Place

Okay, so I’m rather late to the healing salon party and in a way I don’t think it matters.

Knowing me, I’m probably not writing about quite the right thing, anyway, because gad knows I’ve spent the better part of seven years blogging about the wrong thing in as much detail as humanly possible. Some of the things I’ve gone and written about speculums are dead dodgy, for a start, and there was this time I turned them into a personal art project with mixed results and so on. I’ll leave somebody else to pull my back archives for speculum art because unfortunately I never did create the tag ‘speculum rabbit’ to celebrate the occasion and to be brutally honest the sheer weight of crap I’ve written over the years makes finding the post in question a bit to terrifying at this time of night.

In other words, life has phases, even virtual ones, and for those of you who found my coffee-fuelled ramblings at the frazzled Mama stage, this is my story.

I am a real person.

For those of you who prefer it straight,  these are my kids and this is my life. I have public blogs for both and am happy to share. I try not to get comment linkback here for obvious fanny-related posts aplenty along the IVF brick road way, but a friend acquired here is a friend. Period.

So, once upon a time I wrote about infertility. About dead babies. About my period. About cycle after cycle. About IVF. About miscarriages. About loss.

At the end of the day what I write about is my life so over the years what I write about has changed. My life has changed. I write about my ridiculously funny, wonderful, terrifying, rewarding, life-hogging job, my children, the family I finally have. I even write about my blasted home renovations or at least I plan to when I can get around it because goodness knows if I haven’t already bored the socks off of the last reader, then writing about paint colours should do the job for me.

I write about my life and that’s all I can do. I’m not good at other stuff. I like to write about my feelings, my day, the things I probably shouldn’t put on social media. I’ve done it for seven years and I guess this blog is seven years of me, in a slightly neurotic nutshell.

I don’t have the time I used to. I  adore working in obgyn, but it’s pretty much a lifestyle option. Accordingly, I have to pony up and pass some real ass big girly part doctor exams one of these days.  I also have three children.

Something has to give. I don’t write as often as the post come into my head. I simply can’t anymore.

But I write, anyway. Half the time i should really be doing something else, like folding the neverending pile of washing, but instead I write to you all.

Because I want to and it’s as simple as that.

I write about my infertility, about my losses, about my children, about my work and about ME. I can’t change it. I can’t sex it up any.  My place may not be squarely in the infertility blogosphere any more, but I am here nonetheless. I can’t say I fancy chasing fresh readers in Mamablogland because what I write isn’t conditional on how many people read. I just write. From both sides of the stirrups.

I plan to keep writing. I aim to be funny as piss if I can do so, because personally that’s about  the best coping strategy I have and goodness knows I’m going to be stressed enough over the next half a dozen years to need a little light relief. A vent. I don’t think there’ll be any new stuff about IVF. I could be wrong, but for so very many reasons I think that part of my life is done. But if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of the stirrups, then I guess I’m your lass. The one with the bad reproductive past history.

I can’t control my audience, who and how many. It doesn’t matter.

I write because I want to do so and I thank you all, whatever brings you here and however many of you there may or may not be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Bhaji is being a right bugger and has just escaped from her baby straightjacket for the third time in an hour and is duly flailing looking for the boobie. Yes, I am cussing myself for that particular sleep association right now.

g

Break.

Hi, I’m Geohde.

I think last wrote something around these parts some time in the Jurassic era but then I swear a Brontosaurus ate my keyboard and a Tyrannosaurus decided I looked exactly like the right kind of sympathetic ear to unload a lengthy diatribe about all that Nasty Predator bad press and how difficult it is to find a good knitting circle when everybody thinks you’ll probably use their ribs for needles and so on.

Yes, I’m making things up and, no, I have no earthly idea when I last posted, either of content full stop let alone content of quality, I’m honestly too plain old tired to check the date. Perhaps we should stick with ‘a dinosaur ate my homework’ and THAT my friends is a shame because I work in a positive pent-up stew of human experience and the inability to share in a timely fashion clearly crimps the old style somewhat.

There was the amusing time I worked two weeks straight with the exception of my birthday at thirty six weeks pregnant, pissing off my boss with the request in the process and still sadly being denied an actual full weekend as such to whinge about my sausage legs while laying sprawled on the couch watching reruns of something or other on TV.

There was also the almost as funny time that LS decided the Internet connection didn’t seem quite ship-shape and in a fit of ‘fixing’ or ‘improving’ things managed to break it rather impressively. That took three days to fix, all done in bits and cranky pieces at the end of my cover shifts. At thirty seven weeks pregnant.

I can’t say I handed out overmuch sympathy to the whimpers of Internet withdrawal.

Lest I forget there have also been the slightly droll times LS has been interstate on Matters Professional, leaving my heavily gravid self to do it all solo. There’s been quite a bit of that, actually, and really he’s just bloody lucky I haven’t gone into labour when he’s four hours away by plane just to spite him.

I guess I could mention the time that at almost thirty eight weeks pregnant I found myself leaving work two hours late because extracting twins by c-section from somebody with a BMI in the 60s turns out to be rather hard work. The anaesthetist couldn’t hit a vein with a standard length cannula and an ultrasound machine and that was just the beginning of our collective troubles. The bit where we converted to a general anaesthetic mid-stream was kind of hairy, but I think the kicker was when she just kept on trickling blood post operatively and I had my hand to my elbow through abdominal wall and still had no earthly idea if her uterus was actually responding to enough oxytoxic agents to make cement look all soft because I couldn’t feel it.

That was today and I hope she’s okay.

Tomorrow is my last hurrah at work, I am hoping to finish in a knackered blaze of sharp with a scalpel in hand and THEN ladies of the Internet, I plan to get some bastard I work with to actually recheck my enormous fundal height and my blood pressure because I haven’t had an obstetric visit myself in nearly three weeks on accounts of the clinics being overrun with too many pissed off pregnant women as it is (without losing a staff member to the other side of Angry Wait) and my legs, they dint to about my knee and my vision has been a little starry of late and honestly saying  I feel a tad on the second hand side is missing the chance to abuse the delightful expression ‘like refried shit’.

Mostly I’m just writing to say Hello and I Haven’t Given Birth Yet. I’ve also gone and pushed back my own c-section to two weeks hence because I need a bloody break before I can face a newborn.

G

PS. Am contracting like a b!tch almost all the time these days and somehow I don’t think it agrees with me.

The Most.

The thing that makes a relative blogging drought, okay even an entirely reasonable blogging drought on accounts of working like a blue-arsed fly just weeks from term and sleeping like a dead elephant with a seriously bad nose-mucus-congestion snoring problem that contracts just painfully enough to wake right up three times a bloody hour every hour all damn night because THAT my friends is what I call a full and active social diary these days, anyway I am rambling.

I also realise dead elephants usually fail to snore in any way on accounts of general deadness. They probably also don’t contract for broadly similar reasons.

The thing is that not writing every day to bitch about things that currently piss one off, like, um, pretty much everything, makes it kind of intimidating when one does eventually throw some fuel on the sleep deprivation fire and stay up to the dizzying hour of nine pm to communicate. Be gentle, please, dear reader.

Basically, Internet, if a nebulous ‘it’ moved or passed into my field of vision in the last week, it probably annoyed me.

