Yoga has been my salvation with all the discomforts, pains or pregnancy.
I hate it when some women tell me they “LOVE being pregnant”… I love having life inside of me but really hate feeling like I will throw up, having excruciating sacroiliac pain so bad I can’t even walk, having terrible insomnia, leg cramps so bad they wake me up at night and now feeling like I can barely get out of a chair. Climbing stairs in my house is like scaling Mount Everest.
I have been teaching less yoga these days… in the first half of my pregnancy I felt pukey and just couldn’t focus on everyone else’s needs in a group class. During the second half I feel so awkward and clumsy and I can’t demo many of my favorite poses. Going to other prenatal yoga classes has been my favorite part of the week. I love being in a sea of swollen bellies, sharing what is going on with us physically … it’s quite a bonding experience that I wish I could just do more. I often have to teach at the time of my favorite prenatal class so it feels like I only make it there 1 – 2 times a month instead of 1 – 2 times a week like I would prefer.
Some of the poses that relax the most involve laying on my stomach or on my back which I can’t do these days. After about my 4th month I
couldn’t lay on my back anymore. So now I am limited to side lying poses, some standing poses and lunges. Probably what I do more than anything these days are pelvic tilts – cat-cow poses and a lot of child’s pose. I’ve had a lot of low back pain, SI joint paint (sacroiliac pain) so lunges and pelvic tilts have been my salvation. Also some hip opening poses and some non-weight bearing squats.
I have a few regular private yoga students these days and I think I look more forward to our yoga sessions than they do even though I have to get up early on Saturdays and drive quite a bit to get to their house and then schlep a bunch of stuff inside. I still look so forward to our sessions.
Also in this pic in the post, I got the idea to have my swollen belly painted with liquid gold latex with blue butterflies. I was not sufficiently warned about the impact of covering your body with liquid latex and when I peeled it off it was like waxing…. except instead of it being a small area like my eyebrows it was about 20 square feet of skin. It felt like ass to peel it off.
That was just the beginning of that pain though.
The liquid latex made my belly skin erupt into a horrid looking fiery red rash that was SCORCHING. I put everything I could to soothe my
angry belly. Aloe vera, creme benedryl, ice… we got some Aveena Oatmeal bath packets and instead of soaking in the bath we made this into a paste and let it marinate on my belly. That helped. I rinsed it off and my belly erupted again into a ball of pain. I started pacing the house like a lunatic screaming from the pain….. we were moments away from going to the hospital. We put the paste back on my belly and I just slept in it.
I don’t generally sleep in dried oatmeal on a large part of my body but it was either this or the ER. I woke up the next morning, rinsed off the oatmeal but my fiery belly demanded more oatmeal. So I put more oatmeal paste on there. Thank god I mostly work from home since I put a slightly wet towel over my oatmeal belly to keep it moist. It was weird but this was working.
So it’s almost two weeks since the oatmeal belly incident and my belly is just about healed. I talked to other folks who did liquid latex and they also got rashes. Apparently you are supposed to put a layer of vaseline on your body before you put on the liquid latex.