I mentioned in my go-get-your-flu-shot post that we as mothers are so busy with our babies — feeding, changing diapers, running around for their doctors appointments, etc. — that it’s easy to forget about our own health and well-being. I had been dancing up to four times a week, 1-2 hours a day right up until the day I gave birth, and went I back at it at 5 weeks postpartum feeling great. Then 4 months later I suddenly became extremely exhausted after just one hour, to the point where I would be so inexplicably dehydrated until I went to bed. If I didn’t get enough water into my system (which was hard, because my stomach was literally sloshing around with all the water I was guzzling), I would wake up the next day with a migraine at 8am, throw up nothing but water at noon, and be out of commission in bed until about 5pm. That happened three times to me — once when my parents decided to visit so they were able to help me with the baby, and twice I just brought Winter into bed with me all day and she did fairly well.

A kind parent-baby instructor approached me and asked if I was feeling ok because it looked like I’d lost a lot of weight. A couple months after giving birth, the scale revealed I’d dropped 10 more pounds than my pre-pregnancy weight. I was wearing some perhaps not the most flattering clothes that day (skinny jeans and a baggy shirt that made me look like a Tim Burton claymation character), but I told her that I hadn’t been feeling awesome and I had been thinking about booking a physical. She encouraged me to do so. I contacted my gynecologist, but they didn’t want to see the whites of my eyes until a full year after delivery for a physical, and when I mentioned my migraines, they didn’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. I thought surely, it would be post-partum related? Maybe the baby, being older, was nursing more, and I needed more fluid intake to compensate? I made an appointment with my doctor, which involved a month wait. I went in for some blood work ahead of time, and got a call a few days later that everything turned up normal.

Ever since I was in college I drank water like I lived in the desert, to the point where one doctor warned me that I could deplete all my electrolytes and die like some athletes have. Yes, he told me I could die! And I was anything but athletic in college. I drank tonnes of water, and peed more than anyone I’ve ever worked with. Before I became pregnant, I dreaded how much more I’d have to consume and expel once I was pregnant.

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A couple weeks before my physical I threw my back out. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to do any twisting or contorting with a 15 pound child in a car seat. Or a baby of any weight. Then the day before my physical, I suddenly noticed a big blurry spot in my field of vision. It would come and go throughout the day, but it was there. This is what it looked like:

This was perhaps the most alarming thing to me. Health care providers are always the last people to seek medical attention for ailments, and I’m definitely no exception. But something wrong with my eye definitely freaked me out. My GP gave me a clean bill of health, told me to check out my eye with an ophthalmologist, and confirmed that my current weight was actually the same as it had been at my last 3 visits over the last 4 years, so normal for me and okay on his BMI charts.

Meanwhile the previous month my mother had seen flashes of light and checked it out and she had a posterior vitreous detachment. I called the local ophthalmologist practice and they were booking two months out. I told the receptionist I thought perhaps my retina had detached, and she was unfazed and suggested I go downtown for a slightly earlier appointment. I called a private practice close to my home, and the receptionist asked me a few basic questions and then, alarmed, insisted that I come in that day for an appointment, because my retina could be detached and it would be an emergency situation (I didn’t even mention that possibility this time).

I went in, and the doctor said I had inflamed optic nerves, and it was actually more pronounced in the eye I wasn’t having problems in. She said this could be totally normal for me, or something new; she wasn’t sure. I went back each week for two more weeks and she said my eyes looked healthy — the inflamed optic nerve wouldn’t be causing it, and it was just something she could not explain. She ran down a list of half a dozen different reasons it could be, and one by one discarded them in my case. I pressed her again if it could be due to a serious lack of sleep, and she said no.

So she booked me for an MRI with contrast dye in the event that it was entirely unrelated to my eye. I would have waited 6 months to a year for an MRI in Canada, and I was taken aback that they scheduled it on Monday and got an appointment for Thursday the same week. I get my results this Friday, so fingers crossed, it really is nothing. In this case, I will gladly accept a clean bill of health because I think I’ve done something comprehensive enough to rule out. I’ll get into how I dealt with nursing and the contrast dye in my next post, and hopefully I’ll also have good news as well.

Has anyone else dealt with unexpected postpartum health issues?