36 weeks: Wherein the sh#@ hits the fan

Christmas has come and gone. My Thanksgiving post was started but never finished. I have half a dozen blog posts I would have liked to begin, but just don't have the energy. My progress report grades are due in two days. But I have no desire to do anything right now. I only started this post because I knew I must get this off my chest. That and I couldn't sleep this morning.

My complicated pregnancy became even more complicated last week. We hit a new obstacle that we never saw coming.

When I was pregnant with Cole I always had this reassuring feeling that everything was going to turn out OK. Maybe it was because I was on bed rest from 5 months on, so I felt more secure, or maybe it was just because I knew deep down with my mommy intuition that it would all fall into place. And it did.  Cole was born 5 days past his due date and was an average baby size - 7 pounds 3 ounces.

Throughout this pregnancy I've been reassured by the knowledge that I went full term with Cole and that the same or something close to it would happen with Baby Girl. But all of that reassurance flew out the window with one visit to the maternal fetal specialist last week. It was there we learned that the baby is not growing well. She's on the small side and she's not growing the weight the average baby puts on from week to week. They estimate she's 4 pounds 12 ounces and there is a 20% margin of error either way. The lack of growth could be from the medicine I was taking to control the contractions or from a weakening placenta. He said I should wean off the meds and go on bed rest. He told me to go back in 2 weeks to see if there is improvement in her growth. If there is, then everything can continue on as planned. But if not, then eviction for Baby Girl.

You better believe I haven't taken my medicine since that fateful day. 

This is all compounded now by the fact that Baby Girl is still breech. And if she's still breech come our appointment in 10 days, that could potentially mean a C-section. Frankly, I was never really that worried about her turning around. I figured she would in due time. I believed in the power of my body to birth her and her body to know when it was time to be born. After all, I have done this before.

But then he gave me this disconcerting statistic: "90% have turned by now. She's comfortable where she is." I would have been more concerned in the previous weeks if he had mentioned that statistic at my 33 week visit. That concerned would have made me more pro-active than I actually was. But at my 33 week visit he told me not to bother with exercises until 36 weeks and that she'd probably turn. I still did the exercises anyway, but not regularly. They gave me headaches because of the medicine and some seriously nasty heartburn that actually had me coughing. It was gross and a real deterrent. Now, I've been gung-ho - daily breech tilts, pelvic rocks, inversions, moxibustion, Chiropractic adjustments, flashlight, cold pack, homeopathic medicine, talking to the baby, having Cole talk to the baby and, even though I'm not very religious, prayers.  You name it, I'm doing it. Yet her little head still remains in the center of my being - just below my rib cage and above my belly button. She sits on my cervix in a frank breech presentation with her little legs up in front of her froggy style. She could be born breech, but neither Keith nor I are comfortable trying to find a doctor who will deliver her (none at our practice will because of past litigation). Their automatic go-to is a C-Section.

The part about this whole thing that really upset me is that I always believed, despite my irritable uterus hugging my babies tightly, that my womb was a safe place for by baby to grow. Over the past five days I've felt a range of emotions, but the main one is this feeling of powerlessness and inadequacy. I feel powerless to change anything, no matter what I do, and inadequate because I might not be providing the most optimal environment for my baby to thrive.

I always go to negative thinking, so I know this way is not helping me. Because if the problem is, indeed, my placenta, there is nothing I did that could have caused this. These things happen. Today, I realized just how negative I've been over the past five days - fighting so hard against this compounded problem - the fact that she may not be growing and her breech position. I've been fighting so hard, searching for so many causes, placing so much responsibility on myself, harboring so many regrets, that absolutely nothing is happening, and my fear is worsening. My stress is causing my back to ache, my jaw to hurt, my neck to grow stiff. And she still hasn't turned. Are you surprised? I'm not, considering all the tension I'm creating in my body.

Today I went for my third specialized chiropractic adjustment designed to give the baby more room to turn. Before the adjustment we talked about my tension, my stress, factors that cause me to be stressed and the various effects of it on my spine and neck. Then he did accu-puncture before the adjustment. On the way home, I thought of what Baby Girl will look like when she's finally born, and I just totally lost it. Bottom line is I just want her to be safe and sound, alive and healthy. I finally let go. I stopped pushing her, and I stopped putting pressure and laying guilt on myself.

That's not to say that I'm not going to keep trying to turn her, because I am still doing everything I can. I will continue to do my exercises and even have the doctor do an External Version. But if that doesn't work or if she flips back (which happens), it will not be the end of my world. In the end, I cannot make my child do something she doesn't want to do. And I told her this. I told her she doesn't have to turn if she doesn't want to. I felt such a release after I felt what I said with my whole being.

This is one of those hard lessons you learn as a parent. I remember learning this lesson with Cole during the first year of his life. If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that he didn't want to sleep longer than 1.5 -3 hours at a clip. No matter what we did (and we did everything short of cry-it-out) we just couldn't change him. When we finally accepted that he was wired that way, we no longer stressed about it. We stopped making ourselves insane with worry that we were doing something wrong or that something was wrong with our child because every OTHER kid seemed to be sleeping through the night. We accepted him. And we were a lot happier. And so was he. True there were times when our sleep deprivation brought out the worst in us, but we trudged through it and came out a little more rested on the other side.

I'll leave you with a funny picture I took of Cole after I set up the ironing board to do a breech tilt. Cole insisted he had a baby in his belly too. And that she ALSO needed to turn around.