What Makes a Mother

If you haven't seen this video, you need to. It will bring you to tears.

Survival

That's about all I'm managing today.

After several days of feeling pretty good, physically, the cramping and back pain have ratcheted up a notch and I'm spending more and more time lying around on the heating pad and counting the hours between doses of pain medication. I have a million things I want to write about, and yet nothing that I have to say feels substantial in any real way.

I'm aching, inside and out.

I'm angry.

I'm sad.

I'm empty.

(And now I'm writing like an angst-filled teenager. Sometimes I can't even stand myself.)

I posted the other day on FB how I wished I could be on the other side already, the place where all of this is just a faded memory. I want to be able to look back and say that we survived it, that it was all worth it in the end. But how is that even possible? How can having one child ever make up for losing two?

I will survive this. I know that.

But the question that keeps beckoning in my brain is: at what cost?

Thank You

There are simply too many of you to name. Thank you for your comments, your support, and your love. So many of you have written about me on your blogs -- its humbling to think that you find me worthy of even mentioning on your most personal spaces. I thank you for directing support my way -- without it, I don't know where I'd be right now.

Mo has been wonderful. We've talked, really talked, without judgement for the first time in a really long time. We're communicating much better throughout this, our second loss. Having my parents here has helped tremendously -- they both took off work on Wednesday and came to the hospital with me and Mo. They stayed with us the whole day, just hanging out at the house while I slept. It made me rest easier knowing that Mo wasn't alone.

We're finding that the second loss is very different from the first. It's both easier in some ways, and harder in others. It seems multi-layered in a way that the first one wasn't. My first miscarriage was like a sucker-punch in the gut -- just shattering. I think this one is less of a shock...and yet it brings with it so many more questions. One miscarriage can often be written off as a fluke -- but two in a row? I'm not so sure. After initially balking at having the tissue from the D&C tested, my new OB (whom I'll call Dr. Compassionate, because he really was, considering he met me for the first time Tuesday) finally agreed at Mo's insistence. I'm grateful for that, because I desperately want answers, even though I know that any answer will not really be an answer at all.

I am physically in a lot less pain this time around. After miscarrying naturally, contractions and all, the first time around, I knew immediately that I couldn't wait for weeks to do that again. Especially seeing as how the baby had already been gone for two weeks, with no signs of impending miscarriage, it would be likely that my body would still need a D&C eventually. I just couldn't imagine continuing to walk around pregnant, and yet not, sick and in pain and waiting for this to end. And yet a part of me still feels guilty for this decision. Mo kept asking me, what if the ultrasound was wrong? What if their machine just wasn't working right? I saw the pictures -- they looked exactly the same as our last u/s photos. I KNOW the diagnosis wasn't faulty. And yet, and yet.

I know from experience that, in time, I will feel better. I will eventually channel my anger into something healthy -- my house, my classroom, my plans for the future. I will get to a place where I am ready to try again. But right now, I'm just sad. I miss my babies, whom I never got to hold, but whom I loved already. My faith in any sort of master plan, or even of the existence of God, is shaky at best. But there is a part of my soul that hopes, and prays, that my children know how much I love them, now and forever. They will always be a part of me.

As will all of you. Thank you for holding me up, for being there, good times and bad. I love you all.

No Heartbeat

Baby measured just 7w6d, one day more than our previous ultrasound over two weeks ago. D&C has been scheduled for tomorrow morning.

I am broken.

The Irony of Pregnancy After IF

We all begin this journey with the same end in mind: a baby. We want to add to our family, to be parents. For some of us, though, there comes a point in time where the goal seems to shift. Perhaps because the elusive endpoint seems so impossible to achieve. Somewhere along the line, the goal of parenthood shrinks and we focus on the short-term: getting pregnant. The battle for parenthood becomes a personal vendetta against infertility. The desire to raise a child is still there -- but even more so is the desire to WIN, to not let IF beat us. Ask me two months ago what I wanted more than anything in the world, and I would have told you it was to be pregnant.

But (and here is where some of you may want to ship me off into the IF underworld), now that I'm here, there's a part of me that wonders if it was worth it. Not the baby part -- like I said, that's the ultimate goal, and I KNOW that will be worth it in the end, no question. But was my focus on being pregnant, on carrying this child myself, really worth all the heartache we endured to get here? In the past 8 years we've spent more money on treatments than we would have on adoption. Certainly we've spent just as much time planning (and mourning) and worrying over cycles than we would have on paperwork and homestudies. And in the end, there are still no guarantees that come January I'll be left holding anything at all.

There's this myth out there that, once infertility is conquered, we should be utterly grateful to be pregnant. And I am, don't get me wrong. If everything works out, and a live baby results from this, I will be the most grateful person on the planet. But, perhaps my expectations were skewed. Eight years of planning for a pregnancy can do that to you. You see, I've discovered that I'm not such a fan of pregnancy.

