Kick Me

OK, I think all moms, at least those who have given birth within their recent memory, will be able to relate to this one.

I love and hate the phenomenon of a baby kicking inside of me. I love it for obvious reasons. It is a strange and amazing thing. It starts as a little flutter, like a goldfish bumping into the sides of its little fish bowl. At first you think you imagined it, or that it was gas or a muscle spasm. But soon enough it becomes an unmistakable and undeniable kicking sensation, until it reaches the point, in your last couple months, where you fear that the baby will kick its way out of your already-stretched taut belly like some sort of alien. Not to mention the kicking at your bladder and other already-compressed organs. It becomes your constant companion and your pleasant little secret (like when your boss is talking to you but you're not paying any attention because all you are thinking is "aw, my baby is kicking right now"). It is, for me anyway, the first real tangible and concrete evidence that you have a living thing inside of you. That is why pregnant women are always rubbing their bellies; because they are already practicing acknowledging their baby's need for attention. After Corinne was born I missed that kicking a lot. I felt kind of empty inside. And all that kicking, many times a day for long stretches of time, now translated to crying. Many times a day. For long stretches of time.

I hate the kicking of a baby inside of me because it becomes an obsession. Around 24 weeks, which is where am now, you are supposed to do something called kick counting, where you set aside time each day to count the number of kicks in an hour. This is supposed to indicate that your baby is thriving in there. When the baby is kicking up a storm you breath a sigh of relief that all is well. But inevitably there will come a period of time where you don't feel any kicking for awhile. Maybe you were just busy and didn't notice one way or another. But then you becomes conscious of the fact that you haven't felt anything all day and you become fixated on feeling something, anything, to assure yourself that your baby has not died on you.

One of my favorite episodes of ER, in a morbid fascination, train wreck kind of way, is the episode where Doctor Carter's girlfriend loses her baby in her seventh month. She doesn't feel kicking for a day or so and goes to her OB, who does an ultrasound and determines that there is no heart beat. The terrible part is that she has to then deliver this stillborn baby. I was always horrified at the prospect of having to go through all the pain and hours of labor to deliver a baby that you know is dead. The whole while she hears the cries of other healthy babies being born. I cry each and every time I see this particular episode, which incidentally I just saw for like the fourth time about two weeks ago. Watching it while pregnant? Not such a good idea.

This brings me to this week, where, as I'm sure you can guess, I had "the scare". On Tuesday night I realized that I hadn't really felt much all day. I had been mural painting and had been on my feet and preoccupied all day, so I couldn't say for sure if I just wasn't paying attention. That night I felt a couple of kicks, which was enough to reassure me. Wednesday was pretty much the same deal. By Wednesday night, in those wee hours of the morning when I can't fall back to sleep after my late night pee, I lay in bed for hours waiting to feel some kicking. Usually if I lay on my side a certain way this seems to make Apple mad and she kicks like crazy. Not so on Wednesday night. I tried every position, I tried getting up, I tried bending over, I tried shaking my belly around. Nothing. In the saner hours of daylight I wouldn't have been as concerned, but in those late-night hours, when one is alone with one's fears, I became convinced that she was dead. I envisioned having to go through labor to deliver a dead baby and what would we do after? Who would tell our family and our friends? Would we bury her? Would I repaint the nursery or just lock the door and never go in there again? Would we ever try again, me being 37 and all, or would we say "game over"? What would we tell Corinne, who is just starting to accept the notion of a baby sister? It was awful. I vowed that I would call my OB as soon as the office opened (even though I had an appointment already scheduled for the day after). At around 4 AM I felt some faint kicks, but nothing like the hardy little wallops she had been giving me the past few weeks. Then I decided that she was not dead yet, but that my water had broken just a little bit, enough that it was trickling out very slowly and she was slowly suffocating or starving or whatever a baby would do without its "bag of waters", as it is called. This happened to one of the moms in Corinne's EI group, and she delivered her baby at 26 weeks (the baby seems to be OK, but only time will tell, developmentally speaking). So then I fretted about what I would do in this situation. I would have to drive to Boston every day for months to spend time with my baby in a Neonatal Intensive Care unit. I wouldn't be able to touch her or hold her and the chances of her having a bunch of health issues and developmental delays would be very high, if she even survived. And what about poor Corinne and her needs? Or what if we caught the problem early enough and the doctor just prescribed bed rest. What would I do with Corinne and school? And the holidays? And all my unfinished painting projects?

Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep. By 9:00, when my OB office opened, I was in a state. It didn't help that three different moms asked me how I was feeling when I dropped Corinne off at school. I just smiled and said fine and dandy, while in my head I was thinking that my unborn baby was dying and I had waited one day too many to tell my doctor and that would make all the difference in the outcome. It didn't help that when I called the office and spoke to the nurse, she instructed me to go to the hospital's labor and delivery to be put on a monitor, not "oh it's nothing to worry about, just wait until your appointment tomorrow". She called back a few minutes later to tell me to eat breakfast (I hadn't, in case they had to do an emergency C- section) and drink water and count kicks for an hour before coming to the regular office, because L&D was very backed up and I would have to wait for hours. This was a little more reassuring. I did as instructed, and to make an already long story a little shorter, the doctor listened to the heart and it was normal, which indicates that everything is probably just fine. He wants me to come in for an ultrasound next week, just to check her growth, but he wasn't concerned, especially this early on. He was very nice and reassuring, but I feel like a hysterical mother, which I normally am not, nonetheless. Like they were all saying after I left, "Ugh, there goes another one, pregnancy hormones all raging. How many more times will we be seeing her with false alarms? Wait until she starts having Braxton-Hicks contractions!" But at least I will sleep better tonight, and for the time being I know we're A-OK. And of course, as I type this, I feel little Apple kicking away. Still not quite as heartily as before, but the doctor thinks she has most likely just changed positions so I don't feel it quite as pronounced. I just wish I could go and get the heart rate checked every day, and maybe an ultrasound every other day. I remember this with Corinne, too. The count down to when she could safely be born prematurely. If I can just keep her in there and keep her alive until, say, 35 weeks or so... Then my worries will be over. Except that then, when they're born, you wish that they could just stay inside of you forever so that you always know where they are and that they're nice and protected.

Sigh.