Church Avenue Chomp

I went out with a guy once who looked great on paper — talldark&handsome, architect, motorcycle, lots of wooing. We’d go swimming at night, he’d leave notes on my car, he made me a bouquet made entirely out of roasted corn. (Listen: the bouquet of roasted corn was better than it sounds.) But our chemistry was off, and we broke up, and finally, we both realized that he was gay. Is the gayness the punch line? It is not.

While it lasted, I also thought that his parents sounded very interesting because they were both Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were also both deaf.

Where the heck is this going?

Well, whenever he told people about his two deaf parents, they’d comment that his house must’ve been very quiet. He would reply that to the contrary, his house was QUITE LOUD — that deaf people are far less aware of how much noise they are making, especially if they have started a household with another person who is immune to loud noises.

I think about this a lot lately because when I wake up in the middle of the night, the baby, who is 10 weeks old, is making about as much noise as I imagine two deaf parents might make.

I’m not talking about crying. There’s a loud suctiony pop that happens when he’s sucking his wrist or fingers but isn’t yet coordinated to quite get purchase on them before he jerks his arm and the thumb goes flying out. POP! This is in addition to slurping, gurgles, grunts, clucks and snorts. He sighs and lets out yawns that have a little vocalization attached. And, HICCUP! HICCUP! And he has started to talk, in a manner of speaking. “ahhh, ahhh, ahhh,” he says.

The one-man band is punctuated by the occasional prolonged fart. He’s sharing a room with us but is completely matter of fact about the farting situation, which I admire, at least in someone so tiny.

There is also the noise that only a twelve pound human zipped into a little fleece blanket bag could make, which is achieved by the flinging of legs up into the air. He can’t flip over or move much on his own unless his legs are pushed against something, but he’s sort of at sea in the middle of the cradle. The idea behind the flinging, I think, is that the legs come down in a slightly different position, and if he flings them high and hard enough, he can dislodge himself from the little foam mountains we wedge him between in order to keep him on his back, or wiggle the whole package — body and mountains — towards the bars of his cradle.

If it were your roommate or spouse or two deaf parents making these noises, it might be aggravating, but when it’s your baby making them, holy moly, it’s just delightful.

He used to cry or not cry and that was about it, but as the weeks have gone by he’s become far more active, noisewise, and the best way I can describe it is that he’s more colored in. It’s a developmental thing I’ve witnessed in other babies as well.

First, it happens physically. A friend had a baby last summer. Eli was sweet when he was born but had the appearance of the very new or the very old. At the time wasn’t thinking that so much but it was clear when I saw him a few months later, and his lips had bloomed into red and his cheeks were rosy, eyes bright and focused, skin more jelled on his face. I was amazed at the change, and Henry has seen the exact same trajectory, physically. I thought he was pretty handsome when he was born but look back at pictures and he looks comparatively squinty and gray and collapsed. Henry would grasp his hands together and hold tight and glower with the air of an aging male Russian politician.

These days, with smiling and laughing, he seems a lot more like a baby.

It’s been hard, to say the least, to get anything posted on the blog since the baby came. During most spare moments during the day, I must do something important, like look for the housekeys I lost due to sleep deprivation. Or look for my spare housekeys, which I have also lost.

Or do something crucial, like try to get a nap in, generally to the tune of escalating hunger squeaks, then coughs, then cries, of a waking baby with an eager tummy.

Or do something hypothetical, like wonder why no one ever coaches the baby, “You know what you need to do, right? Sleep when Mommy sleeps.”

If you are a parent, you undoubtedly know the correlative phrase well: well-wishers of all shapes and sizes almost sternly admonish you to “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Chances are that you, like your baby, would get a lot more sleeping done if your meals were delivered directly into your mouth as you snuggled on a pillow in a near dream state, and you were not interested in keeping “going to the bathroom” a literal phrase. Or if the word on the street was that you really only needed to bathe once visible cheese had accumulated in the creases of your wrists.

I digress.

The weeks leading up to Henry’s birth were largely uneventful. And I do mean, LARGELY, ba dumbum. As I came closer and closer to 4 digits on the scale, I fell into a pattern of going to one of the three obstetricians every few days

1. to see whether Henry was breech again (he was not)
2. to see whether his head had descended into my pelvis (nope)
3. to see whether I had become effaced or dilated yet (uh, no)

Another thing they do at these appointments is to look for signs of pre-eclampsia – a condition where the placenta, the organ invented during a pregnancy to nourish the baby, starts to deteriorate in function. Pre-eclampsia is indicated by elevated blood pressure, protein in urine, headaches, and visual disturbances. For the sake of a baby and the sake of a mom, it is important to avoid.

