PUPPPs

No, not something cute like triplet puppies, PUPPP stands for "Pruritic Urticarial Papules and Plaques of Pregnancy". What it means is "itchy belly". This is what Jen got during pregnancy, and it sucks. Basically, this combined with the usual squished-bladder-and-having-to-pee-all-the-time meant that Jen slept in 1 hour increments, and about 2-3 of these a night.

At first doctors / nurses / midwives would just say "oh it's just stretching skin from pregnancy". However due to Jen's vigilant Google searching, she found sites like these:

• http://dermatology.about.com/cs/pregnancy/a/puppp.htm
• http://members.optusnet.com.au/westhoff/puppp/Gallery/index.htm

...and so it turned out this is a recognized super-itchy condition that some woman go through that is a bit more than the usual.

Unfortunately in her case she went through the vast sample of creams, antihistamine, and hydracortizone / steroid creams, however they helped little to not at all. In her case the only thing that worked was using ice cubes or ice chips and rubbing them over her belly (fortunately it was summer!). This would eventually make the itchiness go away enough to fall back to sleep for 30-60 minutes until she needed to pee, wake up, and find her belly itchy again. Sounds fun, huh.