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Mostly Mildly Mental Infertile Multiple Madness.
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Shhhh…..I’m trying to ovulate.
I wish it was that easy.
That’s another two weeks of daily sex (you know, just in case). Even my (ever horny) man is getting kinda over the whole horizontal folk dance, and I’m fairly sure that it takes a lot to turn men off….
It’ll be two years of failed attempts at conception in October.
I think that’s an anniversary that will absolutely require alcohol to celebrate.
I could sandpaper anything smooth, just with the unbridled power of the insides of my eyelids. The grit on those suckers is something else, right now.
I’ve turned into one of those people that we all smirk at for nodding off on the train, and jerking to consciousness just as their stop goes sailing by. I hope I at least don’t drool.
Last night, my dear husband, of the soon-to-be-shortened lifespan, decided that since he was sleeping, I couldn’t. Not deliberately (I think, fatigue makes me paranoid), but it was a torture campaign nonetheless. I would have spilled state secrets, including my total number of sexual partners, for it to stop.
First, it was the the energetic tossing and turning side to side. I figured that he was just getting comfy, and I could handle that. But then began the inching over my side of the bed. Then the flick in the face with the duvet. Then the karate style kick across the shins (apparently he was dreaming he was being attacked, I’m not going to tell him just how close to the truth he was by that point).
Finally he lapsed into erratic snores and snorts….quiet for a while, and just when I was drifting off… ‘Snaaaaark, sniffle, sniff,….’
I don’t see any possible way for this to end well if it happens again tonight. Water will be poured.
A bit more on the abortion thing, I’m enjoying (perversely) the opportunity to be on my high horse some more.
As Cece said (in reply to my bitch about the UK’s recent stirrings with regard to termination of pregnancy)…
Politicians have NO right to tell us what we can or can’t do with our bodies.
Assholes.
She also brought to my attention the recent decision in the US to restrict access to a certain type of second trimester termination. This blogger summarises why it’s all so daft far better than I could.
Sigh.
These sort of decisions are not easy for the mother or her doctor to make. Restricting things further is just madness.
God, it’s times like this that I’m very relieved that nobody I know in person has access to this URL.
I’m going to talk about what frantically bonking-like-the-proverbial-rabbits trying to make a baby does to your sex life.
For some time now, sex has been about how-many-days-pre-ovulation I might be, and just how many horizontal folk dances within this given time frame is enough? Really. Given that I ovulate somewhat erratically, even medicated, this often leads to two week long nookie marathons.
Weeks of get-it-up, get-it-in and get-it-out as quickly as possible, so we can sleep. Followed by some nonchalant, ‘Everyone does this after sex’ propping of the buttocks up on a pillow afterwards. Hell. I’ve even considered standing on my head.
It’s exhausting, and unsurprisingly enough, very unromantic and un-fun.
Rather unlike the early rooting-like-rabbits sex that goes on early in a relationship, where NOT getting pregnant is the prime goal.
The point to all of this rather embarrassing admission?
I actually, for the first time in a very long while, kind of fancied a bit of action last night. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, giggle etc etc.
I’d forgotten that it can be fun.
I know that I’m generally a bit of an irritable sod, but I managed to find another thing that is capable of shitting me to tears, if you’ll pardon the language.
This gem comes from no less than the BBC Health Page .
The abortion debate has been reignited in the UK by revolutionary ultrasound scans showing pictures of a 12 week-old foetus seemingly walking in the womb.
There have been calls for the legal time limit for abortions to be reduced from 24 to 12 weeks and Prime Minister Tony Blair has hinted that the law may be re-examined.
I hope those “calls” are not serious ones, at a minimum there HAS to be an exclusion for foetal anomoly incompatible with life (dodging the whole “social” later term abortion issue for a minute). Otherwise, the implication is that in a modern first world nation, a woman in the situation I was in would have HAD to carry to term. Can you imagine?
