The Storm Before The Storm???

PREFACE: I'm on pain medication (Lortab) right now, so if this post is rambling or just too much info or has a lot of spelling errors, you'll know why...

Just when I start feeling great and think my last few months are going to be better than all the rest, something else comes up. I've always had the weirdest luck and the strangest things happen to me (a bird flew up my pants leg a couple of months ago), so when it comes to injuries, I'm usually the person at the doctors office that they talk about and stare at and is normally followed by a "Wow, I can't believe that happened!" I wonder if they have a medical oddities book about me? It's amazing that I've survived this long (I'm also a huge klutz for those of you who didn't know). I guess these things shouldn't surprise me anymore (or anyone that knows me). So I'm betting you're all wondering what in the world happened to her now? Well, before I get to that, let me fill you in on a couple of things - the 2 things on my upper torso that have managed to grow so large they are putting an enormous amount of pressure on my chest. Just to put it bluntly, I can't find a nursing bra bigger than 40E and I will definitely need larger ones. Well, apparently the pressure of the baby pushing out and the pressure of my 2 friends pushing in makes for a bad combination. So last night I'm walking through the kitchen eating a TUMS and I guess I inhaled as I was swallowing and kind of got choked and I coughed really hard and heard a loud "POP" in my chest. I immediately doubled over in pain and began having trouble breathing. I don't handle pain well, so I start shaking uncontrollably and I got very cold. My immediate thought was that I had just cracked some ribs. And yes, I've cracked ribs before while coughing, although I did have the flu at the time. The pain wasn't quite as sharp as it should have been for cracked or broken ribs, so I started to panic a bit wondering what the popping noise could have been. I walked around the house to regain my composure and try to decide if we needed to go to the hospital. I decided to give it a while and maybe I would feel better and to see if the baby was moving, etc. I decided to take a shower to see if the hot water made me feel better and because Sydney seems to move a lot when I shower. I felt a bit better afterwards and decided to just go to bed. Big mistake. I got in the bed and laid down and it felt like bricks had just been dropped on my chest. So now I can't breath and when I try to sit up the pain is so bad that there is no way I'll be able to push myself up. So I call for Jeremy and by the time he gets me sitting up I've started to hyperventilate. The pain was extreme and I got really cold and starting shaking again which caused my muscles to tense up which made me hyperventilate even worse. Jeremy starts trying to get me to breath properly (not in a sweet, relaxing, soothing way, but a demanding jerk kind of way) which then caused me to start crying hysterically making the whole situation very scary because I really couldn't breath then. I'm sure at that point we should have gone to the emergency room, but it was midnight and I didn't want to sit up there in the ER all night, and I was just too exhausted, so I decided to sit up and sleep (sort of sleep) for the remainder of the night and call my Dr this morning. They had me come in and he did an ultrasound to make sure all was well with Sydney. I had been counting her movements throughout the night and morning and she was as active as ever. The ultrasound showed that she wasn't up that high yet, so there was no danger to her, but they checked my placenta to make sure there were no tears, etc. They tried to look up as high as possible with the ultrasound to see if they could see an injury, but because it's under my breast, that was impossible. My Dr. said it could be a muscle/ligament injury, but because I heard a "pop", it's likely a displaced rib/ribs. There isn't much they can do about that while I'm pregnant, so it's likely I could be hurting until they are able to manipulate it back in place after the baby is born. Like I said, crazy things seem to happen to me. But now I've got some good meds and I'm about to pass out, so hopefully I'll rest a bit better tonight. Oh, and they checked her weight today - 3 pounds 10 ounces! She's a bit on the large side for 29 weeks. If she continues to gain 1 pound every nine days like she did these past days, I won't have to worry about having any ribs in place, she may just bust right on through!