I Can’t Stop Writing Prilosec Commercials

Please don’t think I care less about my blog than I used to, simply because I write in it less at the moment.

There are obstacles to posting.

Heavy ones. Pointy ones.

I’ve been doing teaching prep during nap, and then, nap stopped occurring. I also need to sleep during nap, to keep myself civil while I create this new baby, and so if nap does happen, normally I just sit stunned and wonder what I am supposed to do first. And the suddenly, it is over, before it ever had a chance to begin. This also makes me very, very behind on Breaking Bad, which I used to watch during nap.

What I want to do, lately, is make the blog a public service announcement to women who are pregnant and having a hard time. (Ie, what I want is a public service announcement for MYSELF. I need my own pep talk.)

The message would be, THIS TOO SHALL PASS. AND YOU WILL LIKELY GET A GREAT BABY OUT OF IT. AND IF YOU HAVE HEARTBURN, TAKE PRILOSEC.

I blogged about Prilosec, the acid-reducing pill that one takes once a day when one is desperate to get ride of heartburn, three years ago, but it is time to do so again, because awareness of Prilosec is the greatest public service I can provide to the pregnant-lady community.

Prilosec is a little mauve pill that I, and many of my fellow Americans, take first thing in the morning. It makes me want to speak rhetorically in way that few other things do. Why? It shuts down production of acid. Not having acid shooting out of my neck makes me feel downright presidential.

I still have some measure of heartburn. When I wake up in the middle of the night, which happens to people whose bladders are like thimbles with a 19 pound cats draped over them, I can feel the heartburn. It’s not like it would be, though.

The day before I started taking Prilosec, I threw up 8 times in terrible, never to be forgotten afternoon. I won’t forget it, because it sucked, and Henry won’t forget it, because he got to watch so much TV, which he thought was awesome.

Lest you think I am wholly excused from vomiting, I’m not, but it is a lot rarer. It happens violently if I happen to swallow any saliva, and I go to great lengths to avoid that.

It also happens when I don’t manage to take my Prilosec, but it’s sort of a subtler problem.

I went to Connecticut and stayed overnight a few weeks ago, and I forgot to bring my Prilosec. I drove back in the morning with some food in my belly and some fear in my heart — still an hour before I’d get to take the pill! — but things seemed fine, fine enough that once we were in our neighborhood, I stopped to get Henry and I some lentil soup for lunch. We shared it, and then drove the rest of the way home.

After parking outside of our building, I opened the driver seat door, and leaned over slightly to get out. As I leaned over, the quantity of soup I’d eaten 20 minutes before fell out of my head. No fanfare, just, slosh, splat.

It begged many questions. What is an event like that called? Vomit implies some sort of effort; it implies pain. But the end game is food falling out of your head, and that is what happened. If a tree falls in the wood, if a lady loses her lunch without retching . . . there wasn’t even a burp associated with this.

Would this happen all the time without Prilosec? Did this happen because normally I do manage to take my Prilosec, and without it, I have none of the normal production of body fluids and one needs them if one isn’t going to take the purple pill, which also does something else I don’t understand, like make your throat flaps work in the most basic of ways?

I was worried about taking Prilosec for the whole pregnancy. Would I become physically reliant? Or worse, would it stop working midway through? I asked my sister-in-law, a medical professional, what she thought. She is a nurse practitioner, but also a naturopath, and also a person who suffered her own course of serious heartburn during pregnancy. Take it, she urged. Take it the whole time. I think it’s fine.

But doesn’t a person, I don’t know, need some stomach acid, I countered? Doesn’t stomach acid serve a purpose?

Take it, she said. If you find you need more acid in your body, you can drink some vinegar or something.

Like me, she is a convert.