remembering

This past week I have been remembering and thinking a lot about the past year, and also about last year this time.  I cannot actually believe how vivid some of my memories of last year are, and I hope that they will remain so.

Last year, on this Friday, our team was having a team build day.  we are a small permanent team, with a few people based in our offices in Joburg.  They would all arrive that morning for a day of - wine and chocolate tasting and cellar tour, lunch on a wine farm, painting in the afternoon, and a show and dinner in the evening.

I was also 33 weeks pregnant.  Starting to get really excited and looking forward to the birth of my son, and the start of my maternity leave - I could no longer make it through the day!  I had had a pretty uneventful pregnancy up until then.  Besides the constant battle to keep my blood glucose numbers as normal as possible I did not have much else going on.  Or so I thought.  (I don't count anterior placenta or RH negative blood)  But I had also experienced bad headaches (I want to say severe, but I never complained, so lets leave it at bad....), disturbed vision (I know, this should have been some sort of sign that something was not right, but I put the flashing lights to possibly having blood glucose drops or something.  they were always accompanied by a headache too).  My blood glucose levels had been pretty steady throughout - with just a slight increase in insulin during the second trimester, and then my needs stayed pretty stable (yet another sign...)  But this morning I woke swollen (I had had minimal swelling up till then) - my shoes would not fit.  It was slightly painful walking.  But, pregnant women swell up, don't they.  So off to work I went.  By then my PE must have been pretty bad already.  I had had an OBGYN appointment about 1.5/2 weeks before and all was normal.  No protein at all, and BP was within the normal range.  In that 2 weeks I had to visit the dentist twice to have a filling that fell out put back in - apparently my gums were quite swollen (most likely due to the pregnancy, but in hindsight, this was also probably something to do with PE).  I now think of this day as the day the PE "won".

I had no idea that in just a short few days I would be meeting my son.  I continued to work on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday - the day he came, after a scheduled OBGYN appointment where my protein levels were found to be sky high, and the blood pressure was more than 200 over 134.

1 year, I cannot believe it...