Monday Bloody Monday

Well, that was fun.  Several days of not wearing a pad and just being relatively happily pregnant.  Yup, sure did enjoy that.

Bloody wipe this morning.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that it was primarily brown and after cleaning up whatever had pooled during the night, so far it seems to have stopped again.  If this is all there is to this one, it will be the least severe of my bleeds (well, except the first one which was practically nothing).  But I've only been out of bed for 2 hours so it's likely there's a few more waves of blood before this is over.

I had a video job today.  Yup, I'm pretty sure these little suckers are kicking out blood right before I have to leave for video jobs on purpose.  Last time, I cancelled.  This time, I decided to go ahead and go.  The blood was pretty much over, and I'd only be out of the house for 2 hours at most, and I really don't want my rep with the company to start sinking because I keep cancelling due to "medical emergencies" right when I'm supposed to be headed out the door.  I had my video gear in hand, exited the house, came back in to let K know that I would give the cat her medication when I got back and my phone starts ringing.  It's the client.  Her assistant tells me that she's had a family emergency and needs to reschedule the video shoot.  Woot!  I get a small cancellation fee, and I get to sit home and wipe my crotch all day looking for changes to freak out about!

Called my OB's office.  My first appointment there is on Wednesday but I called and reported bleeding and asked if I could come in this afternoon.  I'm still waiting for a call back. I doubt I'll get in before my scheduled appointment.

I can't believe I'm still less than 10 weeks along.  Every day is just taking so freaking long!  The days aren't adding up together fast enough!  It feels like I've been pregnant and terrified for months now and yet I'm still in the "anything can happen at any moment" first trimester.

Screw this.  I'm going to get some decaf Starbucks and go back to bed.

I hate this

Argh.

This morning seemed to be the end of the fresh blood.  Most of the day, the bleeding has been either brown, or just barely there with my system clearing out some final blood residue.

Just when I thought "Ok, that wasn't too bad" boom, bright red, fresh blood starting all over again.

And I'm 8w2d so it's expected that I would have mild cramps and twinges and gurgles and stuff.  Nothing has been painful, but every fucking twitch has me analyzing what it means and if it could be bad.  I can't determine what's normal 8 week stuff and what might signal disaster!

I'm not really having nausea anymore so the absence of that symptom makes me freak out.  However, the last couple of days, I've been feeling pregnant in that my abdomen has been heavy.  Am I potentially missing a missed miscarriage?  You know, the kind where your symptoms go away because the heart(s) stopped beating but you don't actually expel the fetus(es)?

As I sit here writing this, I'm having a small shooting pain on my waistline, about halfway between my belly button and my right side.

And apropos of absolutely nothing, I got a notice for jury duty in January.  AGAIN.  I fucking hate being forced into downtown Seattle during the potentially snowy season.  The last time I had jury duty, in the same building as this time, I got trapped on a bus for 5 hours because it began to snow hard on the way home and no one in this part of Washington can deal with it.  I didn't even make it home.  I finally gave up when we crawled onto the the exit that would take me to my parents house and had my dad come pick me up from there.  K was behind me in traffic so I just told him to meet me there and we spent the night at my folks.  To tell you how obnoxious this is, on an average day, it takes about 10 minutes to get from my parents house to my house.  But the traffic was SOOOO bad, and so refusing to move, that we were anticipating another 2-3 hours to travel those couple of miles making it pointless to try.  Yeah, I really want the potential of doing that again at around 14 weeks pregnant.  Assuming I can even get to 14 fucking weeks pregnant which right now I'm having some serious doubts about.

Unhappy Alex is Unhappy.

4 more days until my next ultrasound.

And here I thought I might escape

It had been a few days so I thought maybe my doing nothing for those days had changed my destiny in terms of the expected bleeding.

Nope.

20 minutes before I'm supposed head out the door for the one video job I have on the books this month, I feel it.  That hot, wet little whoosh.  Head off to the bathroom and confirm, the bleeding has started.

I had talked to K about this last night.  The logistics I mean.  This bleeding is, in theory, nothing more important or difficult to deal with than an average woman's period.  So, do I go to work?  Or do I call in sick?  The plan was to go to work unless I was in some sort of pain or the bleeding was especially heavy.

I'm not following the plan.  I live about 15 minutes from the ER.  My video shoot is about 45 minutes away, and I'd be coming home at the height of traffic hour, having to fight through Microsoft traffic so it could easily be 2 hours stuck sitting in my car, bleeding.  And that's if nothing in particular goes wrong.

I called in and said I had a minor medical emergency.  Fortunately, they'll be able to reschedule my shoot for next week so I won't lose the gig.  I'm not expecting anything to happen, but I really want to be sitting at home, in my jammies, phone nearby to call someone to take me to the ER in case it does.

So, anything good on TV tonight?

Still standing

Not much to report but you've all shown so much concern (thank you!) that I feel I should give everyone an update.

