Another year that I'll be glad to leave behind.
Started the year out just coming out of the shock of losing the girls and having it hit me full force. Wow, I'm in a much better place for this New Years!
The first few months were spent in desperate flailing, trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other on the path of life. I was trying to find a job (never really happened), trying to figure out my next fertility treatment, it was just awful.
In spring, I got all introspective, writing all sorts of posts about my philosophies on various life subjects like how to communicate with your partner, how we measure pain, crap like that. I guess we'll call that my pretentious phase.
Summer was all about failed FET's and massive dieting. The IVF clinic had me on a roller coaster of false starts and arbitrary rules. For a while there, every moment of every day was all about how to get the maximum energy from the minimum amount of food. Calculating maximum protein per calorie.
And then the fall came. One last full blown IVF attempt. The do or die. And I did.
Entering winter, I spent every day sitting in wet panties and going to the bathroom every 20 minutes to check for blood. And it was often there. Spent some time in the ER, had wayyyyy more ultrasounds than a person is entitled to, and just sat around, very tense all the time.
And now I enter the new year. As I enter 2012, I also enter my second trimester with what I was mourning a year ago back in my belly. It's been almost 3 weeks since my last bleed, and I got a brief moment of baby heartbeat on the fetal doppler yesterday. I'm finally starting to chill out and actually live every day instead of simply endure it.
Dear 2012,
You have the potential of being the best year of my life. The year that I look back on and smile about when I'm on my deathbed. The year that songs are sung about. Your cousins 2010 and 2011 did some nasty things to me. The kind of things that ensure job security for therapists.
But generations have been anticipating you, ever since the Mayans made up that calendar. Now I know that you've been raised to believe you're a bad seed, the end of the world, and all that, but I know you can rise above those expectations. Just look at how your uncle, Y2K, turned out! People talked smack about him for years too and he turned out to be really swell.
So you can do it. You can be marvelous, heralded for generations as the year that the infertiles gave birth. I know you can. I'm counting on you.
Sincerely,
Knocked up, not out
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
It stinks in here
Ugh, I've got robo-nose to the extreme. I pretty much always have a pretty good sense of smell, but when pregnant, I can't get away from it.
We have a cat food dish within 10 feet of where I sit for most of the day. And unfortunately, it has to stay where it is.
You see, it has a prescription kibble in it for the one cat that gets a lot of UTI's (which he currently has one and has been peeing in new and interesting places, but that's another story). It's ok if most of the other cats get into it, except for the one that's diabetic. She has the opposite bladder problems so if she ate this food, it would make her sick.
So for over a year, we've been trying to figure out how to keep the food available to one, but not the other. So we finally figured it out last week. The UTI kitty likes to sit up on one of the cat trees. Well the diabetic cat can hardly get her ass as high as the couch. She just doesn't climb at all. So we put the UTI food up in the cat tree where he now goes to eat, which is in the corner of my office so I get to smell it all day.
And I don't like air fresheners. I'll use one if I have to, but I'd rather not. It's just covering one icky smell with another.
But a couple of years ago, I made these garlic dishes. Small dishes and the bottom is serrated. Apparently you're supposed to grate the garlic on the serrated part and then put in oil so it becomes a dip for bread or something.
They've been sitting in a drawer untested all this time.
I grabbed an orange from the fridge, and swirled it around in the dish, and I now have the lovely scent of orange zest sitting on my desk! And whenever the kibble starts to win, I just zest a different spot. And when I run out of that, I cut up the orange.
I'm hoping to get 2-3 days of fresh smell out of this. I'm feeling kind of brilliant and smug at the moment.
We have a cat food dish within 10 feet of where I sit for most of the day. And unfortunately, it has to stay where it is.
You see, it has a prescription kibble in it for the one cat that gets a lot of UTI's (which he currently has one and has been peeing in new and interesting places, but that's another story). It's ok if most of the other cats get into it, except for the one that's diabetic. She has the opposite bladder problems so if she ate this food, it would make her sick.
