Transitions again

Hello readers (if you are out there). So life with two while still teaching is, um, different. I am keeping my head above water but the whole “I’ll just finish the course before going on maternity leave” decision makes a lot less sense this side of things than it did before P. was born. I know it is still the right decision, but oh man I am SO GRATEFUL she stayed in as long as she did because if she’d been born any earlier I would have been screwed. As it stands I wish I’d somehow found time to write all the lectures, because P. is over two weeks old now and I have written exactly one. Only three left, but writing them in snatches of fifteen minutes here and there is really hard.

Some thoughts on the first couple of weeks (in bullet form and written over several days because that’s now how I roll):

• How to know you’re a second-time parent: I was in the shower, with P. in the bouncy seat in the bathroom. I heard a sound that made me think she was spitting up. Looked out- sure enough, milk everywhere. How I assessed the situation: 1. Is she choking? (No.) 2. Is she upset about being covered in milky vomit? (No.). I finished my shower!
• I had my first round of solo bedtime at the weekend because Grannie was out picking up Q. at the airport. It included sitting on the toilet nursing P. while E. was having his bath; lying down on the bed nursing P. while having “snuggle” time with E. as he read books and leapt around the bed occasionally pausing to bestow kisses on P’s head; and then trying to moderate my discussion forum while also keeping P. from screaming (she was not having a great evening) while E. kicked the walls of his room and sang at the top of his lungs that he liked to eat yoghurt and bananas.
• That particular evening aside, P. is already showing signs of being far more laid back than her brother was. Whether this is due to her personality or due to my second-time approach to parenting (read: it’s ok if the baby is not immediately on a predictable routine) is yet to be determined. But it’s a nice change regardless of what’s caused it.
• E. still having school for eight days after P. was born was the best thing ever. Then we had Grannie here while Q. was overseas, and Q. is taking this week off and then next week E. is in day camp. So I will only have two weeks left in the course when I have both of them home with me full-time and hopefully we will survive and it will be a bit easier to leave the house.
• Packing to leave the house for any length of time now feels like setting out for the base camp at Everest. Gone are the days of “Got a hat? We’re good!”. I knew this would happen but it has still been a big shock.
• E. thus far has been great. He asked me the other day how old P. was. When I said she was twelve days, he said, “I’m already getting quite attached to her.” He is starting to notice how unavailable I am and was getting tired of Grannie as a substitute. But he loves getting books that I can read when I’m nursing, and he loves giving P. kisses on her little head.
• Nursing was really hard in the first week (poor latch when milk came in and I got engorged led to a lot of pain) but things are much better now and have been for a while. P. gained a whopping 7 oz between Day 3 and Day 5 (and was 3.5 oz over her birth weight by Day 5) but then only gained 5 oz in the next week. This is above the minimum but only just, so I’m going to take her back in this week for a weight check just for peace of mind. The midwives are not worried, but of course I am.
• P. is sleeping really well at night. I feed her around 10 p.m. and then swaddle her and put her in the bassinet and she’s been known to go fairly regularly through until 3:30 or 4 a.m., and will then go three hours before waking again, which gets us past 6 a.m., which I then consider morning as far as I’m concerned. So I am getting a reasonable amount of sleep. I still feel like my head will float off my shoulders around 4 p.m. though.
• I survived driving P. down to the midwives for her two week appointment (at 12 days). All of my anxiety about parenting this time around seems focused on the car, because we never had one before and Q. has done most of the driving in our big city. P. was happy on the way there (fell asleep) and then screamed like mad on the way home, only calming down when I sang an invented “We’re ok, P.” song (she loathed my efforts with the Wheels on the Bus).
• We took P. and E. out to see labmonkey and Pea on the weekend, but Grannie did the driving that day. P. was again really good on the way there but did a lot of screaming on the way home. She was superb while out though- happy to just fall asleep in the carrier when we went out to a park. E. was great and would give us P. reports: “Her eyes are open! Oh, they’re closed again!”
• I need to buy one of those mirrors to mount on the seat so I can actually see her when we’re driving as if I don’t have E. to give me reports I find it extremely stressful.
• P. is the NOISIEST baby ever. The only way to describe it is she breathes over her vocal cords, so there is this near-constant hum of noise when eating or sleeping. It is a testament to how much less anxious I am this time around that I am able to sleep right next to her with that racket whereas with E. I was still sleeping in the basement at this stage (and then using earplugs for the rest of time he was in our room).
• Physically I had a much easier recovery, although I’m still having trouble with bleeding because I don’t spend enough time resting (curse of the second-time parent). My midwives spent a lot of time in the hospital making the point that my body had worked very hard even if I didn’t think it had. Emotionally and mentally it’s been much easier too. I’m just in a much better place than I was at this point with E. I’m prepared for all the newborn madness and I’m genuinely enjoying the snuggles. I’m already finding it hard to balance the needs of my two children, but I knew this would be the hardest part for me.
• I am happy. So very, very happy. She is safe, and she is here, and my family has the piece that has been missing.

