Last Updated on September 8, 2017 by melissanreynolds
The time to give up sleeping on my back came too soon! The night became a rather long struggle of tossing from side to side and waking up to dead arms. My back, shoulders, neck and glutes all yelled at me all night, no matter how I arranged the pillows. Even my meditation/daily rest became difficult due to positioning.
It didn’t help that Nu began really testing the boundaries and took extra energy to manage. Though, he was still very excited about baby, from 18 weeks he talked often about the next scan when he would see the baby dance.
At week 19 Nu got a really bad cold and was clingy and not sleeping well, which was really difficult. My pain issues from sleeping on my side and Nu waking me in the night and very early several times, made coping very hard.
Not having to sit at my computer for several hours four days a week really helped my neck and back. The work I did do seemed to flare it up a bit faster due to the lack of sleep.
It wasn’t all bad news, due to baby being tucked in the back it took a while for movements to become more frequent and obvious (which is the best part of pregnancy, until they wedge a foot in your ribs) but when they came it was reassuring.
One thing my second pregnancy taught me, is that the times my body craves coffee are actually the times I need rest. Having a two year old means I can’t always indulge in a full lie down meditation, however I can sit with my heat pack for a time. It makes such a difference. I can go from miserably exhausted, barely keeping my eyes open, to relatively normal after 30-45 minutes of good meditation.
Plus a 10 minute lie down can make a difference – relax (I use a variety of pillows); Close your eyes and count (in 10, out 10, in 9, out 9 etc) until zero; slowly imagine each body part relaxing (right hand thumb, first finger, second finger etc); lie for as long as you can gently breathing.
I saw an obstetrician at week 19 to confirm that my midwife could keep managing my pregnancy with me. When discussing pain relief she said she’d need to refer me back to the pain clinic, when I expressed my feelings of disappointment with the most recent doctor I saw there, she said that I may get a different doctor. *Sigh* She also said that Fibromyalgia doesn’t affect pregnancy, or vice versa. This stunned me. Pregnancy reduces sleep and places stress on the immune system and body, and Fibromyalgia is worsened through reduced sleep and stress on the immune system and body. The entire body is connected. You can’t have something happen in one area (eg. The uterus) and not affect other areas (eg. The back, neck, shoulders, hips, glutes, sleep system and immune system). So I felt like it was just me and my research in a 20 week endurance event. But I was used to that!
We made sure that my husband and Nu could attend the 20 week anatomy scan – again the baby was very busy so it took some time to capture all the pictures. We waited with baited breath to be told it was a healthy baby boy! Nu took a few hours to warm to the idea that it was a boy. I talked myself into it over the next day. Husband was happy.
I thought I would share this journey, as I did with the first, to provide a sense of what it’s like for a mama with Fibromyalgia to do pregnancy. Find all of the posts and more on my Pregnancy Diaries and Resources page.
Sign up to receive access to my free resources which include the PDF reports: Tips for Managing Early Pregnancy Symptoms, Navigating Pain Relief in Pregnancy and my free micro course Pregnancy and Fibromyalgia: Arm Yourself with Knowledge. This is part of the first module of my full eCourse Pregnancy and Fibromyalgia.
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