So for over a year, we've been trying to figure out how to keep the food available to one, but not the other. So we finally figured it out last week. The UTI kitty likes to sit up on one of the cat trees. Well the diabetic cat can hardly get her ass as high as the couch. She just doesn't climb at all. So we put the UTI food up in the cat tree where he now goes to eat, which is in the corner of my office so I get to smell it all day.
And I don't like air fresheners. I'll use one if I have to, but I'd rather not. It's just covering one icky smell with another.
But a couple of years ago, I made these garlic dishes. Small dishes and the bottom is serrated. Apparently you're supposed to grate the garlic on the serrated part and then put in oil so it becomes a dip for bread or something.
They've been sitting in a drawer untested all this time.
I grabbed an orange from the fridge, and swirled it around in the dish, and I now have the lovely scent of orange zest sitting on my desk! And whenever the kibble starts to win, I just zest a different spot. And when I run out of that, I cut up the orange.
I'm hoping to get 2-3 days of fresh smell out of this. I'm feeling kind of brilliant and smug at the moment.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Twitter account
I just opened a new twitter account specifically for this blog. I sometimes want to post random little quips or thoughts that don't warrant a full blog post, so that's where those go.
I feel so cheesy and needy saying this but, please follow me!
I feel so cheesy and needy saying this but, please follow me!
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Sonoline B Doppler
I got a new toy today.
I've really been debating whether or not I should get a fetal doppler. On the one hand, hearing heartbeats can be very reassuring on a bad day. On the other hand, user error and my own fat belly might make a heartbeat difficult to detect, thus turning a perfectly fine day into a panic attack.
I finally decided to buy it for a couple of reasons.
1) My paypal account is where some of my pottery sales money goes and if it's under $100, I use it for play money. If it gets over $100, I cash it out and pay a bill with it, you know, all responsible like. Well, my paypal account had about $55 in it, and this thing cost $53, soooooooo......
2) I've been so afraid to buy anything maternity related because of the fear that in the few days it would take to arrive, I might no longer need it, and its arrival would be a trigger.
So I bit the bullet, bought this thing, and I consider it a toy rather than a medical diagnostic device. If it works, cool, if it doesn't, meh, maybe it will when I'm a week farther along or so.
We retrieved it from the mail and I had it unwrapped and directions open within about 30 seconds. I glanced over them real quick then handed them to K to look over while I hit the restroom.
In accordance to the advice I've read from others, I laid flat on the floor and we used plenty of the included goo. I told K to go ahead and press in pretty hard, cuz it's got a lot of belly to get through to try to find a very small noisemaker. In fact, ok, I wasn't going to do this so soon, but you guys need an honest picture of what this machine was up against. So please don't get disgusted but here is the belly pic we took on the day of 10 weeks.
And no, that is not a normal outfit for me. It's a skin tight tank top, designed to be an undergarment, over a pair of leggings that I would never wear in public. The half sweater thing I thought was cute for almost a whole day when I bought it and haven't worn it since. I decided to make it a part of my belly pic uniform because the tank top was skin tight enough to display some nipple action and while you're all invited to descriptions of my private parts, I think visual displays kind of cross the line. I mean really, no one wants to see that.
But now you know what that 3mhz probe was working through.
We located my own heartbeat several times, in several locations. So put your mind at rest everyone, my heart is in fact beating today.
I took the wand and tried down around the crotch hairline, mostly on the left. I'm not sure why I thought the left was the better side. Maybe because that's where Dr. C found one of my girls when we tried this in his office at 10 weeks during my last pregnancy. I also wanted to show K that he could press much harder than he thought he could. After 3 or 4 minutes, I gave up and handed it back to him.
After another 4-5 minutes, and several locations of my own heartbeat later, we finally heart the faint sound of a much faster heartbeat. It was located about an inch above the hairline, and significantly to the right of center. It was faint, probably because the kids are kind of deep in there, but it was certainly a fetal heart rate. The machine clocked it at 157bpm which is about right. Honestly, I'm going to take the numbers of the machine with a grain of salt, so as long as it's within about 15 of what I expect it to be, it's all good.
