"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it." - Ferris Bueller

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Summoning the Nausea Fairy and the Hot Rice Sock

Good news: pregnancy progressing positively and all the tell-tale signs are upon me. Bad news: all the telltale signs are upon me. I have mistakenly summoned the "Nausea Fairy", as someone called it in my Thursday Thirteen comments. I feel like complete crap. In addition to the nausea in my first trimester last time, I also had terrible migraines. I thought I was in the clear this time around, but I got a repeat of that this weekend. I woke up Saturday morning at 4 o'clock with a raging migraine that took a couple hours to get under control, with the help of some Excedrine Migraine, but I had to call for backup: The hot rice sock. We have some serious headaches and just general all over pains in our family and I think it was my sister who came up with the rice sock idea, or at least she saw it somewhere and passed it on to us. Here's what you do (or what we do): you pour rice (uncooked, of course) into a tube sock (hopefully clean), tie the end of the sock, heat it up in the microwave for about a minute, and then put the hot rice sock on the area of pain. For me, it was across my forehead, from temple to temple. Believe it or not, it is a miracle. Each grain of rice is nice and warm and it retains heat like it would moisture, it just sucks it right up and passes it on to you. Ooh lala. I've started seeing manufacturers coming out with much nicer versions of these in stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, so you can actually buy them pre-made. But my mom and I made one and added some fresh sage to it, so it's hot rice with the smell of sage. Very soothing and zen-like. It worked nice on my headache. My mom thought it would be a great idea to get a really big sock from a really big Marine (my sister's husband) and thinking she would get a nice, big, brand new sock, actually got a used one. HAHA!! That sock's been in a hot Marine boot during parades. I still laugh about it. But she's washed it up good and its provided her with a ton of rice relief ever since. It covers a lot of area.

Hope everyone had a good weekend! I slept most of it. Here's hoping the nausea fairy will take a day off. Countdown to ultrasound begins!

3 comments:

katie eggeman said...

I also used a version of hot rice sock on my 2nd daughter when she was a baby. She was plagued with ear infections, usually in the middle of the night and that use to soothe her until we could get to the DR or until the antibiotics kicked in.

Irish Church Lady :) said...

Ackkkk! You spoke too soon! Cwackers or toast, my dear.

Scribbit said...

Oh, I feel for you! Ice cream was the only thing that sounded good to me when I was pregnant. Luckily I was able to channel that longing into fat free yogurt but it was tough.