Most of the time, I’d leave the dr.’s appointment with no signs of a problem, nor any signs that I was any closer to having the baby. “Honey, at this point, MY cervix is riper to give birth than yours is,” explained the gayest and funniest obstetrician in the practice. I liked his humor, except, huh. Time was marching on, and I simply did not seem ready to give birth, though it’s all I thought about. Was I having cramps? Was there any sort of unusual and meaningful feeling in my belly?

One thing that the labor classes tell you is that you don’t want to show up at the hospital before you are really ready – going into the part of labor where you want to bite people. The doctors I was seeing advise patients not to leave for the hospital until they are screaming in raw animal pain. Why? You will get sent home, and getting sent home is bad for morale. Also, in our case, home is about an hour away from our hospital of choice. So if there’s one thing you know, it’s that you shouldn’t see the inside of the hospital until it is time to have the baby!

However, during a routine appointment at week 38, my blood pressure was a bit high. A sign of pre-eclampsia? “Well, at the hospital,” another obstetrician calmly explained, without leaping about the room in a crazy anticipatory dance, or frankly even looking me in the eye, “they have a lab. It’s faster to get some the bloodwork done there.” Sure, they have labs in hospitals. But he didn’t indicate in any direct manner, YOU MIGHT HAVE THE BABY LATER TODAY, so my husband and I didn’t get it.

This was something we would come to understand more and more during the process. You are having a baby, but everyone who is helping you has a job where they help people have babies every day, so it’s hard for them to muster the sense of wonder and urgency that you are feeling. It’s frankly sort of hard for them to muster anything at all: unlike they experience you are having, they’re just at work.

“So . . . what time should I tell my office I’ll be back?” my husband asked. The OB shook his head. Then looked me. “You may have pre-eclampsia, and the cure for preeclampsia during week 38 is getting the baby out. There is a chance you will get sent home from the hospital. But a better chance that you will have your baby overnight.”

We explained to him that we didn’t have any of our bags. This, as it turns out, means exactly nothing to the medical community.

After all of our carefully concocted plans to bring an iPod with the correct music and the birth ball and 5 extra pillows and all of my carefully chosen pajamas and the camera and the copy of Great Expectations that we read aloud to one another . . . and my snacks . . . I’m sorry, you just want us to GO?

The truth is that to have the baby, you just need you.

The baby?

Huh. The baby. I’d thought of little other than having a baby for months — for like, a year — but faced with actual possibility that it might really arrive, I was just sort of blank. With the details of the PREGNANCY overwhelming me from every angle, and the potentialities and possibilities of BIRTH, I hadn’t been able to think about the outcome – the baby – for a while. I’d gone through a time when whenever I’d drive I’d picture the money shot, the moment of eeking out the baby, with attendant pile of slick goo slithering out shortly thereafter, and I’d hear it let out its first lusty wail, and someone would say, “you have a . . .” whatever I was going to have, and they would put the baby on my chest, and I would say the first sentence to welcome the baby into the world, into my arms, into our lives, but in the middle of my sentence, I’d have to stop, because I’d be overcome with a sob. And I wouldn’t just sob in my daydream, I would sob in the car.

However, these reveries were all before week 38. It was when I was less tired, still small enough to drive the car, 10 pounds lighter. It was when my maternity clothes still fit, and I didn’t have to order 2 desserts at a time. But at a certain point, I was just marching forward as the carrier of the baby and I could not even hold a particularly excited thought about the birth anymore, anything more complex than “When . . .will . . . this . . . come. . . out.” Or, “Will it hurt wicked bad?” Or, every day after dinner – “do not let me go into labor tonight, I am far too tired.” Birth vs. baby is like the difference between a wedding and a marriage: easy to lose sight of the big picture in all of the commotion, and I had lost sight of the baby and could only consider the birth. And when faced with the birth, I guess I sort of wanted to procrastinate.

The dr.’s office is on 43rd street and before going to the hospital, we stopped at Grand Central to get a book. I’d heard that there was a great coffee shop in there and wanted to look around for it. We’d been told I could have a light snack . . . where should we go?

