You know what the gods hate? The gods hate it when you think you've got them beat. They get vicious.

So yesterday, after crowing that lying down helped the pain in my back and that I thought it was pretty much gone...

The pain came back.

(Do I have to confess that, after I told Matt the pain was back, I spent about an hour with "The Cat Came Back" - the Muppet version, of course - stuck in my head?)

So when I got home from work, I went upstairs and laid down. Took a nap for an hour.

And yeah, while I was lying down the pain abated - but the instant I got up, it came back. So much for that idea.

After I got up, it spent about an hour and a half feeling like the results of a pinched nerve. And then, just a bit before the Hall, it spiked. It felt like a knife. Or maybe several knives. I did everything that our Lamaze class had tried to teach us not to do: I sat up straight and sucked in my breath and tensed up everywhere.

Matt said, "Do you want me to massage it?"

Massage it, hell. I didn't even want to move, much less let anyone else touch it. I explained this to Matt in as calm and appreciative a manner as I could. "NO!"

Matt barely twitched. "Maybe you should try your breathing, then?"

Breathing? What breathi- Oh. I should breathe. Yeah. I leaned forward (slowly, slowly) onto the coffee table and tried taking a few slow, controlled breaths... No, the pain didn't magically go away, but as I managed to force my limbs to relax a little, I realized that I could get up and walk around. So I did.

Walk, walk, walk... Try to remember to breathe... A couple of minutes later, the pain subsided back to the dull achey pain, and I collapsed into my chair with relief.

When it spiked again half an hour later, I got up to walk right away, and when I came back to my chair, I began to think about tracking these spikes, in case this was actually something to be concerned about. My mother had told me she'd had sporadic contractions all the way through her ninth month, but she hadn't said they were back labor!

Matt confessed that he'd started tracking with the very first spike.

Another half-hour later, I had a third, but much smaller spike of pain, and it went away after only half a minute or so. And then, within the next half-hour, even the dull achey pain was gone. (Except that it came back when I lunged forward to try to catch something Matt was tossing me. Oops. But it didn't spike again.)

I put a heating pad on the spot for a bit before I went to bed, and that helped some. And once again, it was better when I was lying down.

I don't really want to call my doctor's office about this. It's not labor. At most, it's a few warm-up contractions. I'm already going to my doctor once a week until the baby comes; I don't want to make it twice in one week unless I really have to.

But if it comes back today - and the dull ache is already beginning to emerge, so it very well might - then I might just have to.

As Matt said last night: "Welcome to the ninth month of pregnancy. Preventing people from doing this again on a whim since the dawn of time."

--Liz