The Pregnancy Ham

"Eat as much as you can because you will need the energy for when the baby comes", I can still hear her saying in my head. She was my mother in law and she had always been told that there was no limit to what you could and shouldn't eat while you were pregnant. To her the sky was the limit and I had just spent nearly 9 months stuffing myself to the limit based on her advice. She would tell me don't worry about the weight gain because you had a great body before the pregnancy and you will have a great body again after your son is born. Now that I look back on the situation I really wished I would have thought for myself.

It was the day after Thanksgiving and I was just 2 weeks away from my due date. I had a late evening Dr. appointment and I couldn't wait for the time to pass so I could see the Doctor. Because it was the day after Thanksgiving my refrigerator was packed with the leftovers from Thanksgiving. The thing that caught my attention the most was the whole ham my mother had cooked especially for me. As I sat down with the entire ham in front of me watching TV I started thinking to myself ,boy I cant wait to have this baby and do some shopping. I was sick and tired of being fat and seeing my plump body every time I passed the mirror. Before I paid attention to what was happening before me I looked and to my surprise I had been sitting in the same spot for over 2 hour watching a lifetime movie and had eaten the entire ham.

I didn't feel bad or anything but I suddenly started thinking maybe it wasn't the best idea for me to eat an entire ham. To try to get over what I'd just done I decided to take a nap so that I would be refreshed for my Dr's. Appointment. When I woke up from my 2 hour nap I could feel that something had changed. As I looked down at my feet they looked like the Pillsbury's dough man feet. Not only were my feet swollen to the max so were my hands. I knew my husband wanted to comment but he had learned throughout the pregnancy to keep his mouth shut.

As I arrived at the Dr's office the Dr. immediately knew something was going on with me. He began to ask me a series of question about if I was feeling any pain and what I had eaten during the day. With great embarrassment I explained that I'd mistakingly eaten a whole ham. As he began checking my blood pressure of course it was escalated due to all the sodium I'd ingested with the ham. When I got on the scale for the final time it showed I weighed 205 lbs from 125lbs just 9 months ago on a five feet three inch frame. Before I knew it I was being given medicine to induce my pregnancy because the Dr. felt the baby was too large for my frame and also because of the increase in my pressure due to the Thanksgiving ham.

That night I gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy. He was everything I'd dreamed he would be but by being born at only six pounds I wondered where was the rest of him. If he only weighed six pounds that meant I was still fat and would have to work really hard to loose the weight and get my cute little shape back. By the end of week one I was determined to loose the weight. My husband never mentioned the whole weight thing primarily because I'd made him a little scared telling him the post partum horror stories (lol).With lots of hard work and discipline I was back to my almost normal size about 2 months later. But ladies take my word and never eat a whole ham while pregnant.