Matthew finally reminded me that we had to get to the hospital, and started in the direction of the subway. He figured we could take the shuttle across and then the A train up to 59th street. “You want me to take the TRAIN to the HOSPITAL?” I was fake-scandalized but secretly delighted, since I could tell everyone that I took the subway to the hospital to have the baby, and it was clearly the best way to travel there at rush hour.

And, after months of deferential treatment by the traveling masses, no one gave my big jouncing stomach and I a seat. Even better, since the trip wasn’t long and it added to the drama of the NOW I AM HAVING A BABY narrative unfurling in my head. When I walked into the hospital lobby, someone crossing the lobby to leave looked me up and down and exclaimed “I hope you make it upstairs in time!” Sort of rude, but also, exciting. I was ready to have a baby! And everyone could tell!

We checked into triage. I liked the nurses and they set me up with a series of monitors.

In case you haven’t been in this situation, I will explain what the baby monitor is like: you take off your normal clothes in order to put on a hospital Johnny. You are handed a garment – and in this instance garment should probably be in quotes — that looks like gigantic granny-style underpants without a crotch. It is a tube. You know it has to do with having a baby since pink and blue things are knitted into it the white fabric, so it looks like a newborn hat. Except you could get 30 newborn hats out of that amount of material. After the nurse stretches the tube out enough – and that takes a while – you pull it delicately up around your huge, huge belly and then recline, on your back, in the bed. The tube holds monitoring devices close to you so the heartbeat of the baby and also, your contractions, can be recorded onto a spool of paper that drops to the floor and someone periodically comes in to nod at apprasingly, then fold into a neater pile. However, this was set up by someone normal, not someone 9 mos pregnant, since being reclined on your back is so uncomfortable at that point. If you shift position, like if you try to sit up so that heartburn acid doesn’t shoot out of your mouth like a fountain and your uterus isn’t crushing you, then the monitors can shift and things are not properly recorded and someone will come in and look at the flat lines on the paper and either give you the stinkeye and tell you have to recline again, or they will tell you nicely.

And you cannot eat, or even take Tums.

In my case, since the baby hadn’t descended, and I was not at all dilated or effaced, they recommended a c-section since an induction would likely end in a lot of labor, then surgery anyhow, under those circumstances.

It is not possible to have a c-section until it’s been 8 hours since you ate. A certain set wil find me evil for saying it but that evening, I was far less concerned about the vagaries of surgery–something I was relatively unfamiliar with and had grown accustomed to the idea of when the baby was breech–than I was the immediate and escalating discomfort of heartburn leading to sleeplessness and barfing, which was my specialty. The heartburn was just going to escalate if I couldn’t eat, which I couldn’t, and it was going to be a long, long night, the prospect of which was exhausting. And when I was through, someone would hand me a baby, and I would never sleep again.

Crap.

Except, I was not to have the baby. After being in the hospital for a short period of time, and having my sinking blood pressure andtotally normal blood tested, it became clear that I wasn’t pre-eclamptic, and I was sent home, with nothing but a whale-sized container in which to collect my urine for the next 24 hours, and a heightened sense of anxiety about how uncomfortable the hospital beds were going to be when I did manage to have the baby.

Last I wrote, we hadn’t met Henry. It has been nearly three weeks now and I want to get the word out, blogstyle, that on 2/15 at 11:57 pm Henry Atticus Phillips Schuerman was born.

At birth Henry weighed 8 lbs., 14 oz. and was 31 inches long.

Except, perhaps I mean 21 inches long? Whichever length is just slightly longer than the average baby — but not like, a lengthy, serpentine, snake baby from the Guinness Book of World Records. I think actually Henry was 21 inches long — which is a generously sized baby.

He is beautiful and extremely spunky and seems — knock on wood — like a very, very vital boy. More on this in the story of the birth! I am working on more comprehensive post but wanted to get this out and up.

It’s very surreal that Henry is here. In part because I am so sleep deprived that I want to call in the National Guard so they can hold down the fort while I nap, but in part because it’s like anything else huge, like getting married. I keep telling myself “I have a son.” WE have a son. But it’s hard to get it. I still can hardly believe that I am married, and now, this!

Also, I get to start to recognize the physical gestures from the person who was knocking around inside of me for all of those months!

Welcome to you, dear Henry.