We called it a victory and were done for the day. We figured that finding 1 was good enough, trying to find a second one and making sure we weren't just getting the first one over and over again, well that was a bit too much to ask. I'm quite satisfied with our results for the day!
I don't know how often I'll use this, but I feel better knowing that it's in the house. If I find myself on that line of being scared, but not scared enough to think I have a valid reason to rush to a doctors office or ER, I have a tool at home that has the potential of putting my mind at ease. I'm getting over the fear of missed miscarriage. I think I'm far enough along at this point that if something were to happen, there would be physical indicators to let me know.
And as I start reaching weeks 15 and up, but before I'm far enough along to feel them move consistently, I can see this being a total sanity saver. For right now, it's a toy.
I've really been debating whether or not I should get a fetal doppler. On the one hand, hearing heartbeats can be very reassuring on a bad day. On the other hand, user error and my own fat belly might make a heartbeat difficult to detect, thus turning a perfectly fine day into a panic attack.
I finally decided to buy it for a couple of reasons.
1) My paypal account is where some of my pottery sales money goes and if it's under $100, I use it for play money. If it gets over $100, I cash it out and pay a bill with it, you know, all responsible like. Well, my paypal account had about $55 in it, and this thing cost $53, soooooooo......
2) I've been so afraid to buy anything maternity related because of the fear that in the few days it would take to arrive, I might no longer need it, and its arrival would be a trigger.
So I bit the bullet, bought this thing, and I consider it a toy rather than a medical diagnostic device. If it works, cool, if it doesn't, meh, maybe it will when I'm a week farther along or so.
We retrieved it from the mail and I had it unwrapped and directions open within about 30 seconds. I glanced over them real quick then handed them to K to look over while I hit the restroom.
In accordance to the advice I've read from others, I laid flat on the floor and we used plenty of the included goo. I told K to go ahead and press in pretty hard, cuz it's got a lot of belly to get through to try to find a very small noisemaker. In fact, ok, I wasn't going to do this so soon, but you guys need an honest picture of what this machine was up against. So please don't get disgusted but here is the belly pic we took on the day of 10 weeks.
And no, that is not a normal outfit for me. It's a skin tight tank top, designed to be an undergarment, over a pair of leggings that I would never wear in public. The half sweater thing I thought was cute for almost a whole day when I bought it and haven't worn it since. I decided to make it a part of my belly pic uniform because the tank top was skin tight enough to display some nipple action and while you're all invited to descriptions of my private parts, I think visual displays kind of cross the line. I mean really, no one wants to see that.
But now you know what that 3mhz probe was working through.
We located my own heartbeat several times, in several locations. So put your mind at rest everyone, my heart is in fact beating today.
I took the wand and tried down around the crotch hairline, mostly on the left. I'm not sure why I thought the left was the better side. Maybe because that's where Dr. C found one of my girls when we tried this in his office at 10 weeks during my last pregnancy. I also wanted to show K that he could press much harder than he thought he could. After 3 or 4 minutes, I gave up and handed it back to him.
After another 4-5 minutes, and several locations of my own heartbeat later, we finally heart the faint sound of a much faster heartbeat. It was located about an inch above the hairline, and significantly to the right of center. It was faint, probably because the kids are kind of deep in there, but it was certainly a fetal heart rate. The machine clocked it at 157bpm which is about right. Honestly, I'm going to take the numbers of the machine with a grain of salt, so as long as it's within about 15 of what I expect it to be, it's all good.
We called it a victory and were done for the day. We figured that finding 1 was good enough, trying to find a second one and making sure we weren't just getting the first one over and over again, well that was a bit too much to ask. I'm quite satisfied with our results for the day!
I don't know how often I'll use this, but I feel better knowing that it's in the house. If I find myself on that line of being scared, but not scared enough to think I have a valid reason to rush to a doctors office or ER, I have a tool at home that has the potential of putting my mind at ease. I'm getting over the fear of missed miscarriage. I think I'm far enough along at this point that if something were to happen, there would be physical indicators to let me know.
And as I start reaching weeks 15 and up, but before I'm far enough along to feel them move consistently, I can see this being a total sanity saver. For right now, it's a toy.
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