I think perhaps there is just a smidgeon of self righteous foot stamping thrown in for good measure, too, since LS has now on the cusp of thirty six weeks gestation unilaterally decided to throw the proposed consensus name out the proverbial window and wants to call this child something that sounds like it comes from a particularly excited Italian car dealer with a gift for exaggeration in ten syllables and fifty screaming vowels. Give or take.

Also, over my dead body or HIS if he keeps it up.

Additionally, I currently look like this(or a slightly more fed up version but attaching my camera-phone to my slow computer pisses me off too much to try at this point too. Unsurprisingly):

And feel like THIS:

Which is THIS much better than I felt at this point with the twins:

But despite that, my request for a small weekend reprieve from working twelve days straight at nearly term including three thirteen hour shifts in a four day period of those twelve with a mere ten hour ‘cover’ thrown in the mix (presumably for lifestyle and balance and stuff) on my birthday was deemed excessively decadent and thus I am now only working the three thirteen hour shifts instead of having an actual weekend off.

My cankles are whimpering, and my mood? She is not getting any better at the news.

Regardless, if I got to bed tonight and wake up into morning without exploding amniotic fluid all over the bathroom floor at 3am then I am officially the most unhappily pregnant I have ever been and if I DO, I think I know why.

Sigh.

At least THAT way I’d get the weekend to myself.

G

Vee Back.

Hello lovely ladies (and really I expect only an ever shrinking cohort of ladies of the Internet at large) who have the patience to watch me periodically dust the cobwebs off of the old blog and whinge about how lucky I am to extract out of infertility three probably robustly healthy children, armed solely with the powers of the good people of mastercard.

Yes, you. Hello.

It’s been a while again and I fully blame raising three year old twins, one who sounds like she has a particularly hard to shake pack-a-day habit and who, unfortunately for all of our reposes or lack thereof is the I-Do-Not-Do-Discomfort-No-Matter-How-Minor Naan. Naan has a cold. I’ve never been more pissed at a bunch of virions in my life because this means that in due course both Saag, LS and myself shall all fall sway and the only thing worse than two toddlers with a cold is having a verified man-cold situation while working full time. At thirty five weeks. Full time working pregnant women with three whiny patients at home don’t get colds, they just suck it up and run screaming to the safety of work. Lesser of two evils.

Regardless.

I am here and I am more or less well and I now have the perfect out for all the naysayers who think that listening to the urogynaecologists speak their evil words about prolapse and various bits of clever mesh is weak behaviour. BN is, yet again as far as we can tell within the limits of modern guesstimation etc and ad nauseum, very fat, floating way high and I seem to be measuring in the range known as ‘bloody uncomfortable term’ and thus today I got told that should I change my mind in a fit of whimsy, I’d probably just hear the words ‘we really recommend a caesarean’ and if I persisted, possibly a silent ‘you fool, you’re screwing our statistics’.

Not that I am exactly embracing the date with the scalpel since I am trying to put it off for as long as humanly possible, a minor contest of wills that happens at every antenatal visit where I come up with as many new reasons as fifteen minutes permits as to why thirty nine weeks is simply too soon to be strapped down to a table and all cathetered and scalpeled up and my Ob simply smiles serenely and moves on to another subject like turning up in labour because I am a nitwit.

I don’t think she even believed me when I said today that LS is working three hours away that day today and that one, my friends, was true.

Anyway, it is late, I have at least another vomit I need to fit in my crowded social diary before bedtime and, well, the highlight of last week was being extremely tardily referred a woman with a history of short cervix at thirty nine bleeping weeks because the endocrine resident, with breathtaking punctuality and unusual interest in the obstetric management of his patients decided to read the file rather than just fiddle with ze insulin.

I deeply admire the refreshing curiosity if only because it literally made my day to cheerily say ‘love, that’s how they get OUT of there. It’s kind of normal at thirty nine weeks to have a short cervix.’ It wasn’t so great back at twenty four weeks, but hey, we all moved on. Unless you were a trainee endocrinologist, it would seem and you lost what common sense you were born with in a sea of novomix.

Goodnight.

G

The fatness continues.

From back in the dark ages at around the 29/30 mark.

The fatness continues. But blessedly not quite at the rate it did with S+N. Uterine and gluteally, in case you wondered.

None-the-less and despite the ongoing all day spew diet attempts (hint, croissants are surprisingly nasty to vomit, it’s all the bastard little flaky bits that stick in your mouth and make you gag and retch and vomit again that really get on the proverbial wick after a while. Also, no, I do Not Do orange juice any more for similar reasons), I don’t recognise large parts of my anatomy and I haven’t magically acquired the ability to get a pre-pregnancy skirt over more than about one thigh. My bottom, she is well cushioned from the blows of the world.

This too shall pass. Just like a kidney stone, I expect.

I may even miss not seeing half my food twice one day in the fullness of time.

It’s hard to remember I get a whole person at the end of the tunnel from the sea of puke and fatigue, though. Must remember that bit. Ought to chase down that bloody errant crib order, too, because although a newborn baby CAN sleep in a box, it’s not ideal.

G

Bonus.

LS is on a plane-slash-overseas doing conferenc-ey things trip and I probably should by rights be sitting on the couch on my ever expanding arse eating ice cream and watching singing competitions on the box (in my underwear no less) without fear of judgement, but instead I thought I’d say hello to you all.

Hello Internet.

It’s been thirty almost two long LONG weeks of vomiting my guts up and if one more person tells me how big or low or all baby or bleeping radiant I look it is going to end in bloodshed. Other people’s. I am good at making people bleed, I do it for a living except for the bits where I try to stop other people bleeding to death, instead.

Also, I write you this missive because I have somehow cleverly conned the twins into thinking that 7pm is the New Bedtime, despite the fact that one can still hear only slightly older children kicking about some kind of ball in the street and it is still dead bright outside. I am not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth. I said it was bedtime and I guess I should take up professional poker or something because three year olds, especially in combination, are usually remarkably canny suspicious bastards about that sort of thing, yet mine drank their milk and fell for it hook line and tuck-in-goodnight.

Lucky me I guess, at least right up and until the suspiciously canny bastards wake up at four aayy emm or something, but then again since I have to sort out all matters domestic on my tod for a week, an early run up at the get-exceedingly-whiny-twins-and-self-dressed-and-out-the-door-in-time-to-catch-peak-hour game might not be such a bad idea.

Did I mention I am working approximately fifty hours next week in the third trimester with rapidly expanding cankles with three year old whinebots all on my own? Oh, good.

There’s always coffee. If no adult sees me drink it then the trendy judgement never happens, either. Take note, baristas everywhere, on that last bit because the only other thing that is liable to make me bother to move my creaking frame anywhere fast with a scalpel is in response to a spontaneous and repeated offer of decaf.

Yours,

G

PS. I think I told you about the poor, poor woman who had one monochorionic twin die at twenty weeks and then went into labour and lost the other at twenty three weeks and had a nasty case of chorioamnionitis and also managed to come about as close as it gets to bleeding to death afterwards. I should really stop whinging about my life, huh?

PSS. Edited for the grammar. The shame. It’s probably still all wonky and clearly I need more sleep.

Knacker

You’ll never guess this one from the thirty week pregnant full time working mother of very active twins who are currently very busy indeed being princesses with regrettably but one crown between them and don’t ask how THAT is working out because the answer is the obvious ’not very well’, but, guess what?