There is so much great stuff going on to write about – I mean, I don’t know whether it’s that great to read about – but this has been a week of implementation of a lot of interesting tactics because we found out on Monday (I started this post on Jan 9th) that the baby is breech.

Lots of people don’t know that much about their own births. Because my mom has always told me the story of my birth on my birthday – with great warmth and fondness, no less, bless her, I have always known a few key things about mine.

1. I was huge — 2 oz shy of 10 lbs. This, owing to the fact that
2. I was three weeks late, which they would never let happen today, especially if
3. A baby is breech, or with its head up rather than down, which I was.

So. I’ve always viewed my mother as sort of a superhero for various reasons, but when I think about these facts, especially. And I’ve always been sort of proud of the breech detail – in the same sort of way that I like that I am left-handed.

However.

The obstetrician confirmed the other day that the large round place which, depending on the moment, is either nesting comfortably near or chipping painfully up against the ribs on my right hand side – the spot that if I scratch it, lightly, produces a referred flutter of movement low, low in my pelvis – was a head. My sister had been speculating that it was a bottom up there, and that when I scratched it, I got punches in my lower abdomen. But it’s a head rather than a bottom, which is the other big round hard sticky outy part that babies have got.

That means that the head is up, which means that the baby is not head down. These days, being head down is a pre-requisite for being born through the most obvious exit.

(Obstetricians used to be trained to deliver breech babies, but that is no longer standard practice – these days, if a baby is head down at the time when a mom-to-be goes into a labor or need to be induced, the solution is a c-section.)

I was told that one way to deal is to see an expert in turning at the hospital. Apparently, just as they sent us to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital to see a specialist in doing amniocenteses, they have a special who does something called a “versioning,” which basically means that this person is specially trained to manipulate the position of a baby inside of a person from outside of the person’s stomach. By pushing. It’s generally done at 37 weeks, and may or may not include its own epidural: it doesn’t feel good. It can result in placental tears, and emergency Caesarian section, and bruising to the mother, and I would think, discomfort for the baby.

I asked whether there was anything I could do to try to change the position of the baby.

There are three obstetricians in our practice and the 3 docs within have very different modes of operating. Counter to the way I often fee, I like and trust all of them but the one I was with that day is clearly the least amenable to say, woowoo practices, like the hiring of a doula. He told me: “WELL. If I were a midwife – which I am clearly not – I might tell you to get your hips up off of the ground several times a day to let the baby turn. Other people recommend acupuncture. I’ve never seen any of these things work. But these are the things that people try.”

The versioning sounded frankly terrible, so I decided to pull out all of the stops to avoid it. Below, I will detail the hocus pocus we tried to move the baby. And tune in at the bottom to see whether or not it worked!!

THE HOCUS POCUS

MUSIC DOWN THE PANTS

This is the most obvious and easy-to-try-at-home trick: put headphones low, low, low on your belly and wait for the baby to dance down to listen. They definitely do react to music even while still inside – for months this one been expressing opinions about swingtime music, the song Back in the USSR, anything with a blastpunch of happy horns. The problem is that you never know whether the kicking and punching means “more!” or if it means “the outside must be scary. why would you put me through this?” I always prefer to think, “more!,” but the things I listed are all things that I love.

ACUPUNCTURE

I contacted Laurel, an acupuncturist I’ve seen before for help with nausea (and out and out vomiting) in the first trimester. She told me to come on in. She did some points in my feet and elsewhere to help with reflux, but also, burned “moxibustion” sticks near points on my toes to try to encourage turning. Lots and lots of people had recommended this Chinese medicine therapy. I’d heard about Chinese medicine you can put on your toes to make a baby turn and this is the stuff.

Moxibustion sticks are like incense sticks but not as stinky. She burned a few in her office, then she gave me a bunch to take home. At night, M would have me sit in my glider and put my feet on the ottoman and he’d burn it near the “spleen points” on my smallest toes and try get them hot but not burned. And inside I could feel Baby start to flounce and scrabble. And outside I could watch M’s eyes water, not from emotion: from smoke.

The doctors had told us that the baby was really pretty big – possibly too big to turn again, so we didn’t know if it was in vain, but we tried this for several evenings, in conjunction with . . .

