She's coming

You guys, do I have a story for you. It's been CRAZY DAYS since I lasted updated you here, and I was all set to come home and write a nice juicy update.

But then this little girl, with her usual left-field, centre-of-attention antics, had other ideas. We met with our fetal medicine doc and our OB today and discovered from today's growth scan that little seedling's development has dramatically curtailed over the last few weeks. She'll now be better out than in, and so it's time.

Let's admit you tonight and do the c-section tomorrow, said Dr B.

H and I stared. (Stupid, I know; this is after all the moment literally everything has been building toward.)

I don't have adequate words. She's small and we're of course worried about how she'll fare with surgery (which will probably happen over the weekend) and NICU, etc. We're also crazy insane exited and overwhelmed at the thought of finally holding her and looking into that beautiful little face, discovering what colour that mop of hair is.

Send good vibes guys. And we'll see you on the other side.

Getting prepared, part I: babymoon

Alright I admit it: one of the (somewhat frivolous) things on our preparations list was a final waddle jaunt someplace relaxing and slightly luxurious, while we could still pretend it's just the two of us for a few days and get some respite from the whirlwind of appointments and practicalities looming along with little seedling's arrival. H suggested a last minute, doctor-approved, comfortable-journey-by-train to the continent while it was still a possibility; and so we spent last week exploring some lovely Belgian towns, soaking up the fin de siècle atmosphere of amazing grand cafes, drinking the justifiably famous Belgian beer (him), eating mussels (him again), pastries and chocolate (me, me) and generally being aimless and immersed in something other than our day-to-day reality. 

A babymoon is meant for those last moments of couple-y decadence before life is turned upside down by late night feeds and hastily stolen moments for personal hygiene and long conversations about the contents of baby's diapers rather than the contents of the Sunday papers over a bottle of prosecco.

At least that's the idea, right?

For us I think it was as much a respite from the hazy blur of often scary and overwhelming medical stuff that's characterized this pregnancy. And really, there was as much happy anticipation of little seedling's arrival in our conversations as there was avoidance of that inevitability.

We strolled...and window shopped in beautiful baby boutiques.

We visited late night jazz cafes...and laughed at her reactions in time to the music.

Ravenous young lovers with eyes only for each other, we were probably not. (Well, there was our two nights at a beautiful Brussels hotel with a rather racy past. Does that count?)

So I guess not a babymoon in the traditional sense (if the term 'traditional' can be aptly applied to a trend that has arisen in recent decades to respond to our growing affluence and consumerism) of decadence and pampering implied by the term. But ok, both owing to financial constraints and to the fact that I have no intention of eternally forgoing the reading of novels or long country walks just because I am about to delve into active parenthood, ours was a more subdued affair, though none the less delightful for that. Here's a visual sampling of what we encountered....

 

First flutters and baby Buddhas

So, December. Seriously, when did that happen? After so many weeks in which every agonizing second seemed to crawl by, allowing me too much time to over-analyze ever twinge, post-pee toilet paper wipe and scary what if thought in painful, terrifying slow motion, this past week has flown past at lightening speed. Mammoth Hanukkah latke-making (and eating) sessions, trips into London to see the exciting Paul Klee exhibition I mentioned, and my performance in a holiday-themed flashmob organized by my choral group as well as less joyful, more stressy work deadlines, have all helped to fill the week and catapult us into this final month of 2013.

But really, mostly, there is this: I am now 13w3d 13w4d into a pregnancy in which our little seedling gives every indication of being happy and healthy in there, progressing without complication. I can't really believe it, the good fortune, the truth of it all. I know I've said it before, but even (especially) when that second line appeared, I never imagined we'd make it this far. Second trimester! Mind blowing.