To make it clear, I think the women who DO carry babies with anencephaly to term are extraordinarily brave. I wish I had had the guts. I’d have a birth/death certificate/pictures/something instead of the aching nothing I have now. But I couldn’t have. And even though ending my pregnancy was one of the hardest things I ever had to make myself do, I am eternally greatful that I was given that option.
I’m not even going to mention further the following article, which equates later terminations with women not realising they were pregnant. Judgement, much? I wouldn’t have had a clue either, if I hadn’t been so obsessively trying to reproduce.
Ending a pregnancy is traumatic. Period. It doesn’t matter as to the how or why you got where you did. I hate this unmentioned implication that “Oh well, I’ll just have an abortion” is the response to the late “oops”.
Or am I being oversensitive?
I ran 5.3 kilometers in thirty minutes today.
I’m not going to lie, I really wanted to stop, but I didn’t.
I think I’m just about back in shape.
To be honest, I’d like to be a lazy couch potato, eat sweets and drink fizzy drink, but my glucose metabolism is a bit iffy. You know you REALLY want a baby when you literally eat cardboard and run your ass off at 8 am most days.
Blech.
Amusingly enough (If you’re short on humour), over six weeks after the baby died the lab is still labelling me “pregnant”. Ha! Little do they know.
Fortunately my beta is down to a measly eight, so I think it’s a mere small technicality of time until I’m (officially) NOT pregnant.
On the added bonus front, I would have been 20 weeks tomorrow. My bill for the maternal serum screening that I never even got the pleasure of the results for (because the ultrasound was such a show stopper) is due.
This time, I have the pleasure of only parting with $100. Small mercies.
Reading http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Story.aspx?id=1078&lang=1&g=0 this morning made me cry.
It’s excerpts from a book written by the lovely Tertia (of So Close fame, the link to her blog is on the right). I’m going to quote just one of them:
Brave? I don’t know. Stubborn? Maybe. Determined? Probably. As terrifying as it is to go through yet another fertility treatment, the alternative is far more frightening to me. The alternative is not trying and therefore facing the possibility of a childless future. And that, for me, is terrifying.
I can feel myself getting more and more insular, more obsessed. I can think of nothing else. The yearning for a child is consuming me; it is all I do, all I think about. Suddenly the big world outside is fraught with potential for hurt – pregnant women and babies are everywhere, all daily reminders of my failing.
The only time I feel even remotely happy is when I’m on the Internet, winding my way through the cyber world. I find solace and information in the computer. I spend hours online, searching, researching, looking for stories, miracles or miracle cures, for stories of hope and inspiration.
Infertility bulletin boards are the coffee shops of cyber space. It’s a place where you can hang out with like-minded people, people in the same boat as you. These people get where you’re at. They can relate. They understand your pain.
My dad urges me, gently, to see a psychologist. But what use is talking? Talking won’t change reality. I’ll walk into the appointment barren, I’ll leave barren. What’s the point? I don’t want to see anyone; in fact, I don’t want to leave my house. I want to stay inside and never come out.
I’ve been thinking of buying this book for a while, but perhaps I’d better wait until I’ve ended my own infertility journey (with or without children).
I admit that I don’t quite understand my own feelings, but for some reason, this text is all just too close to home, whilst at the same time being about a completely different experience. My baby never even got to be born, I haven’t even hit my first IVF, but I understand the ache to have a living, healthy child and how it is impossible NOT to keep trying. Even if my psyche is taking a severe beating.
I’ve been in a funk since approximately 5pm yesterday. That’s 24 whole hours of self indulgent weeping and “I can’t go on with this” palaver that my darling husband is going to have to add to his list of grievances when he finally snaps and gives me the old heave-ho (I *think* I’m joking on that point, but I’m really pushing the man lately).
The chromosomes for PBWCLEW came back. Normal.
Clearly the baby was, most emphatically, not normal. The only conclusion I can draw with my I’m-skating-awfully-close-to-clinical-depression-and-only-do-negative-cognition brain is the following.
