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.