An introduction

I have a daughter.

She was born on Saturday, 18 June, at 5:07 p.m. at 39+6.

She was 7 lb, 12.5 oz at birth and 21 inches long, with a head circumference of 34.5 cm. She was nearly identical to her big brother’s stats at birth (7 lb, 15 oz; 20.5 inches; 36 cm).

Her first name is the same as this author.

And her middle name, which is a family name on both sides, is the same as this first name.

Her labour was nearly identical to E’s. I was unable to sleep on Friday night because I had contractions that were long enough and frequent enough (every ten minutes or so) to keep me awake. When I got up on Saturday morning, ate breakfast, and had a shower, they dropped right off again and were sometimes forty minutes or longer apart. By lunchtime they were back to being ten minutes apart, but they were long enough (a minute) and strong enough (I couldn’t ignore them) that we thought we should make sure labmonkey and Pea were on their way in (although I told labmonkey I thought she had time to go to her appointment with the bank first).

Around 2:30 p.m. my midwife called to check in as I had spoken with the student midwife that morning. I told her what the contractions were doing and she said to page back either when they intensified or got closer together.

Around 3 p.m. I decided to have a shower to see if that made a difference, since the one that morning had stalled them considerably.

While in the shower they started coming every 2 minutes apart. By the time I was dressed again they were shorter but still very close together and intensifying.

I paged the student midwife and told her in no uncertain terms I wanted to go to the hospital RIGHT AWAY. This was a difficult phone call as I had a contraction in the middle of it and E. was freaking out that suddenly we were leaving, so he was trying to hold on to my legs and crying while I was on my hands and knees on the bed coping with the contraction.

labmonkey and Bean arrived and we basically threw E. at them and went out the door. (E. was fine as soon as we left and had a wonderful time with them).

Despite having a birth plan with only one item- DO NOT have the baby in the car- there was a point in the twenty-minute drive where I thought we’d left it too late. I was starting to get a lot of pressure. The contractions were still two minutes apart and very intense. Q. did a fantastic job getting us there (he said afterwards, “I’m so glad I bought the German car with the powerful engine”).

I had a contraction as we parked and got out of the car and was then determined to get into the hospital and into the elevators before the next one came. Q. said I made quite an impact on everyone milling around outside the main doors. I can vaguely remember hearing someone say, “Ooh that woman is having a baby today!” as I willed myself to keep walking.

I had another contraction in the elevator and two more before we could get into a room. As we were walking down to the room my midwife said to the student, “We’d better page the backup midwife right now”.

We got into the room and the student midwife offered to check my dilation. I was happy to do this because there was a part of me that was worried I was still going to be at 5 cm and the contractions were becoming really hard to cope with.

I was at 9 cm. This explains why the car ride was so horrible- I was in transition.

