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I’m sure that anyone who has struggled with infertility can understand exactly how I’m feeling at Thanksgiving this year. Instead of going into a bunch of mushy sentiment that is probably pretty obvious, I will instead leave you with what I’m superficially thankful for this year:
Bra extenders
Thank you to whoever came up with this fantastic invention. My ribs and back are deeply appreciative. So is my pocketbook.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Today marks exactly 90 days from my due date. I can’t believe that in less than three months our baby girl will be due. Of course when she decides to actually grace us with her presence will be an entirely different matter, but she’s due in 90 days. In some respects, the past 190 days have passed by quickly and in others they seem to have crawled by. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for a really long time already, but also feel like it was just yesterday when I finally saw those two pink lines for the first time. What a mixed bag of emotions it all is. I know that the next month and a half will fly by with the holidays and I’m sure that February 18th will be here before I know it.
So far the second trimester has been treating me well. My bleeding/spotting seemed to stop pretty much right around the start of the second trimester and I am so thankful for that. I still have moments when I panic thinking that I may be bleeding, but upon further inspection find that everything is ok. On the whole, I feel good emotionally about this pregnancy. I’ve moved beyond the “afraid the other shoe is going to drop” stage and am just trying to enjoy things.
Appearance wise I feel like I’ve finally “popped” within the last week or two and actually look like I’m pregnant now versus ambiguously chubby. It’s amazing to catch a glimpse of myself in a window reflection or mirror and realize that the large bellied woman staring back is actually me. It’s very surreal for me and I’m still getting used to it.
I have another OB appointment on Monday and I’m a little afraid to get on the scale. I’m pretty sure that I’ve gained over 30 pounds since my transfer and assuming that I have at least 13 weeks to go, I could do some serious damage. I am definitely interested to see how my uterus is measuring though. At my last appointment my doctor said I was measuring “a little small,” but he wasn’t worried about it. 97% of me is not worried about it either, but 3% of me does think about it though and I hope that I’m back “on schedule” on Monday. I know that these measurements aren’t the most reliable and I shouldn’t read too much into it, but if it continues to be lower than it should be, I will ask what can be done to reassure me about the situation.
All in all, things are good and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 90 days hold for us!
My closest friend from my support group is THAT girl. You know, the one who had some absolutely odd defying thing happen to her and people talk about her anecdotally like “My best friend’s, husband’s, sister’s cousin…” Yes, I know her.
I met Jill about a year and a half ago at my first support group meeting. She had been trying to get pregnant for a little over two years at that point and there was absolutely no explanation for why they weren’t succeeding. Her willingness to honestly and openly share her feelings about what she was going through and her ability to see the humor in something that, by definition, was anything BUT funny drew me in. While I love all of the girls in my support group, she was the one I was rooting for the most, she was the one I most wanted to see succeed. I could envision her as just the best mom that any child could ever want, and the thought of her not having that opportunity broke my heart.
As the group floundered through last summer, trying desperate last ditch attempts at IUI, or special diets or herbs, Jill and I were preparing for our first IVF cycles in October. October came and went, my IVF was cancelled due to poor response and I was devastated. Part of what helped me through the disappointment of my cancelled cycle was being able to follow along with Jill’s cycle and be a cheerleader for her. Her cycle went great, and though she ended up with a positive beta, it was low and didn’t double properly; she had a chemical pregnancy. While she was heartbroken at the outcome, she picked up the pieces and was looking forward to cycling again soon. She was part of a shared risk program and was happy to have two more fresh tries left.
As she and I were getting ready for our second attempts at IVF, we found out that another woman in our group would be trying her first IVF cycle at the same time. It was so exciting to have the support of real life people during that time and knowing that we could potentially be pregnant together and have kids right around the same age was fun to daydream about. Right before Jill was going to start her cycle, she got a call from her clinic telling her that her cycle would be a frozen one, not fresh, since she had one embryo frozen from her previous attempt and her shared risk contract required her to use her frozen embryos before doing another fresh cycle. She was beyond depressed about the news, thinking that her one little embryo couldn’t possibly have a chance and it would just be a waste of time and money. We did our best to cheer her up and give her hope for her one embryo and we all went through our two week waits together cheering each other on along the way. Though things didn’t work out for me or the other woman, we were ecstatic to find out that Jill’s one little embryo did indeed take and she was pregnant with a nice high beta.
