Wednesday morning started out like any other day. I got out of bed and prepared for my day. I had some cheese toast for a light breakfast.

Wednesdays are Danish Conversation Group days, which are kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes it is helpful and fun, and sometimes it is painful to go. I took the S-train to Hellerup for the meeting, and was glad to see a couple of women there I hadn't seen before. Sure enough, they had come with ideas for a great meeting. One had a children's book about travelling to Skåne, and we read through it together, learning both about Danish and about Skåne. And about how whoever translated the book from Swedish to Danish was a bit sloppy, as there were still some jags and ochs in there, but we got through it. The verdict this time: Helpful and fun. We meet at a café, and during our time there I had some orange juice and a couple croissants. I do love croissants.

I walked back to the train station just in time to watch my train pull away from the platform. Not a big deal, as it comes every four minutes. The C line goes all the way from Hellerup to Herlev without transfers, but I always take the F line and transfer to the H or C in Flintholm, because it saves me about 15 minutes due to avoiding the whole downtown area. So it would have made perfect sense to wait the 4 minutes for the next F, but right at that moment a C pulled up, and I thought, what the hell. I'm not in a hurry or anything. I knew it would take longer, but who cares?

Thomas and I have often remarked that DSB schedules the H and the C all wrong. The H doesn't go anywhere the C doesn't go. It doesn't go as far as the C in one direction, and it skips a few stops in the other direction, so it's kind of like a limited-stop version of the C. It would be sensible then, if the H came a little bit before the C so that the people in a hurry could get on that, and the people who need to go to small podunk stops can wait for the C. Right? In my experience, the C always comes before the H. In either direction. Now, before you point out that they both come before each other because they come all day long, I'm saying that you have an 8-12 minute stretch of no trains at all, and then the C comes 1-3 minutes before the H. I think it should be the other way around.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because I took the C instead of the F, I ended up going through the downtown area, and when my C train arrived at Østerport, I noticed the signs saying that an H was arriving in just 2 minutes. Østerport is where the H starts its journey in this direction, so this means they had to have planned it this way. It wasn't delayed at a previous station or anything. They really decided to make it come 2 minutes after the C. This is especially puzzling because of the fact that the H skips past some stations where the C stops, and even more relevantly, at all those stops it skips, there is only one set of tracks for each direction. This means the H cannot overtake the C. It takes more than 2 minutes (probably 6 or 8) for the C to stop at those stops, so how can the H start out being only 2 minutes behind the C?

I wanted to know how this would turn out. At every stop, I checked the signs, and the H was scheduled to come 2 minutes behind the C. Then we get to Vanløse. This is the last stop before a stretch of three stops that the H skips. Still, the H is reportedly coming 2 minutes behind the C. How can this possibly work? My C train stops at Jyllingevej, Islev, and Husum before pulling into Herlev which reports the H will arrive in 1 minute.

There is just no way that the difference between stopping at three stations and driving on past them is one minute. No way. The only way this can happen is to make the H stop on the tracks and wait for the C to go. So in other words, DSB has planned this schedule so that even though the H skips past several stops, you will not get where you're going any faster than if you take the C. This is even more ridiculous than I had originally thought. After Herlev, there are a couple of other stretches of stops that the H skips, so this problem undoubtedly continues down the line. The H has to stop and wait for the C. So wtf is the point?

You may be wondering why I went off on this tangent. Weren't we walking about how my day was going? Well you see, by the time my train got to Østerport, it was clear to me that I had a very real need to vomit. (Ever since I got pregnant, vomiting has been a staple for any day where I haven't eaten enough. It must be that my cheese toast and two croissants was not enough today.) I have a major aversion to public vomiting. So while I would have found the above train experiment rather interesting at any point, it became my sole focus at the time because I needed to think about something other than vomiting. It worked beautifully. I was able to make it from the station and up the stairs to our flat and in the bathroom before my stomach let loose its contents into my bathtub. (Yes, bathtub. I'd like to see YOU kneel before a toilet quickly and without injury when you're 28 weeks pregnant.)

