Categories
Eve Personal

Weird And Wonderful Things

I saw a familiar face on the news last night. I wasn’t really paying attention so I’m not altogether sure what the piece was about but it had something to do with pregnancy or babies and he was being quoted as one of the top ante-natal doctors in the country. That last part was what caused my eyebrow to raise and my eyes to roll although I may have been judging the man a little harshly. It’s just that the one and only time I ever saw him I was in agony and the only expert opinion he gave me was to chuckle and tell me, “Ah, sure, that’s pregnancy for you. Full of weird and wonderful things we just have to put up with!”

I was about 12 weeks away from my due date when I noticed a few insect bites on my wrist. It was July 2004 and the weather was really hot so when the bites started to spread up my arm after a few hours I put it down to heat rash. Cool baths didn’t help though and when the spots started to show up on my shoulders and other arm I decided to go to the doctor. The first person I saw (my usual doctor) thought it might be an allergy of some kind and advised calamine lotion but by the next day it was obvious this wasn’t helping. Over the next couple of days the rash had spread all across my stomach and was now starting to appear on my legs. The sores were bright red and raised up and had the texture of orange peel. What was driving me to insanity though was the itch. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t find any kind of relief, the itch was just agony. I remember thinking that I wished it was painful rather than itchy because I could have handled pain. I lay awake for hours at night dreaming of going down to the kitchen to find a sharp object that would shred my skin and maybe stop the feeling of a million ants crawling underneath it. Even the tops of my feet and inbetween my fingers were raw from scratching.

It was at this point that I met our friend the “leading expert in the care of pregnant women.” He was in charge of the emergency Saturday clinic and I went to him desperate for help. I remember he examined me but didn’t really seem to be listening to me but again, that might be an unfair memory since I wasn’t really myself. I do remember him sitting back in his chair and giving that chuckle:

“What we have here is what my old mentor in medical college used to call MROP.”

I sat forward, relieved that it actually had a name…perhaps that meant he knew how to treat it! His next words dashed that hope,

“Yes, what you have is what we like to call a “Mysterious Rash Of Pregnancy”…it’s just one of those things that happen to pregnant women.”

I wasn’t about to give up hope, “Is there anything I can do to treat it?”

“Yes,” he said and smiled, “Give birth!”

That’s when he stood and gave me that line about pregnancy being full of these weird and wonderful things that we have to put up with as he ushered me out the door. Case closed…the next three months seemed like three years stretching out ahead of me. How was I going to make it to the birth without losing my mind?!

Well, thank goodness for Al Gore’s wonderful invention. I went online that afternoon, mostly just to see if there was anyone else out there going through what I was going through although I didn’t dare hope I might find a cure. Within a few minutes I found hundreds of women talking about the same thing. The symptoms they described were exactly what I was going through and in some cases even worse. It was such a relief just to find people who understood but they had a lot more than that. They had a name for it: PUPPPS in the US or PEP in the UK. A rare condition that isn’t harmful to the mother or the baby but which can cause huge distress to the sufferer, even to the point where women have been induced early to put an end to it. I read of one woman who’d had an abortion because she contracted the condition at the beginning of her pregnancy and couldn’t bear the thought of going through nine months of it. It’s not known what causes it but some theories include an allergic reaction to the baby or a consequence of the skin stretching so much in a short time.

Among all the personal stories I found a long list of possible treatments and among them was repeated reference to Dandelion Root Extract. I waddled my way to the nearest Health Shop (after checking with my regular doctor of course who was dubious but figured it would do me no harm) and stocked up…I would have tried anything at this stage.

The happy ending is that within 24 hours the itching calmed and after just 3 days the rash had cleared up almost completely and as long as I kept taking the Dandelion tablets it didn’t come back. I made sure that my doctor knew exactly what it was that I’d discovered I had and that she had the name of my cure. She’s told me that she’s passed it on to at least one other woman since my experience with it. Last night when I saw him on the telly I had to wonder how many unlucky women the “expert” had chuckled out of his office since me.

Categories
Eve Ireland Photography

Splash!

