I had a love/hate relationship with pregnancy. I loved the feeling of the growing baby swimming around and the growing bump. People are just so nice to you when you’re pregnant. (YES! I did want to sit down, thank you!) I hated the waiting and the waiting but also all the issues that arose during the pregnancy.

I went into pregnancy thinking, “man, it’ll be great to not have my period for 9 months”. How naïve. What I learned from my doctor and my sister (a pediatric resident, yea, how lucky am I!) is that when you’re pregnant your body is under extreme stress, growing a baby and all, that underlying medical conditions can pop up. Hopefully for you they disappear soon after your Stowaway is born, but you never know.

I’m extremely grateful that everything I experienced was so minor in comparison to what could have occurred. I didn’t need bed rest and nothing threatened the viability of the pregnancy, thank goodness, but it was still a lot to handle. Early on, my doctor found a subchorionic hematoma causing me to bleed. Yea, talk about being under stress when you’re newly pregnant and you see that for the first time. It’s a blood clot between your uterus and placenta and typically dissolves as your uterus grows, and thankfully mine did. Once that was diagnosed, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism forcing me to take a pill everyday one hour before eating anything. Try to tell a hungry pregnant woman she can’t eat for an hour. The term “hangry” doesn’t even come close. Then came the gestational diabetes, or lack there of. You see, for a typical diagnosis, you need three out of four abnormal numbers, I had two out of four abnormal and the rest were borderline. So I was told to eat like a diabetic but no need to check my blood sugar. Let me tell you something. When you see a pregnant woman tracking her portions and what types of foods she’s eating with myfitnesspal- people start to give you dirty looks.

As I sit typing with my healthy, little Stowaway currently in my arms, I am still not back to normal. I’m still on medication for hypothyroidism and my blood sugar says I’m pre-diabetic. Maybe it’s taking my body longer to adjust after the stress of a pregnancy. Maybe this is just the new me. Either way, for all the stress, worry and issues I had- I would do it all in a heartbeat all over again. Partly for the seat on the subway (just kidding), partly because nothing beats your Stowaway’s first big belly laugh.