I am knackered. Pooped. Stuffed. 

I am also utterly shagged out (but only in the metaphorical sense in case you wondered because I can’t think of a single sensible reason that anybody in my whale-shaped swollen state would actually still feel like expending extra energy in sex), buggered (clearly my local vernacular has some unfortunate turns of phrase for colourful descriptions of ‘tired’ and I think I shall simply move straight along without bothering to issue a formal disclaimer) and thoroughly over it, under it and through to the back teeth with it.

If you can’t hear the exhausted sigh emanating from your speakers, Internet, it’s only because I’m too damn tired to record one.

I have another eight weeks of work to go.

I have one whole day in october where I am not either working or on call and thus working at the whim of somebody else’s decision that today is not their day to get out of bed and do some work already.

I think this turn of events is rather unsatisfactory.

Unfortunately, nobody really cares what I think.

Anyway, in case you hadn’t worked out the general drift, I am working this weekend until the heady time of nine thirty pee em, straight through next week as per usual and then I get my one precious work-free October day before I start the next working week early on Sunday.

My cankles can hardly wait.

Really, the whole thing is about as welcome as a fart in a crowded lift set to ‘express all floors’ and if it wasn’t for the minor amusement to be gained from telling anxious grandmothers to be that their daughter, the one currently wailing and flailing in the chair like the world’s most dramatically pregnant pork chop, isn’t even technically in labour yet and that, no,  we don’t do epidurals in the corridor but she is welcome to ask again when we get to birth suite, I don’t know where I’d be.

Actually, yes I do. Asleep in MY bed. Not flailing. I prefer to snore open-mouthed at this gestation, me.

G

Various

Amusing side of coming out about one’s gestation at work at nearly twenty weeks:

1. The medical staff genuinely (mostly) seemed to have no idea.
2. The midwives all knew it already.

I guess that means I know who all quietly just thought I should get a gym membership already and stop with the insane eating were, and that none of them had the nerve to tackle my ever expanding waistline (or suspicious lack thereof under multiple billowy shirts) over it.

Also, don’t ask a doctor to spot a poorly concealed pregnancy, not even an obstetric one because they probably won’t.

It is a nice relief to be able to finally point out that yes, I AM fat right now thank-you-very-much but I am also pregnant and therefore excused. It’s slightly less nice to find that some arseholes who were always pushing for more blood out of my time poor stone at work are all smiles and ’rest, dear, it can wait’ now they know. I could have done with that when I was puking my guts up fifty bazillion times a day as opposed to the modern day one to three’ish.

Sadly, it wasn’t much in the way of fun at all to be noticeably pregnant and deal with the poor couple who terminated their pregnancy at a belated and unfortunate twenty three weeks and five days on grounds of being horribly poorly ill informed about the prognosis of their pregnancy back at sixteen weeks when it all really began to go to hell in a hand-basket.

Pregnant abdomens around women who have just delivered a baby that gasped for a minute and then quietly died are just cruel.

Actually, I am quietly so bloody angry about that last case because to walk around for two whole months allegedly having obstetric care and being told everything will be okay when everything was never going to be remotely okay ever again was just one of the cruellest attempted ass saving manoeuvres I have seen in some years.

G

Out.

Cat Out Of Bag/Box/Whatever.

I told my boss, I kind of had to before some blabbermouth inadvertently did it for me because, put simply, too many people have asked when I’m due lately for the ‘what baby?’ game to be a viable ongoing proposition.

Also, I was getting sick of people giving my guts a sideways look in conversation. I never do get how people think I won’t notice that sort of thing and perhaps it really all was just paranoia after all and when I return to work no longer draping Secret Foetus perhaps I really will cause mass surprise. But I doubt it.

Anyway, the word ‘disaster’ was mentioned, albeit with a friendly smile, and it was an unfortunately rushed corridor conversation (because Bosses are always Busy). All in all, not quite my ideal venue to campaign for my ongoing worth as a medical human being despite occupied uterus and I can only help that the ache I feel in my back isn’t now knife related.

Sigh. At least I don’t have to suck my guts in any more. Better out than in.

G

Nope, not quite.

Hi Internet,

It’s me, the woman with the invisible tongue fur. Remember me?

Yes, I do still go to bed by eight pm but today I am determinedly staying up way late and am dutifully clip-clopping away at my keyboard because, Internet, I miss you. If I don’t make time up aforementioned way late, past when the most determined two year old reveller has packed it in and stopped singing the fifty-billionth verse of ‘This Old Man’, well, I never seem to actually turn my computer on at all.

Sigh.

Also, double well, I was THIS close to shutting the door on the arse of The Puke because I didn’t vomit for two whole days and then I puked my guts up after dinner two days straight (tonight inclusive in case you wondered). Dinner didn’t even taste very good the first time and I am thinking there may actually be a niche market for things to make vomitus more appealing. Or less generally burning, lumpy, orange and revolting.

Either will do.

Anyway, I burped and gagged up only about half of my dinner tonight and I don’t know how three sausages and some beans turned into lumpy acid-coated plastic but I swear it did.

I. Am. So. Very. Over. The. Puke.

Please make it stop?

I am actually really getting quite concerned that at the ripe old gestation of fifteen weeks I am still vomiting because, Internet, what if it doesn’t stop? I know The Puke is a lot better than it was since I only feel like I’ve just eaten a mouldy sandwich from about three pm and not all damn day but, um, I am going to lose both my sanity and my back teeth at this rate.

Yours,

Geohde The Acid Breather.

PS. Two midwives asked if I was pregnant at work last Friday. I’m not surprised since I’m kind of the size of a small gestating truck. I’m also quietly shitting myself and emailing my union for advice because the last time the powers that be heard about an oven bun situation I ended up being given the proverbial arse.

Sigh.

Tongue Fur.

Hi, Internet.

It’s been a while, and it’s certainly not for lack of material to whine write about. It’s the utter lack of time to be profusely bitter in writing that’s the utter bastard and I’ve yet to figure out a way around that particular doozy. Also, I apologise about the title, but I do actually have a question. Yes, about tongue fur.

Shall I digress?

I currently work on what can only be called a suitably diverse unit and by ‘diverse’ I mean generally either non-english speaking, confused, drug and alcohol affected, subject to an official investigation into how the baby got into the fourteen year old in the first place, and the shooting up when claiming to go for a ‘smoke’ like.

I actually don’t mind it because there aren’t many jobs where you can teach somebody how babies are made and rescue them from thus far quite successful unwitting attempts to achieve three unplanned children, all under the age of two.

I’ll wait while you do the match and return when you’ve finished boggling, too.

I do prefer it when I can find an interpreter, though, and don’t have to wing it so much because while diagrams and gestures get the message across, I can’t say it feels especially graceful. Plus, I’ve yet to discover the best mime for ‘mirena’ or ‘implanon’. Condom, on the other hand, is dead easy.

Don’t ask, I shan’t tell. The secret condom gesture is going to stay that way.

Anyway, I am mostly writing to apologise for the lack of writing and in doing so have possibly generated a big neon sign flashing  ’Geohde Actually Goes to Bed By Eight PM But Doesn’t Want To Tell Anybody’ because that’s the pathetic truth on days where my Contraceptive Fairy duties allow me to escape in time to do so.

