Heartburn

When I was pregnant with EJ, for the last trimester and some change, I had terrible heartburn, heartburn so bad that it would wake me from my sleep and warranted keeping a discount warehouse-sized bottle of Tums on my bedside table. I can't say that the Tums would get rid of the heartburn completely, but if I was lucky, it would turn down the heat of the burning enough so that I could eventually fall back asleep, propped up on a stack of pillows to get the acid moving back in the right direction.

As I've written about before, EJ's birth was pretty dramatic and traumatic, and in the end involved all of the following:

1) A full day of unremitting back labor
2) A completely failed epidural
3) Roughly 4 hours of pushing
4) A c-section
5) A poorly-placed IV that made my whole left hand swell up like a balloon
6) Post-op separation from EJ from roughly 7:30 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning, when I was finally brought to my maternity room

So, with this in mind, I can not overstate in what bad shape I was in as I moved in and out of a morphine stupor that first night in the hospital, trying to figure out where I was, where my baby was, where my husband was, why I felt like I'd been in a street fight, etc. I was so sore, I could barely move, and when I startled awake and uncomfortable, I found myself in real trouble, as trying to shift around meant taking my swollen, painful hand with the IV and using it to support the weight of my tired, cut-in-half then sewed back together body. The whole thing (which was repeated over and over) was worse than just lying still in an awkward position, so I remained restless at a time that I probably needed sleep more than ever.

All that said, even in the worst of it, I remember having this incredible, crystal-clear revelation in that hospital bed in the dark: THE HEARTBURN WAS GONE. That fact alone seemed so miraculous that I had a few moments of relaxation whenever I remembered it, and tried across the next few days to remind myself of it whenever I was feeling particularly crummy.

So, fast forward to last night's midterm elections. From my point of view, there was not a lot of good news. As I was thinking about it this morning, though, I had a realization that is as close to taking a dose of political Tums as I can get in the moment: THE POLITICAL ATTACK ADS ARE GONE.

It's not everything, but it is something, and I'm taking it and rejoicing in it with all my fellow voters, left, right, and middle. We can all celebrate the end of political advertisement overload, robocalls, and a general atmosphere thick with blame for blame's sake.