Dreams and False Alarms

A couple of really nice things that happened yesterday

1. I got my "For Your Tears" handkerchief from Debbie Pucci, which of course, made me cry.

2. My sweetest co-worker, got my note about the miscarriage, walked up to me in the hallway and gave the longest, sweetest hug. Somehow that hug really reached me in a way that not much else has in the last week.

3. When I saw my chiropractor, who is also such a dear dear person, I told her about some of the digestive issues I was having since the miscarriage, which can absolutely be attributed to hormones, but also, to what she called the "Grief and Loss Diet." Which relies on a lot of cookies. Somehow calling it that made me smile, and also let me put a frame around it which makes it feel like I can set it aside after the new year.

4. We made reservations for sat and sun after xmas at a cabin overlooking the ocean--and we need some ocean right about now.

5. My kitten plays fetch, and presents her toy to be thrown. She might be a dog.

Surfacing, bobbing, gasping, blathering.

Friday was awful. It was that horrific crashing day when the progesterone really starts to plummet and your whole life flashes in front of your eyes while you wear 3D "your life is crap" glasses. Yeah, that good.

I raged at my therapist for telling me, earlier in the week, that I needed to rebuild my trust in my body, to which I politely replied, "Not until I have some reason to!"  I also said fuck a lot. A lot.  I said mean things about my 22 year old nice who just had her second child with her sort of boyfriend, who she allegedly doesn't like, and her  main goal in life to get tattoos and piercings. Oh, and don't even let me get started on the fact that she never even sent a thank you (even a verbal one through my mom who was at the baby shower) or a written note for the $100 Wal-Mart gift card I gave her--ya know, the place she buys her formula and diapers. For the moment, she can just suck it. Yeah. I'm feeling really nice.

Also, if you are my friend IRL, I can't imagine you will be able to take this any other way than to be hurt, but it is really painful for me to open your holiday cards. Please keep sending them, in the part of me that isn't burned into a little black cinder, it is nice to see how your children have grown, but the rest of me just weeps. Weeps at the sight of all of that adorable abundant child-ness.  If we don't have a baby by next year, I'm seriously considering sending a picture of our cats. I know I could just not look at them, but I want to. I want to be normal and happy, and enjoy other peoples happiness, but when you are coming off a miscarriage, or a failed IVF, it's just a little hard to be rational.

So back to Friday. I feel, and especially that day felt, like a colossal failure. My work, my business, my reproductive organs, my everything.  I just had no place in me that felt good at all. Ok, that isn't completely true, my husband, my marriage and my cats were exempt from that shit storm.

The reason I most likely miscarried is a chromosomal abnormality. It's the most common reason for a woman my age. Furthermore, husband and I thought I'd be ovulating a little later in my cycle than I did, and we were, shall we say, injudicious with our timing. So there is a possibility that for once, at the ripe old age of 39, I actually might have gotten pregnant by having sex with my husband. Hopefully the baby wasn't too far gone, like last time, and they'll be able to culture some of the cells. It would be good to know if it was the translocation, or just old eggs. No matter what the reason is, we still lost our baby, and choosing what to do next is daunting. If it was the translocation, do we take another whack at donor sperm and my eggs? If it wasn't do we chalk it up to regular 39 year old miscarriage (oy) risk, and try donor sperm, or do we just throw in the towel and go for DE.

Sprogblogger, proceed with caution...

AND THEN...what if that doesn't work. It doesn't work for 20% of people. Yes, I am allowed to think about that. We have been on the wrong side of every fucking statistic we've come up against, why should this be different. We can't afford to do shared risk--it's 31K plus meds, plus donor compensation. Yeah, we'd need a serious cash infusion to make that seem even reasonable. So when I said in my last post that DE was the bottom of the financial and emotional barrel, I didn't mean that we didn't value it, or even feel like it was our best bet, it's just that it's our last chance at pregnancy, and anytime "last" is in the equation, it takes on enormous weight. Of course, after we rob a few banks we could do adoption (even county adoption costs money--they don't just give those babies away).  Yes, I am feeling a little angry and bitter.

