Category: Things They Don’t Tell You About Pregnancy

You’re nervous, maybe a little frightened/anxious…

Will it hurt?

How long will it take?

What am I going to feel like when it’s over?

You start, then maybe stop for a second, making sure it’s not too painful. Then keep going past the worst of it until you’re done and you feel the sweet relief.

Oh wait, I’m not talking about that first time.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I’m talking about a much different first time – the first time you have to poop after giving birth. Surprise!

All right, let me back up a second. I guess I could also have titled this post “Things they don’t tell you about pregnancy – #4:  The Aftermath“.

Again, with all the babies being born and on the way right now, I thought I’d give you my take on the whole thing. It was one of the biggest question marks in my entire pregnancy, labor, and delivery experience – what in the hell is this going to feel like and how am I going to feel afterward?

As always, this is strictly based on what happened to me, certainly not the rule for how it happens for everyone, and it might be a little graphic for some. And obviously it would be totally different for anyone that has a C-section.

If you’d like to read D’s entire birth story, it’s over here. This post will probably be long enough on its own without adding all those pages too.

But to sum things up, she came out too quickly for me to even have a chance to ask for pain meds or an epidural, it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before, it was probably the most strenuous activity of my entire life (even though the actual delivery part only lasted for 20 minutes), and fortunately I only had a tiny bit of tearing with a few stitches. Now, onto the fun part…

After giving birth, your body is pretty much like what the fuck did you just do to me? It hurts, I won’t lie.

I mean think about it. A small opening increases to over 10x its regular size, then you have to push a large object with shoulders and limbs through it using your pelvic muscles (well, and pretty much every other muscle in your entire body). So it’s no surprise that after that trauma you’re a little messed up for a while.

I was very fortunate with my experience – besides going quickly, I was in pretty good shape physically afterward and only took ibuprofen once or twice in the following days.

Funny story about that too – they give you permission to take a huge super dose of the stuff after delivery, and you can call the nurses for more powerful pain relievers if you need, too. I didn’t read all the sheets they gave me about the dosages, so only took the usual 1 or 2 pills. When I told the nurses this, since they were surprised I wasn’t asking for anything whenever they came to our room, they just laughed, saying I could have been taking like 3 times what I had. Oops. Oh well, I was just happy I didn’t need it.

But back to the point here. So in the 2 days after D was born while I was in the hospital, they had me take stool softeners. Not to make me go (the thought of which scared the bejesus out of me after what had just happened down there), but to make it a little easier when the time came.

And that time didn’t come until shortly after we had gotten home, so sometime in the afternoon of the second day after my delivery. That was fine by me – I would’ve put it off forever if I could have.

Even just peeing afterward was a struggle – the first time I went after delivery I think they had me go in one of those plastic bedpan things, just to make sure everything went ok (i honestly can’t remember if they did anything with that pan of pee, or if they just needed to make sure i could go).

Then instead of wiping they had me wash myself off with a little squirt bottle that I’d fill up with warm water. Thank god. Using toilet paper was another frightening prospect at that point.

And all the “accessories” I had to wear? Geez.

They give you gigantic pads to soak everything up, as well as ice packs to put in your underwear on top of the pads. Those things saved me – they’re big long pad-shaped packs that you crack and then enjoy the icy goodness to help reduce the swelling.

And the best part was they give you an endless supply of everything you need in your bathroom. I was like fill em up! I got multiple refills of both the pads and ice packs. For as little as you really feel like going to the bathroom after delivery, the more often you change those ice packs and nasty dirty pads the better. I think I changed things at least once every hour or two, whenever I could feel the coolness subsiding.

Ok, now this part is extremely gross, so just beware. (no, seriously, BEWARE if you read ahead!)

When we were moved up to our actual hospital room from the delivery room, the nurses said to call them right away if I passed any blood clots bigger than the size of a golf ball. I was like ew, ok. I was obviously bleeding, but nothing out of the ordinary for post-delivery.

Well, as soon as I stood up for the first time up in our room (i think i was walking over to look at d in her little bed), I felt something very big and slippery slide out between my legs.

Oh my holy god, what was that??

I told R that I was afraid something nurse-worthy was happening, and went into the bathroom to investigate. Yep, there it was – a big, maybe 3-golf-ball-sized clot, just chillin’ on my giant pad.

Ok, disgusting. I’d better call the nurse.

She came in, put on her latex gloves, and mushed the thing around between her fingers to see what was going on (sick!!). Fortunately it looked normal, there was no need for alarm, and it was the only one I passed. Gross, the fun continues.

