one down
Posted: June 2, 2013 Filed under: miscarriage sucks, stupidly introspective, the big IF, ttc Leave a commentOne decision that is.
As some folks here and lots in other places noted, I’m clearly not ready to give up on this pregnancy/baby lark.
I had some New Age Time with my chiro (rolling my eyes at myself), after which I realized my fear about trying again stems from how terrible I felt for, really, two years after my last failed IVF. Hence, in hindsight, my friend’s order to examine how I’d feel if I tried and failed again. Which is, obviously, within the realm of possibility.
Here is the deal. Things were bad there, for a while, y’all. Not like thoughts of suicide, but generally just not good. But then, last summer I started to feel better and now, as evidence by several things (my energy level for cooking and gardening most prominent among them), I feel, well, like my normal self. No longer broken! Fixed! It’s nice.
Even if I fail miserably at this, even if that failure makes me miserable, it looks pretty clear that I’d be able to, given time, come out the other side and feel ok. It might take a while. It might be really hard. I might alienate *all* my friends this time. (That’s a joke.) But I’ve done it before – with complicating factors – and so I trust I could do it again.
Done and done. That part at least.
somebody should do some tidying around here
Posted: July 18, 2012 Filed under: blogging, day in the life, food, home, miscarriage sucks, stupidly introspective, summer 2 CommentsAiming for once a week for the rest of the summer is do-able, don’t you think? I mean, I’m hardly working. And then perhaps I could also do things like clean up my blogroll, which is sadly out of date, and maybe log my lunch everyday. Really, I have no excuse.
It’s been a hard couple of years, y’all. But I think I am feeling better. Time. I’ve taken two years of it and now I am calling you, though not in the morning.
Here are things:
- it is hot as fuck here, again, and there has been no rain and the plum tree has lost about 1/3 of it’s leaves. Jim Waive saw fit to remind me that I like to freak out about the weather in July.
- I am gearing up for (yet another!) embryo transfer, avec steroids and lovenox, which is said not as if you planned on marrying an ox, but as if you started to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and then changed your mind and wanted to talk about vans and oxes.
- there is Neighborhood Dramaz. Really. More than one drama. One neighbor is concerned that my cats mistake her front flower bed for a litter box. Oops. Not much to be done but apologize and give her some eggs. Production has improved slightly since my last post, btw. Other neighbor, previously featured on Caved as a Serious Cat Person, is very upset that another neighbor has vicious sounding big dogs that are not supposed to be at his house but for some reason keep coming back. Written out, it sounds so silly, but she is truly distraught. To the point of sounding irrational. And the offending neighbors do nothing, which is the shame of it, I think. Starrhill is pretty tight; there are really only a few of us in the place and this is how we usually handle shit: if you’re upsetting somebody, go talk to that somebody, hold your damn hand out and try to make some compromise. I fear it has gone on too long for that at this point. And that the actual owner of the dogs seems to be the sort that thinks she doesn’t need to hold her hand out.
- LB and I are splitting a share from Appalachia Star farm again this summer and it’s pretty great. The tomatoes are about to come rolling in and I am very excited. In other food news, I have pots of herbs that I am actually using for the first time in years. It’s like being born again. Sort of. Being home to make a lunch is like being born again.
- I had another miscarriage awhile back – whee. This one didn’t hurt, which was nice. The sliver lining is that it put me up to the magic number of three miscarriage, which makes my insurance company willing to pay for the Big Giant Pannel of Autoimmune tests. I do love a good visit to my lab people.
- my old neighbor, who should just move back to Starrhill, solving all the Neighborhood Dramaz, loaned me the book about running everybody read like 2 years ago, and which I also happened to give my dad but never read myself, and for about 5 minutes I was all “I could run!” And then I laughed at myself. Because the part of the book about eating beans and tortillas is really much more up my alley than running.
- one of the search terms I just saw in my stats is tiny tits. Hahahahahahaha! Sorry, wrong blog.
I have been thoroughly enjoying Twitter and Instagram. We can blame that for my lack of blogging, but didn’t everybody have that particular crisis like 4 years ago? Only my laziness to blame, as per usual.
here is a stick. come beat this dead horse with me.
Posted: May 1, 2011 Filed under: blah, miscarriage sucks, multi-week wait, the big IF, western medicine 9 CommentsOh, well, hello there!
Are you even still here? Did you think I’d given up on having a baby? Yeah, me, too. But no! I didn’t! Why give up when I can torture myself more? Woo and hoo!
