Sunday, January 13, 2013

Stress?

Last Tuesday we went to our second baby class at the hospital. This class is the first of three and discussed labor, pre-labor, giving birth, etc. for two and a half hours. Wow. It was....a....lot. As with any trip to the hospital, especially this year, there's a risk of getting sick. Getting sick I did, sort of. Wednesday night I had the shivers and Thursday morning my nose was running something fierce. As I braced for what was clearly the flu, something strange happened. I didn't get any more sick. By that evening, though a little tired, I had no symptoms, except for some heartburn. The next day, after sleeping pretty well, I was pretty good again, except still for some heartburn. Really, after the shivers and the runny nose, I was only a bit tired and had heartburn. Sweet! I did indeed have the flu shot a couple of months ago and if this is what happens if you catch the flu after getting a flu shot, everyone should get one!! Actually, you definitely should anyway as it has been shown to reduce your chance of having a heart attack.

The heart burn seemed like an odd symptom to attribute to the flu though right? Is that a normal thing? Though it's easy to find a bunch of stuff on the web about the stomach flu and heartburn, I didn't really see anything that linked the flu to heartburn or a heartburn-like feeling. It got me to wondering: could the heartburn be from something else?  What if the heartburn was from the stress of the birthing class on Tuesday. Was it a coincidence that the symptoms showed up when they did?  Correlation or causation?  Normally I wouldn't have linked the two, but I remembered the scene at our wedding reception when I couldn't eat the great food that we had picked out because nerves/anxiety/stress took over in anticipation of me singing to LL (as a surprise). If I got that messed up over a song that I had sung a hundred times, how might my body react to having a baby as we get closer and closer to the due date?  Could heartburn result? I'm thinking that's reasonable. We'll see. Another class on Tuesday!

2 comments:

Bee said...

Good Lord, I hope you don't go into labor!!!!!

terri said...

You don't seem the type to get so stressed that it makes you physically ill, but I remember the story of preparing to sing at your wedding. Maybe your body is just trying to tell you something that your mind refuses to acknowledge.