Is This My New Normal?

So from the very minute I woke up today I've been having this sharp pain in my lower right abdomen. Sometimes it migrates towards the middle, but it mostly stays to the side.  It's as if someone's poking me with a skewer from the inside out.  "Come here," I tell Wayne, pointing my finger, trying to show him what it feels like.  "Uh, no thanks, I think I have an idea," he says as he swerves to get out of my way.

We look online for possible reasons why I'm feeling this way. Is it the placenta? Is it growing into the bladder?  Is it the baby?  Is he pushing on a nerve?  Is there something going on with my kidney?  The questions abound.  Just call the doctor and let him know, he tells me.  No, I say.  I don't want to bother him on a Saturday afternoon.  If I call his emergency line, it's going to damn well be an emergency.  I'm not going to be the little girl who cries wolf over every ache and pain.  Wayne replies that if there's one person who should my doctor should be paranoid about, it's me.  I wonder out loud to him, "Is this my new normal?"   

After the surgery, the baby's here and I'm all sewn up, how long will my recovery be?  How long will I be in pain and will there be complications?  Will I have to get used to a life with constant aches?  Will I be one of those women who visit my friend, Mike, a urogynecologist for what he calls "lips and drips"?  

Now that there's an official diagnosis, all of those crazy, little unexplained things that have made me say from the very beginning of this pregnancy that something's off, it's not the same as the others ... well, it all makes sense now.  Let's start from the very beginning.

We got pregnant around the time of our wedding vow renewal.  We had been having problems for the past year of our marriage (hey -- after 20+ years together there are bound to be some rocky roads), but had made the decision to start over brand spanking new.  We made new vows to each other in the Shakespeare Garden at Central Park with only a handful of close friends, my parents (who weren't there for the first time), and our four boys.  We both wore linen white ... fresh and pure ... how we wanted our new life to be.  We had found each other again.  When we found out we were having another baby, we looked at it as a sure sign that everything we had gone through was going to be wiped away.  This was a new beginning in more way than one.  But then things started to get weird with the pregnancy pretty soon afterward.  I'll write about what happened in a separate post because it's pretty long ...