I hate to whinge, because I am down to about one miserable hardly-worth-the-acid vomit a day and it is usually in the evening, but I am kind of sick of feeling sick. It’s the fatigue. Fatigue is a bastard. The term morning sickness is an utter lie made up by some sadistic liar I swear because the morning (apart from the whole late untucked shirt fat-clothes I Am Not Pregnant dash into work, that is) is about my best bit of the day and it is all downhill from there.

Perhaps it’s the tongue fur.

I’d be interested to know what you all think because never before in my life have I been so obsessed and prone to repeated gagging by the results of microbial hijinks on the back of my tongue. Mere suggested presence is enough. By three pm I have to keep slipping off to the bathroom to scratch the back of my tongue until it just about bleeds and retch up a storm, just to feel normal for about an hour. At best. Because it otherwise feels like someone shoved a plush pile carpet back there while I wasn’t looking.

Yes, I wash my hands very thoroughly afterwards. And before. You all know where else I put them all day.

Please tell me that this sort of morbid fascination with oral carpetry is but temporary and, you know, kind of normal on some level?

I’m beginning to think I’m all weird and if you’ll excuse me, it’s past my bedtime by twenty five minutes.

G

Not Helping.

Scene: Superkarkit supermarket on a busy Friday afternoon

Geohde: Avec whiny twins and a full trolley of shit groceries. The act of lifting at least one whiny twin causes recalcitrant round ligament misbehaviour i.e. some tiny midget appears out of nowhere and stabs me clean in the fanny with a red-hot poker. Cue frozen pained, non-moving wince. Cue further wails of discontent from now non-moving twin.

Crime: Sympathetic glance and a ‘How long have you got to go, dear?’ from the checkout lady.

Sentence: One Breath Holding Count to Ten ‘A Long Time’.

Sometimes it would be easier to say what I am thinking which is that most of what I am gestating is 13 weeks of bouncing baby fat because it’s either that or I have the world’s most obsetrically minute pelvis in the entire world. Actually, since when I lie on my back I seem to have a uterine friend hanging out for all to see, it’s probably the latter, but I dearly wish I could just tell people to fuck off sometimes. Don’t we all?

Hastily edited to add that, um, the US-as-she-is-spoke versus real English strikes again (or at least I think so) from the comments. Where I am a fanny is the bit in front of the bit I think YOU all think I am referring to. My bottom is just fine. Really, it is.

Read.

I have to confess that only once in my reproductive career have I ambled into a scan cheerfully. However, since that point nearly four years ago where a nice but far too excitedly clinical sonologist pointed out the absent skull vault and classic (‘classic! you know’) frog’s eye sign of PBWCLEW’s anencephaly, that’s all been blown to shit.

I’m not excited by gender, I’m relieved by normal anatomy and my god do I get pissed at the cheerful waiting room chit chat about ‘I get to find out what kind of baby I’m having! Squee!’ because a tackle-check is so not the bloody purpose of the damn thing.

Don’t they know their babies could die?

Anyway, as far as I could tell from the emotionally disconnected and rather brusque look-see today, everything appears to be more-or-less fine with Bhaji Nightshift, apart from the fact when the sonologist got to the rushed you’ve-been-in-here-ten-minutes-already ‘so, any questions?’, I asked if she’d checked for posterior fossa signs of spina bifida. The resulting ’why would I do that?’ made it pretty clear she hadn’t even bothered to read the damn referral, but perhaps the entirely innacurate spelling of my name of the screen should have given that away a bit earlier on in the game.

I can’t say that sort of attention to detail thrills me overmuch.

Also, Bhaji’s nuchal is a bit on the bulgy side, although not definitively on the ‘oh fuck’ end of the scale and so now I guess I’ll resort to biting my nails until I get the combined risk score back. Suffice it to say it’s pretty farking hard to have an amnio if nobody knows you’re pregnant.

Absence

I guess you’d have have to have been living under the same rock of gibbering misery that I was on my last two months of permanent (12 hour-long-a-pop seven-in-a-farking-row plus working-like-a-blue-arsed-proverbial-on-my-alternating-week-gaily-referred-to-as-’off’ after seven sequential twelve hours nights) nightshift to miss the fact that I haven’t been writing all that much for, um, let’s go out on a limb and say ‘two months’.

I’ll just repeat myself, because I feel the urge now it is all past tense, but those parenthesis need repeating. Permanent (12 hour-long-a-pop seven-in-a-farking-row plus working-like-a-blue-arsed-proverbial-on-my-week-gaily-referred-to-as-’off’ after seven sequential twelve hour nights) nightshift.

I think I averaged about a mere fifty hours a week on my ‘off’ week and, well, eighty four hours a week on the official one.

Hey, did I mention the past tense?

Thank feck for that, because there is very few things more miserable than perpetually being awake at 3am in theatre, scrubbed, sitting between an unconcious woman’s legs madly trying to grasp a recalcitrant cervix, succeeding, showing an instrument through the hole and THEN spending the next hour of your life dutifully wiggling the uterus-ey thing up-and-down like a macabre puppet so the boss with the more savoury view can deal with an exploding ectopic in a timely fashion.

It’s amazing how much blood some people can stash in their peritoneal cavities when Tubal Babies Go Bad.

Anyway, speaking of my own gestation, my g-d but I have been miserable on that score, too. I am now mercifully enough at the point where I only vomit about three times a day, although I gag about a billion times, give or take. In case you wondered, the times to avoid being directly in the line of oral fire are 1. when I am brushing my teeth in the morning 2. wen I am brushing my teeth at night and 3. when I am driving home from work and so fucking tired I just vomit anyway just for the sheer hell of it. On the freeway. That one’s like death and taxes.

I’d steer clear of my temper ALL the time because nausea makes me pretty nasty.

Now for the bit I’ve been getting to, weeks 6 to eleven or thereabouts:

Notes to self:

1. Just because my phone claims to be able to take five megapixel pictures doesn’t mean they won’t all be five megapixels of grainy shit. When it gets worth it I shall use a Real Camera.

2. My god but the size my arse is already getting and, yes, in case you wondered I am already up a disgusting five kilograms. It’s the nausea, the only time I feel remotely better is that five seconds of hot chip bliss before I’ve eaten too much again.

3. Stand BACK from the camera, Geohde, it’s not helping getting closer.

4. For scale of the problem at the early end of the series given what in person at the time looked unquestionably pregnant but now looks merely one-pizza-too-many, see the jean-fastening adaption. My guts are normally flat, I promise you. They look like THIS on the outside and THIS under the clothing.

G

Bad Bhaji

Do excuse the air of haste about the blog, it’s just that I write this brief missive in those golden five seconds known as ‘Dinner in the oven then bolting off to nightshift’. Yes, again.

I have six remaining and then I have six whole glorious weeks where I only have to look at women’s business ends in daylight hours. I can’t tell you how draining this two months of nocturnal nauseated-beyond-belief have been but I maintain that the first trimester is best done in daylight hours, if possible. Vomiting at 3am is just adding insult to oesophageal injury.

Anyway, BN still appears to be in there, although the little bugger did take twenty panicky minutes (after being THIS easy every other damn time, of course) to find on my doppler yesterday. LS also still appears to be whinging intensely about his lot in life.

I think that’s about the status quo around these parts, except for the bit that now LS has come to me with the solemn pronouncement (gleaned after much solemn introspection) that all the HOUSEWORK he is doing is what is holding back his career and thusly he plans not to do any more of that sort of thing and it is now all my problem.