YOGA

Laying on your back when pregnant isn’t pleasant –unless you have a thing for being smothered by your own outsize organs. (I would like to say something about my uterus: at one point, I swallowed my pride and asked one of the obstetricians whether it was possible that it had actually expanded to the degree that a portion have climbed to the outside of my ribs. He said, “uh, no.” But the head was RIGHT THERE, so that is to give you an idea of the size.) And laying on the back is bad for circulation, so it’s bad for baby, but like many things about pregnancy – like nutrition – the mother’s health gets compromised first. Ie, a pregnant person would puke or pass out before anything happened to the baby. But my yoga friend / teacher Marisa came over with a bunch of information and some hilarious props and we did a supported bridge – an arching pose we’ve avoided during pregnancy except for in this situation. But she’d checked it out and it was the solution, plus she was monitoring me and the OB had basically mentioned it. And it’s not dissimilar from the old “propping the ironing board up on the couch and laying with your head down and feet up” that people recommend for turning breech babies.

Anyhow we tried this after some chanting of things to activate certain chakras and also, playing a little gong she brought over. It was great. There we were, pulling out all of the stops! The supported bridge made me immediately clammy and nauseous, though, and I had to roll off and we put me into the supported chauvasana that makes me nap and snore and smile. In contrast to the supported bridge, it is pretty much the most comfortable I pretty much ever get during pregnancy. This is not a picture of me but it shows you the position. If you are pregnant and can’t get comfortable, I recommend a yoga session ending with this!

HEADSTANDS IN THE POOL

This is another thing that was highly recommended by many people as helping out with flipping a baby, with no real logic provided, but it’s hard not to try to think about the logic, and this is all I can come up with: “well, if I am a baby who likes my head up, and my nest gets upended, I will not know, being a baby and stuck in a cocoon of goo, but will be conscious enough to claw my way around to have my head up, which is actually down.”

Huh.

We went over to the Chinatown YMCA. I wasn’t big enough to need a maternity suit last summer, and just never got one, and couldn’t find one to borrow, so putting together the swimming outfit was going to be a challenge.

I ended up with a bikini top I have that ties rather than clasps, some boy shorts which are my normal bottoms but worn a little lower, and a t-shirt over it. We don’t, though, have a full length mirror in our house, so seeing my, uh, splendorous body in the mirror at the Y was really something! I think that I gasped. Everyone at the pool was very tolerant and tried not to stare.

Anyhow, I did a few laps then some headstands, but water does not negate heartburn in the way that it negates weight, and so as the acid started to sizzle my eyes, it was pretty quickly time to get out of there.

If the towels at the Y wrap around you, consider yourself lucky! Well, normal, but I certainly missed that feeling.

CHIROPRACTOR (The Webster Technique)

Rather than in needles, the acupuncturist seemed to put most of her baby-flipping faith in moxibustion and in something called the Webster Technique, which is a thing that chiropractors do with ligaments connected to your hips to ensure that a breech baby has enough space to get head down. The acupuncturist actually shares space with a chiropractor but suggested I go to a specialist in Park Slope.

For some reason, I have always been suspicious of chiropractic endeavors though I am, if not the first, definitely not last in line to sign up for other hocus pocus. But I’ve had the experience with some acupuncturists and it has been my impression of chiropractors that what they REALLY want to do is get you to commit to going twice a week for the rest of your life. So you can pay them a lot? And to do this, they ask just a few targeted questions before telling you that your life is going to hell in a handbasket.

But I trust the acupuncturist I see now and wanted to give this a try, so I called and set up an appointment with the chiropractor. I was told it would take alternating sessions – regular adjustment, then Webster Technique, regular, then, etc. I made an appointment for the next day.

My jury remains on whether chiropractic stuff is brilliant or bullshit. I met the woman, she looked at my posture, I got on her table belly down on a maternity-style pillow with a stomach cut out, I felt horrible in that position but she told me it wouldn’t take long.

First, she touched my back for a second. Like you’d expect a chiropractor too, right? Right before they started crunching you and twisting you around? But then she quickly moved her hands down and got to business in my, uh, butt crack. Or gluteal cleavage, as they say in the bodywork business. This part of me was wholly clothed in corduroy pants, but I can’t describe what she did to me in any better terms than . . . slowly stroking up and down my butt crack. Sorry – ahem. Gluteal cleavage. She did, to her credit, briefly acknowledge that it was an unusual place to pet me. Then she would do a rapid hand movement that felt like nothing more or nothing less than she was picking up and flicking away a piece of lint.

From my butt crack.

In order to turn my baby.