I guess that clot was what the placenta looked like, because I didn’t see that in the delivery room (sorry, i warned you this part was nasty).

After that it was just the bleeding to deal with, which was like the heaviest period ever times about 10. Plus each time the nurses came in to check on me they pushed on my abdomen to make sure my uterus was contracting properly, which not only hurt, but caused more blood to come out.

Fortunately everything went perfectly, and it was back down better than they expected by the time we went home. (my bleeding continued for about a month, finally tapering off completely by 6 weeks after. it obviously wasn’t so heavy that whole time, but still enough to need the pads)

My first shower post-delivery was quite the experience too.

I hadn’t stood for that long of a time since giving birth, and felt pretty weak. I had showered just shortly before we went to the hospital the day I gave birth, so I didn’t shower again until I think the second day after, before we went home. Maybe it was the afternoon of the day after, I don’t really remember. But anyway, it was a chore.

It took a really long time, I was nervous washing off the busted open area for fear of catching a stitch on the washcloth so just kind of patted things down there, and I didn’t know if it was going to sting getting soap in that general vicinity. I didn’t have any stinging fortunately, but the washcloth and towel I used to dry off both went directly in the laundry when I was done.

I’m telling ya – it’s a dirty job, this labor and delivery thing.

And now for the part you’ve all been waiting for – the pooping.

I was so scared of it. I was convinced it was going to rip everything back open down there, and I just didn’t want to do it.

So once we got home and I felt the urge, I warned both R and my mom (who came up the day after D was born and stayed with us for another couple days) to ignore any screams they may hear emanating from the bathroom, but if I wasn’t out in like an hour maybe give a friendly knock on the door to make sure I hadn’t passed out from the pain.

So I took some baby wipes in (hell no was i even going to try to use t.p. are you kidding me?!), sat down, and prepared for the worst.

You should’ve seen me – I was seriously acting like I’d never pooped before and didn’t even know what to do. It took forever for me to just relax and get the show on the road because I was so fearful.

But whaddya know? It ended up being much less traumatic than I expected. Thanks to the Colace they’d had me on for the past couple days things just kind of slid out without too much pushing on my part. And the gentle touch of the baby wipes was much friendlier than toilet paper ever would have been, so the clean-up wasn’t too bad.

Whew! You have no idea how relieved I was that was over.

So, there you have it. The messy aftermath of vaginal childbirth. Fun stuff, eh?

Like I said, I was lucky not to really have much pain at all afterward, so I didn’t have to deal with taking any meds home other than the occasional ibuprofen. And by my 6 week postpartum checkup, all the stitches had healed and dissolved completely, and my doctor couldn’t even tell there had been a tear at all. Sweetness.

Now, here are my tips for l&d:

• Don’t take any cute pjs that you think you’ll want to wear for delivery. In case you missed it above, this is a very messy process, and things get bloody. Let the hospital gowns get soiled, not your own stuff.
• Do take some comfy clothes to wear after delivery, once you’ve had a chance to clean up a little. I did wear their gowns for at least the whole first day and a half, though. Pack your nursing bras and tanks if you get some. This is the perfect time to start getting used to them once you’re out of the gowns.
• Stock up on pads before delivery – I got a bunch of the ultra thin super absorbency ones. Super absorbency will definitely be the order of the day, so getting them as thin as possible was much more comfortable than the huge bulky ones they gave me in the hospital.
• They gave me both a numbing spray and cream in the hospital, in case I needed some extra help on top of the ice packs. If you use the numbing spray, spray it on the pad or ice pack in your underwear, not directly on yourself. I used it once, and couldn’t even imagine spraying anything directly on my poor lady bits after that experience.
• Take the ice packs home! I lived on those things, literally, for days after delivery.

I’m sure I missed some gory details in there somewhere, so for those of you with upcoming deliveries, feel free to ask away! This was a fun one, wasn’t it? 😉

 

The more I add to this little series, the more I think I should change the title. Because none of this stuff is secret, really, it’s more like I just didn’t know it going in. I don’t want to lead anyone on in thinking I’m revealing all these never-before known gems or anything, they were just my experiences. So what do we think? Do you care what it’s called? Should it just be “Things about pregnancy”? Should I just shut up and leave it?

So here’s my next one – parts of your body that have so far remained fairly dormant will begin taking on a life of their own.

Well duh, there’s a tiny human in there, of course your body’s going to change. Things stretch (what’s with that gross dark line running down the center of your belly?), things swell (have you seen your ankle bones lately?), and some things will never be the same again (the va-j? TOTALLY different from this day forward, assuming no c-section).

No, I mean parts that you didn’t even think would have anything to do with being pregnant.

