Is Running During Pregnancy WRONG….Especially for Someone that TRIED SO HARD to Get Pregnant?

The typical response that I've been getting from people upon telling them that I am pregnant is: "you aren't running are you?" Sometimes followed by "you'd better relax this pregnancy." The underlying assumption to this statement is that relaxing was the reason I couldn't get pregnant or that relaxing ensures a healthy pregnancy and baby. And, we all know that the pyscho-somatic control that we have over our bodies' ability to get and stay pregnant is basically NON-EXISTENT.

I understand their logic. It was hard to get pregnant. How awful would it be if I lost the pregnancy? Would I blame myself for not doing EVERYTHING to protect this pregnancy? The thing is…I know people who haven't been active physically and extremely vigilant about following pregnancy commandments…and still lost their babies. Miscarriage, pre-term labor, genetic conditions ARE NOT INDUCED because of exercise, despite the popular misconception that physical activity is bad for the pregnant woman. This is a remnant of Victorian era logic that held that women cause miscarriages by being too active.

Plus, I have the experience and knowledge that I have a healthy and active pregnancy with my son. I ran 30-60 miles a week through weeks 10-35 and gave birth to a full-term baby. You can look through my 2008 entries to see the mileage I logged. I was so surprised to be able to run so much during my pregnancy, but I felt great and saw no reason to stop running unless medically necessary. I did stop running at 35 weeks because I started measuring small and they were worried that I had intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR). My son was born at 6 lbs, 2 oz and was in 3rd percentile for his weight. He remained in the 3rd percentile until he was 2 years old (with a weird uptick to 20th percentile I believe when he was 3-4 months old). Since his birth, I learned that birth weight is largely genetic and that my husband's family generally tends to have smaller babies (my husband was 6 lbs, 5 oz; his sister 5 lbs, 11 oz; his brother 6 lbs, 1 oz) and I weighed 5 lbs 6 oz (I was a few weeks early, though). So, I have a hard time believing that my running caused his low birth weight.

But, there are times when doubt creeps in while I am running and I wonder if I am doing something wrong…if I am being an irresponsible mother to the baby I love and hope to hold in my arms. What if the impact of running during pregnancy isn't realized until the baby is older?

I wish I had the naivety in believing that everything that would work out…or at least the reassurance that if this pregnancy didn't work out that I could get pregnant again. But, I don't. This will likely be the last time I am ever able to get pregnant with a biological child.

Running keeps me sane. It is my ballast against my anxiety. It frees me from the chain of worry. It makes me feel strong and fit. It reminds me that my body hasn't failed me entirely.

Odd Little Moments

I have days and moments lately where I am relishing in the pregnancy, trying to forget our path to this point, and I find joy.

But, then there are those little reminders that sneak in my day and I am struck by incongruous emotions of anger and rage. I think that is the hardest aspect of these emotions: I feel them when I should be feeling thankfulness and happiness. Or, at least, the general consensus among people I know is confusion over the ambiguity of my emotions. Why anger still?

Here are some of my odd little moments in the past few days:

• Today at my 4-week OB check-in, I dropped off four Sharp's containers full of needles. I wanted them out of the house and out of my life. Seeing those needles filled me with sadness and shame for the lost time. The nurses weren't quite sure what to do with them. I told them they were medical waste and just to throw them away. I'm sure they wondered why I had so many needles.


• Every time I go to the OB, I see a different doctor. They all ask why my paperwork came from Shady Grove (clinic #3) and why I had to do IVF. I told my story today without tearing up for the first time.


• At the grocery store checkout with Nugget the other day, Nugget pointed out a baby behind us in line. Quickly looking up while unloading the groceries, I realized that it was a woman from my running group that had a child two months after Nugget and was now holding a newborn. I turned away and tried to cover my face with a curtain of hair so she wouldn't recognize me. Jealousy. Anger. Sadness. These are emotions I'm sure I'll feel always. I just let them wash over me and continued with my day.


• My knees have been bugging me and I was beginning to suspect that I needed new running shoes. I was incredulous that I would need new running shoes as it felt like I *just* bought new running shoes. In going through my credit card bills, I realized that I hadn't bought new running shoes since August 2010. Which was NOT recently. Having not bought or needed new shoes in a year, this likely means that I have run 200-500 miles in the PAST YEAR as opposed to my prior standard 6-12 weeks. I couldn't believe it. How did I lose a year of my life?

