the exam room. I glanced at the test quickly, then tossed it in the trash. I sat down in the exam room and she asked if I had taken a test. I said, nonchalantly, "Yeah, and it was two lines, so I'm not pregnant." She stared at me, dumbfounded. "Um, two lines means you're pregnant." I looked at her, eyes blinking, equally dumbfounded, and said, "Whaaat?" She in turn replied, "What?!" We both continued looking at each other for a few seconds, suspended in a cloud of disbelief, then she said, "We need to go get that test!" and we made a beeline for the bathroom. As I was fishing through the trash, still in a daze, I thought about all the pregnancy tests I'd taken since we started trying to get pregnant, and wondered how in the world I could have forgotten what two lines meant. I had been longing to see those two little pink lines appear, where up until now only one had stubbornly shown up!

I retrieved that precious little test from the garbage, and we both just stared at it for several moments. We went back to the room, and she told me that in rare instances you can get false positives, but that she would do the treatment that she would do if I was pregnant, rather than the one to try to get me pregnant, since that treatment would be bad if I was, in fact, with child. I think she couldn't believe herself what was happening, and neither of us wanted to get our hopes up just yet. She said, "Well, now we know why you haven't gotten your period back yet!" She loaded me up with a bunch of pregnancy tests and told me to take some more when I got home so I could be sure, and then she and her receptionist, who also knew my story, waved goodbye, big grins plastered on their faces.

I got in my car, still in a daze. How could this be? It was the last thing in the world I was expecting to find out. After all the bad reports I had been getting in doctor's offices, it was surreal to get this kind of good news. I immediately texted John, who was gone all week at his national sales meeting, and told him to call me as soon as he could.

And then I started the drive home, amazed at the fact that this little life had been quietly growing inside me for weeks now, without me even suspecting it, after so many months of anxiously taking test after test, wondering if this could be the month. And here we were, me and baby, on our way home together in the dark, snowy January night. Tears coursed down my cheeks, and I couldn't stop smiling the whole way home. Sure, there were plenty of obstacles ahead of us, like, how was my body going to feed a baby when I couldn't even feed myself? How would my autoimmune issues affect the pregnancy? Had the drugs I had been on harmed the baby in any way? Plenty of questions to ask and concerns to be addressed. But not on that night. That night was a time for celebration. A time to enjoy being with my baby, my best surprise.

During the drive that night, I kept playing a song that up until then I had been avoiding. It's on the same album as the Job song I included in the last post. It's called "Be Born in Me," and it's sung from the Virgin Mary's perspective. Throughout the Christmas season that had just passed, I had been avoiding listening to it, because it had just made my heart hurt, wondering if I would ever get to experience the joy of carrying a child. Obviously, I am no Virgin Mary and Caleb is not the Christ child, but as I listened to the song that night, the lyrics resonated with me, and I just kept saying to God, "I know I don't deserve it, but thank you, thank you, thank you, for this baby you have blessed me with."

The four of us on Christmas Eve, 2011 (Before I found out I was pregnant, so Caleb was like a zygote or something at this point).