Thursday, September 15, 2005

Belly watching and leg cramps

Once again my body has woken me due to pregnancy. This time with middle of the night leg cramps. This is the second time I have had the pleasure of waking up screaming due to the cramping. Poor Greg - I hope I don't give him a heart attack. At any rate, due to many years of martial arts over-exertions and the like, I am quite accustomed to handling this type of problem. The trick is to flex the leg (in particular the calf muscle) and hold it. It is also extremely helpful to bend the foot back from the ball of the foot until your heel is "in the lead" so to speak. I used to be able to do this myself, but now, the belly gets in the way so Greg has to assist me. This technique corrects the problem almost immediately. In this case, I released the flex too soon and the cramp came back, including those little muscle behind the knee. Unfortunately, while the cramp may be gone, the leg will stay sore for the next few days and make the walk to work a little less pleasant. According to my sources, calcium is a temporary solution (oops - it was my usual one), which may aggravate the problem in the long term. Suggestions for prevention included taking vitamin E supplements, using sea salt in my food, or taking a magnesium supplement. Basically, this is an electrolyte issue. For some people, the danger is confounding a leg cramp with a leg thrombus. While I don't have my genetic test results in hand, I don't think this is the case, because other telltale signs of a thrombus are completely absent.
On a sillier note, Greg and I amused ourselves last night by belly watching. During a time when Rebecca was particularly active, we just watched the bare belly. It was pretty amazing to see the surface deformations (more extensive than I would have thought for 24 weeks - but what do I know), and of course, Greg took advantage of the situation to yet again feel baby kicks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bonjour Madeleine,

Quand je coachais la nage synchronisee, je disais a mes nageuses de manger des bananes... ca aide a diminuer les crampes musculaires a cause du potassium qu'elles contiennent. Je ne sais pas si c'est vrai, mais ca avait l'air de fonctionner.

Annie

p.s. C'est bien qu'on puisse t'ecrire des commentaires plus facilement maintenant :-)