There was no crunching, twisting, aligning. It was just energy work. When I left I called my husband, who expressed concern that I was getting all sorts of things done that he figured might harm an otherwise healthy baby. A valid concern, but I tried to explain to him that she just lightly stroked my buttcrack and then picked lint off of me. I cannot remember whether or not I mentioned the fact that it cost $175. But he asked me to PLEASE call the obstetrician to get this okayed. This time, I got a different of the 3 docs on the phone, who said that as long as she didn’t manipulate my belly, it was ok with them.

I saw the chiropractor again the next day when she did the actual Webster Technique. This time I had to lay on my back (also very uncomfortable) but she stuck her finger into my — sort of in between my abdomen and my hip crease. On my right side. For a matter of seconds. Then she released it and sent me home.

I was ready to never go back. And I didn’t.

WHAT NOW?

The baby still had a hard round spot crammed up under my right ribs and I thought we had failed. It was time to go back to the obstetrician, but I wasn’t that interested in the versioning. I wholly expected the obstetricians to try to talk me into it, but it was just the opposite. The one I saw for my next appointment said he’d schedule if it I like, but he also told me that in my situation he’d never opt for it.

I was glad to hear this – because one thing I’d learned through all of the breech madness is that my MOTHER had experienced a versioning on the day I was born.

She went into labor at 43 weeks and when the dr. poked around and determined that I was still breech, he called in a very large nurse.

Now, my father had asked to be present at the birth – unusual for that time period. And he hadn’t seen my sister be born 5 years previous, so when he saw a gigantic, Brunhilda-ish nurse climb on top of the table where my mother lay, and straddle her, begin to push on the bump, he figured that this was a part of all births. (No one had mentioned to him that I was breech.) Because of my mom’s experience, I should at least be willing to try it if it was recommended. I apparently was squooshed into a better launch position and born vertex — ie, head down. I thought that both she and the OBs would figure I should try it.

As it turns out, my mom’s scenario with me went as good as it could have. Versionings are now done at 37 weeks, which is an acceptable time to be born, but not an ideal one.

If the baby wanted to or could turn, I thought, it would. I wasn’t sure about forcing it. I talked with my mom, who absolutely agreed. And then, the obstetrician I saw that day decided to put a c-section on the calendar for 39 weeks. C-sections are things that typically make women feel bad. Bad in a way because someone slices through their tummy muscles — but more than that — emotionally put through the ringer. People feel like failures because of something that I actually feel we should be happy was invented — it’s a procedure that keeps death from childbirth at a FAR lower rate that used to be. It is not what I had pictured, but I had talked myself into the fact that if I needed a c-section, then that would be okay. I sort of refuse to be a woman who feels bad about something that I can’t help.

But then he did a sonogram, and alas, baby was head down!

Not to switch gears so fast, but it wouldn’t stay that way, of course. Big baby, schmig baby. It swam around and about for the next several weeks. Now I am at 39 weeks and as of last appointment, was head down, so I did not go through with the scheduled c-section, which would have been on Friday.

There have been other excitements in the pregnancy, which will come in the next post. But as for breech, I will check in again at the OB in a few hours and we will see!

I had a few good weeks in there. They were during the oft-touted “glorious second trimester” of pregnancy, which did not start as soon as it was advertised, and also seemed to end somewhat early. But for a few weeks, there was no particular stomach upset.

Heartburn is such a dramatic term for a physical condition, if you stop and really listen to the word. But in a way another way, it seems completely benign. People get heartburn. During childhood, when I watched lots of TV, there were lots of commercials about acid indigestion, with adults waking up in the middle of the night and making theatrical faces.

And as for the commercials I was like, yeah, whatever, I cannot connect with this, in the way that I can connect with, say, the Dow Scrubbing Bubble commercial.

Then a few years, when I was old enough to have developed a sympathetic streak, my mom had really bad heartburn for months on end. I didn’t like that my mom wasn’t feeling well, but she took what seemed to be some intense steps to get out from under the thrall of something I simply couldn’t relate to. For instance, she stopped drinking tea – her favorite — and started drinking mugsful of – warm water. I was completely confused. Warm water is so much grosser than tea. What’s the point?