When I got pregnant I obviously expected my stomach area to get huge, and probably an overall general weight gain evenly dispersed across my body. What I did not expect was that my ass would suddenly decide that it wanted to encompass a zip code all its own. I’m not kidding – it GREW!

I’ve always been relatively thin, so had never really thought much about my butt. It has some roundness to it for sure, it’s not a pancake by any means, but I’ve never considered myself as having a ghetto booty, per se. Leave it to a growing baby to change all that. Apparently fetuses enjoy feasting on large ass cheeks, and mine obliged accordingly.

Whatever, SM, your butt didn’t get that big when you were pregnant.

Ha! That’s where you’re wrong! I give you Exhibit A:

And now I give you Exhibit B (keep in mind D was born at 38 weeks, 6 days):

Or, if you prefer, a side-by-side comparison:

Baby got back! Seriously, you could rest a drink on that thing by the time I gave birth.

The photos are a little deceiving though, because what they don’t show is how wide that area became as well. I’ve never been very “hippy” either, but man did I spread out during those 9 months. I know that’s normal and it’s just your body getting ready for the baby to pass through the birth canal, but still. I didn’t know I was going to expand to such an extent in my derriere.

What was also weird to me was that my butt and hips were the very first things to change and grow once I got pregnant. Before there was any sign of an expanding belly, the seats and thighs of all my pants were already tighter. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that my hunger was suddenly insatiable and focused primarily on greasy foods like cheeseburgers and pizzas, and exercise was pretty nonexistent, but whatever.

On a side note, but still pregnancy related, I found out last week that 3 more of my friends are pregnant!! That makes like a million girls I know now that are due sometime within the next 7-8 months. I may be verging on having more pregnant friends right now than non-pregnant friends. So crazy. I can’t wait to meet all these little squirts. D will be the “big kid” and boss everyone around, I’m sure. And I’m not gonna lie, it’s kind of making my ovaries start to twitch a little…

 

I guess I should clarify and say that these posts are more things I didn’t know about pregnancy, not things that no one before me has ever known about it. And I’m sure all of them can actually be found in the multitude of books out there somewhere and you may even know about or have experienced them all yourself, but these are mainly the things that struck me as weird or unusual or just something I never expected to happen. So take them all for what they’re worth, if you will.

But moving right along, this one can be called “Smell-A-Vision”.

I had heard that some women get a ridiculously keen sense of smell when they get pregnant, but that’s not exactly what happened to me. It’s more like my smells got all fucked up. There really just is no better way to put it – my favorite scents all of a sudden made my stomach turn, just like that.

In about week my sixth week of pregnancy I came down with a cold that I then couldn’t shake for approximately the next 6-8 weeks. It was awful. I don’t consider it morning sickness because it wasn’t any of those typical symptoms, it was just a stupid winter cold that then morphed into a hacking, sleep-robbing cough. It was miserable. And of course, being newly pregnant, I couldn’t take any medicine that actually worked to get rid of it. The non-drowsy, pregnancy-friendly version of cough medicine? Worthless.

But it was during this time that my nose went haywire. Every single fragrance in the house became my enemy. My favorite perfumes and candles triggered my gag reflex. I’m not kidding, I had to get rid of each and every bottle of lotion, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, etc., and start completely over with the most unscented ones I could find. This made me especially mad because I had just stocked up on all environmentally-friendly products, and I had to junk them all or give them away. And that shit is expensive! Then even the unscented scent started to make me ill. Even if I smelled someone else using one of those products I would get quasi-nauseous.

And just the thought of the smell of certain foods was enough to make me want to puke, too. Right before I got sick (and before anyone besides me and R knew I was pregnant) we had been down at a holiday cocktail party at my mom’s house, and she sent home bags and bags full of leftover food – mini-egg rolls, meatballs, stuffed mushroom caps, the like, and to this day I still have a hard time eating some of those things because of the memory of that illness and how smelling them made me feel then. Super weird, I know.

There was one episode in particular that about made me die – about the same time as that cocktail party, R had gotten a bag full of various types of meat from a butcher that was going out of business in our area and he stuck the whole thing in the refrigerator. So then each time you opened the fridge this vicious combination of meat and leftover party food wafted out, and I swear to you I could be all the way in our living room and almost pass out from that noxious odor. Of course he thought I was crazy – who doesn’t like the smell of all different types of cured meat marinating together in a bag? Barf!

