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.

Are you ready? Yes I'm ready.

I'm sorry that I've turned into one of those bloggers who broods around with blog posts rattling around in her head, instead of setting them free to rattle around on the internet.  Brooding does seem to capture what I am doing with my thoughts, and my feelings, I mean brooding in the more "sitting on one's eggs" rather than in the sense of being sad and grumpy.

Have you been following Mo and Will's report on their 1 day work up in Colorado?  I've been peeking at it through my fingers. For a moment when Mo first described her work up I felt an upwelling of my own wish to have a one day at the temple of last chances and miracle babies.  I thought, only for a moment, maybe I too have a constricted blood flow that hasn't been seen. And then, I stopped. I just stopped myself from walking down that road, and reminded myself that more data would only make me feel crazier, and that I was done with being crazy.  For me, the data is in.  I don't get pregnant, maybe if we'd known about the translocation earlier we could have moved to donor sperm and we'd already be dandling our little baby on our knee. Or not. Maybe there is something that goes on with my eggs that is beyond age.  Whatever it is, it's not knowable at this time. The "why" of this situation is not going to be answered.

Not having an answer, oddly enough, has really helped me to feel that I'm ready to move on to DE. If it can't be known, it can't be known, and I will only lose more precious years of my life to answering, what has become, a not too important question.

Am I sad that I won't see my family and my husband's family expressed in our child? Of course, but it's sadness, a relatively easy burden to carry compared to the rage, terror, helplessness and sense of annihilation that I carried with me for most of the time I've been trying to conceive a child.

And you know what? I'm excited! Really excited, about this next step. It's not a guarantee, but it's a damn sight better than what I've been working with for many years now.

Although this baby will start out it's life in a lab, this child will be conceived out of our love and passion , and it's going to be wonderful.

So bring on the beta on Monday, and set me free from the endometrian, I'm ready.

Long time no see

I'm pretty sure if I looked in my archives, I'd find that I've got quite a few posts that say some variation on "long time no see".  Sorry about the silence. Since I didn't post my negative last week, some people were still writing to wish me luck. Sorry for the confusion!  I was actually very busy, then it was my birthday on Thursday, and I was exhausted from all the busyness earlier in the week. Also, I was just in a bad place before then and I didn't even want to hear myself talk, ya know? 

So! Well! Where to start?

I don't have breast cancer, so that's good. 

I went for my paranoid mammogram on Monday, got a call on Tuesday from my OB saying they wanted to do a diagnostic mammogram and an ultrasound because of a suspicious mass in my left breast, so I promptly mobilized, and used my PPO insurance to get myself an appointment the next day at a one of the best hospitals around, and had my answer ( a simple cyst), just under 24 hours from when my doctor first called.  I did a remarkably good job of holding it together--every once in a while I would stray into "well it's so early, it will be a good prognosis, but that means no pregnancy, and who will let a woman who has had breast cancer adopt etc etc.", but I managed to not go there. Thank god I got seen so quickly!

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We picked a donor.  We were looking at 5 donors, all vaguely resembling me, all proven, but 3 were from my clinic, which saved us about 5K, so the choice was clear in some ways. The donor is the same age as one of my nieces, taller than me, but the same coloring, and well, I guess she seems nice. At some point I had very high ideals about who and what and where and how she should be (also known as trying to replicate myself in another person...), and then I just got to a place where I realized that she needed to be a good person, and she needed to be willing to meet the child when they were 18.  I was quite worried that I would have to compromise on that, if I ever wanted to get this party started, but she is willing to be contacted.

We do one more IUI, sometime in the next 5 days (today is cycle day 8), with endo.metrian for the luteal phase, and then if the beta is negative, then we commence with the DE cycle. Luckily, our cycles are already somewhat synchronized (she'll get hers the same week I do in Nov), so we might even have a transfer before Dec 31!

