When is an itch not an itch?

Why am I writing a post about an itch?? Itching is very common during pregnancy due to the stretching of skin, but if it is severe itching there may be more to it. When I was about 35 weeks pregnant, I all of a sudden got really itchy feet - REALLY itchy. So itchy that it would wake me up every night, and I would have to get up and go stand on the cold kitchen floor before finding a good corner of something to itchy the soles of my feet against! Boy did I give them a good itch. Jay thought I was going crazy. I thought I was going crazy!

After about a week of it driving me absolutely mental, I googled for something that could be used whilst pregnant to help relieve the itch. You might think I wouldn't need to google this but the amount of things you aren't meant to use whilst pregnant is scary! To my surprise, there were a few pregnancy forums discussing the same thing. I wasn't expecting it to be a pregnancy topic at all! Who would think that itchy feet would be pregnancy related? Well it is - well it can be I should say...

Severely Itchy feet and palms during pregnancy can be a sign of Cholestasis, which is a serious liver condition.

I contacted my Obstetrician straight away, even though I wasn't so panicked about it. Jay thinks I overreact too easily so I was determined not to this time. This was the wrong time to choose! Apparently my Ob thought it was urgent to go and have a blood test straight away - now I was in a panic! 

I had the blood test and was told that results wouldn't come back for 2 days as it isn't a test that they do very often. Huh?? It's urgent enough that I needed to go straight away but not urgent enough that they test the blood straight away??!! How does that make any sense? On top of that, I saw my Ob as I was walking to the train station and he explained casually that if the blood tested positive for this condition, then he would be looking to induce me urgently and getting the baby out! Erm, okay - now I'm sensing the seriousness of this all. Apparently if you have Cholestasis, it does have the potential to cause still birth. Given that I was 37.5 weeks at this point, it was near to full-term, so we would want to get baby out immediately - well after the 2 lonnnnngggg days I have to wait to even get the results!

Long story short, the test results came back negative and I didn't have it, but I did still have these damn itchy feet!! We agreed to do another test in a few days as it can still appear later. Great! I couldn't help but worry as the mention of stillbirth when you're pregnant is obviously so very scary. I never did end up getting Cholestasis, but the moral of the story is that there are soooo any things directly related to pregnancy that you would never think could be related to pregnancy. Never would I have thought itchy feet would have anything to do with pregnancy - why would I??!!

The funny thing is that as soon as I had Mia, the itchy feet stopped completely! So very strange, but I guess just one of life's pregnancy mysteries lol!