I was very much expecting to vomit. What I wasn't expecting was what happened next. That is, nothing. Normally, I vomit and then I feel better. I can go about my day. Normally starting off by eating something to avoid this happening again later. But now I vomited and I didn't feel better. And in fact, I had zero appetite. I wanted nothing. The thought of food was not good. At various times after this point, I forced myself to drink or eat something, but it always came back up. Toast. Water. Sprite. Sun Lolly. Apple. Pork wantons. Fried rice. Nothing stays down. Add to this the increasing incidence of cramps in the belly area.

I don't get menstrual cramps. I haven't felt any Braxton Hicks at all. I don't get cramps. Now I'm getting cramps. My mind flashes to the birth story of a woman in my online due date club. Due about a week after me, she actually gave birth in May. Her son is doing fine, although of course at this stage, fine means "oh sure he's hooked up to tubes for everything and is constantly monitored and sometimes something concerning happens but for the most part we think everything will end up well." In her birth story, she said it all started with some stomach pains that she didn't think much about. Stomach pains? I'm having stomach pains! No good thoughts at this point.

Good husband he is, after getting home from work and seeing how much fun I'm having, Thomas scours the web for possible information and gives me lots of backrubs. He wisely thinks it is not as big of a problem as I fear, but respects my feelings. I love this man.

So anyway, Wednesday night consists of me waking up every 15-45 minutes or so with stomach cramps, intense hunger, and barely enough strength to make it to the bathroom to pee. (How I have always managed to pee so often even though I can't drink anything is really quite a mystery.) At around 4:30 Thursday morning, I give up on the sleeping thing and take a somewhat relaxing bath. I eat a Sun Lolly and I think it might actually stay down, not that it provides any nutrition or anything. I pour a glass of ice water and get back into bed. I'm not planning on sleeping, but it's a comfortable place to be. I take two sips of water and about a minute later… yup, I am hurling into a bucket. It wakes Thomas.

I ask Thomas to call the hospital. I figure at the least they will have some advice about how to keep things from being puked out again, and if it's something serious then, well, the hospital should know, right? I'm still envisioning ambulances and IVs. Really, I am not always such a downer. But when you haven't had any food for a day I think you're allowed some slack in where your thoughts venture.

Thomas discusses what's going on with a midwife, who apparently doesn't speak much or any English. I understood enough of what he was saying to know he asked for someone who spoke English but then agreed to just translate for me. Occasionally he asked me some questions, but he knew most of the answers himself. Yes, she's throwing up everything. Yes, even water. Is the baby still kicking? Yes. That's good. Fever? No.

After a few minutes of this, it is determined that I have a stomach bug, perhaps caught from one of the kids at the mommy group I go to. I didn't think any of them were sick, but ok. But most importantly, we got advice on what might stay down.

Thomas cut up a piece of bread into 16 tiny squares, and over the course of several hours I ate one square at a time, with Nutella. I still had no appetite and I didn't really want the bread, but it went down and stayed down. If I sipped Coke slowly enough, it stayed down too. But still not water. Water doesn't want to stay down. So Coke and bread it was until dinner time, when I finally realized I actually wanted some food. Potatoes. I want potatoes. Thomas gets me some potatoes from the rotisserie chicken place across the street. I love this man.

There were a few times I thought I might throw up again, but no! The potatoes worked! Though I can hardly say that a piece of bread, a few small potatoes, and some sips of Coke consist of good nutrition for a whole day, this is way better than the whole nothing-in-the-stomach-all-day-Wednesday situation. I sleep relatively well Thursday night, waking up a few times to pee, of course.

So now it's Friday morning. I don't feel 100% but I feel well enough to eat some more potatoes and say with confidence that it really was not me going into early labor on Wednesday and I really do not need to be rushed to the hospital and hooked up to an IV. In about an hour, I meet with a midwife for a standard consultation. My midwife? Who knows. I still haven't met my midwife yet, and since there's a strike going on, there's a good chance my midwife won't be there and I'll meet with some random midwife whose English is marginally better than my Danish and we can struggle through the meeting and I'll not get any of my questions answered to my satisfaction. But at least I'm not a downer anymore, right?