Friday, March 18, 2011

restless legs

I have been knitting a fair bit, and made a hat yesterday that was supposed to be for a newborn although I think it has turned out for a 3 to 6 month old by the time I washed it.  I settled on bamboo yarn with 30% silk, so it is a light summery hat.  Although by the time Emma turns 3 months old, it will be winter over here.  So be it.  She'll wear it in the house.  I am now making the same hat but on much smaller needles, and this time I am doing it on double pointed needles in the round, instead of flat.  It is a little harder, but there is no seam and the finishing is more beautiful.

Emma is moving a lot, the more I lie down and do nothing, the more she decides it is time to have some fun and kick mommy in the bladder.  She must have restless legs just like me.

Restless legs...what can I say, they are a bad bad affliction of pregnancy.  At one point, I tried to rank in order which one symptom sucks the most:  the nausea, the tiredness, or the restless legs.  Definitely if the restless legs would be ongoing all day long like the nausea used to be (and some days still is!), they would rank up there with the nausea.  As it is though, the nausea sucks the most, followed by the RLS.  The tiredness is the least of my worries, especially now that I can sleep when I need to.  I did notice that the more tired I am, the worse the restless jerking gets, to the point that sometimes my legs simply kick without control, like in Parkinson's disease.

I flew to Vancouver last week and was attacked on the plane by an enormous case of restless legs.  I was sitting at the window, and MrH was in the aisle seat, trying to doze off.  My legs had to move non stop, and the fact that I had no room to stretch them (I am tall) made me almost have a panic attack.  I stretched them over his lap, and everyone else was looking at me funny.  Not as funny as they looked when I put them on the ceiling though!  Trust me, if there is one place where you don't want to get a RLS attack, the plane is it, particularly in the crammed spots available in this particular plane.

What really helps is getting a lot of sleep.  And sometimes meditation, in order to avoid getting panicky, especially in crammed spaces.

1 comment:

  1. The RLS sounds terrible! But I wish I'd been another passenger on the plane and didn't know what was happening. Sorry, I know you were really miserable, however the bright side is I'm sure there were many people who had an amusing story about this bizarre woman on the plane putting her legs over her husband and on the ceiling. I'm imagining this story is someone's travel blog, or the story for a young person to tell the relative she's visiting but doesn't know very well that breaks the ice, or the thing that brightens the day of someone travelling for work and gives them something amusing to tell their spouse when they call before bed. :-)

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