I am still ambivalent about doing the IUI--still scared that even if I do get pregnant, and even if I don't miscarry, that my age puts me at so much risk for Downs and other genetic issues that it will be harder to feel excited than I would like. At this point I'd like a DE cycle for the price of an IUI. Shall I dream on?

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On Wed my mom called me to let me know that one of her dear friends had died in her sleep. For those of your just joining in the story now, my mom and her contemporaries are in their 80's, and so these losses may be piling up. 

Her name was Joan. She was at the hospital when I was born, and there for every significant milestone in my life until I was in my mid 20's when she and her husband moved about 4 hours away.  She was my buddy. She was a terrible cook, but ambitious--she introduced me to crème fraîche and many other delights. She was a snappy dresser, and always let me rummage around in her closet. I was allowed to try on her clothes, and model them--often combining things in new and different ways, which she always gave me credit for when she wore the outfit. In sixth grade I was going through a very awkward phase and took the worst school picture of my entire life (I am rather photogenic,and enjoy having my picture taken--drivers license pictures included).  She worked for a photographer, and that year had portraits taken of me, which she paid for. My Senior pictures, my wedding pictures, all of them paid for by her. 

She made me beautiful SARAH pillows when I was about 10, velvet, satin, corduroy.  I finally gave them to another little girl named Sarah, but right at this moment, I wish I had them back. She also took some of the most lovely baby pictures of me, did quite a lot of photography, and batik. She had a practical elegance that I can see so clearly in my own fashion choices--any type of herringbone, or nubby wool trouser strikes me as a Joan outfit. She was, I think, an artist stuck in a 50's housewifes life, and although she broke out and did do art in middle age, I wonder what her life would have been like had she known from the beginning that that was who she was.   But what I want to hold onto is that she didn't let it stop her, she did those things. Maybe I can too--maybe I can start holding my own art in a little higher esteem.

She was an early proponent of seat belts--I never wore one unless I was with her. She worked in the library, and I thought for a long time that being a library assistant was a glamorous job. Not because it looked glamorous, not because she always seemed so important--But because she had an air about her and she could find my favorite children's book, or let me know when it would come back. Very important to a girl obsessed with Mushy Eggs (out of print, but on it's way to me).

She would often start out a sentence with "Well Sar.." and then go on to tell me about something she was thinking about, something she'd seen or respond seriously to my thoughts or feelings.  She had lovely looping handwriting--somewhat like my own if I concentrate.  I recently unearthed a postcard she sent, which she made out of a picture she took of me, wishing me luck in my 'new adventure' (changing high schools), and teasing me about a teacher I'd clashed with who'd resigned.

The picture below is of the two of us, me probably wearing her kerchief--I recall being fascinated by them as a small child, and always asking for one.  She was probably asking for my opinion, and taking it seriously.

I love you Joan--thank you for ever little piece of you I carry inside of myself.  You live on in my heart, in my wardrobe, and in that special place where I know that I was loved, and adored and enjoyed from the moment you knew I was on the way. Rest in Peace, rest in peace.

 

 

 

Mid season replacement

Dr Calm's nurse called and said my progesterone is a little low, so they want me to start Endo.metrian and continue through next Wednesday. Husband and I both reacted oddly--essentially "really? Isn't it a bit late for that?". But they assure us that it's not too late.

Darling that she is, my nurse dug up two samples that will get us through the next 6 days.

I feel mixed about this. I want to increase our chances, but I didn't want to 'think' about this cycle, and now, every 12 hours there will be a little reminder in a foil pouch.

Oy.

A shot in the dark

We did an IUI this morning.  No ultrasound to check out the dimensions of my lining or my follicles, no trigger shots to give us the sense of 'perfect' timing, and no progesterone supplementation to screw with my mind and give me gas and sore boobs.

Like sex with one's husband, but so not.

I feel sort of...hopeful enough to go through with it, but not hopeful enough to worry about how the due date will inconvenience my hectic (hardly!) schedule in 9 months.

