Do you ever just feel like everything is pitted against you? Like the whole world is conspiring to make your life difficult?
Sorry I haven’t written in a while, by the way. Time gets away from me.
So my little sweet Nora was a perfect sleeper. I’m talking 9-10 hour stretches at night, then she’d eat and go back down for 2-3 hours. And she’d take 2 solid 2 hour naps a day and usually a shorter one in the evening. This went on for 3 beautiful months. And I told a few people about it. Enter the Mommy Jinx. For those of you not familiar with the Mommy Jinx, the gist of it is this: when you finally breathe a sigh of relief and congratulate yourself and tell your family and friends that indeed you do have a perfect sleeper/eater/pooper/self-entertainer/sharer/obedient child, your child will promptly make a liar out of you and stop sleeping/eating/pooping/self-entertaining/sharing/obeying. Beware. The Mommy Jinx.
She started waking up once per night again when she was 5 months old. No big deal. She’d sleep from 8:30-3:30, then go back down until 6 or 7. Fine. But then a couple of weeks later (we suspect a growth spurt), she suddenly started waking up every 1 1/2-2 hours for a few nights. What is that? She didn’t wake up that often as a newborn! After about a week, we got it whittled back down to “just” 3 times per night, and then after a while we had a couple more nights of glorious sleep, though that didn’t stick. And now our 6 1/2 month old Nora hasn’t slept a stretch longer than 4 hours in probably 5 days. What’s with that? Last night was bad. She went down at 8:30. By midnight, she had woken up 4 times already. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, due to exhaustion and the fact that my wonderful husband did most of the actual getting up (attempting some sleep training, trying to get her back to sleep without feeding her…..at least sometimes), but I think she slept from midnight till 4:00, then woke up again at 5:30 and then we got up for good at 7:30.
So what is causing this? As Mark and I say, who broke our baby? What happened to her? I have a bit of a cold and she’s been coughing just a little bit and has the tiniest runny nose. Could that do it? Or is she teething? The fact that she might be in pain or not feeling well makes us hesitate to try sleep training right now. Or is she not getting enough to eat during the day? I highly doubt that. I nurse her on demand, which is still about every 2 hours all day, plus she has solids twice a day. Do we need to try an earlier bedtime? More naps? A more rigid schedule? There has to be something! Our pediatrician said we should just let her cry herself back to sleep, but I don’t know. I suppose if things continue this way, we might have to try it. But again, what if she’s sick or teething? And this man doesn’t really know my daughter. It starts out as a whine, turns into a cry, and if we don’t do anything, she just gets more and more worked up. And by “worked up,” I mean screaming until she can’t breathe, face purplish-red, with all the sounds of fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, pain, and injustice emanating from her tiny frame. That, to me, is not the sound of self-soothing.
So I hinted that there are other things conspiring against me. I mentioned the fact that I have a cold. Ick. Annoying. But the big one is my chronic pain that is getting worse and worse again. It’s a long story, and few people know all of it. But here it is:
In high school, I started having abdominal pain. I went to lots of doctors, had lots of diagnostic tests, and they said I had ovarian cysts. The pain lingered, off and on, for several years, then towards the end of college it got really really bad. I went to even more doctors, had even more tests, went to Mayo clinic in Minnesota, found out I had a kidney infection, and the doctors congratulated themselves on solving my problem and sent me home with antibiotics. It improved. Enough to make me think it would be gone. But before long, there it was again. Steadily worse. In early 2007, I had yet another round of doctors trying to diagnose me. I had my 2nd colonoscopy and I had diagnostic surgery. They found nothing. Finally I went to a chiropractor. He found that I had a significantly rotated pelvis, and attributed my pain to that. He began treatment and I once again had hope. And I improved again for a while. But shortly after our wedding in August, 2007, the beast reared its ugly head again. As bad as ever, and the chiropractor wasn’t listening to me. In 2008, we decided to try a different chiropractor, Dr. Michael. He is phenomenal. We love him. He has been so encouraging, helping us stay motivated to be proactive in solving this. He has helped me make considerable progress with the structural problems (not only a rotated pelvis…he saw in my X-rays that my entire lower spine was rotated and my neck was completely messed up). But after years and years of such structural problems, my soft tissue is a wreck. I have nerve damage that runs from my hip down my leg and up through my whole abdomen and back. Years of nerve damage have caused muscle atrophy. I started seeing a massage therapist and she found in my abdomen that I have scar tissue and adhesions and damaged fascia (the web of connective tissue under the skin that runs throughout the body). I see her as often as I can, and I see Dr. Michael once a week, but both of those get expensive. I’m looking into a TENS unit (electronic muscle stimulator that, from what I understand, interrupts pain signals and engages damaged tissue to help it heal itself). Pregnancy made me worse, but then after Nora was born I felt great. No pain for about 2 months. But then it slowly crept back in and now it’s back full-force. As bad as it was before I was pregnant. And now I have the responsibility of my beautiful, wonderful, sweet little girl who won’t sleep. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the most important things I can do to keep my pain manageable is to get plenty of rest.
So that, my friends, is why I feel like the world is conspiring against me. It’s a lot to deal with, and it’s hard to know how to respond when people ask how I’m doing or how it’s going….how honest should I be? How much of the truth do people want/need to hear? How do I tell the truth without being “Debbie Downer” and the awkward person who responds to “How’s it going?” with the whole story I just told? How do I explain that I want to have relationships and spend time with people, but I am so consumed with just surviving that I just don’t know how?
Wow, that blog got pretty heavy. But I’ve just felt the need to share. To tell my story. To vent.