I am thinking that it is time for me to take a picture of my baby bump. I don't know how long I will have it...so I better enjoy it while it is here.

The Curve in My Shadow

As I pass car windows, store windows, and sometimes if I catch the light at the right angle while I am running, I can see the small curve in the base of my belly in my shadow. Evidence that life exists. That I am growing. That the baby is growing.

It is in these moments that I allow myself a small squelch of joy.

LOOK!

I'm pregnant.

15 weeks.

**************************************
My nausea, exhaustion, and depression have subsided. We are slowly becoming the people we once were, although changed. We make social plans; we're actually going to a concert tomorrow! I've started attacking interior design decisions that I have been neglecting for the past two years since we moved to our new house. I have had the energy to deal with Nugget's temper tantrums and am making attempts at discipline and potty training. Real parenting rather than passive watching from the couch stuck in the doldrums of my depression. I printed out pictures for his baby book that I haven't updated since last summer, realizing that I am missing large chunks of the past 1.5 years. Where was fall? Summer? Spring? There are NO pictures from spring.

I've made progress on RMNL:
--I bought a new camera lens
--I planned our summer vacation (Maine AND Portland OR--> Glacier National Park --> Seattle WA)
--I took the career aptitude test and am awaiting the results
--I started going to therapy again

But, all of these decisions seem so much EASIER now. I was so depressed before that even decisions about mundane minutia seemed out of my reach.

The anger and bitterness still flares. I still haven't spoken to my sister. My sister-in-law is due one week after I am and that rubs me the wrong way. I still struggle with feeling like a failure as a woman for not being able to conceive (despite knowing that my husband played a HUGE role in this equation). I feel behind on my life, even though most of my close friends are only now beginning to think about having children. It's just so hard to see others hurdling forward in life when I spent so much time and money trying to do the same thing they did in mere months. I keep telling myself to go back to 10,000 feet. To look back on the entirety of my life and realize that when I am 80 I'm not really going to care about my few years of struggle. Well, I hope that I don't regret that when I'm 80. Otherwise, I'll have had a pretty boring life.

A cute little clip from the paper today. Yes, baby, you are like WAY wanted. WAY WAY wanted.

RMNL (And Nuchal Tranlucency)

Living and working in a place where acronyms abound, my husband came up with a new initiative and ascribed it an appropriate epitaph: Running Mama's New Life (RMNL). The goal of this initiative is to help me find myself again. Over the past several years as infertility and getting pregnant has been the primary focus of my life, I find that who I am and what I want out of life have become obsolete questions. Besides getting pregnant and having another child, I'm not sure what I want to do with my life. I don't particularly enjoy my job, even though it is an AMAZING work environment for working moms. I spent much of the past year and a half just wanting to be happy and vowing that if I ever made it out of this IF experience that I would make sure my life had meaning. So much of what I do at work feels pointless and irrelevant...but perhaps that is the knowledge workers plight. So, the RMNL initiative is supposed to help me find myself again.

Current Goals of RMNL:
--Take career aptitude test (not just my perceptions of what I want in a job, but my ACTUAL abilities) and work with career counselor about what to do with my life;
--Get back in shape (as much as possible)
--Reconnect with my friends
--Travel!!!
--Work on self presentation: grow out hair, learn how to do hair, learn how to put on make-up, pay more attention to fashion (I'm not an UN-fashionable person, but it is usually an after-thought for me. I am too busy in the morning to actually put on make-up and do my hair and I'd like to take a little more care and consideration to my appearance so I don't end up looking like a frazzled mom that walks around in yoga clothes all the time)
--Take 2nd half of photography course and save up for a new camera

I know some of these are superficial, but maybe I've watched too many HGTV shows on how changing the external can impact our self-perception.

And.....

I had my nuchal tranlucency today. Baby was ROCKING out!!! The baby was JUMPING up and down and we had a wait a few minutes for the baby to calm down before we could do measurements. My downs and trisomy risks were that of a 20-year old...but after falling on the short side of statistics for too long...I could help but feel that a 1 in 6,185 risk for downs to be...a little low for my comfort. Maybe nothing can comfort me now.

