Rough night Saturday night

I had a fairly rough night Saturday night. Saturday afternoon, I took a 2.5 hour nap in the hammock. That sounds like it would be wonderful, but for at least an hour of that, I was in that between stage of sleep and awake where you can't move or wake yourself up. My husband had a friend over and they had sat on the back porch talking for a while. When the friend fired up his truck to leave was when I noticed that I couldn't open my eyes or wave bye. When I finally did come in, my husband said the friend had been gone for about an hour. During that hour, the most mundane dream type things happened that were terrifying because I couldn't move. I spent a lot of that hour trying to evade people and situations in my dream without being able to move or make noise. I even dreamed that my husband was sitting just inside a nearby window (he was not) and I couldn't make noise to alert him. He's normally really good about being able to tell that I'm having a nightmare and wake me up, but he also has strict instructions to not wake me from a nap on the weekend. Since he could neither see me, or hear me outside, he had no idea I was in distress.

Anyway, that horrible nap ended at 7:30 which would normally mean that I wouldn't be able to go to bed at a reasonable hour. So at about 11pm, I took two benadryl to make sure I got a good night's sleep and got back on a regular schedule. The benadryl did it's major job of making me really sleepy, but a muscle in my left leg kept jumping so bad that it was keeping me awake. It was an uncontrollable spasm (not painful) and kept me from sleeping well, or at all, I'm not sure which. And because of the benadryl, I was having trouble really being awake to know what was really going on. Because of the muscle spasm, I couldn't stay really asleep. The jerking leg was keeping my husband up so he had gone to another room to sleep. And because of the horrible hammock nap earlier, I started to freak out that I was stuck in a paralytic sleep/wakefulness thing again. As a result, I was laying on my back some which is not really recommended at 6 months pregnant because it can make you short of breath. Being slightly short of breath certainly didn't help my panic and so each aspect of my distress started feeding off the next to make me really panicky. I took a bath to try to relax the muscle spasm, which involved laying on my back which made things worse. And I was exhausted and desperately wanted to go to sleep. Then it crossed my mind that I hadn't really felt the baby move in the last hour and was the baby OK in there? So now I'm even more short of breath. And it's 3:30 in the morning.

Finally I call my sister, a nurse, nearly hysterical, to find out if this shortness of breath & can't sleep & can't feel the baby thing warrants a trip to the ER. I'd rather not go to the ER on a Saturday night after the bars have closed, but I can't breathe! She determines that I am getting enough oxygen, and I'm not having a drug reaction. She also probably figured out pretty quick that I was just freaked out with nothing much wrong with me, but was sweet enough not to say that. Instead she just chatted with me for more than half an hour about random stuff which calmed me down enough to stop panicking. The muscle had nearly stopped it's spasm as well. She recommended putting on a calming chick flick and trying not to actively worry about not getting to sleep. That worked! Sisters are wonderful!

So I finally got to sleep around 4:30. So much for my sleep schedule. With a few short sentences around 8:30, I told my husband what had happened and he let me sleep until 10am. He knew I really wanted to go to church. If we get up at 10, we can just make it to church on time and still sing in the choir. The baby still wasn't moving. I felt rotten and groggy through most of church, but was glad I was there. During a hymn, I felt the baby kick and I relaxed quite a bit. A friend with two kids told me that being freaked out about nothing is normal during pregnancy. Great! That's something to look forward to! Me and hubby both agreed that I shouldn't have a Sunday nap, even though it is the "day of rest" so I could try to naturally get back on a good sleep schedule. I did the less active things on my to do list and that worked out quite well.

I finished sewing a maternity top I had been working on. My first clothing sewing project in maybe 10 years! It took a lot of hand stitching because I'm not smart enough to figure out how to make the machine stitches neater on the fancy edging. So it was a lot of sitting yet being productive. We took a long walk in the evening and I had a good night's sleep Sunday night. Whew! Finally some normal sleep!