During my pregnancy, I decided to keep track of most of my “symptoms”, not as a complaint or to discourage anyone from having children, but more just as a way to commemorate and remember the experience. Obviously, everyone’s pregnancy experience is different, but I thought it was kind of neat to track how my body changed with the growing baby.
There were many times when I would notice something little and then google it, wondering if anyone else had experienced something similar. A runny nose with no other symptoms, aversion to coffee, gagging while brushing teeth: others had experienced all of those changes as well.
Some even have names. Pregnancy rhinitis is congestion or a runny nose that occurs because an increase in blood volume can cause blood vessels in the nose to swell.
And I learned, no part of the body is left unchanged by pregnancy. Hormones relax intestinal muscles, which causes food to move more slowly through digestion and can result in constipation. Hormones, plus a growing baby pressing on my stomach, also allowed me to experience the joy of heartburn for the first time.
But of course, none of this mattered after my beautiful baby girl was placed on my chest.
A Thinkful webinar called Intro To Data Analysis: Tableau Basics gave me the basics to start trying out Tableau Public, so I used Tableau to plot my data and then brought it into Adobe Illustrator to tweak the design a bit.