I turned a normal baby with normal DNA into one missing the most critical part of it’s central nervous system. Into the kind of baby that is still parts of folklore and superstition in parts of the world. Into a baby that still has the word “monster” attached to the definition in some sources.
I dread to think what that says about me….I think a date with Zoloft is looking more and more like a good thing to do. I haven’t mentioned the eating part till now, but that’s not going so well, I’m not sleeping and I’m full of self recrimination and negative thoughts. At least I still have insight, mercifully, that I’m behaving like a total twat….
These past few days or so, I’ve been back to having trouble sleeping. Extreme-sports level sleep deprivation has never been something I’ve been good at. I wouldn’t mind if it was all in a good cause (you know, like maybe a baby, finally), but this is just ridiculous. Apart from anything else, lying awake all night is dead boring. There’s nothing going on, nothing on TV and my husband churlishly refuses to stay up and keep me company.
Courtesy of fatigue-induced brain failure, I keep repeating myself and asking the same questions (probably to the same people) all day, which makes me, in all probability, a little unrewarding to talk with. All my (limited) cognitive powers are devoted to stopping myself from yawning and inspecting the insides of my eyelids. Do you know how hard it is NOT to yawn when you really want to?
Yet, at night time, magically, a switch is thrown and I ruminate over things obsessively. I think the only cure will be a far more drastic re-arrangement of daylight savings time, i.e. can we all please just be up when it is dark and cozy in bed when it’s light? That would be most appreciated.
I start my OB term next week, which I have an inking just might be the prompt for the renewed lack of sleep cycle. I’m very worried about several aspects (apart from having perineum to examine all day for 10 weeks, hell it’s an improvement on bums or scrotum and talking about poos with 5 year olds).
One of my (male) fellow students pointed out that owning a vagina is a real advantage with this Mysterious Womens‘ Business into which we are to all be indoctrinated (He doesn’t know the HALF of it). Honey, it’s factory standard, along with the zits and infertility and the tendency to grow babies without a CNS. Still wish you had one? Thought not.
To be honest, I don’t know if I can have pregnant bellies in my face all day, do antenatal clinics, deliver babies and learn about birth defects and terminations without totally losing it. I don’t think, in a kind world (to be self indulgent), that I should have to.
But the world is not especially kind, and if I don’t, then I can’t graduate.
You wouldn’t believe the kind of motivation that comes from having been a student for twelve (Not Kidding!) years. I hope it’s enough to get me through.
Guess what??
Nope, not pregnant.
I’ve coped with the (very expected) situation quite well, I think. I’ve only let one teeny-tiny measly Defcon-Ten F-bomb drop in the privacy of my own home. How’s that for restraint?
I’m sure that the people peacefully enjoying a barbeque on their balcony next door will get over the shock of my profanity.
I hope my announcement about the emptiness of my uterus didn’t surprise too many of you.
Back to the drawing board……..
I know that it isn’t over until the fat lady sings, but my temperature has taken an ominous dive this morning. Fat lady, your cue….
Sigh.
I had been hiding, deep down, dreams of being able to tell people that I was pregnant. Again. Already. In my fantasy world, it was going to be the most wonderful cure all for PBWCLEW. Of course it was going to go perfectly smoothly for 40 weeks, followed by the easiest delivery and most lovable baby that ever did scream all night.
I knew that Hope* was seductive, but come on. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango, so the fault is at least partially mine for the optimistic indiscretion I made.
God I’m daft. And not pregnant. AND unlikely to be any time soon.
Now I’d just like to get the hemorrhaging over with so I can delude myself for another six to eight weeks that it could be “the” cycle.
* I’d like to clarify that by “Hope” I mean the emotion, and most emphatically NOT the big-lipped, amazingly-pneumatically-racked soapie character. She freaks me right out.
Today I’ve had the hot tip that I’m less important than a new mother. Glad that was cleared up. I feel so much better about myself for growing a baby with a fatal birth defect, now I’ve got it into my thick skull.
As for the inciting event, you ask?