It may seem a bit pre-emptive to say that, being still in the first trimester, and I'm not ruling out the possibility that I may yet turn into a glowing, joyful, momma-to-be. But, so far, that is SO not the case. I feel wretched, and have for at least a month. I no longer have the energy to complete the most basic of tasks, I hate food for the first time in my life, I can't sleep more than a few hours at a time, and I'm gassy and nauseous and generally uncomfortable 24 hours of the day. And those are just the physical symptoms. There's also the mind-numbing anxiety, the inability to pee without having a heart-hammering psychological meltdown, the sheer terror that I might lose this baby, too. In a word, pregnancy SUCKS.***

I didn't expect to feel this way. Yes, I KNEW that pregnancy wasn't easy. I KNEW that pregnancy after infertility, and especially after loss, would be even more difficult. What I didn't realize was that I would start to question whether or not I would be willing to do this again. Because, right now, I seriously wonder. Perhaps in time I'll discover I love being pregnant. Perhaps when my baby is born I'll be willing to do anything to have another one. But right now -- I just don't know. If, God forbid, something happens, I don't know if I have it in me to do this to myself again. I'm not saying that adoption is the easy way out -- it's not, and it brings with it a whole different set of emotions and difficulties to handle. What I am saying is that, somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the goal. I became so focused on getting pregnant that I forgot that there was an end to all this madness -- being someone's mom. And, having done everything we've done to get here, while still being thrilled to be pregnant, I just don't know if, given a chance to do-over, I would make the same choices all over again.

And that makes me feel like an outsider, both in the real "fertile" world we live in, and in my cyber-world of fellow infertile friends. I don't fit in with the other happy-pregnant-people, nor do I mesh with those still so desperately seeking to be where I am. Even in the club of "Holy shit, we've finally made it!" I find myself much more pessimistic than everyone else. I've finally got what I always wanted -- and it is nothing at all what I expected it to be.

***(I know that this not what those of you still in the trenches want to hear. I'm probably risking a great majority of my readership by posting this, but these thoughts are abundant in my head lately. And since I blog for myself first, I thought I'd put it down here in hopes that I can get it OUT of my head -- and maybe, just maybe, help one or two of you feel like you're not alone. )

131....

...and I am officially released to the OB! *HUGE* sigh of relief.

Thank you all for talking me off the ledge yesterday. You truly did have me feeling much more positive last night and this morning.

And, of course, now I have my pictures of my "little dinosaur" to reassure me, too! The RE said everything looked "perfect."

One more hurdle down, so many more to go. With a little handholding, though, I'm beginning to think we just might make it!

Stressing

I'm trying, folks, I really am. But in the wake of tomorrow's ultrasound, I have to admit I'm very nervous.

The nausea that was nearly constant a week ago is gone. Completely. I actually feel -- dare I say it? -- pretty damn good. I'm tired, yes. But sick? No. And that frightens me.

I also started having mild, period-like cramps. I know that some cramping is normal, but this feels different somehow. Not miscarriage-like bad, but ominous just the same.

On the flip side, my spotting/discharge/gunky stuff has all but ceased.

Despite knowing better, I keep Goog.ling fetal heart rates. Ours last week was confusing -- do I go by the date I measured at? Or the date I actually was? Three days shouldn't make much of a difference -- but in early embryonic heart rates, it does. While our heartrate doesn't qualify as "slow" it wasn't normal either. One site referred to it as "borderline." What no one knows is what is going to happen from here.

Tomorrow it could be normal. Or, it could be gone.

Everything I read indicates that a slow fetal heart rate (below 90 bpm) is a poor prognostic of a healthy pregnancy. Some 60% of pregnancies with such a rate between 6 and 7 weeks end in first-trimester loss. A "borderline" rate of less than 100 bpm gives about a 15% chance of a miscarriage. Which, of course, I don't read as "85% of the time everything is fine," because, really, when are the odds ever in my favor?

I no longer trust my body to do what it is supposed to do.

I am in such a weird space right now. I waffle between making plans for the nursery and playing "wait and see" with my heart. I feel a little bit distant from this pregnancy, which I know is a result of not wanting to get too attached too soon. Sometimes I feel like being absorbed into this world of infertility and loss gives me a skewed perspective of pregnancy. After all, most women have healthy pregnancies and deliver healthy babies. On the other hand, where else do I fit if not in this place?

I wish I could just fast-forward to January and leave all this behind. And that pisses me off. Infertility has taken so much from me the past seven years -- taking the joy of a hard-won pregnancy, too, just seems like a bit much.