But, slowly, I am feeling hope creep in.

My mother insists that it is time that I start telling family and friends that I am pregnant. But, I am not ready. I keep pushing back the deadline...maybe now I should wait until the baby is 24 weeks (viability). She says I am being "selfish" and that I need to share this joy with others in my family. She says my family has always been there for me (really? were they? I don't remember getting much support from anyone other than my mother and father) even if they didn't call. RIGHT. I have got to promise myself that I won't use guilt to manipulate when I am a mother!

Not Sure How to Re-engage

I would never say that I am an extroverted sort of person, but I love people, talking to people, learning about people, helping people solve their interpersonal problems. I'm the sort of person that talks to my neighbors, stops by my co-workers desk to catch up on their lives, frequently has lunch and dinner dates with girlfriends, rarely has a weekend with no plans to see friends.

Or, at least, that's the person I used to be.

Over the course of the past year, as we sunk deeper and deeper into the "IVF cave" and I felt the chasm between my struggles and those of everyone else I knew grow deeper, I stopped being sociable. We stopped making plans. I stopped returning my friends phone calls. I started closing the door to my office and stopped making eye contact with my co-workers in the hall-way.

Since we've gotten the positive pregnancy test, my husband has slowly been emerging from the "IVF cave," making plans with friends, going out of town for a bachelor weekend, and even telling people that we are pregnant. He is happy, elated that we are pregnant.

I still wake up in the morning sobbing to nightmares of miscarriages. I don't know how to re-engage with my life. I don't know how to start conversations with people that I stopped talking to last fall. I don't know how to connect with people that have not been through some sort of life harrowing, navel-gazing journey.

I am trying to reach out, but it feel awkward and uncomfortable.

Over the course of this journey, I have found that I can't really lean on most of my friends. Not that they didn't want to be supportive or didn't try, but they just said the wrong things ("you can always adopt") or didn't provide the support I needed. I find the list of people that I can depend on has winnowed down to less than a handful and, sometimes, not even they can make me feel less lonely.

I feel as if I am in a downward spiral of self-absorption and I don't know how to break myself out of the cycle.

Shouldn't I be happy? All I can do is hold my breath each time I go to the bathroom, expecting to see blood, expecting for this pregnancy to be over. Every other day I think my nausea has dissipated and think that I will miscarry at any moment. Part of me wonders if this will get better if I make it to my second trimester, but another part of me is terrified that this is my new normal: the fear and anxiety and depression and isolation will never leave me. I don't know how to pull myself out of this.

Underwater

You remember when you were a kid and you would race your friends to see how far they could swim underwater without coming up for air?

That's kind of what it feels like I am doing now.

Desperately trying to swim as far and as fast as I can, underwater, where all is silent and safe, asking please, please let me make it...not wanting to come up for air because the spell will be broken.

Supposedly, I am 9 weeks 1 day pregnant today. I had another good ultrasound on Tuesday and am still battling nausea, which is awesome in that it provides daily reassurance that I am still pregnant. I don't go back to the doctor until June 28th, which is scaring the beejezus out of me. It seems like such a long time to wait and see if everything is progressing as hoped.

Despite warnings from my doctor, I decided to rent a heartbeat monitor (http://www.babybeat.com/) to help me get through the next couple of months until I can feel the baby move. I seem to recall this happening fairly early with my son, maybe 16 or 17 weeks?

I am still struggling with anger and bitterness, and hope that with time it will dissipate as this pregnancy becomes more real.

But, it seems every day I hear about another terrible loss, further evidence that life is not safe.

Give some love to Built in Birth Control (http://www.builtinbirthcontrol.com/), who just lost her twins at 21 weeks, again. This is her second pregnancy loss of twins. It breaks my heart.

We have arm and leg buds

And a heartbeat of 165.

We've graduated to the OB.

Four more weeks in the first trimester, and maybe then I'll breathe a sigh of relief.

Give some support to Jennifer, she just had a devastating loss of her son Gavin at 18.5 weeks: http://doihavetobeadink.blogspot.com/