My OB’s secretary called asking to change my appointment time from a Friday several weeks away, to the Thursday. Since my university never thinks I have a life or deserve to know what I’m doing that far in advance, I had no idea if *either* time was good or bad. The point being, it was all the same to me.
I’d already said ‘Yes, sure, fine’ and only thought the ‘whatever’ about the altered time, when she kept talking.
I assume that she was trying to apologise for moving the time, rather than rub it in that my baby is dead. She goes on to explain that a woman who has just had a beautiful healthy baby needs my appointment time more than I do, and if I could just take the one she doesn’t want, well, that would be so swell of me. Glad I could be of service.
And before you ask, yes she knows what happened, I spoke to her the day we found out about what was wrong with PBWCLEW. She just didn’t stop to think.
Got it. No baby. Not pregnant any more. Not important.
Glad we cleared that up for once and for all.
This post comes with a warning. Those looking for information about either:
a) My reproductive tract,
b) My current state of fertility,
c) Either of the same with relation to my husband, or
d) Complaints about all of the above
Please move along. I’m going to talk about my bowels instead.
No, really, I mean it…..
The focus of my posts is usually on one of two other bodily orifices, specifically either orifice “A” (in the context of stupid things that come out of my mouth) and orifice “B” (fertility-related things involving an orifice that is most emphatically NOT my mouth, has to do with babymaking and lives in my underwear most of the time).
I just couldn’t resist a sharing cautionary tale, and thus including orifice “C” for the one and only time. Okay, so it does involve “A” to some degree as well.
Yesterday I was in the supermarket casually browsing the sweetie aisle. I promise it wasn’t for my own selfish needs, I was there just in case a box of chocolate happened to launch itself lemming-style off the shelf and I could save it from certain death on the linoleum by virture of a well-interposed shopping basket. Whilst looking for said precariously balanced chocolate, I made what I thought was a brilliant discovery…..sweeties with no fat or sugar!
Bonus thought I, a guilt free treat, and proceeded to buy three packs.
Needless to say I spent last night and this morning stuffing my face in dental-friendly sugar-free heaven.
Big Mistake.
About an hour ago rumblings of a disturbingly uncomfortable nature began to emerge from my lower abdomen, complete with that gotta go NOW sensation.
Putting two-and-two into four, I checked the remaining lolly packet and there’s a tiny warning about excess consumption and laxative effect.
They weren’t kidding. Take it from me.
Now if you could just excuse me for 5 minutes…..
I’d just like to point out (before anybody else does) that, yes Virginia, I am a sucker for a voice of authority….
To quote myself:
Exhibit A, written on April fools’ day, no less:
“Additionally, if anybody else tells me that pregnancy is a great suppression therapy for PCOS it may end badly (especially if I know where you live, I’m devious).”
And….Exhibit B (just yesterday)
“Coming back to the RE and The Plan. The Plan at the moment appears to be to see what happens. Reasonable, but also frustrating.To be honest I was so busy blabbing about how crap I’ve been feeling and sobbing with gratitude about her help that I clean forgot to pin her down on how-many-cycles-of-what type specifics. Uncharacteristic, I know. Apparently being pregnant is good suppression for pcos so I may ovulate on my own ok’ish for a while…..”
Spot the error?
Interval between posts eight days
How quickly they forget…….
It’s only two sleeps (Ha! More like 1.2 total sleeps) until the RE appointment.
I just hope I get some good news and an Aggressive Plan.
Call me selfish, but I really want to be pregnant again. Apart from the bad stuff that happened, it was kinda cool. I liked the bump, even if none of my clothes fit.
Plus, to be honest, it was pretty fun having a blanket excuse for endless Fish’n'Chips…
Um, I have a confession to make….
Houston, we *do* have ovulation.
In fact, its an un-medicated personal best, coming in under 30 days. I just about managed to ovulate before a woman with a better behaved reproductive tract would have menstruated. Shocking, I know.
Now what am I going to gripe to my RE about?
It’s hit me this morning that this means that I am officially in my 8th two week wait, and the first since PLBWCLEW died. Never mind that it’s taken 16 months to have eight, I’m young *cough*, I’ve got time. Or so well the meaning like to tell me.
