As always, it has been quite a while since I blogged here last. I can't say I realized it was almost a whole year ago, but life gets in the way and blogging falls to the very bottom of the list. Life slowed down a bit in the fall, and I started thinking about a topic for a new post. Since I've been doing well, it's getting harder and harder for me to come up with topics that will be relevant to the people that end up here and read my posts. I know you guys are struggling to make sense of what your body is doing to your life. I don't want to write over and over again about how well I'm doing or how it's almost like I don't have IBS anymore. I can remember how hard that would've been for me to read during all those years where I was so sick.
But the truth is, my IBS was backing down. Around the time I started thinking about blogging again, I had been off the daily Imodium for almost 8 months with hardly any relapse in symptoms. My gut had started spasming again with certain foods, and I was having some loose stools, but I very rarely had any urgency. I had my scheduled poop every morning and it was always tolerable. I still don't know what changed that caused this stretch of amazingness for me. I had another stretch like this during high school when I got to live a completely carefree life- I got to eat whatever I wanted and not worry about where I was going to go to the bathroom if my stomach started acting up. I never made it to that point in this last year when I was feeling good, but it was still a similarly spontaneous remission.
This time was especially strange because I was going through an emotional time in my life. We had made some very big decisions and started to put some stressful plans in place. Usually when I'm stressed out, my gut gets very unhappy, but it was smooth sailing up until mid October. Then I started getting urgency again and almost every stool was very loose. Suddenly things I was able to eat the week before were major triggers for my IBS. Soon enough, my GI issues weren't the only symptoms and it hit me that this might be bigger than IBS.
Has anyone guessed it yet? Yep, I'm preggers.
I can't remember if I've talked about it much on here in the past, but holy cow was I adamantly opposed to having kids in the past. I went through a short period when I was 19 when I needed a child right then and there. I remember going home and telling my now husband we needed to get married that weekend so we could start having kids. Looking back, I cannot believe how extreme that need was, and I'm so happy we didn't act on it! Over the years between then and now, that definitely calmed down and we started to logic out having kids. We made a pros and cons list, I researched how it could affect IBS, and we had many, many discussions about it. We would check back in with each other about every 6 months about it and make sure each of us still didn't want kids, look over our pros and cons list, and plan to talk about it 6 months later. To us, it was always a decision that had to be thought through as carefully as buying a house or changing a career. It never seemed like the right plan for us. And I was absolutely terrified of pregnancy since there was a high probability of me throwing up at some point and it making my IBS worse.
Enter our pseudo-nephew. He just turned a year old a couple of months ago. When we found out our best friends were expecting, the first thing out of my mouth and in my husband's head was, "We have to start soon so they're close in age!" We looked at each other with crazy eyes like, "WTF? When did we both suddenly start wanting kids?" I thought it was another crazy hormonal rush and that it would pass. So we went back to what we knew- our pros and cons list and our long talks. We decided that this had to have come from somewhere, so I started reading blogs people had written about having kids instead of ones people wrote about deciding not to have kids. I also bought a book called All Joy And No Fun. After reading that book, I realized that all the cons on our list didn't mean much. If I looked at all of the annoying things our furbabies do day in and day out and didn't take into account how much joy they bring us, I would've never adopted them. We decided to start thinking about maybe having kids for a while and see how that felt. Well, it felt really good, pretty scary, and definitely like it was the right idea for us at the time.
Over the course of a year, we slowly came around to the idea and decided to take the plunge. Well, it worked lol. I found out I was pregnant in October, so I'm just over halfway through my pregnancy. When I found out I was pregnant, I just screamed, "What the fuck?!" over and over and over. I was terrified. It took me a couple of days to be excited about it because I couldn't stop worrying about how nauseous I might get and what if I puked and what was going to happen with my IBS??
I promise I meant to get to the part most of you guys care about a lot faster, but I feel like this is enough text for one blog post! I'll talk about how pregnancy has been for me so far in the next one. If I don't post soon, please hold me to it! Life has gotten pretty crazy around here, so I might need the reminder.
