Heavy

Kelsey Breseman
4 min readOct 2, 2024

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“If the baby weight was checked luggage, we’d be verging on exceess baggage fees…”

This post is now available on my new Substack as well!

Photo by Robert Walker

The baby is coming out, one way or another, in two to seven weeks. And at long last, it’s seriously hampering my lifestyle.

Pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel in both hands, plus overwhelming exhaustion, mean I should probably stop volunteering for manual labor in parks and gardens twice a week. I’ve also finally stopped climbing — my hands are so sore that I struggle opening the lever door handles in my home some of the time.

At night, my hands and feet are swollen enough that I sleep with an ice pack. The accompanying itching, fortunately, turns out not to be pre-eclampsia or any of several available terrible pregnancy rashes.

No, the doctor on the phone tells me. The little poison oak-like pustules appearing between my fingers and toes are not related to pregnancy at all. It’s scabies.

I’m not familiar. “Is there another word that might be used in another country?” I seek to clarify. “Bedbugs? Eczema?”

But no, it is indeed scabies: little mites that have likely been living on us for the last month or so and have now laid tiny eggs under my skin.

That’s entirely more gestational capacity than I’ve volunteered for.

“Oh, yeah,” Robert shows me his knuckles. “I think I had that a little bit ago.”

The nice thing is that while I’m pregnant, anything doctor-prescribed is free through the NHS. So the evening finds us covering our whole bodies — faces included — with bug-killing permethrin cream, which must remain on the skin for at least eight hours.

Meanwhile, Robert washes every fabric thing in the apartment on the hottest cycle, plastic bags everything that can’t be washed to quarantine for three days, and vacuums every surface. I just sit on the couch, exhausted. At least we didn’t have to do this with a newborn in the house.

The pamphlet tells us that with all these treatments, the mites should die quickly, but the itching might persist for several weeks.

This doesn’t pair well with pregnancy skin. My belly is stretched tight; the little scabies bumps appearing on the tender skin are a fresh hell.

I’m used to being resilient. When I burned my arm on the side of the oven baking bagels in July, I reassured Robert that it would go away without scarring. It did not. Now, it’s crossed with a second burn from the exact same reach, baking sourdough. I bake with the oven all the way up; it blisters immediately.

Not only is my burn on top of a burn slow to heal; the medical tape I used to affix a non-adherent pad over it has apparently caused an allergic reaction. A raised, itchy welt follows the path of the tape several days after its removal. Maybe that’s what it means when tape says it’s expired?

I’m still getting around okay. Cycling is a lot easier than walking; I have to hold a lot of focus on my biomechanics to keep from a full waddle. If I’m inattentive to my core, the belly stretches all the way out, actively expanding.

Actually, I can’t open the fridge anymore without hitting my belly with the door. It’s a small kitchen.

When I go swimming, I’m stretched so taut that you can see me as two entities: a bone and muscle structure approaching my pre-pregnancy shape, joined at the ribs and sides to a uterus whose edges you can actually see. I weigh about twenty kilograms more than I did in February: if the baby weight was checked luggage, we’d be verging on excess baggage fees.

But it’s not so long now, we hope. The baby is occasionally in birth position: head down, kicking at my ribs, heavy on the pelvis. Then it flips sideways again. One of the couples in our antenatal class is missing tonight’s last-session social because theirs arrived over the weekend.

In just two weeks, we’re cleared for potentially labor-inducing activities (long walks, sex, self-expression of colostrum — in the words of a new friend, basically a nice weekend, and most of that is already allowed). If it takes five weeks longer, the stats around infant mortality start to tip in the direction of medical induction — so that’s the target range.

The NHS handout says we should have packed our go bag by now, but we haven’t yet. Robert’s gotten as far as online shopping for nice duffels — I think he just likes the excuse. But I think we have everything we need in the house, and several things we probably don’t need, too.

For now, he’s reading me The Hypnobirthing Book every night. I close my eyes and breathe along with the instructions: four counts in, eight out, visualizing hot air balloons filling and lifting away.

Previous: Milk | Next: Scares

Photo by Robert Walker

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