Last Wednesday was our nuchal translucency screening, and all appears normal (we'll have more conclusive results when the accompanying bloodwork comes back in another week). We had a lovely u/s tech who spent a lot of time touring us around each of little seedling's appendages, including already-kissable no maternal bias here, I swear upturned nose, miniature and perfectly round little toes on tiny flailing feet. And this time, I think there could be no mistaking that it was mild annoyance (rather than delight) that caused said kicking. S/he kicked up a fuss when ordered, so that the tech could get her nuchal fold measurements, but was otherwise content to be left alone and continue it's chilled out, intrauterine dozing.

How am I able to hypothesize? Well, this past week has seen another amazing development: little seedling has started to oblige with the concrete, anthropic evidence that I have been so craving; I am beginning to feel distinct movement. I know this is incredibly, unusually lucky, but I had similarly early sensations of movement with S (at around 15 weeks), so I guess my body just tunes into that stuff somehow. If I'm sitting or lying quite still, I'll get a very pronounced whooshing feeling, followed by little flutters. It's strange and amazing and miraculous.

And there have been exactly two times this week when little seedling has felt the urge to flail with such notable intensity. The first was during a rather fraught and confrontational 'discussion' with my mother last Sunday (worthy of a post in itself), when emotions ran high. The second was when H and I went to the movies to see the rather tense and suspenseful Captain Phillips the evening after the scan, the tone of which kept me for large parts of the film on the edge of my seat and not just because of necessary bathroom breaks. <Note to fellow pregnant readers out there: films which take place exclusively on the open waters of the ocean, complete with naturalist, jerky camera work conveying the surging crest of 30-foot waves, are not advised when morning sickness might be an issue. And the film wasn't that great, either.>

Anyway, put together with little seedling's reluctance to dance for the u/s tech, these bouts of movement in the face of (actual or fictional) tense, stressful situations have led H and I to developed an image of this baby as blissed-out, slightly languorous, and certainly conflict-avoidant. Basically, I'm harbouring a tiny baby Buddha. Or an adorable sloth. << weirdly cute image right there...

Whether through fervent parental daydreams or actual human development remains to be seen, but it's kind of fun to think about how quickly distinct personality traits suggest themselves.   

I wonder if little seedling will also be as corpulent.

Of course, things aren't all fluffy bunnies and unicorn farts around here, and even though I haven't been blogging quite so much lately, I'm sure I'll soon be back with the other side of the coin. But while that stuff too has it's important place, for today I'm continuing to work on all the good stuff. The fullness of life. Right here, right now.

And Happy Hanukkah/Thanksgiving to those celebrating this week!

For really real

Today I am 11 weeks pregnant. Not so far along in the larger scheme of things, I suppose, but oh so much farther than I ever imagined we would get, in those scary, tentative first days. In the last little while, this has all begun to feel real. Like, really real; this might actually happen. I don't mean the reality of a baby joining us in 6.5 months. Shut your face! That's still crazy talk!

What I mean is that for many weeks I couldn't even grasp the reality of my, uh...delicate condition. Being pregnant. Knocked up. I'm not sure I actually fully believed there was a bun in this here oven. <Any other grating cliches we can trot out here?> But the fact is, we'll soon be rounding the bend on the second trimester.

My confidence is currently on an upswing though may swing down without warning; I still reserve the right to panic at any given moment after another breathtaking peek at the little seedling during our 'graduation' from the fertility clinic this week. And graduate we did, with flying colours. Such agony! Such relief! S/he was in there, still measuring slightly ahead with a crown-rump length of 11 weeks 2 days for an ultrasound done at 10 weeks 5 days. That was very reassuring. But best of all, we got to see little seedling fist pumping away in there, either annoyed or delighted with the extra attention (who could say which?) and making its feelings emphatically known as we gazed in reverent silence at the screen lighting the dim sanctity of that room shared with three radiology students in that amazing moment. Before now, there was the little heart beat, but really, somehow I didn't have quite such a sense of the...alive-ness of our baby. Until now.

