Week 15: Och… My achin’ back!

14 weeks, 5 days.

So aside from having been exhausted after my start-of-the-week cleaning, there’s another casualty – my lower back. Lower back pain is pretty common among pregnant women, especially since your body releases relaxin, a hormone which, among other mysterious things, relaxes one’s ligaments, and this extra weight in your abdomen does all sorts of neat and painful things. This time, I’m not sure how much it has to do with either – I injured my back in the early 90′s at a temp job flinging bundles of Sunday papers onto a pallet, and every so often, when I overdo it, it acts up. The past few days, it’s been absosmurfly miserable.

This time, though, I cannot take my savior drug of choice for all things painful, ibuprofen – or any other NSAIDs, for that matter. Nope, if I’m gonna take anything at all, it has to be acetaminophen (paracetamol, for you foreign types), and acetaminophen’s never done much for me. Not that I really want to be exposing the little one to drugs if I can help it, but mommy couldn’t find any comfortable sitting, lying, or standing positions for 3 days. I did do some yoga, and that helped some. Stretching my back in a hot shower is effective enough to get me to sleep, so that’s good too, although my sleeping position usually means I wake up hurting more than I did when I went to sleep.

But yesterday, I think I found the key to fixing this… I went swimming, and that helped immensely. Keep in mind, the last time I think I was voluntarily in a swimsuit was about 3 summers ago in Germany – it’d take some serious pain for me to want to expose this flab and my out-of-shapeness to the public. Funny that being pregnant offers such a nice excuse for both that I really wasn’t self-conscious about it at all yesterday, which means more swimming for me! After a few easy laps in the pool (on my back doing some lame beginner’s stroke because it didn’t make my heart rate go up too high) and some stretching, I was ready to declare the relief of swimming better than sex, and move into the pool permanently. Alas, the pool does close eventually, and I suspect I was swimming in some lane I shouldn’t have been, and so I left instead. But that relief lasted most of the day, so I’m going to alternate yoga and swimming from now on and hope for the best from now on.

I was also able to contort the Snoogle into some bizarre position that moved my weight away from my left hip (the side that hurts – you know, the side I have to sleep on now?), and woke up not aching, at least not until I got up. Now I can sit or lie comfortably, but still can’t stand or walk for long. And I know if I sit or lie for any significant period of time it’s going to hurt again doing that too. But at least it’s getting better.

One thing’s for sure – no more overdoing it for me. Back pain sucks!