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.