We decided I had just enough time to get into the tub, so my midwife filled it. I got in, they managed to do the admissions bloods in between contractions, and probably within eight minutes or so my body started trying to push. I didn’t want to give birth in the tub so I had to get out again and I had one horrific contraction while standing before we could get me back to the bed.

By this time the backup midwife and her student had arrived, so I had four midwives plus Q. to support me. They were checking P’s heart rate regularly and reassuring me that she was doing well and that everything was normal.

I think I pushed for around twenty minutes- this was more intense than it was with E. and I found it really hard to control what my body was doing.  When she was born there was this pop and explosion of liquid and I was terrified that it was blood and I’d torn badly, but it turned out that P. was born in the caul and that explosion was the sack breaking open at her birth. Q. said afterwards it was a bit like a horror movie because she was flailing like mad as soon as she was born to try to get out. The midwives were very excited and said it just made her that much more special.

I ended up with one tiny cosmetic tear, much like with E., that my midwife stitched just because otherwise it wouldn’t join back up. After the birth I was incredibly cold and they kept bringing hot blankets (I remembered these with E.- they are the best possible thing at that time). The placenta delivered without difficulty and was intact. P. came up onto my chest straight away and we delayed cord clamping. We said yes to the Vitamin K shot, no to the eye drops, and yes to oxytocin to help the placenta detach.

E. at birth squawked a bit and then had a long period of “quiet alertness” where he took everything in. P. came out MAD and she stayed mad until we were finally able to establish a decent latch. She wanted to get nursing straight away and became increasingly frustrated when she didn’t immediately demonstrate mastery of this skill.

“Fiesty!” said one of the midwives.

Two other comments: “She doesn’t really look like a newborn at all!” and “She’s so alert!” were identical to what they said with E.

P., like E., has a lovely round head because she didn’t have time to get squished during delivery. Her Apgars were 9 and 10. The critical issue of whether or not the kidney is functioning was resolved that first night with proof of a wet diaper. The rest of her newborn exam went well.

We opted for early discharge, like with E., so we were back home by 8:15 p.m., early enough that we told labmonkey to keep E. up so he could meet his little sister. E. was wildly excited (there were many kisses on P.’s little head) but did manage to go to sleep that night when we finally packed him off to bed just after 9:00 p.m.

Q. and I were all set to learn from our mistake with E. about not sleeping on the first night when the baby is tired, but P. apparently missed that memo and went straight to “cluster feed every hour for the entire night”. She did this again last night before finally falling asleep at 3:30 a.m. and sleeping until 6 a.m., which was the first chance I’d had to get some sleep since Thursday night. All that effort has meant my milk is in already and I’m hoping for some more settled nights at some point in the near future.

It’s been an emotional couple of days. We went through so much to get here, as you all know. And now she’s here, she’s safe, and she’s real.

Our daughter.

(Feel free to email me at rescogitataeATgmailDOTcom if you’d like to see pictures.)

How to terrify your unborn child (and a belly pic)

Here is a funny story that stopped being funny and then became funny again.

Yesterday, after I had my third appointment with my therapist, I needed the ‘loo (of course I did- I am 35+ weeks pregnant).

The washrooms at this particular hospital have self-flushing toilets. Very enthusiastic self-flushing toilets as I had discovered on a previous visit.

I sat down and probably ten seconds later the toilet flushed.

It was loud.

Very loud.

My uterus was very close to the sound.

The baby FREAKED out.

And by freaked out, I mean engaged in some of the strongest movement I’ve had this entire pregnancy, causing my entire belly to contort.

Funny story! My baby was frightened by a toilet!

And then I woke up this morning and kept feeling baby bits where I wasn’t used to feeling them, and the movement was different, and all I could think about was: Oh fuck, it scared the baby so much s/he flipped and now is breech.

Luckily I had a midwife appointment scheduled for today, so I didn’t have too long to stew. My backup midwife correctly read my state of mind and suggested we check baby’s position at the start of the appointment rather than at the end after discussing Vitamin K shots (yes), eye drops (no), cord clamping (delayed), heel prick to test for various issues (yes) and oxytocin after delivery (wait and see).