And so when I say things are getting real, I mean that now, I kind of accept the fact that there is an actual human being growing somewhere in the vicinity of my lower pelvis as I type this. My baby. It's crazy and amazing. And also, I must confess, not something I was able to truly absorb before this week. I think in my first pregnancy, I personified S from the very beginning, felt maternal love for another human being from the very beginning. Putting aside for the moment my sense of guilt at not having been able to do that for this baby...well, it was just too terrifying to invest that much. Until now.

And it only got more real from there, though more on the basis of social cues than of biological evidence. After our discharge from the clinic, we were sent for an intake appointment with the community midwives team. We've only ever gotten that far once before. Typically here in the UK, prenatal care and births are handled by midwives, with OBs or specialists stepping in only when a woman is referred as high risk. I do fall into that category (for many reasons, my age and medical history and recurrent losses being chief among them), but our initial assessment was carried out by a midwife who will follow us alongside Dr. B. We liked her very much; she was knowledgeable and understanding and sensitive but also very practical. Meetings with the community midwives tend to be less rushed and more focused on parental feelings and adjustments than hospital appointments do. We spent more than an hour, and at the end were rewarded with a bag full of goodies aimed at consume!consume!consume! expectant parents and...wait for it...a maternity book for which to record a progressing pregnancy, all the way up to a birth plan. Holy shit. For reals.

More disorienting delightful still, our appointment took place not in the clinical, high risky environment of the hospital, but in a local children's centre, complete with diaper caddies and tiny person furniture and adorable toys like these two:

Wizards and witches and babies, oh my!

The atmosphere was so warm and so... familial, oozing such an aura of parental ease, of children-as-a-natural-part-of-life, that it caught us off guard. In the past, such spaces were clearly demarcated as being out of our reach; cruel reminders of what we couldn't do and didn't have.


I felt like an interloper at first. Did we really belong there? This place with the built-in changing tables and nursing pillows and leaflets for mother-baby yoga? The fact is, I don't know if I'll ever truly feel a part of the 'club' (or, in many ways, if I want to) but for perhaps the first time, I allowed myself to feel embraced and lulled by the warmth of such an environment, which for so long felt beyond our grasp. For however long this pregnancy lasts (even though I still can't mentally grasp the whole living-baby-in-6.5-months thing, I am hoping for it with all my heart), I want to bask in it. Feel every second of it, as completely as possible skipping the terror of course pleaseandthankyou.

No, we didn't take a wrong turn. Yes, we are really supposed to be there. We have the paperwork - oh ok, and the little burgeoning human - to attest to that. And if my renewed nausea and fatigue in the last days are anything to go by (this is supposed to abate in the second trimester, right?), then - staying with my confident, hopeful vibe - the tiny human is going through another growth spurt.

The stuff that dreams are made of

Cute aggression: it's an actual thing

Now I have a perfectly logical explanation for my overwhelming desire to nibble on (oh, okay, bite) H, or one of my little brothers or nephews, when they've been particularly adorable.

Also, watch this video, which explains it all, and I guarantee you'll love all the people. All of them.

From now on - instead of my default whatifthebaby'snotOK?! reaction - I'm going to apply this theory whenever I get one of those scary cramps or twinges which (at nine weeks pregnant today!) keep coming: my uterus is just experiencing cute aggression when it thinks about little seedling. How could you not want to squeeze this?

Fragmin frenzy (all for nothing in the end)

This story has a very happy ending, thank the gods, but for a while there on Thursday and Friday, it was panic-induced, ugly crying central over here again. It all started on Thursday afternoon, when I was finally able to track down some now moot blood work results. (For the record, all looked well; I would have been able to carry on with IVF at our original clinic. Of course, I'm doubly fortunate that as [amazing, magical, can-still-hardly-believe-it-myself] events transpired, we didn't need to go down that road.) I got my results and I hung up.

Five minutes later, my phone rang again: Hi, I've just seen a note in your chart and it looks like Dr. M (the RE we'd been seeing at the subfertility clinic) would like you to go on Fragmin. Can you come in tomorrow so we can show you how to do the injections at home?

