Anne Nahm

Was up all night with faux labor. It was so convincing that I had my toothbrush packed. All to end with nothing this morning. No baby, no tremors, no contractions. Maybe on retroflection, it was just a really bad case of gas. It was stinky, but I thought that might be the smell of fire and brimstone. You know, from being in Hell.

I’m still in my pajamas, waiting to drop into the old heave hos. But now that it’s past 1:00 in the afternoon and I haven’t had a contraction since four this morning, I’m starting to feel a little ridiculous. Not quite ridiculous enough to put on pants, though.

Here! Enjoy a song that won’t get out of my head. It’s in there with Varuca Salt for some reason. Most of my day has been a repetitive loop of I want it now! Nothing to worry about! There are actual claw marks inside my skull.

Sometimes, I get overwhelmed by the violence in the world. I turn on the TV and hear about some horrible, ongoing, generational war in which all are slaughtered. The needless destruction, the pain on both sides. Empathy for all creatures great and small overflows in my veins and I’m all, “Jeez, can’t everybody just get along? Love your fellow man, you stupid bastards.”

Annnnd then I spend three days with my own relatives. That’s when I realize DEF CON 2* with the missile silos open is a perfectly reasonable response to some people.

PS: As I stood in a parking lot yesterday, a relative bent down in front of my belly, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “COME OUT BABY! WE’RE LEAVING TOMORROW. COME OUT NOW SO WE CAN SEE YOU BEFORE WE GOOOOOOOO!”

I actually felt my pelvis tighten to retract the fetus back into my body. It felt a hundred times grosser than a turtle heading at a dinner party, but there was no effing way I was going to extend that visit. I think it may have pushed my due date back at least three days.

*Thanks to Adrienne at BabyToolKit for the heads up on which DEFCON I needed. :^)

Honestly, what is the right response to someone who looks right at you, gestures to your enormous belly, and says in some half-irritated tone, “haven’t you had that baby yet?”

Because “um, no,” seems to lack something. Like a bitch slap.

Am very cranky these days. Would tell you details, but then ‘cranky’ just turns into ‘whiny’. And honestly, who needs that? Suffice it to say that everything annoys me. Un/Fortunately for both you and I, relatives descend today, which gives my free floating irritation a laser-like pinpoint on which to focus. And thus, whining ensues:

I woke up this morning to an email from my mother about how I was in no way obligated to meet up with relatives (who just happen to be here for Easter two weeks early. Not because of due date. Coincidence!) to spend this afternoon touring a bajillion antique boutiques and quilting stores in the area.

But in case I might want to go, here’s the itinerary! And all the places we could go for lunch! And they will be taking my 3-year-old with them! And if I do not want to go, please just shove the three-year-old through a crack in the front door, because once relatives see me, they will cry big, shiny tears if I don’t go with them. But! Don’t feel obligated. Honestly. Also, three-year-old will love going to many, many stores in which adults are distracted by talking and who will not be allowed to touch anything.

Also please reply to this email by Very Early In The Morning, or they will just show up and assume I want to go.

Un/fortunately, I woke up much earlier than my wiley mother must have suspected I would. Now I actually have time to ponder if I should go. Instead of just waking up to the doorbell and hordes of relatives descending. Do I fling my helpless child through the door and hide in the house? Tempting. But the child, she is so cute and seems to trust me. On the other hand, having to babysit my own kid, in tiny grandma stores, full of untouchables, while I am dragged about by the whims of aging tourists? Oh my slappy hand is getting all twitchy just thinking about it.*

Anyway, here’s last year’s Peeps are Evil for Easter. I thought about getting some chick-style Peeps and trying again this year. But in my current state, I would have inhaled them before they had a chance to do anything naughty. And then I probably would have gagged. And then I would have an obituary headline like Woman Dies Choking Chicken.

Here is the Bloggess, who is taunting executives through the mail. When I read this post, I was pretty sure she made this story up. But then I am reminded of every other post she has written and how they wind up true, and now I am not so sure.

And here is Amalah tweeting about the Aquarium. Which is quite a bit funnier than I just made it sound.

And here is The New Girl and her charming neighbor, Charlie Manson: licensed cattery owner and guy who left photographs in her mailbox.

Enjoy!

*Not slappy towards the child, who is cannot control acting like a three year old, but for my older relatives, who should know better.

My dentist was kind enough to see me Tuesday after I called on Monday. Yay healthcare in small towns!

He poked around in my mouth for a good two minutes and then sat back consulting my file. He said that if I would please make sure to come back for x-rays a week or so after giving birth, he would make sure that 1) they prepared everything before I arrived, 2) he’d have someone on hand to hold my infant while they zapped me, and 3) I could be in and out in ten minutes. But puh. leese. Anne. Come right back and get x-rays within a week or so of having the baby.