The baby, both she and her student reported with confidence, was still very much head down. But s/he had changed positions and the limbs were now facing more out towards my belly rather than towards my spine. A big enough change to explain the crazy movement in the bathroom, but not one that would affect labour plans.

I was relieved my instincts were wrong (when I described what I’d felt, my midwife said that it sounded just like what women describe when their babies do flip).

And now it’s just a funny story again.

My baby was frightened by a toilet!

And here is the latest belly pic, at 35 weeks exactly:

For comparison, this is the closest I have with E’s pregnancy, at 35w6d:

I think I am carrying pretty much exactly the same.

Bend, so you do not break

I am writing this on a train.

Outside the train it is still winter: the ground is covered with snow and the trees stark, barren sentinels against our passing.

The train is late.

I have been marking for a class I’ve tried to teach to the best of my abilities this semester despite caring more about so many other things.

I have marked slowly, interspersed with weeping. I know I am red-eyed. I am unsettling to those around me.

This is the third time in the last two months I have been on a train, under these exact conditions. I feel like my memories of this particular corridor will be filled now for all time with marking, weeping, and snow.

I am trying.

I am trying so hard to cope.

I got to the end of my semester. I took too long to mark some essays, but otherwise there’s nothing I can point to and say “I should have done that better.”

When people ask about my Dad, I am able to give them the good news (He’s moved hospitals and can now start rehab! He’s able to use the ventilator to speak! He passed a swallow test and can eat some foods again!) and sound positive even as my heart breaks all over again that this is the good news, that he is still paralyzed, still on a ventilator, that while in the grand scheme of things, I know he is making progress, the situation is still too much for me to comprehend.

I am being beaten down.

This morning, I wept as I had to explain to E. that our cat might not get better, that the vet might not be able to fix what was wrong. I wept as Q. (newly recalled from work by my frantic phone call) bundled E. up and brought him to school from the vet’s, after E. had a chance to give Poppy a hug and a pat “just in case”. I wept when the vet told me what we had to do, the humane thing to do, the thing that you do when you are the adult and you take responsibility for these lives. I wept as I got on the train, pulled in too many directions again, knowing that Q. would have to tell E. after school that there was only one cat waiting at home.

“We will need to get another cat!” wailed E. in the vet clinic. “And we will name that cat Poppy too because it was a good name and she is a good cat and two cats are better than one cat!”

“Maybe we will get another cat one day, E.,” I told him. “But we won’t name that cat Poppy. You can’t replace a cat. They’re part of the family. They’re all special, each one of them.”

I am terrified that this experience, E.’s first real exposure to death and grief and loss, will, in the end, be seen by us as practice for the losses that are yet to come.

One of his grandpas. Or both. I have no idea what’s coming. But I am afraid.

I have been fighting for some weeks now an irrational fear that this baby will die at birth. I was going to tell my midwife about it, but I had to cancel that appointment because we were at the vet instead, surrounding our cat with love while giving the vet permission to end her life.

The problem is it doesn’t feel irrational to me anymore.

The odds of stillbirth are 1 in 100.

The odds of being born with one kidney are 1 in around 1,000.

I don’t know what the odds are of having colon cancer that doesn’t behave like colon cancer, but I imagine they’re pretty high.

And my father’s accident defies belief.

So why wouldn’t the baby die? It would actually be a more likely outcome than anything else that’s happened in the last couple of months.

I am trying.

I am trying so hard to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

But there is a limit to what anyone can manage.

And I know, deep down, I’m reaching mine.

 

All is as well as it can be

I’ve spent seven hours in the last two days in two of the best hospitals in the province, if not the country.

The baby has been scanned to what really is an excessive degree (but as the radiologist at the second hospital was telling me today, even when the hospitals are linked to share reports, it’s only documentation. They never share images. And no radiologist will trust another radiologist’s report if they can’t see the images that were used to determine the report. So I’ve now had three anatomy scans in nine days. The only bright spot is the two hospitals will only be able to partially bill the province for their scans, as you can only bill for one anatomy scan per pregnancy.)