So a week or so ago, after a big, long break, I had a “counseling” session with my re, who was his usual great self. He wanted to recheck my thyroid* and was cool with my plan to put off the mega-pricey battery of auto-immune tests. If I hit the magic number of three miscarriages, my insurance will shell out mega-bucks. As I’m just one blood-bath short, I think I’ll wait. If this next try works, score! No need for testing! If it fails, well, at least I get the million mega-pricey battery of tests for free. See? Win, win.
Anyway. My thyroid checked out just fine, thank you very much. (Now, let us sing the praises of the lab people. Who not only remembered my name after all this time, but also remembered that I like a bit of gauze and a piece of tape rather than the big, stupid colored wrap that is the norm these days.) And so I was cleared for take off. Note the metaphor. It’s a Journey, y’all.
Here’s how it’s all going to shake out: oral estrogen starting on CD 2 (Have I missed counting cycle days? No, I have not.) and then prog (By vagina! Because that’s how we roll.) and some wandings and one blood draw and then off I toddle to Richmond to get one of my ten – yes, that’s 10 – embryos popped back up in there. There being my uterus.
So let’s beat this motherfucker into the ground this time. Hand me my stick.
*What? You didn’t know there’d been thyroid trouble? Well, that’s a story….from the Fall When Everything Fell Apart And Then My Cat Died. But we are living in the now, y’all. The. Now.
wash out
Posted: August 18, 2010 Filed under: blah, miscarriage sucks, the big IF 8 CommentsI love a thesaurus, don’t you?
IVF 1.0 failed. Or, rather hung on like a tenacious fire ant whose betas won’t rise and then flamed out brilliantly in a painful hour of horrid cramping bleeding that I like to call a miscarriage. The medical world likes to sugar coat it with the name Chemical Pregnancy, but that sounds a tad formal for something I’m so up close and personal with, don’t you think?
It’s been a particularly crap past couple weeks. I’d like a do-over.
hahahaha. ha.
Posted: July 30, 2010 Filed under: history, miscarriage sucks, multi-week wait, possible girl in trouble, the big IF, ttc 8 Comments20.
Yes, friends, that’s a doubling time of 77.something hours or a little more than 3 days. Not great, but not nothing.
Keep breathing.
more stats
Posted: July 28, 2010 Filed under: miscarriage sucks, possible girl in trouble, the big IF, ttc 5 CommentsAnd for your continued amusement:
Beta at 9dp5dt is 13.6
Lower than low. But not not pregnant (all y’all not pregnant people would get a beta of 5 or less). But really, lower than low. Lower even than the last time.
Here are some fun facts to keep you busy. We love Julie. Because she’s funny and she sites her sources. Lower betas for 5 day transfers? For here, please.
More blood on Friday. Cross ’em if you got ’em.
almost just like a mother
Posted: May 9, 2010 Filed under: history, miscarriage sucks, stupidly introspective, the big IF 9 CommentsInterestingly, I’ve never written a Mother’s Day Post. It seems sort of the sine qua non for infertility blogs. Ah, maybe *now* I’ve arrived!
I must say, prior to anything else, that my own mother wins – supportive and loving and willing to let me make my own way through things. My current struggle with Mother’s Day has nothing to do with her. Nothing.
Back in the day, when I thought I was just ttc, not actually infertile, I would read about how some people found Mother’s Day too hard to deal with, how they hated it. And I was all, “Aw. Poor them. I’m *so* okay with all this.” Totally cavalier and shit. At the same time I was nurturing fantasies of at home insems, no medical intervention, rainbows and unicorns and chocolate bacon and all that sort of shit.
Oh, how far we fall….
Last May, it hit me. Oh, yes, I should have seen it coming. I’d already become one of Those Infertiles – you know the ones: the ones I used to sigh and shake my head for. Poor them. Only it became poor me. Somewhere along the line, it became poor me. And the crowning moment was that Mother’s Day. It bit.
Was it because had the miscarriage not happened, I would have been a mother then? Or was it simply the slow erosion of my sense of self? Or just that 5 years is too long to do the same thing over and over with no success? Whatever it was, I think it marked the moment when I began to think of myself as infertile. Not just lacking in sperm, not just unlucky or impatient. But infertile with a capital IF.
The kind who has friends they don’t really talk to any more. The kind who hides behind newspapers so as to not see acquaintances with babies and feels small and stupid for not being big enough to deal. The kind who uses a medical diagnosis as an identity. The kind who can’t speak with hope anymore because that line’s been disconnected.