Hold me while I laugh hysterically, please.

Like I said, nothing has changed a jot around these parts and I shall still be scrubbing body fats and very personal hairs off of his shower when I can’t stand the filth any more.

Men.

G

PS. Bad Geohde for forgetting the patient with the third degree tear (the kind of tear sustained when one pushes a watermelon out of a Not Watermelon sized hole and rips allllmost all the way through to a rectal delivery if you know what I mean) had only had a spinal and was awake with working ear holes while humpty dumpty was painstakingly put back together in theatre. Otherwise, when the anaesthetist took an unusual interest in the surgical going’s on and popped down the caboose end for a look, I would have not replied “I had a c-section’ to his equally bad ‘I can’t even work out what I’m looking at here’. Ouch.

I think I might hunt that patient down and tell her all about my wound infection, just to even things out. Ain’t no mess free way to have a baby, really there isn’t.

Dopple

Ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat,ker-blat, ker-blat, ker-blat.

And then I can only assume the blasted thing swam away because that ten seconds is all I could get.

Ten weeks, three days.

A new snail record in first trimester Geohde doppler-ing, but none-the-less there. At last. Finally. Et Cetera. Between you, me and the rest of the Internet I had been getting noticeably anxious about having the only mobile fetus sans audible heartbeat when playing along at home.

Also, at least now I don’t have to risk blowing my cover at work to see that something is in fact alive in there after all because the way the whole job situation is looking for next year, I am going to have to cancel my booking for obstetric care until about August and invest in some seriously loose waists in the meantime. Getting sprung avec foetus by self-directed ultrasound might just have given the game away, methinks.

Yes, it shits me no end that I cannot use my own health system for the care I should by rights have, but if I stuck to that particular principle I will be  kissing my job next year goodbye. Also am rather saddened that I can’t publically enjoy what is (almost certainly) going to be my last spin at this whole thing on accounts of Too Much IVF, Too Much Work, Too Much Bad History In The Malformation Stakes, and now bonus Too Much Bloody Vomiting, but there it is. Or isn’t, until August.

Don’t worry, I’m booking (and rather painfully forking out) my ‘Does this one have viable anatomy?’ serial scans privately and there really isn’t anything much else I need doing medically for months anyway. I can only hope.

G

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Puke.

Dear Internet,

I know the radio <insert slicker modern version of no-longer suitable catchphrase here*> silence MAY make it seem a little bit like I’ve abandoned complaining about my life now that I seem to be knocked up but, really, it’s not the case.

I will always need to complain heavily about my life.

Honest.

It’s mostly the two months of permanent nightshift biting my arse. Oh, and that minor matter of the first trimester fished from about the fourth circle of hell because, honestly, I did NOT sign up for the bit where I get to see my meals in bleeping reverse at least several times a day. Really, I didn’t. They weren’t even that good the first time.

I’ve done the entire first trimester in it’s entirety twice before without any such green-faced issues and so I think I am entitled to bitch about just how horrible I feel. I know I paid rather a lot of good money and loitered in the vicinity of a lot of transfer catheters and generally really ASKED to feel completely shit, but I still maintain that I am not a masochist. I (usually and with exceptions on a pissy 16 dpo beta of bloody one hundred for crying out loud it would seem) Don’t Do first trimester Yurk.

Except when I do.

It’s a good thing IVF taught me a thing or two about shoving needles in my own arse because that my friends is how I am even turning up to work at all these days. The only times that I feel even vaguely like I am not in the middle of a particularly violent spin cycle are when I very first wake up BEFORE I move and that half a second of intestinal bliss about halfway through a serving of piping hot chips BEFORE I make the fatal mistake of eating that one too many.

Basically, in case I have failed to be entirely clear, I feel like shit all the time. Rapidly weight gaining shit, even with the tidal nutrition problem. Thank you, hot chips. They’re about the only thing that sticks.

I also didn’t sign up for the bit where I find it hard to be in the vertical position for more than about two farking hours a day on accounts of insane need for sleep because I am just too busy for that sort of shit right now. Ask my seventy hour working week. The flow-on-no-time laundry deficit at home is getting so severe I have the best part of the last fortnight still laid out on the loungeroom floor and am now merely treating it as an all-you-can-wear buffet with regards to clean underwear and socks in the evenings (life is backwards on permanent nightshit).

I would adore telling my employer to get me the hell off of nightshift and exactly halve my hours while they are at it, apart from the bit where I can’t actually tell them I am pregnant and vomiting into the toilets between suturing shredded undercarriages (post baby ejection thereof) because I am bang in the middle of applying for jobs.

Whatever your local anti-discrimination mafia may tell you, the pregnant chick usually comes about fiftieth, not first.

Sigh.

G

PS. I really should mention the bit where I had another scan and at nine weeks Bhaji Nightshift still seems to be all alive and stuff but hearing LS sigh heavily with disappointment and hang up the phone when I told HIM kind of spoiled the hell out of that ray of sunshine for the time being. He’s being a bit of an arsehole, really.

*ethernet unplugging? Modem dysregulation?

**Knocked in the mastercard? In a Delicate Stirrup? I’m never very good at this sort of thing.

Absent.

I think you’ll just have to kind of imagine me slinking back into the blog at this point, hunched back and somewhat (further) prematurely aged by the life-force suck that is working eighty six hours in seven straight days. At night.

I do apologise for my absence at a critical juncture and I can promise you that I wasn’t trying to build up dramatic tension. I was just bloody knackered.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting week of nights, if I do say so myself and I now know lots of things about tertiary hospital obstetrics I didn’t before, namely:

1. Twenty four weekers are farking tiiiiiiny when they’re born. Tiny. Red-skinned. Fragile. The ones born alive let the sadddest miniscule squeak of protest out, well before the paeds intubate them, they do. The paeds never will remember to check the gender in the flurry and so I’m usually the one that peeks and tells the parents they now have a daughter.

2. I can cut a sample of skin from a fresh stillbirth for a karyotype, but I can’t stop apologising to the baby when I do it even though they don’t know about anything anymore. It’s horrible. Especially on the poor ones that have been dead for weeks. I also hate the terminations for unsurvivable foetal conditions. We use intracardiac lignocaine.

3. At one point we had four dead babies in the dead baby room. At once. Three of them were triplets, all in a row in the crib. That room was never empty, even on a good day.

4. pPROM is not funny at twenty four weeks either. Especially when there’s pus coming out of the mother’s vagina at delivery. See point number one about twenty four weekers in general. We get a lot of those.

5. My week ended quietly shitting myself a new one while holding a retractor in theatre. Fresh blood spurted everywhere unexpectedly during a caesar for stalled labour at full dilatation. It went uterus-rupturingly bad. I watched it peel clean open almost all the way around  in a Noveau Caesar Scan fashion below our incision while my boss was getting his exercise trying unsuccessfully to extract the deeply impacted head. The baby had already been stuck for ten long, long minutes. We had to cut the muscle of the front of the uterus in between the incision and the rupture to get the baby out- it was wrapped like a contracting band around the kid’s face. We had to get clamps big enough. Theatre emergency buzzer was involved. Hearing that baby eventually pick up and squak was the biggest relief ever because it all came This Close to emergency hysterectomy and sometimes you lose the uterus and the baby. Actually, when you can see the edge of the tear right on the edge of the uterine arteries it doesn’t get much closer to losing at least one of them.