For the last 24 hours or so, I would describe any discharge or blood when I wipe to be of the "residue" category.  Brown, not much there, but it's consistently there.

I'm still doing the endometrin so I CONSTANTLY feel like I'm leaking.  I'm trying to limit myself to 1 wiping check per hour because any more than that and I'm going to wipe myself raw and that's a whole other category of discomfort.

Told one of my bosses today that I'm not going to be working for a while.  The doctors said it was fine to do pottery, but I also noticed that on the days I did nothing, no bleeding.  On the days I spent a lot of time at the wheel, bleeding.  So doctors be damned, I'm not doing it until I feel somewhat secure again.

However, my video work is picking up.  I currently have 2 video shoots scheduled for this week and the company that I get the gigs through called me to see if they could book another one on Thursday for me.  That's fine, but they need to call the clients and make the schedules work, I don't want to deal with that.  I know that sounds like work, but really, it's not that strenuous.  I interview someone on camera for a half hour and then I film them doing what they do for 45 minutes or so.  The rest is spent sitting at my computer putting it together.  I'm kind of looking forward to the one on Friday, it's a go-kart racing place.  So there should actually be some fun stuff to shoot.

In pregnancy symptom news, most of it has faded away.  Currently 7 weeks 4 days.

• My digestion always has a general "not right" feeling to it.  A little on the hungry side, a little on the full side, a little on the queasy side, it can't really decide what side it wants to be on so it's on all of them at once.  But only a little.  
• When I get hungry, I become starving all of a sudden.  
• Oh!  Spent about 5 minutes last night sitting in front of the toilet wondering if I was going to have a repeat performance of Thanksgiving morning.  We really need to sweep the bathroom floor.  
• I don't really get cramps anymore, but rather the occasional odd gurgle.  
• Shoulders and upper back burn most of the time.  Don't know if that's a pregnancy thing or not.  
• I seem to be low grade tired all the time, but never solidly sleep.  I seem to be up peeing all the time, or just on the verge of being awake at any given moment.  I don't feel like I'm really soundly sleeping.
• It still has no dawned on me that there's a chance I'll make it past 10 weeks.  I'm not sure why.  On the other hand, I can't fully picture going through a miscarriage either.  So I have no hunches as to what's going to happen with this pregnancy.  For once, I simply can't figure out the future.

For the most part, I sit here, just kind of holding still because I'm afraid to jostle anything loose, playing cards on the computer, feeling like I'm leaking, and waiting until the hour goes by so I can see if it's endometrin goo or blood flowing into my underwear.  Real exciting life I've got going on here.

Question about bleeding while pregnant - if the cervix is closed, how does the blood escape?  Isn't that like trying to pour water out of a bottle with the lid screwed on?

Ultrasound tomorrow.

Went to the ER Bleeding

It's never 9am on a Monday morning that these things happen.  No, it's always 10pm on the Saturday of a holiday weekend.

Last night after a late dinner, I went to the bathroom to check in the moisture I tend to feel in my undies every hour or so.  That's endometrin for you.  You always feel like you just started your period but it turns out to be a clear, white nothing.

Not this time.  I had soaked through my pantyliner and when I was on the toilet, I dropped a major clot.  I could seriously feel it slide out of my body and when we looked at it in the toilet (yes, I made K look too because I was that freaked) it was something about the size and structural integrity of a full egg yolk.  It looked like some sort of animal kidney or liver that my parents used to feed our cats when I was little.

Here's a logistical problem that you face when something like this happens.  Do you flush the toilet?  Seriously!  What does a person do here?  We opted to not flush the toilet in case it was something that would need to be retrieved for some sort of testing.

I called the clinic and got my call back from the doctor on call and was given the choice of going to the ER or waiting until the morning and getting an ultrasound at the clinic.  Uh gee, let me think about that, BYE!  And off to the ER we went.

Let me tell ya, when you're 19 weeks and in labor, there's a whole lot more rush on your behalf than when you're 7 weeks and bleeding.

I got all checked in, blood pressure, temperature and oxygen levels measured, and was told to wait, so we waited.  I needed to pee.  But I was really afraid of what I would see if I took my pants off so I held off for a while.  When I finally went, there was still blood, but it wasn't as bad as it had been before.

During all of this, I'm trying to come up with a logical explanation for what's going on.  I'm convincing myself that whatever was in the toilet, if it was a gestational sac, it was only 1 of the sacs.  And that the other one could still be in there and just fine.  I'm basically preparing myself to be told that we've lost one and trying to psych myself up to believe that the other one is fine.

Finally, after about a half hour, we head back to a room and I'm told to strip down.  They set up an IV in my hand and take some blood at the same time.  The IV was a precautionary thing, they didn't actually attach me to any fluids, they just wanted the IV in place so that should I need something later, there's no delay in getting it into my system.  On a side note, every time I've typed IV so far in the post, my fingers automatically finished that to read IVF.