We’re still here, though. Us infertiles. It almost feels like coming out. You get to put a name to how you feel. You get a community of people. You get to swap stories and use acronyms nobody else gets. You get to hope that by telling your story, somebody somewhere will feel a little less alone. But the difference between being infertile and being gay is there’s no joy in infertility. I’d not wish it on anybody.
Since the miscarriage, I’ve taken to referring to “when I was pregnant,” with increasing ease. If I were to pick it apart, and clearly that’s just what I am going to to do, there are several things going on. Oh, let’s make a list. Just for fun.
- civic/social duty. Lots of women have miscarriages. Fewer talk about it. Even fewer will talk about how it went. So I should step into the breech, yes?
- it happened. So it’s worth mentioning. I could glance down and look away, or I could say, “yeah, when I was pregnant, I…..” Or “… right, that was when I was pregnant, so….”
- healing. The more times I talk about it, the easier it gets to talk about. Also, see #1 above as the corollary to this.
- shock value. Self explanatory, also relates to #1 above.
- truth. I was pregnant once. I might never be again. I want to remember.
Maybe that was the closest I’ll ever get to motherhood. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not. I know that’s a very narrow definition of motherhood and not one I really subscribe to, but, for real, y’all. Maybe that’s as good as it gets for me. Maybe those 7 weeks and a handful of days are it. I don’t even count it as a baby – it was too early and too hard to believe for that. But I was a mama, just for those couple few weeks.
And I’m still here. Scarred and scared and very, very low on hope, but still here. No stronger, no smarter, no better – worse, I think, in a lot of ways. But still here. Struggling with my motherfucking baggage as I climb back on the train one more time.
Happy Mother’s Day.
moving on. or, how did i get here?
Posted: April 3, 2010 Filed under: blah, miscarriage sucks, stupidly introspective, the big IF, western medicine 10 CommentsYou see, this is how it is: infertility is rough. It eats up at the edges of who you think you are and sticks long, brittle poles into your being. You have to walk very, very carefully after those poles are in there. Those fuckers are brittle and will shatter at the least provocation. And you thought you knew who you were. Ha. I’d like to be all new-age-y and shit and say how I’ve “grown as a person” and that this “journey” is a “gift” that has brought out the “better parts” of my “true self.” But we all know that’s some bullshit. It’s just been ugly and has made me uglier.
Disappointment is a bummer. And it’s the lifeblood of the infertility world. You’d think it was hope that kept us all going, but nope. You’d be wrong. We continue because the disappointment is so damn disappointing. Hope, on the other hand is the brick wall you keep banging your head into until there’s a nice dent in both the wall and your head. And here I was, hoping my best self would rise to the occasion and provide some much needed grace. Oh, well, as the kids say.
And it gets old. Talking about your bitter brittleness. For real, nobody wants to hear it anymore. Not even yourself. Disappointment is so god damn boring. Can’t we talk about something else?
(Although, clearly, I can’t talk about much else, if you notice just how little I’ve had to say of late. I wanted to tell you about the injectables cycle this fall and how it almost broke me, literally and figuratively. About the cycles missed on account of holidays. About how even with femara, home inseams are just not working. About how I am on the far side of 35. I wanted to tell you all those things. But didn’t, or couldn’t, or something.)
So, yeah. I’m going for an appointment to talk about IVF in a couple weeks. I’m just tired. Five years in and I am just fucking tired. Of disappointment and bitterness and waiting. It’s time to bring in the big guns or throw in the towel.
glutonous
Posted: February 3, 2010 Filed under: doula, family, general queer stuff, miscarriage sucks, nablotryagain, stupidly introspective 6 CommentsHere I am. Just back from …. birth class. No, no. I’m not knocked up. I’m taking it for my doula certification. You’ll remember, you old timers, you, that I took a weekend long doula training class. And it was great. And birth work is great, what I can do of it – teaching sort of gets in the way of being on call for births. Having taken the training, but not completed the certification process, I can attend births, but I cannot claim to be a “certified” doula. To be certified, I have to write up six births I’ve attended and take a birth education class, in addition to other things I’ve already done. Well, a friend is offering a free birth education class, so I figured I’d take it and be all the closer to certified.
And it’s great. Yep. Great. Full of interesting information and well balanced with regards to intervention-heavy vs. intervention-free birth.