I have now finally gotten pretty much back to normal smell-wise, but it seriously has taken me almost this long. I just recently started wearing perfume again, finding one I used to wear that I can tolerate and actually like. And there are still some of those body products that I can’t use – there’s one type of lotion in particular that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use again, since the smell of it still makes me batty. Even smelling particular scents in my mom’s house that are the same as when we were down there that holiday season takes me back to that time and are not friendly to my head.

Oh man, I need to go take a deep breath of fresh air after reliving my smell-a-vision horrors.

 

There are approximately 7 bajillion books about pregnancy out there, all filled with oodles of facts, figures, and if you’re lucky, photos (oh, the photos!). I got a couple of them while I was pregnant, and actually did find a lot of useful and helpful information. You can easily experience sensory overload though, trying to plow through everything you’re told you just MUST do or have in preparation for that small human that will soon be coming into your life, or everything you MUST NOT do or have so as to make sure said small human’s entry into this world is just absolutely perfect. (fyi, that entry is rarely “perfect”, whatever that means, so just hang loose. if l&d doesn’t go exactly as you had hoped/planned, don’t fret. as long as that baby gets out here safe and sound, that’s what matters most)

But what I was always more interested in during my pregnancy was everything those books weren’t going to tell me. Like all the really weird, gross stuff that you’ll never find in print, yet is fairly common knowledge to almost every woman who has ever given birth. So that’s what I always asked my friends who had children – what do I really need to know about all this?

With all the new babies right now and my increasing thoughts about when we’ll try to give D a sibling, I find myself looking back on those 38 weeks and 6 days last year more and more frequently. I’ve been trying to remember all the weird, gross stuff I experienced that I was totally unaware would happen going into it. Maybe so I’m better prepared next time, maybe to share with anyone else who’s pregnant right now or trying to get pregnant, or maybe just because. No matter the reason, I’ve decided to start this little section of the blog called “Things they don’t tell you about pregnancy” to house all the weird, gross stuff that I encountered.

These tidbits will be in no particular order, neither chronologically through the stages of pregnancy nor of importance. I’ll just share them as I think of them, which = randomly (kind of like everything else i put on here). So if you’re pregnant, trying to get pregnant, have ever been pregnant and can relate, or have no plans to ever get pregnant and just want to see what crazy shit I’m going to come up with now, hopefully I can give you a little insight into what’s really (might probably?) going to happen to your body. If not, then maybe you can get a few laughs out of hearing what happened to me.

Let’s talk about hair. I have long hair, and shed a fair amount when I wash and brush it. I’m constantly sweeping up hair off the bathroom floor and pulling the wads of hair out of the drain after my showers. So I was blown away by the end of my pregnancy when I wouldn’t lose a single hair no matter how many times I brushed or washed it. NOT ONE! This was completely foreign to me, because I’m not kidding when I say thousands of wigs could have been made with the hair I’ve shed during my lifetime. It was awesome. I never had to clean out the drain, I never had to sweep up the floor, I never had to worry if I had stray hairs on my shoulders or back, and I was no longer finding random pieces of hair on the floor around the house. Long, shiny, thick, luxurious hair was the order of the day. And the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking since months before I was even pregnant helped it grow that much faster, too.

Fast forward to about 3 months after I had D, and the party came to a screeching halt. Not only did I go back to shedding, but hair was falling out like there was an evacuation order atop my head. And at a rapid pace! Handfuls upon handfuls would come out in the shower, and the bathroom floor looked like I was standing on a small rug when I got done brushing. And if I used a hair dryer? Oh forget it. The bathroom was covered in a hair sweater. It was disgusting. I hate stray hair, especially hair on the floor, so this annoyed the crap out of me. Plus, I swear I could feel my hair thinning. It was awful! What happened to my lustrous locks? Am I going to be bald soon?? I had heard other women mention that their hair did start to fall out after pregnancy, but I had no idea it was going to be like this! I just figured it’d go back to my normal shedding amount, since I had more hair than most of the people who told me about this. Surely my regular waterfall of loose hairs would equal what they referred to as “hair falling out”. Nope. My hair fell.out. Anywhere, anytime, and all over the place. I hated it. I even had to warn my stylist that the sink was going to be horribly full of hair after she washed it since I’d just had a baby and I apparently needed Rogaine.

Fortunately, there is a light at the end of this hairy tunnel. It does stop. For me it was around the 6 month mark post-delivery. Finally the clumps of hair got smaller and smaller until the shedding was back to a normal, much more manageable level. But I was really worried there for a bit. My pony tail was thinner, and I swore that my hairline had receded. I am happy to report, however, that it all goes back to normal. Too bad the grays that fell out still grew back gray. Ah well, that’s why I pay my stylist. At least now she has a full head of hair to work with again.