The end result of all of these scans is as follows:

1. The baby is very flexible and can put his/her feet over his/her head and then play with his/her toes, wreaking havoc for techs who are trying to get clear images of one hand or one foot with no apparent extraneous digits.

2. The baby is growing normally and looks great.

3. The baby still has no left kidney. It is not hiding in the pelvis and there is no artery leading anywhere on that side like there is on the right. All techs and radiologists are quite sure it is not there.

4. The right kidney looks perfectly normal and appears to be functioning well as the amniotic fluid levels are good. The baby helpfully voided the bladder during the scan at the first hospital, which is another indication of a working kidney. The kidney is not any bigger than one would expect, but the doctors think it will probably get bigger to compensate for the absence of the other one.

5. The baby quite possibly will have some anomalies in the genitals, but we’ll have no way of knowing until after s/he is born. Possibilities include a missing fallopian tube or ovary or testicle, or issues with the vas deferens, or an oddly shaped uterus. Nothing we can do about this and we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s not uncommon with missing kidneys because the systems are linked to the same point of development.

The plan going forward is as follows:

1. Scan again in 5 weeks at the hospital where I will be delivering to check fluid levels and see if the right kidney is getting bigger, plus a consult with the paediatrician there to sort out what sort of tests will need to be run after birth. I am anticipating a referral to a paediatric nephrologist at the children’s hospital, and I may well meet with him/her before baby arrives just so we have everything in place.

2. Ultrasounds at some point for Q. and I to confirm that we each have two kidneys, as we don’t have proof of this. The genetics counselor wants to be sure it is something random and not something inherited. She’s pretty sure it is, but would like to just check off that box. Apparently unilateral renal agenesis (which is the fancy term for being born with one kidney) is around 1 in 1,000 births.

There is nothing in this diagnosis that requires me to move my pregnancy out of the care of the midwives, and there is no reason to think the baby will need to stay in the hospital after birth- the tests can all be done as an outpatient. Since we opted to do the Harmony screening, we already know the baby has no chromosomal issues. The only way to get more information would be through an amniocentesis. Both the genetics counselor and the maternal fetal medicine specialist offered it, but both also agreed with my assessment that there is no medical indication right now that such testing is warranted or,  indeed, likely to tell us anything more. From my point of view, it’s a no brainer- invasive test with a risk of miscarriage (even if very low) to probably not learn anything more? No thank you.

Oh yes, and 3. I am now referring to this baby as Phaselus (or P. for short) for the duration of the pregnancy, which is Latin for kidney bean.

Nothing is ever simple

“Why don’t you go and empty your bladder,” said the nice ultrasound tech at my anatomy scan yesterday. “I’ll take a few more pictures and then the doctor will pop in for a look.”

“Does the doctor usually come in to see the scans?” I asked.

“Oh yes, most of the time,” insisted the tech.

Well, maybe that line works on first time mothers, but I have had an anatomy scan before (admittedly not at that same location) and I know it is NOT AT ALL normal for the radiologist to come in and consult during the scan.

Nor is it normal to have the radiologist and the tech stare at the same part of your baby over and over again with identical puzzled/furrowed brows.

Nor is it normal to have the radiologist ask the tech “Is it right or left you were looking at?”

At this point, you can picture me quietly freaking the FUCK OUT while trying not to move while they scanned and scanned and scanned. I knew it wasn’t the brain because I could see the part of the baby they were focused on. I thought heart or lungs.

I was wrong.

I forgot that we are supposed to have two kidneys.

My baby apparently only has one.

On a scale of “one to panic”, this is a “hiccup in pregnancy” as the radiologist put it. It is not brain or heart or spine. Provided the existing kidney functions as it should, there is no reason to think this will affect this baby in any real way except possibly make him/her more likely to develop hypertension. It also gives us an ironclad reason to forbid contact sports (no hockey, no football, no rugby- I am not at all heartbroken by this).