Yesterday was better, I did the laundry, I made some very thick bean soup, I baked some bread, and caught up on some movies and TV shows, attend at all times by at least 2 of my three cats.  Little furry bundles of love.  Many multi cat households struggle with the relationships between the kitties, but our kitties are very compatible. We have two boys and a girl. The girl kitty is 6 months old and so cuddly and playful. There are times when Husband and I just marvel at how lucky we got with this little one.

Today I am determined to get a tree. Part of my funk on Friday also feeling like I didn't have the energy to do it for us any more. Husband major holiday tradition involves Chinese food, not too hard to honor. Over the last three years I've tried to set the stage for welcoming a child into our home, I've made some stabs at holiday traditions, but they all get squashed under the weight of all of this fucking loss.  So, today I going to drag him away from his desk, where he sits to make the all important money for all this fruitless baby making mishigas, and try to have something resembling a good day.

And I'll probably cry some more. But oddly not for the baby itself, the way I did for Sparky, who seemed so real, so inevitable, but for all the faith I've lost; for all the time that has passed; for all of the fear I have about all of the next steps; and most of all, my fear that I'll never recover. That even if we do finally get our child, I'll always be this broken, sad shell of a mother.

Thank You

Thank you so much, each and every one of you who has commented, sometimes twice, to let us know that you are with us in our pain and loss.

I am numb. I may be angry, but I'm not quite sure who or what I'm angry with. I can't cry. I cried more on Monday than I have Tuesday and Wednesday combined.  I just feel shut down.

At this point what I am most sure of is that I am weary, and that husband is weary. We hardly let down our guard through the whole 7 weeks--each of us was waiting for a bad thing to happen, and when it did, it felt as if the inevitable had come to pass. Of course, that's hindsight, but still, we are so battle weary it is hard to really believe that pregnant means baby.

We are at a crossroads. Hopefully we'll have the genetic results in two weeks, hopefully there are some results to be had. The last time it was too late and nothing could be learned from the culture.

We are looking for the money tree, wishing that doing DE didn't mean scraping so close to the bottom of both our emotional and financial reserves.

Thank you again for all of your support--it means the world to us.

No heartbeat

The baby died sometime last week. D&C tomorrow. Heartbroken and numb.

Full Contingency Living**updated

I am not doing so good today.

I managed to keep the fear of the baby being dead on the periphery through most of the weekend, but this morning, it has crawled up into my head, and won't be shaken loose.

There is no escaping the realty that my breasts have deflated a bit, and are less sore, and even if one of the baby sites says that might happen around 8 weeks, it just feels like a bad sign.

At one point, as I lay in bed half asleep, the voice of Henry Kissinger said "Your baby is dead." I'm not one to put a lot of faith in former secretary's of state speaking to me in my dreams, but it was spooky.

I realized earlier in the week that every time I go to the bathroom, I run through the contingency plan of what I will do if there is blood. What I will move around, when I will get the D&C, what I'll say on the blog, who I'll email, what I'll do about work.  Of course, I could stop myself, but it is this kind of odd calm that comes over me as I plan what to do. It's an awful sort of calm.

This morning, as I lay there, I thought "If the baby is dead, how do I face Christmas?" I'm woefully deficient in holiday spirit as it is (not a life long condition), but I can't imagine how  to do it. How to pull it together, to hold it together. Of course, I don't have to, but how much more of living can I opt out of because I'm in so much pain?  My work, which I worked so hard to get established in is limping along, my best friend (or former best friend) cut me off over something I wished she'd have worked out with me, and I can't seem to find the juice to push through and get excited about anything. Of course I have plenty of reason for all of this, but ack. It's hard. One thing I can say is that my family is as supportive as they can be, and my husband is the best, and my marriage is definitely stronger for the experience of infertility, and my cats are a constant sources of joy. BUT. I'm at a loss. If we lose this baby...what?  What. How. How do I do it again? What is left to pick up? I don't knit, I have no plan. No contingency plan for what to do next.