There was more about how the doctors had discussed it and it was quite commonplace and it was just a precaution and not to worry and...(I'm not worried about taking the meds, you twit, I am worried that my failure to do so for more than four crucial weeks at the beginning of pregnancy might have killed my baby!!). Truth be told, I didn't really absorb anything further at this point, as my mind was already racing with the tragic inevitablity I was sure we were being led toward. That, and it took all the strength I could muster not to verbally assault the woman on the other end of the line, with her cavalier tone, who seemed to be treating the care of my hard-fought-for unborn child as a kind of afterthought, oblivious as to why such news might make someone in my situation anxious.

Now for those who don't know, Fragmin (or heparin solution) is commonly prescribed for patients with a history of recurrent miscarriage, but we'd reviewed my repeat bloodwork again and again, and since I don't carry the MTHFR mutation, and because of my cancer history and the risk that blood thinners pose to my already vulnerable platelet counts, it was decided there was really no need in my case. I spoke about it with Dr. B (the MFM) during that first, nervous terrified telephone consult.

If you know anything about the MTHFR mutation and its treatment though, you'll know that treatment with heparin is indicated as beneficial to preserve pregnancy at the earliest possible stage, from the moment of a positive pregnancy test, through the first trimester. Cue panic, more raw, mucousy wailing and a feeling of dread and certainty that I and my caregivers, through neglect of the most horrible and obvious kind, had surely killed my baby. <And then I got up, left for work, and had to sit through and pretend to care even a smidgen about a looong meeting on the changes to asylum law which was little more than white noise> I don't know why exactly this particular news threw me so badly - I suppose any such forgotten 'detail', sprung on me so thoughtlessly, probably would have - but for those hours, I was convinced I was once more carrying a dead baby in my useless womb.

So off we went yesterday afternoon, and I won't bore you with the agonizing details, but suffice it to say that several screamy, demanding phone calls back to the clinic, in which I insisted on having our next u/s moved up from next week so that we could see the damage, resulted in a long meeting with Dr B, a reprimand to the nurse who handled the phone call, and best of all <drum roll please> another peek at our little seedling, very much alive and thriving and measuring ahead now at 8 weeks 3 days, having transformed from adorable grey blob to unmistakably human: giant adorable head, arm and leg buds all present and accounted for. And all 1.9 cm beautiful to behold. We found a strong heartbeat immediately with the abdominal u/s (the transvag invader having weilded its last).

I won't be taking the Fragmin, as originally agreed. Dr. B reviewed all my files, and still feels that it's not warranted in this case, especially as (music to my ears) my 'pregnancy seems to be progressing beautifully and you have a beautiful, healthy baby in there'. I trust him. The RE who put that note on my file (truly it seems as an afterthought) apparently makes a habit of that protocol, and I am suspicious of any approach to treatment that deals with patients by rote, irrespective of their individuals needs and histories. Dr. B kindly but firmly encouraged me to relax and enjoy as much of this as I possibly can, and it's medical advice I'll certainly (try to) take to heart. He ordered the scan I had demanded, just as reassurance: he is the first doctor we have dealt with who understands that when he is dealing with patients who have our reproductive history, it's as much about treating the parents and their wounded nerves as it is about caring for their baby. 'We understand that this is not just about the common cold, and you're entrusting your hopes for the future with us'. Melt. I wanted to hug him just as much as I wanted to strangle the RE and his stupid nurse for freaking us out in the first place.

But as promised - and despite unhealthy levels of adrenalin and cortisol having doubtless being released in the interim - a happy ending. Which just leaves me to make introductions.

World, meet little seedling. Little seedling, mee...well, I guess you don't need to worry about any of that right now. Plenty of time for all those introductions soon enough. Today (again) just joy and relief.

Still here, still pregnant

And every time I utter (or even think) that second statement, I feel a compulsion to add 'as far as we know right now'. That's terrible, isn't it?

While I had hoped that seeing that beautiful little flutter would be enough to not only calm my fears but make me feel more connected to the idea of being pregnant - and in some ways it has - and while I've managed not to descend into further bouts of mucousy crying, I'm also, it has to be said, a little...reserved? Detached? Hiding in a ball under the duvet?

