Third Trimester Changes
As your physical challenges grow bigger in these final months, remember to keep your eye on the prize. Holding your little offspring in your arms is just around the corner now. It's amazing how one look into your newborn's beautiful eyes can cause nine months of discomfort to become a thing of the past.
Here are some tips to help you cope with what you may be going through:
Backaches
As your baby and uterus grow, your muscles stretch. This can put a strain on your back muscles.
Hip Pain
In preparation for childbirth, hormones cause the joints around your pelvis to loosen. This may cause hip pain, usually on one side.
Leg Cramps
Softening of the pelvic joints in preparation for birth, often coupled with bad circulation and baby pressing on nerves, can cause leg cramps. This usually happens at night or in the early morning.
Sciatica/Lower Back or Leg Pain/Tingling/Numbness
Your growing baby can put pressure on your sciatic nerves, which run from your lower back to your feet via your legs. This can cause tingling, numbness or pain, known as sciatica.
Vaginal Pain
If you're feeling sharp pains in the vaginal area at this point, your cervix may be starting to dilate.
Swelling and Fluid Retention
Swelling in your wrists or ankles is the work of fluid retention and a rise in estrogen. Retained water helps accommodate expanded blood volume and offsets water you'll lose during delivery.
Heartburn
Heartburn can come from stomach acid rising into your esophagus, or from the pressure of your baby and uterus on your stomach.
Constipation
Those high hormone levels are still slowing down your bowel muscles. And that baby of yours is now crowding your digestive system. Which can lead to the common complaint of constipation.
Hemorrhoids
Constipation can also lead to hemorrhoids, the painful, swollen veins around the rectum that often itch and bleed.
Frequent Urination and Leaking
The larger your uterus gets, the less room you have left in there for everything else. Including your bladder. This can make you a frequent flier for the bathroom. It can also cause urine to leak, especially after you laugh, cough or sneeze.
Fatigue
It's back. Most likely due to the physical exertion of carrying all that extra weight around, plus waking up at night for bathroom visits and other issues.
Sleep Problems
The size of your stomach. Nerves or excitement. Aches and pains. Trips to the bathroom. Your baby's in-uterus gymnastics. The list for sleeplessness goes on.
Shortness of Breath
Your baby may be pushing on a muscle under your lungs, decreasing your lung capacity.
Itchy Bellies and Stretch Marks
As your skin stretches and tightens, it may get dry and itchy. It (coupled with genes) may also cause stretch marks, the red or white streaks on breasts, stomachs, and upper thighs.
Spider Veins and Blotches
These spidery or patchy-looking areas of your face, neck, arms and chest are most likely the product of increased blood flow, and they usually fade after pregnancy.
Varicose Veins
Though mainly hereditary, varicose veins are aggravated by pregnancy factors like weight gain, decreased blood circulation, and the weight of the baby in your pelvic region.
PUPPP (Pruitic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy)
In other words, itchy, red, raised patches on your stomach, arms and legs. This condition runs in families, and usually only happens with first pregnancies.
