Organs on the Move
At this point, I am 20-weeks pregnant, which means I'm halfway through this strange process and it shows. The bump is still small compared to what it will become, but it's definitely there. I can feel the little lizard wiggling around on and off throughout the day. Sometimes I call E over and he puts his hand low on my belly and he can feel the fetus moving, too.
Something that keeps surprising me about this stage in pregnancy is how high my bump is compared with how low the fetal movement is. It feels strange that my body protrudes so much above my belly button when that's not where the little lizard is swimming around. But, of course, our aquatic lizard needed room to do laps low in my body, and so it displaced what's normally there: my digestive organs.
Later in pregnancy, the bump will be mostly baby, but, right now? It seems to be primarily intestines. And that's so weird to think about!
My pregnancy books have drawings of the fetus as it's developing and information about what's changing in there each month, but the space depicted around the uterus is just whiteness. The imagined pregnant person is a void. The information about what's happening to my body is focused on the external -- symptoms I might be experiencing, when my belly button is likely to pop, etc. I have found myself wanting to know what's going on internally for me. It's not that I'm uninterested in my future child's physical development, but like, can we talk about my physical development, too?
I want anatomical drawings of a pregnant person's body that include everything!
However, I have a pretty strict no pregnancy-related googling rule. If I have a question, I check my pregnancy books or I text one of the two friends with kids that I picked as my people to ask for pregnancy advice. (This is something one of my pregnancy books recommended doing - pick two people whose opinions you trust and then give yourself permission to ignore input from others if it gets overwhelming.) I just feel like nothing good is likely to come from me poking around online for advice about my pregnancy woes.
So, to save me from information overload, E does any necessary (pregnancy-related) online research for our family. When I expressed a desire to know what the heck my organs were up to, he pretty quickly pulled up a gif of a fetus growing in a pregnant person's body. (If you're interested, here's a youtube video from the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, which is where the gif came from.)
We watched the gif several times, marveling at how the intestines and stomach get pushed up by the growing uterus. No wonder pregnancy causes so many digestive issues! And then we noticed the bladder...
"It gets flattened like a pancake!" E said.
Obviously, we knew pregnancy puts pressure on a person's bladder. Like morning sickness, having to pee all the time is one of those pregnancy things people actually talk about. But seeing the visual of the bladder being compressed really drove the point home.
I already feel like I'm peeing all the time and I know it's only going to get more frequent as the months go by. But at least E and I have a fun new visual to use when talking about it.
Me, emerging from the bathroom: "Guess who already has to pee again?"
E, sympathetically: "Aw, your poor flattened pancake."