Lucy asked me today if I thought I might die. Though I'd been half wondering the same thing myself, I hurriedly assured her that I was just fine and that everybody gets sick sometimes. I wake up all too often from a nauseated tum and a sharp, localized pain under my sternum.
At first I thought it must be food poisoning. Now, umteen Google searches later, I'm wondering if it might not be a hiatal hernia combined with GERD. I don't know if these things have much to do with heredity, but when Oliver was a newborn, he was diagnosed with the very ominous "failure to thrive," which was thankfully quite quickly modified to be called the much more reasonable sounding GERD (gastro-esophageal reflux disease, for those of you not in the know). He cried and cried and then he cried some more. It broke my nursing-mother's-hormone-saturated heart. The only thing that comforted him (other than the hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of medicine he was eventually to consume) was to be strapped to my chest in his Snuggly. As I sit here at 4:30 in the morning, wracked with pain so substantial that it wakes me up every hour or so with its sweat inducing waves, it breaks my heart to think that my poor newborn had this to contend with until he turned four, which is when he was finally able to go off all related medication. And to add insult to injury, I think of the times where I felt flashes of irritation with him, wondering why he was so ill-natured at times. Not my finest hour.
In the meantime, for those of you who do, please pray for me. I'll be just fine, but this hasn't been a happy ride.