The good news was that he didn’t seem to think it was an abscess, which would probably have been bad and tooth lossy, at least according to the doctorate education in dentistry I awarded myself over the weekend.

“Could be scar tissue,” The real dentist said in a hopeful tone. “It is right where those screws are.”

“Which means it’s nothing to worry about?” I asked right back.

He got the slightest bit squirmy in his swivel seat. Guess a big hunk of scar tissue means they watch it and maybe operate. But, you know, no immediate problem.

He was less pleased by the news that I had been using a Neti pot nearly daily throughout this pregnancy. Although he could have thought the Neti pot was some kind of culprit, I got the feeling he was worried that my sinuses had been giving me consistent problems for the last 9 months.

Due to the fact that the screws “are right up against (my) sinuses” (which I think is the polite way of saying, ‘that bozo punctured your sinuses with titanium screws’) it could also be a cyst. That’s basically an infection with a hard candy crust. Only bone instead of candy for crust. And, you know, gross infected stuff on the inside – much like the inside of a Cadbury egg. From what I imagine.

Which: Wheee! Cyst is what happened last time. And resulted in a big chunk of bone being cut out of my skull.

I was remarkably cool in the dentist’s office, telling him and myself that it was probably just scar tissue. Scar tissue! Scar tissue! Nothing more than an oversized skin tag, a strange growth from pregnancy that could be clipped off with nail clippers at my convenience. Thank you, doc!

And then I drove myself over to Fosters Freeze and bought a soft serve ice cream cone because I happened to remember my mom getting me one when I was a very small kid, and didn’t a soft serve ice cream just sound dandy? Why yes! It did!

It took me until three in the morning (which is right now) to wake up in a weird panic. Hey, guess what I found in my own archives from June of 2008?! This note I wrote myself:

Anyway, the doctor assured me after he cut out my bone that there was absolutely nothing left to get infected on my right side, praise jeebus! And please Anne, for the love of malpractice fees, never darken his doorway again.

But the good doctor left all the bolts on the left hand side. So now every time I get a sinus infection, I get to worry if I am developing some kind of cyst on the left hand side.

Anyway, I guess there is no sense in worrying about it until I deliver. It’s just easy at three in the morning to get freaked out – the cyst on the right hand side was so tiny they barely knew it was there, and that resulted in them taking out a fairly big piece of bone. Recovery was long and painful, ended my ability to nurse my kid, I couldn’t get out of bed without bad pain for about a month, and I had aftermath pain for nearly a year. I wonder what I am going to lose if they have to take this out.

Friday night after dinner, I was acting very lady-like and fishing a piece of lettuce out from between my teeth. That’s when I noticed this really big, hard lump, way up on my gum line on the left side of my mouth. I thought, “whoa!” and circled my finger over  to check the other side. No lump over there.

I fingered for a while with a puzzled look on my face, wondering how long it had been since I last fingered that part of my mouth (if ever), and whether or not this lump was a new part of my anatomy or I had simply never made note of it before.

Then I made my husband touch it. He was surprisingly squeamish about this business and withdrew his digit rather quickly.

Friday night is the best possible time to have a medical question, because Dr. Google is the only one On Call until Monday, unless you fancy spending some quality time catching strange diseases from other hypochondriacs piled up in the E.R, all of them fingering various body parts.

Dr. Google could only suggest a tooth abscess or a tumor. Yay!

Saturday morning, I woke up and realized there is a third option: That oral surgeon left the screws in my head on the left side*. Even though he had to take all the ones on my right side out because they got infected. A quick review of the x-ray (which I secretly photographed while waiting in his office) shows some of those screws to be where the lump now resides. Although, you know: In the x-ray, those screws were fasten into the bone of my jaw and not hanging out in some lumpy appendage glove box within my mouth.

So now to call my local dentist with the kind of clear-cut and reasonable question I love to pose to professionals: Umm, could you feel up inside my mouth and tell me if you remember feeling this thing before? And could you do it sometime this week, because I’m due to drop a baby like an anvil sometime in the next ten days?

I am trying to avoid Chicken Little type predictions about the future, but the general sense that bad shit is going to keep happening until I am crushed by postpartum depression is like some kind of background theme music that is gaining volume as my due date approaches.

Also, my blood pressure is up, my body swollen like someone fished it out of the river four days post-mortem, and I have gained three pounds this week. Again.

* Three years ago, during my second child’s infancy (and after four months of feeling really terrible and not realizing it was not simply because I had an extra child to take care of), I discovered I had an infected cheekbone implant which required six months of antibiotics, two general anesthesia surgeries, and me traveling once a month to a doctor who worked two hours away from my home. You can read all about those fun times here.