I am ok, mostly because labmonkey crunched all the data for me yesterday afternoon and told me that there were red flags they should have seen in the ultrasound if the existing kidney was not developing properly (even though they don’t come fully online until after birth, they are busy during the pregnancy processing amniotic fluid). I spoke to my midwife again this morning and she went over the report in detail. With the exception of the likely absent kidney, everything else looked perfect. So it is probable the existing kidney will work just fine, and there is no evidence that the baby has developed abnormally anywhere else on that same side (which was also a possibility).

Next steps are to meet with a genetics counsellor to discuss potential outcomes and a follow up ultrasound in three weeks’ time to check again and see if they can see anything else. My midwife is also arranging a consult during pregnancy with a pediatric kidney specialist so we can line up the baby’s care for after birth and make sure we have everything streamlined. At some point we will bring E’s paediatrician into the mix as she will be coordinating the testing once I leave the midwives. One big advantage to living in a big city in Canada- I have world-class medical care a short hop away by transit and I don’t have to pay for it out of my own pocket.

Right now there is no sense I have to transfer out of my midwives’ care or plan for a c-section. I will need to give birth in a hospital, but I think I had just about decided against the birth centre on my own anyway, so that is no big loss.

I am angry that, once again, nothing in my life to do with babies is simple. But I have also been quietly fretting about the anatomy scan for weeks now. I had a gut feeling something was wrong. And I have had too many friends who have been told at that scan that their baby was going to die to feel anything but relief that if there is something wrong with this baby, it is something that could ultimately be entirely inconsequential.

I hate that I am on a scale of “things aren’t perfect but they could be worse”. I would like to just have a perfect report. I would like to be one of those oblivious pregnant women who treats the anatomy scan as a way to learn the sex and whose biggest concern is whether to reveal with blue or pink icing in the centre of the cake or hide balloons in a big box.

But that’s not me. And that’s not my life or my experience of pregnancy.

And today, despite all the upheaval and emotion of the last twenty-four hours, I am still pregnant and there is no real reason to think we can’t bring home a healthy baby in June.

I am going to hold on to that.

7w3d- still pregnant

Second ultrasound was today.

All was well. Baby was hanging out where s/he should be, heart was at 148 beats per minute, growth was spot on. It’s still a blob, but now a blog with a definite top half and bottom half.

I got pretty twitchy when the tech scanned for over a minute without saying anything, but then she must have realized I was starting to freak out because she popped in a “everything looks good so far”.

I don’t think you can ever fully recover from having an ultrasound where things didn’t look good. That moment of waiting for reassurance is terrifying.

Dr. B. is being cautious and has kept me on the entire chemical cocktail. I was hoping to escape the fragmin injections from this point, but no joy. My stomach is all sorts of interesting shades of purple and green and yellow.

I’m on the progesterone suppositories instead of the PIO shots, which makes Q. very very happy as he absolutely loathed giving me those injections. But the suppositories are gross. End of complaining. If it maybe helps, I’m willing to do it.

“How are you feeling?” asked Dr. B.

“Pretty sick, to be honest,” was my reply.

He gave me a HUGE smile. “Great news! That’s what I like to hear!”

I have yet to vomit (and I never threw up with E., so I’m hoping my perfect track record can continue), but I am very very very queasy most of the time. It felt like a switch turned at just past six weeks, when the pregnancy made it clear just who was in charge of my body (hint: not me).

The baby (called Kernel last week and Blueberry this week) approves of the following activities:
1. Sleeping
2. Lying down
3. Eating carbohydrates continuously or at least every hour, preferably while lying down

Activities other than the above lead to queasiness, cramping, and general feelings of not being well. The baby is particularly unwilling to have me do anything that requires a great deal of thought or concentration. Apparently that is too taxing. I vacuumed the house today and then felt like I was wading through treacle for the rest of the afternoon.