Then there was another half hour or so of excruciating waiting.  Bear in mind, that I'm shaking this whole time.  It was a combo of sugar/caffeine from the real coke I had with dinner and panic.  But that kind of tense shaking is not comfy.  While I pass the time inspecting my hair for split ends and color variations, K just sits in the chair next to me and silently waits.  I don't know how he does that but somehow he does.

FINALLY, the ultrasound tech retrieves me and my bed is rolled into a dark room for a date with Wanda.  But first, they do a topical ultrasound to check my kidneys.  WTF?  Ok fine, have a friggin kidney, but the doctor and I clearly have different priorities.  After we've established that I have kidneys, Wanda shows herself and here we go.

I see 2 sacs as the technician takes a quick look around.  I can see that one of the sacs clearly has something inside of it, the other one, can't see as well.  But regardless, it's there, and that means it's not at home at the bottom of my toilet.  But every time she glances at what's in there, she takes a still picture which pauses things so I can't clearly see if there are beating hearts.  We occasionally think we see some hearts fluttering as she passes by and this is reassuring, but it's not clear.

The tech is extremely thorough.  Much more thorough than the ultrasounds I get at the clinic.  They check both ovaries, including the blood flow through the ovaries.  And finally, fucking FINALLY, she focuses on the gestational sacs and start getting some good looks inside.

Of course, the tech is legally not able to give any conclusions of any kind, but fuck, we're IVF patients, we know what the fuck we're looking at.  And we are looking at Twin A's beating heart. YES!!!  All sorts of measurements get taken and I'm seeing ages like 6 weeks 5 days coming up on the screen.  And we move on to Twin B.  And Twin B is indeed right where it's supposed to be.  And there's beating heart number 2.  OMFG YES!!!!!  I start seeing measurements like 6 weeks 6 days on the screen.  And now K and I are babbling back and forth about how much growth we've seen since my ultrasound a whole 4 days ago and trying to make various diagnoses with each other since the tech is not allowed to join in.

As the panic starts to subside, we head back to my room to await conclusions.  Every so often I still need to wipe and I'm still bleeding a little bit.  A doctor comes in and determines that we're not going to do a pelvic exam, the ultrasound gives more info anyway and why introduce anything up there that doesn't need to be there (thus validating my no penis, no fingers policy during this pregnancy).  I'm told I can go ahead and get dressed and so oddly enough, that's what I opt to do.

After another bit of waiting, the doctor comes in with all sorts of results.  There's some blood in my urine sample (duh) but otherwise it looks fine.  My bloodwork all came in just fine.  And my ultrasound, things look as perfect as they can be.

WTF?  How is that even possible?  How can that much blood, a clot that size, exit my body, and you can't find any evidence of where it came from or what the hell it is?  10 days ago, I passed a clot that was like a smushed pea and they could find the gap where that had come from, but you can't see where a clot the size of an egg came from???  I tell him that I'm picturing all of the lining of my uterus just breaking off in bits and pieces and eventually the piece that's holding one of the sacs in place is going to come out taking the sac with it.  The doctor said that's not what's happening.

Here are the final baby conclusions.  I'm told that the best indicator of fetal strength is the heart rate.  The heart rates are 137bpm and 139bpm - very strong.  So that's really good.  The doctor also says that size and age measurements are not exact sciences at this stage so take those numbers with a grain of salt.  Regardless, we're at 6w5d (Twin A) and 7w0d (Twin B) which is 2-4 days behind actual age, but significant growth from last Tuesday so I'm good with that.

I was told that if I bleed through 2 pads an hour, that's panic time.  But if I have something to panic about before then, I can come in any time and peek in on the kiddos.  I'll likely be doing that every couple of days because I seem to be bleeding significantly every couple of days.  I woke up this morning to quite a bit of blood, but it didn't soak through a pad, and as of 9 hours ago, the kids were fine so I'm sucking it up and not panicking.  Yup, see this face, this is a non-panicking face.  No really, it is.  I always look like that.

When I went to sleep last night (after flushing the toilet guilt free), my big boy kitty was under my arm, my smaller boy kitty was under my other hand, and my mini girl kitty, who never comes up on the bed at night, she was sleeping on my belly.  She was still there when I woke up this morning.

For the next few days, I'm not doing jack shit.  No pottery, no dishes, no nothing.  I'm either sitting or lying down.  Intellectually, I'm fully aware that there's nothing that I'm doing to cause this bleeding, but I don't give a hoot about reason.  I'm sitting here, feeling like I'm having a period and it feels awful.  My brain simply can not wrap itself around the possibility that with all of this bleeding, I might possibly make it out of the first trimester still pregnant.  That just doesn't seem possible.

I'll be keeping my Tuesday ultrasound appointment at the clinic.  Yes, I'm likely going to look in these little ones every 3-4 days because they are scaring the bejebus outta me.