2-16-11 - Hit me like a peach in the face

I am officially 13 weeks today.  According to the app on my phone, the baby is now the size of the peach, thus the peach reference in the title above.

However, this post is not about fruit or even the baby.  It's about me getting sick, completely out of nowhere.  I was totally caught off guard, just like if someone had thrown a peach in my face (because who in the world would be expecting that??)

Yesterday was a busy day for me at work, and at the end of the day I had to give an hour and a half long presentation that involved me talking for most of the time.  As I was walking towards my car I noticed that my throat was sore, but I figured it was from projecting my voice so much for the presentation.

But then I swallowed. And there was a slime in the back of my throat.  And I sniffed, and my nose was stuffed up.  I couldn't believe it, but at some point between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. I had come down with a cold.

I was miserable all night last night.  I was swallowing nasty thick slime that made me feel more nauseous that anything else associated with this pregnancy has so far.  I wanted to use nasal spray so bad - it's my go-to drug for when I'm stuffed up because it's so damn effective.  But obviously nasal spray is a no no.  Sad....

I knew that the immune systems of pregnant women were always weaker than normal.  In fact I read - and I'm pretty sure that I mentioned this here already in a previous post - that the reason for this weakened immune system is so that your body doesn't try to reject the baby as something harmful.  I think that's so crazy.  Anyway, I've always had a pretty good immune system and don't regularly get sick at all.  I have allergies that are sometimes really bad, but I can tell the different between bad allergies and actually being sick, and I am almost never sick.

The worse part of the whole thing is that I can't sleep at night, because I can't breathe.  And when I can finally breathe, I start coughing.  It sucks.  Even worse than that is my bladder. It's pretty normal for me now to have to go to the bathroom every time I wake up during the night, even if I just went an hour ago.  So when I sleep for 20 minutes and then wake up again, my body makes me think that I had to go to the bathroom again, so I get up - thus fully waking myself at that point - to the go to the bathroom.  Then I drink some water to help with my dry throat, which only results in adding more fluids for my already over-active processing system to work with.  It's an endless, horrible cycle.  I think I went to the bathroom at least 6 times last night.  That is definitely a new record.

I really hope that this doesn't last too long.  Come on immune system, you can do it!