Anyway all of this says nothing about what you came to hear but I have the most vile morning sickness in that I always feel deeply wrong and partially pukey and a scan booked for Wednesday. There better be a bleeping baby is all I can say although the way work is going, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to risk another pregnancy. Plus, I must be getting old or something. I mean, I had TWINS and never felt like I’d eaten a moudly sandwich all the time.

G

Still here.

Still doing the night-shift run from hell.

Still not bleeding.

Still no repeat beta because, well, falling asleep in the phlebotomist’s waiting room is about the LAST thing I feel like doing after being awake for twelve nauseatingly tired hours when I should by rights be asleep. Hospitals should close overnight, really they should. People should just generally have the decency not to get sick or have babies unless natural light is involved.

Still no scan booked because, um, see above.

Biochemically at least am five weeks on the dot today. Can’t really say any more than that right now without the aid of a crystal ball and a borrowed ultrasound machine. Will TRY and be a good girl and get a beta after nightshift Monday. For you. Will try almost as hard not to hit the kerb parking in the carpark for same due to ridiculous fatigue. Ditto to boom gate and random pedestrians. Especially to the pedestrians. I suppose.

Will also try to summon up the energy to call for aforementioned scan appointment if numbers dictate, but be warned, ain’t booking THAt until safely after my next lot of days-off-between-night-shift-DAY-shift-set of GIMMEE CASH blood money locums. I’d rather live in ignorance of bad news for a few more days and pay my mortgage comfortably this month. Both of them.

Sigh. Being awake all night is fucking wrong, even if paid to do so. The end.

G

I don’t like being pregnant.

There, I said it.

I do not like being pregnant. Gravid. With child. Gestating. Incubating. I do not feel all warm and fuzzy when my proverbial oven is cooking buns, and I can think of about a million things that are more physically pleasurable than the elegant condition known so charmingly as being ‘knocked up’.

I. Do. Not. Like. Being. Pregnant.

Please don’t hate me. I know it is not in the best of taste for an infertile woman who has hit the baby jackpot to admit it, but I just don’t get off on being the approximate dimensions of a planetary satellite. I like to be able to turn over in bed at night, unassisted. Heck, I like to sleep on my stomach. Apart from the superficial physical aspects, being pregnant mainly makes me feel alternately terrified my babies have died while I wasn’t looking, or simply inescapably enormously fat.

I am a traitor. I do not ‘glow’, I ooze sebum and I collect backne. I sweat like a pig-wrangler on a busy day. My nose develops a non-disguisable (by even the most enthusiastic hairstylist) collection of pimples. I snore. Loudly.

Even in the first trimester, when the whole shebang is physically easy for a non-porcelain phone conversating type, I do not like it. I am crippled by horrifying anxiety. I have weekly scans, because magical thinking tells me my baby shall die if I do not peek as often as possible. I own a doppler and spend literally hours finding a heartbeat at  early gestations. I cry if I am not successful.

I do not like being pregnant.

My grooming suffers in exponential concordance with my expanding girth. I stop brushing my hair. I gain forests in areas that are normally heavily logged. I wear items more conventionally recognisable as tents, as apparel, and in public.

I do not lovingly stroke my belly as I sit, but wince as a contraction reminds me that bending in the middle is yet another item ranked rather highly on my personal uterine verboten list. Unmedicated with contraction stopping Fun Drugs, I go to the toilet about fifty times an hour, more than half convinced I shall prolapse an infant whilst sitting on the can because the pressure in my pelvis dictates that not even a millimetre of urine and a baby can coexist peacefully. Medicated with drugs that should drop my blood pressure, I become horribly hypertensive anyway and I swell until I am cursed with Fat Fingers to go with my Fat Arse.

I am hungry all day long and additionally at 10pm, midnight, 2am, 4am and 6am, but the insane reflux means that I have to choose between enjoying a second, more acidic, version of each meal or spitting partly digested food and stomach acid into the bathroom sink. Sometimes a bucket, because I cannot walk beyond a waddle.

I get ravenous appetite derived stretchmarks on my ass, and when the blasted thing duly shrinks post partum, I am left with cheeks that could hold pencils up. Hands free. But that’s okay, because so can my stomach. Also, my bowels can really hang out, thanks to the wonders of a diastasis recti. I do not like what being pregnant does to my body. The first time I saw myself post partum, I almost cried. My stretchmarks and muffin top bother me, they fail to fill me with warmth that I mostly successfully (2/3 of efforts to date) grew human beings.

I do not like being pregnant.

There.

Now that I have said it, I can feel simultaneously heavily relieved to have gotten that small confession off my chest and mildly terrified that the heavens shall open up and the rain of judgement shall pour forth heavily upon my ungrateful head. I love my children, but I do not like being pregnant. That is all.

Belly go up…

….and belly go DOWN. No points given for picking the point at which I spontaneously exploded twins.

A.k.a (you guessed it) a tired, weekend post. Probably horribly misspelled to boot.

Lazy Blogging 101 strikes again, i.e. when low on verbage of meaning simply add pictures and hey presto! A post is born. Except I can’t figure out how to embed the darn thing, and have wasted an hour that could have been better spent creating actual content with meaning swearing fluently about it.

Could you all just play along and click on the link? Ta, ever so. Much obliged.

Looking at the pictures, I am freaked out anew with just how stupidly massive the whole growing-two-babies-at-once made me. The photographic proof stops somewhere at about 34 weeks, after that point I no longer wanted to ‘remember’ since the discomfort was burned in my refluxy throat….

To be honest, (a small disclaimer) I ordered them by my best slap-dash weekend approach of approximate bump size, and not date taken, so if I’ve got anything a bit wrong and appear to be shrinking and growing in a disturbing fashion it’s simply the fault of my decidedly dodgy editing and not some bizarre Foetal Ballet.

It’s actually kind of freaky to realise just how much you can distort your body and come out the other end only a bit-of-extra-skin scathed.

Check it out:

The Incredible Elastic Belly

Quack.

Well, if it walks  like a duck, and it sure as hell quacks like the proverbial duck, it doesn’t take a degree in ornithology to work out that it’s probably not a dairy cow, right?

In other words, I continue to grumble my way along the hypertensive puffball highway into land that would, sooner or later (depending on one’s rigorousness in labelling), earn the moniker of the dreaded pre-e. My naughty vascular system seems to have decided that 150/90 (medicated) is the new norm, my feet have enough fluid in them to pee for my nation (when it all shifts after delivery) and now the last holdout, my kidneys, are unmistakeably leaking protein. The lazy buggers.

Since the operating definition of that which starts with ‘pre’ and ends in ‘f-king scary’ is oedema, hypertension and proteinuria, well……quack.

I’m still hoping to make it till my, as it turns out, very wisely scheduled (thank you, gods of planning) c-section, although it really does now depend on items such as how truly vigorously squirty my arteries get. Along with mere trifling matters like continued movement from The Fetii and an absence of oh-my-g-d-what-is-with-this-headache-and-incidentally-why-do-I-have-this-right-upper-quadrant-pain-all-of-a-sudden.

I think I’ll make it.

Quack.

Only three more days……

Things I have recently discovered.