I don’t remember feeling like this with E., but I guess I am a) older, b) not in shape, and c) not souped up on a triple dose of prednisone to cope with the allergic reaction to the PIO shots.

In other pregnancy administrative news, I saw my endocrinologist (the rudest man alive) yesterday. After criticizing my clinic’s drug regime (he was horrified I was still on estrace and progesterone despite being pregnant, which I feel just demonstrates how little he actually knows about fertility issues) he eventually gave me a prescription that bumped up my synthroid dose, which is all I needed him to do. I have to see him again in two months if all continues to go well.

I’ve had one meeting with my midwife (the one who delivered E.) already. She was really interested in the diet changes that produced this result. She then asked me if I was planning to stay on the diet during pregnancy, as she was concerned about calcium if I wasn’t eating dairy.

I was just past five weeks at the time, so not feeling sick yet, and I said to her, “To be honest, I don’t think I’ll be able to stick to this diet if I feel like I did with E.”

Now, the idea that I might stay on my high protein/lower carbs, no dairy diet is just laughable. Blueberry has NO INTEREST in that plan. We’re already in negotiations about eating something other than crackers between breakfast and dinner. And Blueberry would really just like to eat potatoes for dinner.

Anyway, it wasn’t clear to me from the reports on the study that the PCOSers stayed on the diet when pregnant. They had lower miscarriage rates, but that could just be because their eggs were better quality to begin with and the embryos were healthier. We are still eating lots of meat but I am not beating myself up over the fact that I consumed an entire box of Triscuits last week. It is what it is, and this is either a good baby or it isn’t, and there is very very little I can do that would change anything.

 

The Unmaking

Here is what you do.

You take all of your maternity clothes out of your closet. You wash the ones you wore that week. You put them back into the suitcase in your basement storage room. You expect they will be musty again by the time you next get them back out. If you get them back out. Your regular jeans still fit. A small kindness.

You fill out a new form and write new cheques for E.’s registration for nursery school. You go to hand it in. “Q. tells me your work schedule changed suddenly,” the admin assistant says brightly. She looks at your new requests. “You’re working more then. Is that something you’re excited about?”
You burst into tears.

You call your midwife. Or, to be more accurate, you call the number for the midwife collective, on the weekend, when you know no one will answer, so you can just leave a message cancelling the appointment you were supposed to have this coming Wednesday, so you don’t have to say to anyone but a machine that you’ve lost the pregnancy.

You take the ultrasound pictures out of your agenda where you have been keeping them (collecting them, adding one with every new scan) and tuck them away in the filing cabinet, along with the picture E. drew for you on Thursday afternoon to help you feel better.

You ask a friend, one of so very many who has asked if there is anything they can do to help, to take your M coat back to the store. The store normally does exchanges or store credit only for items that were on sale, but you emailed and explained the situation and they are being kind (so kind) and will absolutely refund the money. You don’t want to keep it in the house ‘just in case’. You can’t stand to look at it. The basement is filled with baby things that you have kept for close to three years ‘just in case’. They weren’t supposed to be ‘just in case’ any longer. They were supposed to be ‘in September’.

You email your supervisor. He didn’t know you were pregnant but you tell him the truth. Your work has been so badly disrupted over the last few months that you cannot stand him not knowing, not understanding why you have gone from being months ahead of any expected timeline to being dangerously close to falling behind.

You reread books about great racehorses when you wake up at 4 a.m. and cannot fall back asleep (because you cannot fall back asleep, not any more. You wake up, and then you remember, and then you cannot fall back asleep because you cannot unremember it.) Seabiscuit. Secretariat. Ruffian. You are running out of options because you already read most of your comfort books, the ones you will gladly read over and over again because they are beloved friends, during the first couple weeks of the pregnancy, or during the IVF, or during the FETs. You are wary of reading anything new because every time you try (Gone Girl, Life After Life), you are ambushed by an unexpected pregnancy, or miscarriage, or stillbirth. You certainly cannot face the third volume of Call the Midwife, although you enjoyed the first two. It is surprisingly difficult to find a good book that is not going to ambush you with some sort of story about babies.