Everything appeared to be going well and Jill’s first ultrasound showed her baby with a healthy heartbeat and her doctor told her that her chance of miscarriage dropped from 20% to 8%. She was feeling confident about things and was therefore absolutely shocked to find at the next ultrasound that her baby’s heart had stopped beating. She went through a horrible miscarriage and eventual D&C in the ER and came out of the whole situation as just a shell of Jill that I had known before. I felt absolutely awful in that I didn’t know what to do for her or how to support her best. I did the only thing that I could think of and reminded her of all of the really great things that she had in her life and what a fantastic partner her husband was through everything. She decided to focus on those things and scheduled a vacation for her and her husband in Mexico.
Meanwhile, she was having her betas checked with her OB to make sure that her HCG levels were dropping appropriately and also met with her RE to discuss the next steps. Her RE wanted to do an SHG to make sure that nothing was left in her uterus and then move forward with another IVF cycle, which Jill agreed to. Surprisingly, the SHG showed a polyp that hadn’t been seen previously, and the RE felt that it would be best to remove the polyp before going forward with the next IVF cycle. The hysteroscopy was scheduled for a Friday and on Thursday Jill had another check to make sure that her beta was still dropping from the miscarriage.
Amazingly, miraculously, her beta, which had been below 50 for a couple of weeks came back at nearly 600. The “polyp” that they found during the SHG was, in all likelihood, her baby implanting itself in her uterus. She and her husband had sex just once since the miscarriage, on Valentine’s day, no less, and now she was pregnant. Completely naturally.
In the early morning hours on Sunday, my friend Jill, who had been pregnant 3 times in less than 6 months and suffered through more heartache than any woman should ever have to endure, finally saw her deepest desires come true. She gave birth to her beautiful, healthy son. Her Facebook status says that she is in love with her little miracle, and I know that nothing could be more true. My heart could not be any happier for her right now.
Beyond my sheer joy for Jill and her family, her story gives me hope for all of the women who are struggling with infertility. We hear about women who conceive in the most unlikely scenarios, after years and years of trying. We want to believe that maybe, just maybe, one day we will be one of those women. While the women who get pregnant in such improbable ways are few and far between, they are out there. I know one of them. And that in itself gives me hope.
Yes, I’ve been well aware of my absence over the past five, nearly six weeks. It crosses my mind every few days that I should really post something to my blog. And I have stuff to post; thoughts, emotions, experiences that I’ve been thinking about and wanting to document. I just haven’t had the motivation to sit down and actually write them down.
I’ve determined that it would be absolutely awesome if I could blog in the shower. I do a lot of thinking when I’m in the shower. Not on purpose, my mind just seems to wander as I thinking about the prior day or what’s on the schedule for the current day. I think about situations that I experienced, how I react to them, how they affect me and I think “that would be such a really great blog post.” And then I never get around to writing it out.
I’ve gotten bogged down in what any normal, sane person would consider to be mundane. You see, I’m what some would call obsessive. Anal maybe is a better term for it (oooh, can’t wait to see what kind of searches are going to be linked to my blog from using that term!). I’m a research queen. I need to know all of the facts, opinions, reviews, school of thought, etc. before I can commit to anything. And by no means is anything baby related exempt from this compulsive behavior of mine. In fact, anything that has to do with our baby is probably subjected to even more scrutiny than my average obsessiveness. And I’m drowning in my own desire for knowledge.
I find myself spending hours a day on the computer researching my newest obsession, cloth diapering. My desire for knowledge (and cheap diapers) cannot be quelled. I’m pretty sure that I know everything there is to know about cloth diapering at this point (without having any actual hands on diapering experience), but I’m still not satisfied. I cannot even begin to estimate the amount of time I’ve spent on this matter. And it makes me sad and a little bit angry when I think of all of the time that I’ve spent obsessively going over little things like this that, in the end, probably don’t really matter all that much.
So today I resolve to try to spend less time planning out what products we will use, how I will give birth, and how everything in our life will work out after this baby girl joins our family. Instead, I will let try to let our lives just happen and focus on enjoying today what we have now. And if we make a poor choice on something now and again, well isn’t that all just part of experience?
One Small Wish...Granted 