CPE and Pregnancy

The road to the CPE residency, while not all that long, has involved several headaches. I sort-of knew what was going on before I was ever able to say anything to anyone, and that was hard. The biggest reason was that I was excited! I wanted to be able to celebrate and do a happy dance, but I couldn't! Because my facebook status had sort of revolved around my application, interview, and the wait for a response, once I began to get some answers I posted a rather ambiguous status update that I was "excited and hopeful". Well, this was met with lots of assumptions, both direct and implied, about the state of my uterus. I quickly responded that I was in fact NOT pregnant and did not elaborate further at that time.

Later, I was discussing the whole thing with a chaplain friend who was very aware of the whole process and knew exactly where I was in it all. His somewhat smart response was "Well you kind of are (pregnant)!" I laughed, but the explanation made sense.

You start out feeling sort of different, even before you know what's going on

You get really excited.

Then you get really nauseous.

Your eating and sleeping habits change dramatically

You feel growing pains in places you didn't know you had

Then you start to feel better and for a while you feel like you could go anywhere and do anything

Then you start feeling bad again

And you start getting kicked. A lot.

You get to a point where you don't think you can grow or stretch or develop any more

And the entire experience is incredibly painful

But when it's over, you block out a lot of that pain and end up with the general attitude that "hey, that wasn't so bad!" And the end result is SO very worth it, even if it does take you a while to start sleeping "normally" again because you develop a new standard for what is normal!

Too bad this is going to last longer than 40 weeks and I won't get any parties or cute gifts! I'll leave the verdict on how much poo needs cleaning up for a later date!