In no particular order, I list the following items (all discovered in the last few days):

1. What is good for the knocked up goose is also apparently not harmful to the gander of the household a.k.a Prenatal vitamins are an apparently Unisex Phenomenon.
2. Yes, Virginia, there is a reason you are so bloody uncomfortable, or Confirmation that I am now officially Really Pregnant.
3. Things I can do without, alternatively known as I am a virtual repository of Reproductive Spare Parts.

Addressing item one.

Although the fatigue induced by not really being able to sleep anymore due to an unholy combination of massive abdomen, late night foetal dance parties and contraction bonanzas may have addled my brain somewhat, I was still surprised to recently note that I appeared to have chewed my way through a trimester pack of prenatal vitamins. In just over a month and a half.

Perplexed, the only explanation I initially could come up with was that perhaps I had been accidently taking them in both the morning and the evening on the basis that it was better than simply forgetting to take them all-together. But I didn’t think I had.

The mystery was solved last night when I discovered Long Suffering digging his way through the greatly depleted pack and popping a couple down his hatch.

His explanation when challenged by the presumed biological certainty that he couldn’t possibly be knocked up, was a permutation on a shoulder shrugging ‘why not?’.

For now I’m putting it down to Sympathy Vitamin Consumption, and not some sort of miraculous male pregnancy. We’ve got enough babies due in this household in the near future as it is.

As for item two?

Easy.

At my OB visit today I had the pleasure of discovering that I am now the aghast owner of a fundal height of 48 cm.

Despite the top of my uterus and sternum having been introduced to each other some weeks ago, things continue to expand in utero. Presumably forwards, since upwards is no longer an option (unless I make some room by divesting myself of a rather overtaxed heart and lungs, which I shan’t).

Clearly, since being 48 weeks pregnant doesn’t ever actually happen, being that size at 35 weeks isn’t in any operational definition of the word ‘comfortable’.

Finally, item three.

Things I agreed to donate at the delivery of The Fetii for the Greater Scientific Good:

• Two placentas.
• Two lots of umbilical cord blood.
• One sample of my overly contractile myometrium.

I get to keep the babies.

As to when I shall be donating these items, the answer would appear to be that Operation Get These Kids Out Already will be happening next tuesday. If I don’t go into labour first, of course.

The possibility no longer upsets me, I’m that uncomfortable.

Scan-o-rama

I am fully expecting that today’s growth scan (for The Fetii, let me make it clear, not for myself since it’s abundantly clear that I continue to grow very well indeed) shall be the last. The next time there is a question as to the weight of The Fetii, well, they can simply be picked up and plonked on a scale.

I find this realisation somewhere between exhilarating and terrifying.

It may have taken two trimester’s worth of ultrasound indulgence to break my habit, but I will now shamefully admit that there are only so many times that one can coo over a profile shot, especially  when covered in goo from the chest to the bikini line. Doubly especially when Saag’s head is now so low that any efforts to get an accurate measurement of dimensions would involve a bikini wax on my part. Naan, on the other hand, has her noggin firmly displayed as a great big lump halfway up my right side. You could find it in braille. Her femurs, however, really took some finding (I was pleased to note that that they were not in fact missing, just very well hidden).

Technical difficulties introduced by the arrangement of the Fetii aside (which necessitated, amongst other things, bodily sloshing from side to side to access bits of babies), all looks good. Both persist on growing along singleton growth curves, clearly having never been given the memo about twin growth slowing down in the third trimester. They each have stacked on a rather gluttonous half a pound per week in the fortnight since the last scan, and I am now as a direct consequence of this behaviour, the container for over eleven pounds of baby.

This neatly explains my constant hunger to the point of retching and the difficulty involved in driving to the appointment in the first place (arms out at full stretch, feet just on pedals and ginormous guts still rather too friendly the steering wheel).

And finally, in slightly related news, clearly the local homeless people who haunt the entrance to the hospital in search of food, money, or possibly medical intervention for any one of a number of chronic health complaints have been working on their observational obstetrics. Two of them saw fit to inform me that I was having twins.

Who needs ultrasound when even the homeless can provide such an accurate spot diagnosis?

Yes, yes, no (I visit the OB).

You know  you look about a million trimesters (uncomfortably) pregnant when other women in the waiting room look twice at the sight of your majestic splay-legged approaching waddle. Forget ladylike manners, my knees haven’t been introduced to each other in some time now.

After I perched myself uncomfortably on  a chair, legs flung but-for-these-trousers-the-world-is-my-gynaecologist apart, the lady opposite picked up the courage to politely enquire ‘You’re due anyday now, aren’t you?’. I suppose that asking if I was, in fact, due some weeks ago would have been the obstetric equivalent of remarking that my arse looks big in those trousers.

It does, in the literal and the figurative sense, but it doesn’t do to say so.

I (with features composed into a beautifully martyr-like expression) remarked that I had, in actual fact, officially at least another month to go. I carelessly completely omitted to mention the twin aspect. It probably wasn’t a very nice thing to do to to all the first appointment-ers (still possessing intact waistlines), but I’m not feeling especially nice these days and certainly not up to dealing with ‘Twins!!!!!Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ again.

Excess exclamation marks make my HEAD ache…..

I did field yet more ‘you’re carrying (pause for effect) awfully low, aren’t you?’ comments in response to my not-entirely-honest pronouncement, and resisted the urge to snarl that I was clearly simultaneously carrying high and out the bloody sides as well. It’s nobody’s fault but mine if my bladder is compressed into a flat organ of spasmy pain when I try to sit, after all.

As for my actual appointment, yes my BP is officially up despite my calcium channel blocker habit, yes I’m puffy, but mercifully no I don’t have much in the way of proteinuria. As long as I do not develop the full trifecta, I am not pre-eclamptic (just swollen, miserable and hypertensive).

The traditional palpation of The Fetii allowed me to demonstrated my prowess at having my overstuffed uterus touch my sternum (rather horrifyingly, if I made 38 weeks, I’d be reeling off a fundal height measurement starting with fifty-something. I’m not that far off now).

So we continue, albeit with a revised schedule. I have the pleasure of a growth scan later this  week, bonus home monitoring of BP and pee stick proteinuria screening and another appointment (with inserted if-you’re-still-pregnant-and-don’t-spontaneously-explode-babies mantra) next week.

I get to pee on things again, although asking a woman who can’t really reach her girly bits any more to wee in a cup is essentially the same as asking the aforementioned woman to piddle all over her hand.

The big news, after all that blather, is that should I be pregnant this time next week, I may very well not be the week after. The c-section date has been released from its optimistic-but-unrealistic attachment to 38 weeks and pinned hopefully to 36 weeks.

The countdown is on.

Well, darnit.

It always seems to be something coming out of left field that whallops me while my attention is firmly invested elsewhere (for example, in rabid fear of pre-term labour engendered by an enthusiastically contracting womb).

Call me slow on the uptake.

I had noticed several days ago that my cankles were, well, even plusher than usual. I’d even had to ratchet my wedding rings off because of the advent of accompanying Sausage Fingers. I was beginning to wonder if any part of my anatomy would be unscathed by the general bigness-enhancing effect of pregnancy. It’s been like Miracle Grow for everything from my arse to my pinky fingers.

However, rather than rubbing some dusty neurones together for a change, I simply added ‘Sausage Fingers’ to my (already rather long) mental file of things that suck about pregnancy and thought nothing more of it.