And it’s hard to sit through – writing a birth plan or visualizing my cervix opening like a flower seems rather akin to prodding an almost healed puncture wound with a chopstick.
And it’s straight. Yes, friends, you’d think I’d know at this point that coupled, straight people have babies and most of them have no real, true idea that I exist. Nobody’s mean, or hateful, or anything like that. It’s simply as if they have *no idea* single mothers, or lesbians, or any other differently familed people might be giving birth, too.
work in progress
Posted: October 19, 2008 Filed under: miscarriage sucks 13 CommentsAs a list, of course.
- Friday, 10/17/08 – u/s at 3 pm shows no appreciable growth of the gestaional sack from last week. RE recommends stopping prometrium to allow miscarriage (honestly, I think I might prefer the term abortion here, but maybe not everyone would understand that).
- Saturday, 10/18/08 – copious watery mucous through out the morning (26-ish hours since last dose of prometrium), I’d think I were about to ovulate if I didn’t know better. No other changes.
- Sunday, 10/19/08 – mix of watery and white/creamy mucous (the later in sort of stringy bits) mid-day. Damn near perfect eggwhite mucous at bedtime – really, it seems just like CD 14 of a regular cycle. WTF? Is there a mucous plug of some sort this early on?
- Monday, 10/20/08 – still nothing. Wore a thrice stuffed luna pad knock-off to work, just in case. Possible slight cramping around noon – or possible post lunch GI rumblings. Very slight, really not even there, light pink/light tan mucous in the mid-afternoon, when I finally got to pee.
- Monday, 10/20/08, 7:45-ish – definite red flow, as old FF likes to say. Whew. Let’s get this party started – I am soooo over the limbo shit. I guess I should take some advil, as I was advised. Part of me wants to tough it out and see how bad it is. Weigh in, please.
- Monday, 10/20/08, 9:30 – flow my ass, it’s more like spotting. Mostly red, some brown, much like the last couple days of my period. Some lower back pain, which, in retrospect, has been going on all day. Maybe this won’t be too bad? Or maybe it will really suck. Going to bed with advil and a hot toddy.
- Tuesday, 10/21/08 – nothing to speak of overnight. Um. WTF? No cramping, sore back or blood all morning, despite being upright – I thought maybe gravity would help. Oh, and I thought this might resolve quickly.
- Tuesday, 10/21/08 – ok, so the last entry was not entirely accurate. When I finally made it to the bathroom, there was a good bit of very sludgey, very dark brown goo. But nothing else. As of now – 6 pm – there’s some back pain. :: taps fingers impatiently::
- Wednesday, 10/22/08 – some blood/watery mucous through out the night – not much. No pain worth mentioning. The girl kitten is going to the vet to get fixed today. The irony is lost on me. Continued bleeding – say, medium? – through out the day. Switched from knock-off luna pads to The Keeper™ in the late afternoon, fill it in a couple hours. Had acupuncture at 4.
- Thursday, 10/23/08 – wow. Now we get to the real deal. Cramping of growing intensity starting around 6 am. Sometime on the toilet to see if anything would come out (answer: yes – about the size of a golf ball – just a clot, the gestational sack would have been too small to see – also diarrhea – ew, nobody mentioned that). Also sometime in bed, ah, writhing. Hurt like a motherfucker, peeking around 7. Shaking, chills, the whole 9 yards. 800 mg of advil did nothing. Counter pressure on my lower back, on the other hand….. miraculous. The New Girl woke up to my labored breathing, asked what she could do, and from somewhere I dug up having her press on my back. Who knew that doula training would come in so handy?
- Thursday, 10/23/08 – thank you baby Jesus for telling me to take today off work in advance. I was about done with the passing of the Giant Clot around the time I usually leave for work. Went back to sleep and woke up around 10, feeling….. damn good. Huh. Relieved and renewed almost. Wow. Made coffee, tended the fire, got back in bed. Went for very late breakfast at the Diner. Came home and got on the couch. Still bleeding and some moderate cramping, but I think the worst is over. Whew. I’m exhausted.
- Saturday, 10/25/08 – no, it’s not fucking over yet. Some cramping, not terrible but really less than fun. Still bleeding like a MF stuck pig. An average of an ounce every 3 or 4 hours for the past 2 days. It’s like there’s an open bleeding wound somewhere inside me. A literal one, I mean.
- Sunday, 10/26/08 – still bleeding. Jesus fucking Christ.
caved 