We're starting to seriously talk about DE, and when to do it. I want to do it sooner, Husband want's to do it later (me: start with cycle mid oct, him: start with cycle in Nov).  We'll probably do the latter--husband needs his time to get used to the idea, and of course, all this is dependent on the donor being available and agreeable to both of us. 

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Do you ever go through those phases that are just annoying? The kind where you feel it all freshly again; feelings you thought you'd mastered rear up again?  I think overall I'm doing better, but there are times when I look at Fa.ceboo.k and it feels like one more place where happy people show pictures of their children and talk about cheerfulness (not kidding on the last one, former cheerleader and cheerleading coach posted something about cheerfulness being infectious etc). I'm sure it is, but all I could think was "nice you can be so fucking happy all the time."  For a person who's been eating a lot of shit sandwiches for the last 3 years, I'm pretty happy, but ugh. Geeze. Yeesh.

And on the other hand, I want to have an easier, happier life, like other people do (cheerfulness weirdo not withstanding), and today I can't feel like I'm a part of that life; not to say they (amorphous they don't wnt me, they do!) but it just feel as if it hurts too much to know how easy (some)things are for others.

I think that resemblance talk just kills me.  I love it for a moment, and it's so true in many cases, but it just hurts to know our children will resemble us in many ways, but not physically, and as little as that will matter in the long run, it is a loss. 

One odd thing is that I can't seem to find an egg donor who resembles me. In many ways that's fine, it is less important to me than it was before, but it's just odd.  I sort of look like Ellen DeGeneres (big smile), Cate Blanchette (long face, sharp nose), Kate Winslet (Similar eyes, and holy crap we have the same boobs) and a little Princess Diana thrown in. Where the heck are all the egg donors who look a little bit like any of those people? All the women seem to have round faces and little eyes. Ok, that is an exaggeration, but really, what is up with DE and round faces around here?

Clearly, I'm all over the place, taking shots in the dark in many ways.  To sum up: IUI, feeling jealous, wanting to know why egg donors are roundy faced.

Meeting with Dr Calm tomorrow to discuss Donor Egg process. Oy.

Living it up, just a little

I just let myself fall apart last Saturday and it felt good. I had held it together all week, not out of any sort of external necessity, but just, well it just happened that way.  Anyhow, your comments and emails really helped, and by Sunday, I was normalish.

I'm peeing on the damn sticks in the am, and thinking that I'm probably not going to get an ultrasound, just go in the morning 24 hours after my LH surge and take my chances.  So, the IUI should be happening sometime between Tues and Thurs. 

I'm finding myself not disposed to diet, but disposed to be disgruntled about my weight. Ugh.  Also, since we are at the beginning of austerity measures here to make sure we don't accidentally spend our DE money, no private Pilates. I know that sounds sort of minor, but I've got major alignment and loose ligament issues, and I can be really crooked and have no clue, and hurt myself when exercising, so it was awesome to have someone spotting me the whole time.  I'll figure something out, but feh. Ya know?

I'm finding myself plunging into my work, and it feels so good. I've been working this whole 3 years, but with one foot out the door? One foot in the fertility clinic? Not sure where that foot was, but I found it very hard to make any exciting commitments that really fed me.  I decided to take on a project, and met with the director of the project and it was LOVE! Love I tell you. She is just the sort of person I rarely meet in my field, and it was a mutual love fest, which is JUST what I needed.

We meet with Dr Calm Oct 1, and we'll probably get the scoop on the DE process, and hopefully be ready to cycle in Nov or Dec. If I don't have a baby, I at least want a tax write off for the medical procedures to fall in this tax year. I know, romantic loving mother I'll make. But honestly, shelling out this sort of cash makes one need to think strategically.

I have some posts rattling around in my head, but I think I need to let them gestate a little more before I write them. And probably, if I'm honest, I just need to take a break from processing being infertile. Ya know? Just live a little.