And maybe the baby is fine, and I'm all worked up for nothing. But I'm so scared, scared of the baby being dead, and of my own deadness that it feels too hard to hold onto the possibly that the baby is ok, and that I'm going to be ok. I've been through crappy times before, heck a lot of times before, and I will be ok again. But it feels so hard to believe in this moment.

**I have an ultrasound scheduled for tomorrow at 2:30--Dr Calm offered it because she knows how anxious we are.

Upon further refelction, uh meaning when I'd calmed down a bit, it occured to me that my breasts haven't shrunk, but they don't hurt as much. Perhaps it is because they aren't growing right now. If it's anything like puberty,they hurt when they are growing, but not when they aren't.

Thanks for all the reassurance and sharing your stories, it really helps.

For once, the internet was reassuring

So, after all the fabulousness that was this Monday and Tuesday (making it to 8 weeks, and seeing the baby 2x in 2 days), my progesterone level came back at 9.9. For those of you not in the know, that is not optimal. It's not insurmountable, but it's not great.

Essentially it means that my placenta, such as it is, isn't make a huge amount of progesterone. The treatment for this is progesterone supplementation, which I've been on since the IUI, so there's not much else to do. I did ask the doctor if I could increase from 1 pill 2x a day to 1 pill 3x a day, and she said "it couldn't hurt." But she was also not very concerned.  she told me about a patient who had a level of 2, and that child is now 22 years old. So clearly 9.9  isn't too bad.

From what Husband and I can tell from our extensive googling, low progesterone can trigger a miscarriage, because the low level triggers the uterus to shed the lining.  But, there isn't a clear indication, except from one site that wasn't a medical site, but rather one with a lot of angels clutter, that probably said "if you've exepreinced infertilty, you weren't meant to be a parent" so I just stopped reading that one!

Dr Calm, wonderful woman that she is, said "I'm not concerned, some patients need to stay on supplementation through 14 weeks, but given your history, I'm happy to do an ultrasound for you next week to check to see if there is a heartbeat and that the baby is still growing." Husband has an all day conference call that he can't get out of on Monday, so we're going in on Tuesday at 2:30.

Part of me feels scared, and part of me feels like, well, like maybe it's still going to be alright. The internet is practically littered with happy outcomes--women who's P4 levels were lower or the same as mine who are hold perfectly healthy babies right now. As the title says, for once, the internet was reassuring.

Also, Julia at Uncommon Misconception had a similar situation to mine: good betas and ok P4 and then it dropped and she started bleeding, now me, no bleeding (WHEW), but is has dropped from a high of 27 to 10.  One of the things that I have wondered is if I have a slight luteal phase defect--not one that occurs every month, but might be on and off. One of my friends who is a doctor reads this, so she will probably tell me I am out of my mind, but one of my pet theories is that maybe I didn't have a great corpus luteum, and that in this part of the pregnancy when the placenta is about to take over, the corpus luteum is running out of steam, but the placenta isn't ready to take over yet. (**Yup, friends says I full of it, and to not believe my crackpot theories!) The endometrian, doesn't show up in your blood stream (but the prometreum and the shots do), so maybe in my uterus it's like a 40, but in my blood its a 10.  Again, this just me speculating.

Anyhoodle, please please please let my baby be alive and growing on Tuesday.

Off to the chiropractor and to make Rugelach with my mom.

His, Mine and Ours

**This was posted yesterday at Caliope' blog as part of the Great Blog Cross Pollination**

 

From the time I was a small child, forced to rely on the newspaper and non cable TV to fill my hours, I've always liked first person stories--and biographies especially. In fact, one of my first adult reads at 10 years old was Mommie Dearest. What, you may ask does that have to do with our dear Calliope?  Clearly, it's not the bad stuff, but rather I got hooked on her blog because of the compelling story she has been telling, first of her quest to get pregnant, and caring for her Grandmother with Alzheimer's, and then of her pregnancy with W and all of the lovely parts of parenting, and the sorrow of losing her grandmother. All of my favorite bloggers are the ones who respond to comments, and Cali does that in spades. 