I’ll tell you the point. Heartburn is completely abstract — until you are in it! When you are pregnant, chances are about 70% that you will at some point be in it. Why? Because in addition to growing a giant uterus, all of the organs that normally are in your trunk – stomach, intestines, esophagus – are smushed and there is no room. In addition, you muscles relax, making food sit around in your already compromised belly for longer. For some, this leads to insane levels of farting. I guess I should feel lucky that the accumulated gas buildup in my system pushes upwards. Sometimes, my feet pounding the pavement is enough to send burps roaring up and out. And the last trigger is that during pregnancy, joints loosen. Joints are cartilage. And so is the flap, I think, that normally keeps one’s esophagus closed. And keeping the esophagus closed is like keeping the acid where it should be. When it gets out, it burns. Hence, heartburn.

TUMS
First, I tried Tums. I got one tiny little roll of them. They made me feel better. And I acquired more as I ramped up my habit. I started keeping rolls in various states of chewed through-edness in my pockets, my car, my purse. This is apparently quite common for pregnant ladies.

I don’t understand how Tums work – I just know that they are calcium-based and either fruity or minty and cheap and you can get them at nearly any corner store. We took lots of evening walk during the summer and fall and started to refer to certain delis as “Tums stores,” since, once I’d passed through the nauseous phase where I ate roll after roll of Mentos, and then chewed through pack after pack of Juicy Fruit, Tums became what we were in search of on the evening walk.

Eventually, I got a bottle of 48. This was the master, and it lived on my nightstand. I sped through the bottle.

You can run into some problems with Tums — they’re pretty unpleasant to upchuck if you take them when it’s too late and you’re already too full of acid. And people were starting to tell me that if you take too many, you are defeating the purpose because your stomach will start to make more acid to compensate. Yeah yeah, this is possible, but these people weren’t actively suffering from heartburn which dragged them out of bed at night to sit up for several hours, or made them sleep sitting up, or throw up. I often didn’t meet the 10/day limit listed on the back, but I always had the tally going in the back of my mind.

Soon, I was onto the bottle with 96! These were extra strength. They were berry flavored. According to the bottle, you’re only supposed to take 7 per day. I had about 108 days of pregnancy left at that point. “I wonder whether I could make this bottle last the rest of the time?” I considered it a personal challenge. Not necessarily one that I would undertake – but one that I would think about.

I generally work from home in Brooklyn but one day, I had a meeting at the New York Department of Education as well as a few others, so I went into the city. Normally I would have brought my laptop but I didn’t want to be hauling anything around while pregnant, so the sum total of what I brought was a little black purse and my jacket. And most of what was in my little black purse was my giant container of TUMS.

At the end of the day, the container was missing. A few days later, I was talking on the phone with a colleague who had been at the meetings that day. He’s a jokester, and he was one who’d told me that TUMS can affect you badly if you take too many, and he was also one who’d recently had a pregnant wife. I got up my nerve – I knew how silly and paranoid I would look if I was wrong – but I asked whether he had taken them.

He was horrified. Both at the suggestion that he was take TUMS from a pregnant woman, but probably also at my level of desperation. He insisted we terminate the phone call and that I go out and get another huge container of them, right then and there.

I also tried Rolaids at around this time. I only crunched my way through one pack so I don’t think they get their own section. “Less chalky,” said a teenaged girl at a suburban gas station who sold them to me. What are suburban teenaged girls doing with acid indigestion? Poor baby. But I tried them and they were alright.

When I confessed to my obstetrician that I told her that I had a constant tally of how many TUMS I could take during a 24 hour period, she suggested a more proactive approach to acid. “How about Zantac?”

ZANTAC
I will never forget the first night I tried it. I was with my husband and we’d been out swimming after work. He was trying to tell me a funny story on the way home but I wanted to steer the car into a pole to end our lives right then and there, is how crabby I felt, because of my throat and the burning seeping up into it. I was able to maintain a dim grasp on reality for long enough to force him to leap out and go into a pharmacy where he came out with a pack of Zantac 150. We came home and ate whatever we were going to eat. As I recall, it might have been some horribly acidic (to a member of the ranks of the afflicted) turkey and tomatillo chile that I make that you might find enjoyable, as I used to, before I realized that it could also take the paint off of the walls, acidwise. And I think we were watching a Buster Keaton movie called “The General.” I sat up at straight as possible and prepared to eat. Right before I did so, I took the tiny, five-sided minty pill with the active ingredient called Ranitidine.

And my life totally changed. Within about 4 minutes, I felt like a happy, healthy, normal girl without fire in her throat and thoughts of arson in her head. The change was so extreme that I could only wonder what HAVOC this medicine was wreaking on me.

