hi, my name's christen, I'm 24, and...

...I have a varicose vein. This has been an unexpected hardship that I have not handled very well. Please don't hate me that this is the worst thing going on my life right now. I have absolutely nothing legitimate to complain about, which leads to way too much time to stare at this vein and let it nauseate me. It really does nauseate me, not because varicose veins in general bother me (they really don't, so please don't worry about covering any up while you're around me for fear that I will gag) but because it's on MY body. My body, which I felt sailed pretty well through a first pregnancy and childbirth, with no noticeable marks of any kind by several months postpartum. My body, which is not even a quarter of a century old. All this talk about "my body" reminds me of a quote I just read the other day, I think it was by C.S. Lewis...it said something like, "You don't have a soul. You ARE a soul; you HAVE a body." So, my soul's body has an unsightly mark, and maybe this is a significant event in the realization of my mortality and the beginnings of a longing for the resurrected body that Jesus Christ guarantees me. If I'm already thinking like this at age 24, I can't imagine how excited I will be to get a new body when I'm 80! I'm over-dramatizing for sure. It just took this second pregnancy for me to realize how much stress pregnancy puts on the human body, even mine. I first noticed this vein about a month ago, when I was maybe 6 months along. It looked like I had a bruise on the inside of my right thigh, which I then decided was a spider vein, which then popped out and turned into, well - we all know what it turned into. If it were a merely aesthetic problem, I would have probably recovered by now. So I won't feel as good in a swimsuit anymore, I could deal with that. The problem is, I have had some hypochondriac episodes in my life, which have (praise the Lord) taken a break the last several years. Maybe Mason has chilled me out - he has that effect - or maybe becoming Ezekiel's mom has helped me stop focusing selfishly on every little ache. It's been great to feel free of silly, nagging thoughts of having some dreadful disease that I don't know about. However...having a huge, purple, swollen, tender, aching, painful vein RIGHT UNDER the surface of my skin has made me FREAK out. Really freak out. I keep thinking that it means I have a blood clot or that it is going to explode (somebody's laughing at me by now) and I'll suffer tremendous loss of blood. This is pretty funny to read as I write it, which is precisely why I'm sharing it with you. There are long parts of days where I don't think about it especially if I don't see it, but once I see it my mind gets away with me. I am going to show it to my doctor next week (poor doctor) and make sure it looks normal to her, and hopefully that can put some of this nonsense to bed. :) I had no clue how different a second pregnancy would feel later on, toward the end of the 2nd/beginning of the 3rd trimesters! I should avoid the details, but I will just say the lower half of my body feels like it's under tremendous pressure all the time. I am half expecting another vein to pop out of a weird, unpleasant location at any time...it probably already has, but I'm afraid to look. Gross! Babies are worth it though, Ezekiel sure was. He will be 17 months tomorrow, and in 3 months we should be starting all over again. Hopefully then the vein can start to shrink back to its original size, and maybe it will even disappear completely! I'll be thinking of this for motivation during labor, I know it!