 

As she said in her post on my blog, one thing we have in common is our use of Donor sperm.  She comes at it from being a Single Mother by Choice, and I come to it by necessity.  Nearly at the end our quest to have a child through pregnancy, we found out that my husband has a balanced translocation.  Most people who have ever heard of this know it as a Robertsonian translocation, but alas, there are different types. Essentially, my husband's 1st and 5th chromosomes have swapped where their long and short arms are. Works for him, but when his genes try to combine with mine (which are in a more conventional arrangement), the result is too many in one spot, not enough in another.  It took us so long to find out because we didn't fit the profile. What typically happens is that everything is fine up through some point in the 1st trimester, and then miscarriage. For us, it didn't work that way--I would have these unconfirmable proto pregnancies, and then pfft. In IVF, we'd get a great fertilization rate, and then lose nearly all the eggs (i.e. ended up with 3 out of 14). And in the end, it is probably that these two chromosomes make it very hard for an embryo to get beyond a very early stage of development.  As you can imagine, 2.5 years in, and a whole lot of crappy feelings about myself, my eggs, my extreme defectiveness, etc, it was a huge shock to realize that maybe I was ok. Just maybe. But of course, that opened up a whole 'nother can of worms.

 

In April when we found this out, we were both in shock.  At first it was a relief, now we knew what had been holding us back, and then it because very dicey because we were at the beginning of an IVF cycle and trying to negotiate within ourselves and with each other, how to use the donor sperm. We should have waited. We were so shocked and so desperate that we didn't really think it through, or feel it through.  One particularly awful moment happened when we were on the phone with our doctor, and talking about picking the donor, and I said "After all, he will be the father of our children." The only thing that saved that moment, and trust me, it was barely saved, was that I said "our" instead of "my". Oy. God that was awful.  It was a shock to realize how much there was to get my/our heads around.  We picked and rejected one donor, and then picked another, one that we've stayed with for our IUI's and one IVF. 

 

My smart husband insisted that he needed a few months to let this all marinate and sink in and to get used to all of this. It was pretty hairy. I was raring to go because I was feeling like the biological clock that had been bonging "TIME" in my hear for years got an amplifier, but I also knew that this was about us, not me. Honestly, this whole infertility treatment process was about us, but because so much of it happened to me, and because of how I lived it, it was a strange experience to not be center stage anymore.

 

And, of course, my husband was right WE needed time.  I needed time to make sense of our children having a genetic father and 'real' father.  One thing that a friend of mine said that was extremely helpful was that no matter the genetic connection, it is the mother who creates the father (or doesn't, in the case of excluding the father). By that she meant that because of the mother's primacy to the infant, the father, genetic or not, can be excluded to the point of not having a place to be a father to the child.  That was one of those moments that helped me to understand that yes, we would be different, and yet, we would be the same as many other families.

 

Fast forward through one at home insemination, one failed IVF, one IUI with low progesterone, and screech to a halt November 9th.  I had been deep in preparations for a donor egg and donor sperm cycle. I had given up on my eggs, clearly they were also part of the problem.  However, in a moment of super thriftiness so as to not waste a precious endometrian, I decided to take a pregnancy test the morning of my beta, a rarity for me, as I am not a POASer, and it came up positive.  The Beta was fabulous, as was the second beta.  My Husband, was thrilled, I was thrilled (when we weren't scared out of our minds...oy).  In the moment of the positive test and fabulous beta's it was Our baby.  In the following days, a couple of people, admittedly who aren't on the blogosphere and don't talk about these things as much and as carefully as we all do, asked how Husband felt about it not being "his". And I was sort of taken aback. Of course it's His.  Not genetically, but in all other ways.  It's not a bad question, and it's not even insensitive, for me it served as a yard stick of how far my thinking and feeling has come in this arena. I can't think of it as any child but his child.  Many times I forget that we used a sperm donor, and I wonder if our baby will look like him with his big brown bedroom eyes, and then I remember, "Oh, right..."  At some point in the future, our feelings will shift and resettle. Feelings always do.  But right down to the core of my being I know, this is His baby. This is Our baby.

