The first trimester

If you haven’t yet heard the news, the Russum fam is expecting Baby #4 this April. I am officially out of what was the longest, and Lord-wiling, the last first trimester. It was the longest because I found out about this baby much earlier than I have in my previous pregnancies. Since we have gotten pregnant easily and even a bit unexpectedly in the past, I never really took note of missing my period until I was at least five or six weeks pregnant. This time, I found out the first day a test would show up positive at just four weeks gestation. And it was likely my last first trimester because we don’t plan on any more biological children. I just never say it with certainty because God does what he wants.

After two miscarriages in the past year, I was having a very short cycle (23-24 days) while my body was trying to get back on track hormonally. My OB advised we not try to conceive until my cycle was at least 26 days. I had finally hit a 26-day cycle, but when my period didn’t arrive, I was simply hoping my body was moving back toward my normal 30-day cycle. I took a pregnancy test on a whim on a Wednesday afternoon, simply because I had an extra one in my bathroom drawer. It was negative.

But two days later I had THE feeling… the feeling of utter exhaustion, the can’t-get-up-from-your-chair, might-fall-asleep-at-4pm kind of tired that I only get in the first few weeks of pregnancy. That evening Micah took the girls swimming after dinner. While the rest of the family was splashing in the pool, I drove over to the post office to check our PO box and then ran into the Dollar Tree next door to grab two pregnancy tests. You can’t trust just one since they cost only a dollar…

When I checked our PO box, some packages I had sent out had been returned to me for different postage, so I unexpectedly needed to stop by my office where I keep my extra mailing supplies. This is the beauty of living in a place where your church, work, and school are all within a one-mile radius of your house. You can run all these errands in under 20 minutes and no one even knows you’ve left the house. I ended up taking the test in my bathroom at work. (It was a Friday night in summer. No one was around.) I didn’t really notice that it was positive at first. I could see the faint second line, which you can sometimes see once it’s wet; it just doesn’t get dark. It wasn’t until I went to wash my hands that I realized the line actually had gotten much darker. Positive.

The funny thing is… I can’t even remember exactly how I told Micah. I can remember telling him about all my other pregnancies, but this one, from just a few months ago, escapes me. On Wednesday night I had told him I was not pregnant and on Friday night I told him, using some words or another, “actually, I am pregnant.” I took the second cheap pregnancy test the next morning just to be sure.

Then things got a little crazy. Long story short, my doctor told me she was going to put me on Progesterone for this pregnancy as a safeguard against miscarriage. The only problem is that I found out I was pregnant on a Friday night and on Sunday we were going out of town for the next three weeks. I called the nurse line on Friday night and they suggested going to urgent care or the emergency room on Saturday morning. The emergency room seemed a bit dramatic, so I headed to the nearest urgent care, where I was told the lab would be open for blood draws from 8am to 8pm – even on a Saturday. I arrived at the medical facility a little after 8am, hoping to do a quick blood test and get my prescription before meeting my women’s Bible study group at a nearby coffee shop at 9am. I was told by the front desk that I could not do a blood draw or get the prescription because no OBs work on the weekends to order the test. When I mentioned that it should be in my charts (as I had seen it noted in a previous appointment), the nurses on shift said there was no record of it. I left the office angry and in tears and showed up late to my Bible study announcing my pregnancy to them, even though I had just found out it 12 hours earlier. In the end, I had to go to the emergency room (don’t get me started on my rant on how this was the epitome of everything that’s wrong with U.S. healthcare) and the doctor there was able to call upstairs to an OB and get my prescription filled within minutes. They didn’t even send me to the lab.

We began our back-to-back weeks of travel. The first week we were up at Forest Home Family Camp, and I felt great the whole time. For the next week and a half, we were road-tripping up to Washington State to camp with Micah’s family and then attend my brother’s wedding. On our first morning camping, I hit six weeks and I woke up in our tent feeling very first-trimester-ish. Thankfully, I don’t throw up while pregnant, but I tend to feel nauseated with a very picky appetite. It was challenging to find a hearty and protein-filled breakfast while sleeping in a tent. Cereal was not going to cut it. Thankfully, I was able to pull together some scrambled eggs or a breakfast sandwich each day and other than that, I felt pretty good for most of the trip.

We got back from Washington just before midnight on a Monday, and the very next morning I was in charge of hosting our faculty gathering for the school year kick-off. I was 7 weeks on that day. It was the commencement of the longest five weeks of my life. I have felt slightly worse in the first trimester with each subsequent pregnancy. With Eisley, I felt awful each morning but discovered the cure was a huge, egg-filled breakfast. I would eat a small breakfast before leaving the house and then find a second breakfast a few hours later (usually a breakfast sandwich from Starbucks or a huge breakfast burrito) to keep my nausea at bay for the rest of the day. For this pregnancy though, I could not figure out which foods sounded good. I spent weeks 7-11 trying to find any food that was appetizing and could curb the swishy swashy feeling in my mind and my stomach. Eggs were okay, but bacon was gross. Carbs were fine, but I couldn’t find any specific food that really hit the spot. The one food that usually sounded appealing was strawberry protein smoothies, so I would make those at home as often as possible. I credit them for helping me gain the least amount of weight I have ever gained in the first trimester.

But the real reason the first trimester was so difficult is that I’m in the craziest semester I’ve had since starting my job three years ago. Last winter, I agreed to take on teaching two extra 8-week classes this fall to help launch a new research curriculum for our nursing program. At the time, I didn’t know our department chair would be on sabbatical, which meant taking over one of his classes in the fall. Then in July, I told another professor I would cover his classes for two weeks while he was on paternity leave. I agreed to all this extra work not knowing I would be in the thick of the first trimester of pregnancy. During August and September, I would trudge around campus each day, searching for any food that would make me feel even 10% better. I would come home from teaching all afternoon and lie on my bed for 30 minutes, completely immobile from exhaustion, while the kids ran around our house with no supervision. It was the most overwhelmed I’ve ever been in my professional life, as administrative tasks and grading were piling up all around me, and I could not keep up. It would have been a crazy term, even if I had been operating at full capacity.

During my first trimester with Eisley, I would climb into bed at 8:30 pm at night and read a novel for an hour before drifting off to sleep. I was hoping to be similarly slow and cozy this time around, but the grueling pace of my job prevented it. I was often up until midnight during those first few weeks of the semester, just trying to get a handle on all my work responsibilities. The good news is I am feeling better now and trying to slow down a bit. My extra classes have ended, and I am taking the time to sit on my bed with a novel every now and then.

As rough as the first trimester was I was so thankful each day, even when I felt awful. After losing two babies (at six and eight weeks), I was grateful each day I woke up feeling awful, each night I went to bed exhausted. It was a reassuring sign that the baby was thriving, and for that, I am forever thankful.