That's some high impact sleeping

So, you know how I always say pregnancy is magical? Shit got a lot more magical than usual yesterday.

I woke up around 1am with sharp side and abdominal pain, but blamed my sleeping position and just tried to find a comfortable way to lie the rest of the night. I was really uncomfortable when I woke up, but I thought once I got up and moved around that things would relax and be less painful. I usually wake up with a lot of lower back pain and walking around does the trick for that, so that's the source of that theory.

I was in a lot of discomfort, and I thought it was a round ligament issue. Round ligaments are these:

They can periodically cause you pain in pregnancy as the baby is growing and sometimes the baby's position can cause pain too. It's usually a sharp pain that passes quickly, but mine was causing me pain every time I moved my right leg.

I tried to go for a walk to see if that would help and I could barely make to the end of my street before I had to turn around and come home. At that point, I called my doctor's office to see if I could change my routine afternoon appointment to an earlier time. They couldn't fit me in, so I decided to wait until my 3:50pm appointment instead of going to urgent care or the ER. I wasn't bleeding or anything and I could feel the baby moving, so I figured I could wait a few hours.

This pretty much sums up yesterday

My husband has his graduate class on Monday nights and last night was his final presentation, so I didn't want to pull him from that so I took Faith with me to the doctor's office. As you may imagine, an OB office takes complaints of abdominal and rib pain pretty seriously and after a short examination (getting palpitated hurt so much), they told me I needed to go directly to labor and delivery for monitoring and testing at the hospital across the street.

My husband met me over there (he had to miss his final presentation after all, but his instructor is letting him do it on the phone instead) and he was able to entertain Faith while I was hooked up to fetal monitoring to check for contractions. Luckily, everything with the baby looks great so they wanted to move on to other testing. At this point, my husband took Faith home so she could have dinner and go to bed.

In pregnancy, all of your organs get smushed up by the fetus, so my rib pain could have been a gall bladder or appendix issue. Since I was also having pain inhaling, they had to do an x ray to check my lungs and they were fine. They took tons of blood and that was all fine too (great news), so my doctor wanted to keep me overnight because if it was a gall bladder or appendix issue, I would start deteriorating around the 24 hour mark, which was 1am this morning.

I hadn't been expecting to go the hospital, let alone stay the night, but I did have my Kindle with me since Faith plays with toddler apps at my doctor's appointments. That was a real lifesaver since I had to do so much sitting and waiting by myself. I didn't get any painkillers until 9:30pm and the pain was bad enough that I hadn't been able to eat much yesterday, but thankfully I was able to keep some Tylenol with codeine down and finally get some relief.

Since I didn't explode overnight, I get to keep all my internal organs. My doctor's leading theory is that I have a broken or dislocated floating rib on my right side and strained round ligaments. Broken ribs don't usually show up x rays and the treatment for all rib injuries is the same (rest and pain management) so we'll only know for sure by how long recovery takes. It could also be a tear of the ligaments that go between the ribs instead of a break.

Those little pansy floating ribs are just asking to be broken

The obvious question here is: How the hell did you hurt yourself so badly in your sleep??

I don't really have a good answer for that and the doctor didn't either. It could be that I turned too energetically in my sleep and just twisted things too much, or maybe the baby kicked it. The doctor couldn't rule out that I hadn't done it late Sunday (maybe picking up Faith) and it just took a while for the inflammation and pain to build.

The other popular question is: What does this mean for your running? Are you done?

My doctor didn't put me on bed rest and he encouraged me to go for walks as soon as I want, or even a test jog if I am feeling really great. He said that my recovery would completely dictate any return to activity and he wasn't going to ban me. He's extremely supportive of remaining active during pregnancy and for some reason thinks I have good sense, even though he knows I think ultra marathons are a good idea.

Right now I'm still in a fair amount of pain, even just sitting. I can't imagine running again until it isn't painful to inhale. I have more Tylenol with codeine for nights, but my doctor recommend just trying to deal with the pain during the day (regular tylenol does jack shit), so my pain level is going to dictate my activity level. I'm relieved that I am still allowed to walk, but since just driving in the car and going over bumps hurts my rib area, I think high impact activities won't happen for at least a week or two. At least the round ligament strain seems to be improving already, so that's a hopeful sign.

My husband took today off work which is fantastic since I only got a few hours of sleep last night at the hospital. Did you know that Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives comes on literally all night? I learned all sorts of new things yesterday.

This may be the silliest way I've ever hurt myself, even trumping the time I tore a muscle in my back tying my shoe or broke my arm tripping over the vacuum cleaner.


What's the dumbest way you've ever hurt yourself?