Guest Blogger--The Great Blog Cross Pollination

There are probably 400 million kajillion posts out in the blogosphere about how cool and awesome and amazing and wonderful it is to connect with someone on-line. What I find fascinating is what connects a person can be something so specific but what makes a is something far more special and rare.

I created my family with the help of donor gametes. In my particular case I needed donor sperm. And so when I began quietly walking along the long and windy hallways of the internets I sought out other bloggers that were donor gamete needers. Some needed eggs, some sperm, and some the whole shebang. What drew me in was the process other people went through. I enjoyed reading how other people or couples culled through donor profiles. I wanted to know everything about everyone else's methodology. Having a collective pool of other people's course of action gave me a sense of normalcy.

I have to be honest, my path was always obvious. I am single. I was not interested in using a known donor and I am not a lizard and able to make both sperm and egg. In order to make a baby in my body (or lab, as the case ended up being) I needed a sperm donor. And all of my real concerns centered around what he looked like and whether or not his handwriting looked like a serial killers. I had no one else to consider. And there was a bizarre sort of freedom in that.

One of the things that I adore about Sarah's blog (oh yes, I am totally going to use this cross-pollination to tell you how much I adore her) is that she is one of the most considerate and thoughtful people ever. And as she travels down her and her husband's path to parenthood she writes these breathtakingly honest posts that have me thinking about things that I should have thought about ages ago. "How is your mother? She had a bladder infection"  as just a taste, is especially amazing. "Am I Jonah or the Whale" This one too.

Just one of the things that I get to deal with all on my own:

resemblance. I totally picked a sperm donor that came from the same European ethnic pool party as me. I picked a donor that looked like he could be a distant cousin. And one of the reasons is because I wanted my child to look like he belonged to me. I did not want there to be any doubt that I am his and he is mine. And I never stopped to think what this process must be like for couples. It's fucking brutal.

But really, if you want to know how amazing Sarah is, I am going to tell you something that you don't know about her. She was one of the very first people that paid me money to design a header for their blog (thus helping me afford IVF/FET). It was ages and ages ago (or so it seems!) and I really was flying by the seat of my photoshopped pants, not really sure if anyone had any interest in such bloggy design stuffs. I was expecting people, if they asked at all, to just ask for basic stuff. You know, something along the lines of, "I like kitties and the color yellow".

And then Sarah met my inbox. And she had this incredibly stunning and elaborate specific visual in her mind. I'm not sure if I can even do it justice to explain it because it was just way over my head. Way.

But I wanted Sarah to like me and to like my work so I attempted version after version. And I sucked. But Sarah kept encouraging me, kept cheering me on. And she is one of THE reasons why I finally got better and more comfortable in my skills. She's just the sort of person that wants you to be the best version of you. But in the kindest way possible. There aren't many people like that.

Who wrote this post? Way obvious? Way over your head? Have a guess in the comments! Check out all of the http://missionimpossibleinfertile.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/pross-collinate/

It's all good!

Measuring just right! More later!
Lots of happy tears!

Rehearsal

As anxious as I have been all week, today I'm feeling calm, not confident, but calm.  Maybe the calm before the storm? Either way, it will be a storm today.

I find myself rehearsing the news, both good and bad, obviously, the bad news version is more upsetting to rehearse, but I am about 70/30 rehearsing bad and good news scenarios. I'm also imagining contingencies--if pregnant do this, if not pregnant, do that. It's as if today is the IF in the If/Then statement cascade.

Thank you everyone for your good wishes, and your sticking by me while I moan the same moans over and over.

T minus 1 hour, 30 minutes...oy.