Well, the end of the year has come and gone. The whole point of this blog was to try and accomplish one thing per day for 365 days. It was a pretty ambitious new year's resolution last January... and I came close, but didn't quite make it. All in all, I was able to cross 271 things off my list, but I kind of fell off the wagon somewhere around September.
In November I took on the Thirty Days of Giving Challenge and loved it... but only got through blogging about half of the giving I did for the month. I suppose it's time to finally fess up to the blog world that I found out in September that I'm PREGNANT!!! Yippee!! Tomorrow I will be 18 weeks along. Since I have PCOS, I needed to take Metformin and 50 mg of Clomid in order to conceive. I was beyond shocked when it worked on the first try!!
The first 10 weeks of my pregnancy were pretty rough with morning sickness. That came on top of a month of feeling sick from the Metformin and having crazy hot flashes from the Clomid. I was super excited when I finally started feeling better, but then was thrown for a little bit of a loop...
While on vacation visiting family over Thanksgiving, I thought I was starting to get a urinary tract infection. My doctor started me on an antibiotic, but I noticed I wasn't feeling any better. The day after we got home, I passed a 3 mm kidney stone. I ended up passing 3 more over the next three weeks. All were between 3 and 4 mm. I was able to pass them all at home, with great discomfort, but without needing to go to the emergency room.
I was referred to a urologist and put on a low oxalate, low sodium diet after finding out my stones were calcium oxalate stones. That in and of itself has been a challenging lifestyle change that I'll reserve for another post. I also found out today after a renal ultrasound that I have a 6mm stone in my right kidney. As of right now, it's not causing any blockage. It's too big for me to pass and I'm terrified of it starting to move and blocking my ureter. I'm terrified of having to have stents put in and being uncomfortable and in pain for the remainder of my pregnancy. I'm just praying that it stays put in there as long as possible!!
It's been incredibly frustrating that there aren't a lot of resources or recipes online for a low oxalate diet. It's hard to only read horror stories online from other people who have experienced kidney stones during pregnancy. I am not feeling bad. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I'm doing everything I need to do diet wise to try and prevent more large stones from forming and I'm viewing this new diet as a challenge to come up with different, but still yummy meals. It's just discouraging to feel like there isn't enough information out there for those who are experiencing kidney stones during pregnancy.
So, that's what has been going on with me over the past three months! I'm starting to feel like I want to blog again, but I'm not really sure what direction to take my blog. Do I make it more of a personal blog and just kind of blog about anything and everything? I know I will have plenty to write about with this pregnancy, but does anyone really want to read about that? I've also thought about blogging about projects you can do to make a cookie cutter home feel a little more individual and personalized, but I don't know how often I could do blog posts because I'm not sure how often we could afford to finish the projects we want to in our cookie cutter house! Hmmmmm.... something to think about! So, I'm not ready to change my blog page yet, but I think I will need a place to post while I'm working it all through, so for now I'm just going to keep things as they are.
I'm so grateful for this journey over the past year. I've accomplished more than I thought possible. I've noticed that my priorities have changed over the past year. I've become more mindful of others. I've realized that I can always be a work in progress, but there are some things I will probably never change about myself and I'm learning to accept myself more for who I am. I'm so excited to be starting a new year by creating and growing this new life. Keeping this baby healthy and safe until I reach my due date will be my big project this year...
And I'm not making any new year's resolutions... I'm going to tackle challenges as they come...one day at a time :-)
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