I am pretty naive and fairly uninformed when it comes to some things. For example, this is my fourth child, and it has been fourteen years since my first pregnancy, yet I am learning all kinds of things about the human body that I never knew.
Rather than bore you with medical facts that are probably common knowledge to most people, I’ll cut straight to the chase. I have an alien growing inside of me, but for a week I thought it was my uterus.
After my last OB appointment I began to wonder how the doctor can tell by measuring my belly exactly how pregnant I am. Two days later I was lying on the bed. As I began to sit up I noticed this giant thing bulging out of my abdomen. I nudged hubby and pointed, “Look! I found it! That must be my uterus!”
He gave my belly a glance and groggily replied, “Well. It’s something.”
I laid back down and repeatedly lifted myself to a partially reclining position, watching the bulge go in and out, in and out. “That’s amazing!” I chattered on, “There’s a baby in there!”
“Uh-huh,” hubby replied, just wishing I would shut-up so he could get five more minutes of sleep before the alarm clock jangled.
Over the next several days I was fascinated by the bulge. I would lie on the floor in the middle of the day just so I could watch it pop out. I would talk to it and push around on it, trying to make the baby kick. But one afternoon something clicked. I never had a bulge like that during any of my other pregnancies. Why was this different?
I tend to go from 0-60 in about three seconds when I think something’s wrong. For example, if hubby is a little late from work, rather than assume that perhaps a meeting ran long, or he got caught in traffic, I convince myself that he’s lying in a ditch with his vehicle on top of him. I can have his entire funeral planned within ten minutes. Hubby thinks I’m insane, but I’ve just been gifted with an extremely active imagination.
So, within moments of realizing that the bulge wasn’t my uterus, I knew without a doubt that it was a cancerous tumor. I found myself praying through my tears that the Lord would spare me long enough to deliver a healthy baby.
The next day I went to the doctor and found out I have something with a dinosaur name. It’s called, “Rectus Diaphysis.” In other words, I have a hernia five inches long and three inches wide.
During my doctor’s visit word reached the hallway that this pregnant woman had a little something extra growing out of her belly. I ended up with a second nurse, the nurse practitioner, and the receptionist all coming in to get a peek at my freakish bulge.
By the time I got home I was in pretty good spirits again. I can’t really feel it, and I don’t have any restrictions, but I am milking it for everything it’s worth. It’s not every day that you have a giant, physically apparent reason to get out of housework. Want someone to carry a laundry basket for you? Pop out your bulge and say, “Oh, I wish I could carry this but my Rectus Diaphysis is killing me.”
My oldest daughter, who is put off by my growing belly because it symbolizes the fact that I’ve been intimate with her father, won’t even look at it. The younger kids, however, are totally fascinated with the hernia. (Which I found out is actually my intestines popping through an opening in my muscle. Who knew?) Anyway, they’ve seen way too many science fiction movies and think it’s totally cool that mom can make her stomach look like an alien is about to pop out of it.
Hubby seems more interested in the supposed alien than he is the actual baby. Sunday morning while we were fellowshipping at church he kept patting my belly and saying with pride, “Show ’em your alien, honey.”
I can’t “show ’em my alien” unless I lie down and pull up my shirt, which I’m not doing in church. But everywhere else we go, I’m a regular sideshow freak. The girls in hubby’s office have seen it, the folks at our bluegrass jam got a real kick out of it, and with a little more prompting I probably would have hopped up on the conveyor belt in the Wal-mart check out lane so the cashier could take a gander.
I just hope the baby never finds out that people are more excited about mom’s hernia than they are the actual pregnancy. It might cause him to grow up feeling a little alienated.
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