The Naked Truth

My Pregnancy Naked Truth (2)

I can’t believe it takes me a year to finally recap all these memories. But that’s what everybody encounter during their first year of parenting—constant adjustment and rearranging priorities. I’m so relieved I can finally documented this train of thoughts! So here comes my Prego A Gogo lists continued…

3. Self Care before Day Care
I was pretty much aware that I’d spend majority of my time taking care for my baby after labouring, so I aways try to found some time pampered myself while brought that 3,6 kg living creature on my belly. Spa and reflexology was on my self-indulgence top list, I had it twice a month during my last trimester. Of course every Prego woman deserve one.

4. Adapted with my new body: unstable body immune
There were times when I didn’t quite realise how I need higher nutrition uptake as a Prego. The result was quite shocking, my body immune dropped so fast and there came Herpes Zoster inhabited my unguarded self-defence.

5. My brain was filled with food ads
It was crazy and unbearably hard to control. I could craving for Magnum all day long just because I watched the ads on TV and I really couldn’t get it out of my mind. But I really, really tried to have some green menu everyday.

6. Constant bleeding on my Final Trimester
So, I was over-exhausted from interpreting a full-day workshop session for 3 consecutive days, but little that I know my foetus happened to run a protest over my bladder, like, big time. I ended up having a constant bleeding in my final trimester. I checked up to 3 different Obgyn and 1 traditional Midwife in my husband’s hometown (which was very interesting, she still use the traditional horn-shaped tool to find the foetus heartbeat, and used her hand to found out whether it has crowned down), all of them said nothing was wrong, so I stopped worrying and cope with that bleeding until Labor Day.

7. I was relying on my Inner-Prego Instinct. Apparently, the sensitised body will tell you when something was not right.
Here comes the ultimate labouring story every women would share enthusiastically to their sisters (in a broad sense). Mine started when I felt an intense contraction and could barely entered my RAM sleeping, as everybody else. Since I thought the time was drawing near, I decided to called a becak to the nearest clinic, brought the packed stuffs I’ve prepared a week earlier. This clinic owned by the Obgyn I used to have the pregnancy check up for regular USG and supplements. But I stopped seeing her at the third meeting because once she performed a vaginal check, she did it very roughly and I really couldn’t relaxed.
I’ve had my preliminary reading on gentle birth, and I was pretty sure she’s not the right person to perform this mandate. But back to my intensive contraction moments, it was very unlucky that her clinic was the closest one from home. When I got there, I ran to the bathroom first and had the nurse to have a VT on me, she said it was a dilation 1. The Obgyn came and recheck at my V (with the similar roughness), and when she saw my wet panty surface she said my amniotic water was seeping down. The nurse told her it was because I just returned from the urinoir, but her boss insisted to gave me a chemical induction right away. She left me feeling perplexed, that was the worst case I could’ve imagined. Dilation 1 and she prescribed an induction?! WTH.
While weighed out the pros and cons out of her suggestion, I saw a mother pushed on a wheelchair after she got out of the labor room and, man, she just looked horrible. Nearly zombified.
I didn’t want to end up having a traumatic labor and told people “it’s so hurt I want to kill myself.” So I got out of the clinic and, later that afternoon, took a commuter train and went 45 km away to this Maternity Clinic where I had my hypnobirthing class owned by my prenatal yoga coach. I loved her space, the ambience, the lavender scent from her essential oil’s infuser, and the vibrant staffs. One of the Midwife had another VT on me with a piece of PH balance test paper and evidently no seeping amniotic water whatsoever. I entered the delivery room 3 days after, and though I couldn’t say that it was painless, it was the most beautiful pain that I have ever experienced in my life, and I’m willing to give another shot.

2 years ago

My Pregnancy Naked Truth

Don’t read my writing if you’re looking for a downright scientific-based of what it’s like to be a prego, nor any labor methodological preferences I’ve been through. Everything you’ll read here coming out from my personal experience and it might’ve been different from your own’s.