You have stopped crying, for the most part.

Most of the time you don’t feel anything at all.

5w1d- Waiting for Beta

With E’s pregnancy I had four betas drawn- the first three were every 48 hours and then the final one was four days after the third. The clinic must be feeling good about this pregnancy as they only made me do two betas before moving me to the final one, which will be tomorrow morning.

I’ve had three days now without any documentable proof that the pregnancy is progressing without any problems. That’s proved to be more than enough time to completely freak out on any number of occasions. The worst by far was on Sunday when we woke up to discover that our basement had flooded thanks to the cold snap- a pipe had frozen and then broken when the weather warmed up. I spent about forty minutes helping Q. ferry things up from the basement before I realized I had started cramping. That earned me an automatic trip to the couch for the rest of the day, with orders from Q. to concern myself with nothing more pressing than keeping E. entertained. But when the cramping didn’t subside quickly and in fact only increased in strength the longer I sat there, my mood degenerated.

Logically, as I said to my saint of a sister who dropped everything to come over and help Q. carry all the things that were too heavy for me to lift, a pregnancy that could be uprooted by something as simple as carrying a few things up and down stairs was one that wasn’t going to make it. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.

Logical, yes, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

By evening things had settled down a bit, and I remembered that I freaked out about cramping with E.’s pregnancy too (and probably right around the same point).

I’ve been a bit more on an even keel ever since.

It’s been stressful, however, to have to ‘out’ myself as pregnant. Not to friends or family- we’re not telling anyone who didn’t already know that we were in the middle of the IVF cycle until we hit twelve weeks (with the exception of our parents- we told them last time at the eight week mark and we might do the same this time if all goes well). No, it’s the medical practitioners.

First I had to email my GP’s office to request that they fax a referral letter to my endocrinologist. He requires a referral letter to be sent annually and he won’t let you make a new appointment unless this happens. I should have done this back in early December after I last saw him, but I dropped that ball during the IVF. In the email I had to say that it was a relatively urgent matter because I’d just learned I was pregnant and he would need to see me.

Then I had to call my endocrinologist’s office to see if my GP’s office had sent the referral (luckily they had). The receptionist started to book me for May, so I had to interrupt and say I’d just learned I was pregnant. Instead of May I now have an appointment tomorrow morning.

And finally my midwives called back to offer me care, and assigned as my primary midwife the woman who was my backup last time and who ended up delivering E. This made me so happy, but it meant another phone call, another appointment to schedule (this one is on the 15th, a week Wednesday).

Every time I got a little bit more nervous.

I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. If you want a midwife in my city, you have to call the second you find out you’re pregnant. And it makes sense to see my endocrinologist as soon as possible so he can raise the dose of my synthroid to make sure everything will be kept under control in the early weeks of the pregnancy.

These are good, sensible things to be doing. They are signs of a responsible pregnant person.

It still makes me feel like I’m waving a giant red flag at the bull of the universe, essentially shouting out, “Hey! Look! There’s an infertile who’s barely into her pregnancy and she’s making APPOINTMENTS like it’s just going to go along normally!”

Nothing bad has happened yet.

But it is so very hard not to assume that something will.

2.0 IVF 13dp5dt- Happy New Year

So here’s the thing.

I have thought, for a week now, that I’m pregnant.

Two things have done this: the fact that my face massively broke out, and the insane bloat/fullness in my abdomen.

I have refused to breathe a word of this to anyone, not even Q., because I knew that it could be from progesterone and holiday eating and I couldn’t bear to get it wrong again.

I didn’t get it wrong.

The clinic called.

Beta was 835.

Repeat beta and an intralipid infusion on Saturday.

I’ve called my midwives already.

You guys. I’M PREGNANT!