Splash

On The Bridge

Well, I’m still stuck in the house coughing and spluttering, feeling a little cabin fever creeping in. Hopefully it will be back to normal…and work…tomorrow.

Categories
Eve Ireland Photography

Knocknasink Woods

Roots BW

Greetings from the plague house where our little bundle of germs has infected us all once again. Having a child is like a non-stop trip down the memory lane of all those childhood illnesses you thought you’d never experience again! Sorry if this post has a tinge of fever ranting to it.

But enough of that. Before I fall back into my bed, here are some photographs taken over the weekend at Knocknasink Woods in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow (famous last year for a nasty incident involving animal sacrifice). People usually go to Enniskerry to visit Powerscourt and its waterfall but I like to ramble around Knocknaskink, just around the corner. So far Matt and Eve still think I’m a bit crazy when I start taking photographs of bark, but at least in somewhere like Knocknasink they’re the only ones looking at me funny.

Fairy Grove

Graffitti Trunk

By the way, if you don’t use flickr you might not know this but if you go to my flickr page and look at the bottom of each photo there’s a cool feature where you can click on “map” and it will take you to a Google Yahoo map (thanks Matt) of where the photograph was taken.

Categories
Blogging Eve Ireland Photography

A Party Political Broadcast On Behalf Of Gingerpixel

Eve Collage

This is how Eve reacted this morning to the news that Gingerpixel has been nominated for an Irish Blog Award in four categories:

Best Photoblog
Best Personal Blog
Best Designed Blog
Most Humorous Post (for the Garda Prank Call)

Thank you so much if you nominated me and if you want to check out all the nominees then Jason Roe has the full list over at his site. The finalists in each category will be decided based on how many votes they receive from the voting public (and if I might say, what a gorgeous bunch you are…is that a new haircut?) so I need your votes! It’s one vote per person per category so if you, and the members of your extended family, like my blog please cast your vote HERE. Oh, and just to clear up a misunderstanding from the previous round, you don’t have to be Irish to vote!

Voting ends on February the 16th at 5pm GMT, that’s next Friday, so don’t delay…

…because you don’t want this face on your conscience now do you?

Sad Eve

Categories
Eve

On Sleep Deprivation

Eve Asleep
Eve, December 2005

I just found this old article from the New Yorker by John Seabrook. It’s fairly long and it’s about the whole co-sleeping versus Ferberizing debate that new parents (myself included not so long ago) are obsessed by in the quest for more sleep, so you might not be interested in the whole thing (unless you’ve come here while trawling the internet at 4am desperately googling “how do I get my baby to sleep?!” in which case you might find it very useful). This paragraph brought me right back to those early months…it’s such a perfect description:

After four months of co-sleeping, the situation began to deteriorate. His polyphasic habits did not seem to be shifting toward our monophasic sleep. Instead, the opposite seemed to be happening: my formerly unified block of sleep was now broken into two parts, according to the baby’s schedule, but, unlike him, I couldn’t easily go back to sleep once I’d been awakened at 3 A.M., and spent the rest of the night in a hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness, with surreal images drifting across my unrested brain. Then his four-hour sleep phases shortened to two hours. Instead of sleeping in his crib until 2 A.M. and coming into our bed, he was coming in at midnight. He still seemed to be getting the sleep he needed, even if he wasn’t learning to do it by himself. My wife and I, however, were beginning to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation: the burning eyes; the band of fatigue that tightens around the skull, a sensation some liken to the feeling that you’re always wearing a hat; the irritation–at each other, at friends, at the cat’s water bowl, which I kept kicking by accident; and astereognosis, or the inability to recognize things by touch, which is a classic sign of sleep deprivation. There was a sense of growing distance between ourselves and the world. Did I go out this morning to get the Times, or was that yesterday morning? I glance at the weather report in the top right-hand corner of the front page, and it says “Interesting clouds.” Hmm. Interesting clouds. Never seen that forecast before. Then I realize it says “Increasing clouds.” But “Interesting clouds” made perfect sense.

Eve is sleeping peacefully in her cot right now and will do until about 7:30 tomorrow morning. There was a time when I would have paid a lot of money to know that she would ever do that.