1. Pregnancy is all about hormonal turmoil and boosted sensitivities
I’ve tried a facial during my mid-term and that beautician sharp thingy tool feels like piercing through the skin right to my skull. I can bear a tattoo needle but this, nevermore. Your baby gender will determine how ugly you’d transforming. Carried a boy made my glands produced more odours, and popped out black freckles all over my face, down to my neck and chest. If you’re a regular smoker, you’d find out that quitting is suddenly as easy as 1, 2, 3, since your sense of the currently-developed body will reject any unfamiliar smells, tastes, and so forth. I heard some women are even, oddly, experience a certain disgust every time they see their own husband.

2. I think painless labor is a myth (unless you’re having that medical intervention’s injection, or, you’re happened to be the reincarnation of Sidharta Gautama)
I must admit, I took all those hypnobirthing classes, yogas, epino demo, and natural water birth labor process (which includes all natural induces such as acupuncture, reflexology, moxa—which smells like Ganja) because I was expecting so much that it’d somehow make the pain go away, and my baby would sliding down so smooth I won’t get any stitches on my perineum. Guess I was wrong.
Latter, I started to question whether it’s because my husband wasn’t there during my labor, because my birthing tunnel wasn’t well-prepared and I should’ve done the Yoga everyday instead of once a week, or because I was psychologically wrecked.

Somehow I found these women’s expressions on what contraction feels like, to be reassuring and I stop thinking myself as a failed case of hypnobirthing student……

Anna: Like having a boulder pushed into my stomach.
Lauren: Like someone was stepping on my insides. I felt like I was going to shit the baby out.
Holly: Eventually, like a charley horse in your torso. Then a little worse, a little worse … then I felt like I was the lemon being crushed over one of those juicers.
Lydia: They begin with the benign tightening stomach band that lulls you into thinking it’s not going to hurt that much and you can just watch Broad City and laugh, to the menstrual cramp that makes you ask for Tylenol, which makes the nurses all laugh, then something that feels like it’s in the diarrhea family, then ones I’ll call the hammer and sickle, then the mortar and pestle, and the ones with teeth.
Briana: A dozen tiny sadists simultaneously tightening my abdomen with winches.
Sarah: A creeping hug from a wraith with electrodes attached to its spindly fingers.
Ester: Felt like a freight train was running through me. Choo choo!
Christina: At first, like tiny, uncomfortable hugs. Then, annoying like a fly you wanted to swat away, but couldn’t. And when they got really crazy, it felt like being alone in a completely insufficient inner tube at sea — up and down and up and down and up and down.
Allison: Like the atoms that make up the lower half of your body are being split in a nuclear reactor? But I’m pretty sure atom-splitting doesn’t take 44 hours.

More of the article here http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/03/18-women-on-what-contractions-really-feel-like.html

I’ll come with other stuffs latter. My baby is crying. Ciao.

2 years ago

Sudah terlalu lama!

Sudah terlalu lama sejak terakhir kali ngeblog. Saya memang bukan blogger rajin yang punya target menulis tiap hari. Tapi, kali ini agaknya sudah cukup ‘menelantarkan’ pikiran-pikiran yang berkelebatan setiap harinya. Terbukti juga, apps semacam evernote dan semacamnya tidak menaikkan frekuensi saya berlatih menulis kembali. Padahal, kalau nggak punya legacy di bidang karir, akademik, ataupun usaha dagang, catatan blog jadi satu-satunya 'belang’ narsis yang bisa ditinggalkan kalau kita sudah nggak ada. Blog dan semua akun social media kita kali ya :)

Agaknya blogging juga bisa jadi baik untuk saya yang setahun terakhir menjalani peran baru sebagai stay at home Mom. Mungkin ke depannya saya akan mulai dari sana, karena pengalaman ini sungguh membuat dunia saya jungkir-balik, dan saya tahu Mahmud-Mahmud sekalian yang sudah melewatinya bersetuju bulat-bulat. So, welcome, my stages of motherhood.

2 years ago