An unending rabbit hole.

The most unexpected thing about pregnancy has been the full-time pain management gig. My days, which should be spent readying the home for a tiny, new human and wrapping up my gazillion incompletes from the past two migraine-derailed quarters, are spent monitoring my sleep, food, and caffeine consumption, dutifully taking my meds on schedule or as needed, depending on the regimen, and trying to minimize the external triggers like florescent lights (ix-nay on opping-shay), heat (luckily, it's been decent thus far this summer, but I dread August), and excess screen-viewing (so I knit a lot while listening to and half-watching TV, or spend limited amounts of time on the computer, which isn't conducive to intensive paper-writing). I should be reading, but between the pain and the meds, I have a hard time finding a relatively clear-headed balance point.

The whole baby-arriving-in-a-little-over-three-months thing? Totally sidelined. And I need to finish the coursework for winter and spring to retain my insurance, the on-campus apartment we just put into my name, and my now-spent fellowship monies, as well as remaining in good standing with the university in general. Seeing the neuro on Tuesday.

This whole thing has made immersion in grad school damned near impossible, and my sense of direction is getting more and more fogged with the temporal and intellectual distance. I need to get back on track; I even penciled in a return-to-reading for tomorrow, since I've found some meds that don't seem to excessively fog my brain up while still providing relief (though they are untested wrt graduate-level work, as opposed to knitting lace). Part of the problem is managing stress so that the pain doesn't intensify, and spike my blood pressure. Supposedly, chronic migraineurs like myself, who are strongly (though not exclusively) hormone-sensitive, and have escalating headache craziness in pregnancy, well, we are at higher risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia in general. That doesn't cause any stress at all.

On top of that, I'm on total pelvic rest with a partial previa that might resolve by week 32 (I have another 6 to go before that), so I'm not much for help around the house. The main non-pregnancy obstacle I face is the creeping clutter issue. And since sprucing up the rest of the apartment left me with more crap in my office, it's even more stuff to dig out. I'm still at learning pain management options, and other people expect me to be writing. I'm not sure how to communicate how hard it is to write at a graduate level on literature when the pain is hard to keep under control, so that my highest-and-best ends up as lace knitting while half-watching crap TV. The past day or two, the pain's been lower, more nauseating and irritating than it was 2-3 days ago, where it was an insistent, unrelenting pounding that outlasted everything I threw at it. And that had gone on for 2-3 days. Probably (sadly) due to the overnight trip I made to visit my mom and my best friend in SD over the 4th. Before that, I made the mistake of going to a late-ish grad English party, overstaying beyond my own good in my desperate state of social need, so that the next day was misery. Ironically, I wasn't up late for my usual schedule (I'm horribly nocturnal), but the disruption of my shut-in habits, and the expenditure of social energy turned the following day into a nasty migraine.

I can't burn out on grad school. I'm too busy burning out on pregnancy. I'm just hoping I don't fail out of grad school before I have a chance to get anything done.

Oops. Sorry. Busy.

1. I'm pregnant. This means I'll be taking advantage of all the childcare options and general flexibility of graduate school over the next few years. It's one more reason to be glad I'm free of the cube farm. Another advantage is that I shouldn't have an infant depending on me by the time I'm on the job market. The biggest question in my mind on the long-term plan is how to do siblings (I'm thinking post-qualifying exam).

2. Biggest downside of pregnancy is migraines. I had erroneously assumed I'd gotten pregnancy fog early, and hadn't connected it to my increasingly insistent headaches, until I was on the verge of hysterics (which would have just made it all hurt more) and went in to see the doc. A month of pain management later, and I'm keeping up just fine.

3. Second-biggest downside: Having to take incompletes for winter quarter due to the migraines (and resulting high blood pressure). That said, I think I can get all my papers squared away before the end of the quarter and still keep up on spring coursework, especially now that I'm not wrestling with housing.

4. Campus housing is a bureaucratic nightmare, especially if you already lived on campus before applying/entering the program. Someone will assume that they'll get you on a list for a contract, but delete you from the list of entrants needing placement, and then you'll do a wild goose chase dance until you finally manage to get the attention of the right person. It's the same story as any other stupid bureaucracy problem, just the particulars differ. Thankfully, it is now resolved, and I can get back to being a student.

5. I also have my migraine management set for a month, as well as no OB appointments. The only obstacles are ones posed by the shifting nature of my body, especially the hips. It, well, hurts.

6. As much as I relish being able to return to focusing on academia, the stress of the past week alone is telling me I need a day of computer games, fluffy urban fantasy novels, sitting in front of the TV knitting, and generally slacking as a mental health move. I don't even have to go anywhere farther than one building over today!

Neeed...moar....braaiiiins....

Survived the first quarter, now 70% of the way into the second and up to my eyeballs in work. Annotated bibliography, more seminar papers than is reasonable, and a dry run on the major language exam. Upside: Enjoying my classes. Downside: Not fully feeling the mental gelling of paper topics, and I need to have my first 20 pp. rough draft done in 11 days. Second done in, um, 17 days. Plus a 10-15 pp. starter-draft to kick off the spring Arbeitseminar on Milton. After this, though, it's a continuation of the same topic for one, plus poetry (Renaissance sonnet paired with a course on prosody--and I need both). Oh, and taking the language exam in earnest.

Anyhow. I'm going to get it all done. I just need to eat, then shower, and hopefully my brain will decide that we're back on speaking terms. And it's not the schoolwork (or some convivial stress-relief) that's doing in our relationship, just, um, stuff. Stuff that will sort itself out fairly soon one way or the other (nothing bad, just, um, stuff).