This is part of the email I wrote to my sister in law this morning while not sleeping – She’s at 34 weeks and convinced something must be wrong with her or the baby in order for her to be feeling so much pain:
No no, feel free to bitch my direction. I totally understand, and you know I’m not going to pat you on the head and try to feed you some bullshit like “oh it’s all worth it for the baby” or wtf ever.
I’ve totally redefined “pain tolerance” in the last couple of months. I used to think it was how long or how much something painful could be happening to you before you actually registered it as being pain. NOW I define it as how much you can take before you either go completely bat shit crazy, OR you start screaming in total pissed off frustration OR you curl up as close to the fetal position as you can get and start sobbing your guts out. And trust me, at just about 34 weeks where you are now, I went for all three of those responses. That’s about the time I was so freaking sick and tired of feeling pain every damn day, at least once every couple of hours of my life. My breaking point was when I wasn’t able to breathe well, my sciatic was flaring full force, I was in bed piled on pillows so I could try to recline/be comfortable/not suffocate – and I went to roll to my left side and I swear to God that a rusty serrated knife cut my butt cheek away from my bones and poured salt and vinegar in the wound. I screamed my guts out and proceeded to bawl inconsolably for the next half hour while Scout patted me and handed me kleenex.
So basically the silver lining in all of this is that it didn’t really get worse for me from your point on. In actuality I’ve felt better the last two weeks than I did from weeks 34-38. I actually got out of the car last night to walk into Target and realized I’d stood up and was walking like a normal person, rather than my normal waddling hobbling self. That was pretty awesome.
Now my chief complaints are my freaking hips aching/hurting all the time. ALL the time. I won’t miss that. I’m back at the point where I can actually lay on my back for a while at a time, which just feels really good b/c it’s a change in position. And if you really want a treat – pile pillows all around so that they would lay under your thighs and hips and boobs and head – leaving a big ole tummy nest – now do that thing you haven’t been able to do for a few weeks – lay on your stomach…. I swear to you the first time I managed to do this after not being able to lay that way for a few weeks – I promise this was up there with sex … or at the very very least an extremely good, toe curling kiss. I couldn’t lay that way for more than 5 minutes – but it was total bliss and totally worth the effort.
The best part of all is that A swears that it’s amazing how quickly your body quits functioning like a pain making machine and gets back to normal after you have the baby.