Pregnancy Week 25

If I haven’t written for a while it’s because I’ve been so happy.

True, I’ve had about two weeks of relapse but it's now passed, and my upbeat mood and energy have returned. It’s strange to think I might never feel this good again. That it is just the product of a peculiar combination of chemicals in my body unique to this stage of pregnancy. The only drawback is the insomnia but I figure I might as well get used to five hour’s sleep a night for when the baby arrives.

The best thing has been the 23 week scan where we found out it was a girl. For a few moments I felt they must have got it wrong and realised I must have unconsciously been expecting it to be a boy. Then we saw her beautiful profile captured on the screen and over the next couple of days I fell more and more overwhelmingly in love with her. I could never imagine feeling like this. When my friend, H, talked about falling in love with her baby M I just thought it was a figure of speech, like falling in love with a pair of shoes. But it’s not – it’s the same crazy, impossible surge of emotion as a first teenage crush – maybe even wilder. It made tears stream down my face as we were sitting in traffic on the Old Kent Road with some tacky song playing on Magic FM. I’m sure hormones were partly involved… Will I feel like this every day after she’s born?

She’s kicking regularly, every day now. She’s real and alive and I can’t wait to see her dainty face. My confidence is growing in leaps and bounds. About giving birth as well as about coping afterwards. It seems a miracle when I look back to the early weeks when my legs were too wobbly to carry me up the few steps to reach the pavement. But my body feels more robust with every pound I gain. My back muscles are amazingly not giving me any of the problems I thought they would, what with a scoliosis and ME in the equation. In fact all my muscles seem to be adapting incredibly well to my extra weight.

My bump is unmistakeable. Every stranger can see I’m pregnant and to anyone who doesn’t know about the ME I appear “blooming” – one of those blessed people living in the blissful state of becoming. My only problems are my usual one of constipation, (big time) and getting an average of 5 hours sleep a night.

I’m doing pelvic floor exercises and positively visualising being able to push my baby out for the first time. I’m thinking of the birth as being like those exams I sat through with ME when I had to pace myself to get through the 3 hours. I remember them as a marathon of stamina where I was minutely focused on just physically getting through it. There was no room for nerves or fear or self-doubt. I feel up to the challenge of at least trying for a vaginal birth. Thankfully the obstetrician at the hospital has reassured me that I’ll be in total control and can ask for a caesarean at any point if I can’t make it. So at the moment I feel there is no room for fear of pain. I just have to be incredibly focussed on keeping going, conserving energy to try and last the course.

Then I read an account in the Action for ME magazine by a mum with severe ME of her coping stategies. It proved to me that a horizontal, sofa-bound existence can be compatible with a small baby’s need for food, love and clean nappies. I just have to have everything around me to hand and, again, pace myself and not get into a panic when she cries. From what I can see healthy women use up huge amounts of energy on anxiety about whether they’re doing the right thing and feeling desperate about their loss of control over their lives. Loss of control will be nothing new to me. I feel I’ll just go into survival mode as I’ve done before in hard times.

For the first time I’m imagining coping on my own with a baby for some periods of the day. Until now I’ve been in abject fear of being totally incapable of coping physically by myself but now I’m almost relishing the challenge of finding energy-saving shortcuts. Watch this space – I might well eat my words in three months time!