06.23.08 - 5:33 a.m.

So, as hopefully everyone knows by now, I'm pregnant. It has been interesting on a number of levels.

First of all, I'm obsessed with my own abdomen. This is a new thing for me, as I always politely ignored or focused on the functionality of my abdomen rather than meditate on its shape and form. And people didn't really notice I was pregnant until the last week or so. But I've crossed over into the fourth month and I'm visibly prego now, and I can't stop touching my own belly. Initially, I was disturbed by its poky-outedness and I was afraid I was becoming ginormous. However, in weighing myself at home I am still actually within my "normal" weight range and haven't really gained very much. It is all pregnancy-related organ relocation. So I felt fat for awhile, and still do at times. I have taken solace in the fact that, while my belly bulges, if I tighten up my abdominal muscles, I can actually feel them quite firmly a centimeter below the fat, about three or four inches in front of where my stomach once stopped. It's very strange.

And I can't lay on my stomach anymore without feeling like I'm laying on top of a ball, which I kind of am. This is a bit of a loss, because I am a stomach sleeper to the bitter end and always have been. I'm hoping that my back holds out with the side sleeping. It's strange to have my body perform such a quiet, gradual, well-organized revolt against its former ways. It knows what it's doing, but my brain is just sort of left in the lurch trying to figure out what happened.

I always thought that I'd start eating meat when I was pregnant, and I'm sort of vaguely craving hamburgers for the first time in years, but I've tried chicken with no success several times already. I just don't want it. I may try a hamburger eventually if the cravings continue and I can get past the pukey way meat has made me feel for the last 3 or so years. Gross anatomy lab and realizing that humans are red meat gave me a serious aversion to beef. But going back to the body wonderment bit, I've been subsisting on vegetables and grains this whole time, and I find it amazing that no matter what I give my body, it will use it to make a human. Like, there's not a formula or trick to follow. It clearly has a bajillion year old blueprint that it is following and it doesn't need my brain to find the way for it, it is already lightyears ahead of my ability to do research or my medical knowledge or my grand fantasies of having winged monkeychildren.

Also, I keep poking my belly because I can actually feel my uterus in there, silently stretching and growing. Sometime between 16 and 20 weeks, women can usually start to feel the little person do things in utero. Last night, laying there, I thought that maybe I felt something, but I wasn't sure. It's a little bit like being invaded and monitoring the progress of the invader. Not a bad kind of invader, just an insistent one.

And work has been fine. I feel a lot better this month because I've surpassed the eating-every-two-hours-or-feeling-
like-vomiting stage. I have a lot of energy again and I don't need ten hours of sleep to function. What's funny is that now that I'm both known to be pregnant at work and am visibly so, it's this constant comment. "Don't lift that patient, you're expecting," is one that I get from the male nurses four times a day. The staff (my various bosses) are forever asking me how I feel in very serious and concerned tones (this is especially humorous because I feel quite well, better vitamined/fed/slept than my non-pregnant self). The nurses (the female ones) have entire conversations with me about what the gender is, what the name is, if I'm excited, etc. I have always gotten along with the nurses--they're smart, most of them are hard workers, and we all have the same goal of taking care of the patient--but now I feel sort of embraced by them or something. In general, they are waaaaay more feminine than I am, with makeup and nails and gyms and time to devote to these things. I always felt sort of bonded professionally, yet as a perpetual tomboy always felt out of place with their femininity. But now I've got like some kind of free ticket to the Girl Club and we are all Women Together. It's very strange. Yesterday one of the nurses who is planning her wedding asked what kind of purse she should get for her wedding dress, "what kind did you have, just a clutch?" she asked. Oh dear God! I was again afloat in a world I did not know and mumbled something about my "ghetto wedding." (Which it wasn't, it was quite lovely, but it lacked a lot of the more traditional accoutrements.)

Anyway, random monthly rant done.

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