34 Weeks

This weekend was both good and bad. I'll start with the bad news...

Starting on Thursday, I noticed that my tummy below my belly button was starting to itch a little. The same thing was happening on Friday. By Saturday, I asked Dustin to look at it (since I haven't been able to see it for some time now) to see if it was getting red from all the scratching. He said yes and to try not to scratch. Easier said than done. I began putting lotion on it a few times a day. By Sunday it was worse, and then on Monday Dustin said he could see red bumps there. So I looked online to see what was going on.

It looks like I have PUPPP - "Approximately one percent of women will develop an itchy, raised rash in the last part of their pregnancy called PUPPP (pruritic uticarial pupules and placques of pregnancy). The cause of PUPPP is unknown. It appears to run in families and, oddly, 70 percent of women with PUPPP give birth to boys. This correlation has given rise to the hypothesis that male fetal DNA acts as a skin irritant. PUPPP usually develops during a first pregnancy and appears first on the abdomen near the belly button and then spreads to the thighs and extremities as the small, red wheals of the rash gradually merge to create larger wheals. There is no cure for PUPPP, but the irritation usually can be relieved with cortisone creams, high strength steroid creams, or oral steroids if the itching is severe. The rash and the itching usually resolve a couple of days to a week after delivery."

So I called my doctor and told her about it. She confirmed the PUPPP diagnosis, and faxed a percription for me to pick up at the pharmacy. I took one of the pills last night, and as soon as it started working, I was not itching at all! Unfortunately, it also put me right to sleep. So I'll probably only be able to take them before bedtime. Until then, I'm itching like crazy and trying not to scratch and thinking just how lucky I am to be a part of the 1% of pregnant women affected by this. ;)

Now on to the good news - Dustin had off the entire three-day weekend, and we had absolutely no plans! It was wonderful!! We went driving around, walked around at Landa Park, hung around the house, ate out a couple times, and got some work done on the house. We now have a ceiling fan up in our bedroom, the white storage cabinet for our sheets and towels is built and in our bathroom, and Southern's curtain is hanging up in his room. We also moved the small white storage cabinet that was in our bathroom to Southern's bathroom and added another towel rack. And Dustin put up a new shower head in our bathroom. It's one of those fancy ones that has two heads and feels like you're standing in the rain... he just loves it.