After last Monday, I began to feel like it had perhaps, just maybe, all been a dream and now things were returning back to anxious pessimistic 'normal'. Minus the booze. Or the sushi.

That's not really true, of course. I have moments of real hopefulness, and when I am able to access the left brain logic buried under still- heavy piles of fear and caution, I remind myself that as of now, we have nothing but reasons to believe this pregnancy, that adorable grey blob, will indeed keep going and result in a healthy baby eight seven-and-a-half months from now. Today, I'm just shy of eight weeks pregnant. Further than we got last time. And my symptoms, which seem to wax and wane an frequently as my moments of hopeterrordetachmenthope, have run the gamut. And they are often strong. Until little seedling is able to give me more concrete, anthropic evidence that s/he is in there, growing away, it's a pretty nice reminder that things may just be going as they ought.

To wit: I'm a glowing amalgam of nausea, headaches, dizziness, aching boobs, nausea, heartburn, constipation, food aversions, food cravings, nausea, fatigue, bloating, gassiness, aaand nausea, which sometimes seems to exist in simultaneity with a desire to consume all the foods. All of them. On top of that, my weakened immune system chose this week to land me with a mammoth, sniffling, hacking head cold. I am a delight, I tell you.  

So, for the most part I'm laying low here in limbo-land (how's that for alliteration?), not drawing attention to myself or my 'condition', hoping that the malevolent variety of pregnancy gods somehow miss me altogether this time. Cast your lightening bolts elsewhere, evil fiends!

Given our history (and no matter how much I try to distance myself from that too, putting it in the ancient past), I don't know when I'll feel more confident in this pregnancy, if there'll be a magic moment when I'll really, truly believe. I'm certainly hopeful that there will, and that it will be soon; because while I can't say that my fear is stealing all the joy, it has muted it considerably. I'm hopeful that one day soon, the 'as far as we know' will become 'until s/he's born'. 

For now, I'm flexing my coping muscles. Cherishing those moments of holymolyI'mactuallypregnant! euphoria when they come, but also being gentle with myself when I can't muster the energy to embrace them, or stomach ohmigodhowexciting! sentiments of any kind when they come from others. Not that we've told a single soul beyond the thousands of my closest friends on the interwebs you, dear readers <waves to anonymous follower in the Cook Islands>. More just as a general attitude. Which is probably why I feel an occasional need to be silent in this space right now.

Which is maybe not such a bad thing for my long-suffering bloggy friends. Really, I'm repeating myself, aren't I? Lather <paranoid freak-out>, rinse <feel pukey and rejoice>, repeat. Is there a point to any of this? Not really; I guess it's more of a pop-in-and-say-hi kind of post.

I'm still here, still pregnant, and as far as we know...everything's just fine.

Same sentiment, whole new significance.

Best. Thanksgiving. Ever.

Or rather, Thanksgiving/Christmas/Birthday/NewYear'sEveFireworks /WorldHugDay(becauseohwhatthehell) all rolled into one. And then some.

The little seedling was there, measuring bang on target at 6 weeks 4 days, looking, according to the cheery u/s tech, 'as comfy as can be'. Aaawww.

Little seedling's miniscule, miraculous heart fluttered, I finally exhaled, and H gushed hot, joyful tears.

As we sat in the foyer, clutching the written confirmation of said heartbeat more proudly and ferociously than any degree we'd ever been awarded, waiting to be booked for our follow-up scan in just over two weeks....

H (blubbering profusely): It's already so cute!

Me (still too dazed to take it in): It's a tiny grey blob, my love.

H: But it's such a cute tiny grey blob!

************************

We're madly in love. Obviously.

First - and crucial - hurdle crossed.

And you. Thank you for holding my hand, bolstering my spirits, tolerating my crazy, and believing for me through what have been two of the longest weeks in recent memory. I love you all, too.