Completely unrelated to the above (because of aforementioned slowness on uptake), yesterday I finally summoned up the courage to face the scales and see just how much weight I’d managed to stack on with the Never Ending Pregnancy Hunger. The answer was a food-related improbability of 9 pounds in the last week.

Even I can’t eat that much in a mere seven days. Probably.

With a slightly sinking feeling I dug out the BP cuff and sure enough, my BP that was so beautifully normal a mere week ago is now consistently elevated. Since I suspect it would be even uglier without the nifedipine, I am going to go ahead and assume that tomorrows OB visit shall now come with a bonus serving of BP monitoring and pre-eclampsia bloods.

Unless I get lucky, of course, and it all mysteriously resolves overnight. Then I can go back to the familiar territory of b!tching about contractions.

I’d quite like to get lucky.

Long Suffering and other matters.

You’ll have to forgive my recent radio silence. I think that the five days between the last post and this post may in fact be one of the longest intervals I’ve ever managed to go without giving in to the urge to share something with the internet-at-large (or at hunched-over-a-desk, or at whatever condition this missive finds the reader).

It’s not for lack of material.

But it is because the bountiful ‘material’ that is so eager to flow off the tips of my fingers onto my unresisting keyboard is so damn whiny.

After all, it is not so very long ago that things were different. I recall just how much reading the writings of those who were fortunate enough to be on the other side of the fence dividing the metaphorically brown dustball of suck that is infertility from the green, green pastures of successful pregnancy made me feel. It was hard to even read sometimes, especially when my latest treatment cycle had creatively failed and the blogger concerned had what I thought was the temerity to complain about their lot.

Made me want to reach inside my monitor and gently (because I really do care) slap them, to be brutally honest.

Yet here I am, pregnant (and over that rather splintery metaphorical divide) and very likely to have healthy babies (plural) soon, and all I want to do is whine.

See my dilemma?

Internet, I am sorry. But I’m fresh out of anything other than whine and I concede that I thoroughly deserve my own virtual slapping for the offence I am about to commit.

I’m tired. I’m so very uncomfortable in ways that I hesitate to even begin to explain. I’ll be honest. If it wasn’t that the health of my children demands that I gain every millisecond of gestational maturity that I possibly can, I’d have booked an OR, rustled up an anaesthetist from a busy morning of crossword completion (well, what do you think they do all day while the machine goes ‘beep’?) and slapped a scalpel into the hand of my poor OB several weeks ago.

Because I can’t help myself, I will depart with some of the less irritating examples from last night:

• Was it really me who woke up at 11pm, midnight, 2am, 4am, 5am (before giving up for good at 7am)and at some point added a wee snack in the form of half a dozen pieces of toast as an encore to the ritual peeing? Why, my powers of detection tell me that the combination of a certain long-suffering spouse’s disgruntled expression + empty plate + multitude of crumbs that now reside happily in the bed = yes.
• Was it really me who un-wisely decided that nearly a litre of cow-juice before even attempting to go to bed would be effective prophylaxis against the sensation that the epithelium of my oesophagus was being eroded by battery acid all night? Judging by the numerous trips to pee noted above, I think the answer to this one is sadly also in the affirmative. Besides, there was barely any milk left for long-suffering-spouse’s tea this morning.
• I sure as heck know it was me who got precisely halfway through one of my nightly attempts to roll from one side to the other before the stabbing pain from my now-unstable pelvis and rock-hard contracted uterus rendered me stuck, flailing on my back like the proverbial tortoise. How did I resolve the situation? Well, dear reader, one arm managed to catch the side of poor Long-Suffering’s face and I used that as leverage. Kind of like a fixed bowling ball, although damper in some of the holes.
• Long Suffering also tells me that I snore like a big truck driving through the bedroom, when I’m actually asleep.

G-d, I’m tired…..

Hate me yet?

I think my husband might. He has to get up and go to work after my nightly performances.

First things first.

……I better mention that I’m still knocked up. No babies have been born, as yet, although standing up does give me moments where I truly wonder if one CAN prolapse an infant by the act of sneezing.

These precious Fetii of mine, I’m sure, will completely lack the appropriate gratitude for just how sodding uncomfortable I have become in the aim of gaining gestational maturity when they’re old enough to understand. I fully expect eyes will be rolled and a chorus of ‘Muuuuuummm’ to bleat whenever I raise the subject in years to come.

I plan to raise it frequently. In great detail, and possibly with the aid of an itemised list. It makes the present discomfort easier to bear.

Surely I can fend off adolescent requests for the latest ex$$pensive-this-or-that this way, especially if I do it in front of their friends and use artistic license to add such choice items such as ‘Frequently bleeding arse, haemorrhoid induced’ and ‘Shares in Depends, urinary incontinence management thereof’?

I truly hope I did not just jinx myself.

In other words, the ramping up of the uterine vice continues unabated and I suspect shall remain for the ‘duration’.

Which, holy heck, is a maximum of merely 39 days away when the 38 week surgical unzipping of my abdominal wall is factored in.

I now refuse to speculate on the minimum possible remaining duration of this pregnancy, but I shall admit to ensuring that I wash my hair, dress and generally ablute as if I may end up in hospital at any time. After all, I can’t see actual active labour as a time in which dalliance my hair dryer will seem an attractive proposition.

As for the main point of all this effort, The Fetii?

According to yesterday’s growth scan, they’re clocking in at a guesstimate of 4.5 pounds of bladder-kicking enthusiasm each.

Perhaps that explains just why a friend I have not seen in some time burst into slightly hysterical whoops of laughter, followed by an enlightening ‘Oh my‘ and a rushed and unconvincing disclaimer that my predicament really wasn’t funny to see at all. Especially in light of the fact that I have an aforementioned five-and-a-bit weeks to go.

I’m thinking of getting a small wheelbarrow to cart the Giant Guts in.

Yawn, gibber in fear.

Many apologies in advance for a potentially scattered post. I’m tired. And beyond uncomfortable. And just a teensy bit on the scared side, But, critically, as of hitting the ‘publish’ button at least, still pregnant.

Let me explain.

It appears that either:

•  BT* is really cranking up the stakes in the nocturnal sleep deprivation, presumably for my own good given that I may never sleep again after the Fetii are born (according to more dire predictions), OR
• the remaining length of time that I have to remain knocked up may be rather shorter than I’ve been beginning to hope for.

I’ve been contracting.

This, I’m fully aware, is not a particularly earth shattering announcement given my extensive resume in that department.

But.

Starting late yesterday I’ve been contracting quite regularly (and more forcefully than is the custom of BT), including right through the night, despite my usual double dose of nifedipine. Unless I made a critical error at some point and clean forgot to take them, in which case I deserve a royal smack on the side of the head for stupidly bringing much misery upon my whiny self.

I’ve had no sleep, which may be adding to the slight feeling of hysteria.

I don’t feel the least bit ready for babies. Not yet.

Fortunately in the last hour or so things have eased off somewhat, allowing me to both type this missive and leave the burning question of is this early labour versus more-of-the-same-but-worse issue decidedly unclear.

Either way, I think I’ll just excuse myself to nap while I can, and casually try and remember where the heck I left that card with the on call OB’s paging service. Just in case.

Hopefully I won’t need it.