We had a pretty good run of it, Zantac and me. I tried to sell everyone I knew on what seemed to be a wonderdrug. About a week later, I realized that I was having irregular heart palpitations. And that my vision was blurred. I looked up the side effect and . . . I knew it! Like all of the pleasure that crack or crystal meth is supposed to afford that first time around, it’s just too good to be truly, uh, good. But I was so hooked that when I explained to a friend that Zantac had changed my life, and that though it gave me blurred vision and a weird heart, she laughed at how extreme of symptoms I was willing to put up with, I realized how intense it was. I got sick a day that week and went off Zantac.

“Mylanta,” my mom suggested.

MYLANTA
It was during a meeting of our tiny Brooklyn community association that I knew I needed a new form of help. At first, it was everything a community meeting should be – held in the basement of a Mormon church on a rainy Thursday night. In fact we’d been so excited for the meeting that we’d put off seeing friends from Texas until the next night. We were meeting our neighbors and eating oreos and talking about the feral cat problem and how to support local businesses. It was pouring rain and getting there yielded wet ankles for all the neighbors, since many of the corners were flooded with water that wasn’t able to get into the sewers due to too many leave. Never mind, the sanitation dept. had come out to the meeting to discuss our problems, as well as the policeman responsible for our part of town, who drives around fighting crime in a tiny three-wheeled box that probably can’t even go on the highway. I have no idea what he’d do if he trapped an actual criminal – it doesn’t seem that a criminal of normal dimensions and a police officer could both fit into the box.

Anyhow, we had to abruptly leave the meeting because no matter how straight I sat, my throat, like the local sewers, could not cope with the sheer quantity of acid bathing it from the inside.

“Mylanta,” I sat there inwardly chanting. “This is the night.” I’d done my research on what to get on the web. We crept out of the meeting. We needed dinner started, and it was dreadfully rainy, and we had only one umbrella with us, there were oreos crumbs bathed in acid creeping back up into my throat, and I needed Mylanta.

We went out of the way to the favorite local deli run by Mexicans, who only carried the liquid kind. I needed the other kind, that you chew. That M sent me, a wife increasingly dyspeptic in both senses, home with the umbrella and sloshed exposed to the unpleasant elements and in his work clothes, to an obscure, late-night, well-stocked Bangladeshi pharmacy to get me some baby blue minty Mylanta tablets, is proof of how much he loves me. The man should have a cape with an M on it. M for Mylanta. M for M.

Calcified foodstuffs and I have been at war for a while. But for the first few days, I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.

“Yum, honey!!” I would shout through a mouthful. “We could chop this stuff up and put it on ice cream – seriously!”

Just typing that now makes me gag. At a certain point, I hit the wall. I’d like to be able to remember and say the pithy saying about love being fickle, but I am too pregnant for my brain to achieve that sort of targeted recall; please recite the saying to yourself.

PAPAYA
I learned in the self-satisfied birthing class we took a class at an institution I find incredibly annoying because 1. They try to convince you that your obstetrician, should you have one, is likely out to get you to make bad decisions and 2. They make pregnant women – sit on the floor for 3 hour classes. As if a normal 37 year old could withstand that sort of torture. However, I really did like our teacher.

Anyhow – to start that sentence over: I learned that papaya tablets are supposed to be helpful in managing heartburn. Naturally. “Naturally!” I thought. I thought that my whole life was going to be better / different.

I picked some out at the health food store. The label said to check with a health care provider so I called my sister in law who is a nurse practitioner, naturopath, and pregnant. She also has really sucky heartburn so I knew I would have her ear. She thought it sounded good.

I take about 3 after each meal and it does quell the hiccups. But it didn’t fix it. Plus, I read that too much unripe papaya early on can trigger early labor.

On to the big guns . . .

PRILOSEC
Prilosec actually shuts down acid productions. Seems dicey – and the opposite of natural. Isn’t there some reason we need acid? Perhaps not floating up through our burp tubes into our eyeballs – but for digestion? I don’t know.

It doesn’t matter. I would like to work for the company who makes Prilosec. You take a course for 2 weeks, and it gives the esophagus a bit of room to heal. It stops constant burping and hiccupping and it mitigages the need to sleep upright. I would still never do anything so crazy as . . . sit on the couch. That is a position that doesn’t help digestion at all. But Prilosec helps the desperate!