Am I going to obsess over possibly being pregnant? Nah, I mean, what would the odds of THAT be?
A small celebration is in order, however, I can start treatment in two-ish weeks.
I missed that ultrasound probe…..
For those of you who are playing at home.
http://www.fertilityfriend.com/home/144066
My temperature chart has a suspicious wiggle in it.
It go down, it go level and it go up.
Somebody call NASA, Houston, do we have ovulation?.
I, ever the pessimist, remain to be convinced. I prefer to think that maybe my chart is telling me to go hiking, it has that kind of look to it. If it *was* ovulation it was the whimpiest, saddest, little ‘pop’ in a bid for the full complement of chromosomes that a half-arsed ovum ever did make.
AND after all my talk about sexual Dedication To The Cause, I don’t think we even did the horizontal folk dance anywhere NEAR the right days.
Figures..
Or maybe you just might….
To give some background, my biological mother has not had any contact with myself or my sister since my parents divorced when I was about two. This isn’t a post about the fractal nature of my trans-continental family however, so I won’t go into all that mess any further (except to say that nuclear family always struck me as a rather unfortunate expression).
My younger sister decided, recently, as an adult, that she wanted contact, and by the miracle that is the internet, she succeeded. I chose not to, for reasons that probably aren’t too relevant here.
The only request I made was to get a family tree and medical history so that I knew if there were any hidden nasties. I did find out a while back about the thrombophilia (which I have to re-screen for now I’m no longer pregnant).
It gets even better (by which I mean worse), if that’s at all possible.
You’ll never guess what I found out last night….
My MOTHER has spina bifida occulta. It’s a mild form of spina bifida where, usually, the person who has it is fine, but it IS a NTD .
It turns out that after blithely denying any history of problems my own sodding mother has a mild NTD.
There’s nothing occult about NTD’s in my family any more.
After all this mess, I find out information that would have probably had me taking 5mg of folate just in case.
Without rewinding time I can never be completely *sure*, but my baby’s death was possibly entirely preventable with a small tablet that costs a few cents. If only I had known that simple piece of information.
How I wish I’d known.
Today I had lunch with one of my closest girlfriends, for the first time since the whole PBWCLEW thing.
To refresh any failing memories…. you know, the pregnancy I fretted about relentlessly (and with great skill) until I was rewarded with something to REALLY worry about in the shape of an anencephalic baby who had every intention of going to term. Cutting a long story short, with the metaphorical gun to our heads, we gutwrenchingly decided that we had Other Plans about *that* given I would have gone start raving mad if I’d tried it (and got pretty darn close anyway).
I would have been 16 weeks a few days ago.
Instead of this happy scenario however, I have had the pleasure of an unforgettable un-fun wait for a, to call the proverbial spade a not-shovel, abortion (a word I hate to use). Closely followed by a stress-induced crash diet that has people commenting on how fabulous I’m looking lately. I’m tempted to blame it on amphetamine abuse or some such grossly inappropriate response, if only because I can’t shock people with the truth (although I’ve been sorely tempted at times).
The memories.
So, coming back to my (very lovely) friend.
Having had enough time since the acute fallout to not feel the need to inflict the gory details of my pain on others when I see them (until they squirm or cry, and I perversely feel a little better), it was safe for me to go out to lunch in public.
I was even happy to see her (beautifully healthy) baby daughter.
But
Well meaning advice (argggh) did strike again.
I mentioned the recurrence risk (say for convenience 1 in 20), and this normally wonderfully-brilliantly-sarcastic-twisted-bitter-woman-that-I-love-to-bits went all pollyanna on me and pointed out that 19 out of 20 would be fine. I’m glad I got THAT cleared up without the benefit of a calculator…
Additionally, if anybody else tells me that pregnancy is a great suppression therapy for PCOS it may end badly (especially if I know where you live, I’m devious).
Besides, my zit collection would beg to differ.
