Uppercase Woman

Much Better, Thanks For Asking

So I’m feeling much better today.

The biggest reason is because I went to a meeting and shared about it.

I suffer from a bizarre emotional disorder: in times of serious emotion, I shut down. Completely. I go into some sort of weird frozen survival mode, whether the emotions are good or bad. I’ve been descending, I realized yesterday, toward this kind of shut down since my retrieval was so difficult back in April. I’ve fought it, somewhat successfully, but Friday’s good news caused emotional overload and I locked down.

When I’m like this, no one can get in. My best friend called yesterday, and I could barely talk to her. Her daughter wanted to say hi, and it took every ounce of energy I had to not hang up the phone rather than listen to her cheerful little eight-year-old voice. My husband tried to talk to me while I was deeply engrossed in the movie “Singles” which I saw twenty times back when it came out ten years ago, until I finally snapped at him and said, “I’m watching a MOVIE!”

Lucky for me, someone else last night was sharing that she felt the same way, and I was able to see what was really going on with me. PLUS the speaker last night was a woman who went through five years of infertility.

So I shared about how scared I am, not just the general fear about pregnancy and having a baby, but of how, now suddenly, I have something to lose, and that scares me.

I shared about how it’s ironic that my long-term body hatred, directed lo these many months at my inability to conceive, immediately swapped back to its normal position of hating myself for being fat. I also talked about how scared I am to have a baby at this weight. My mother suffered preeclampsia with me, and I know that my risks of that are higher due to my weight (that stupid ER episode where Dr. Green loses a mother with preeclampsia that I can suddenly vividly remember doesn’t help, either).

I shared about how anytime anyone congratulates me I immediately want them to stop talking and go away from me RIGHT FUCKING NOW. About how hard it is to stand there smiling when I just want to be alone.

After I dumped all of that, I felt much better. Afterwards, I spoke to a woman who happens to be a new mother (after suffering a miscarriage and then having her son born with a cleft palate), struggles with her weight, and is also a nutrionist (that I’ve seen her professionally in the past) about putting together a food plan so that my weight gain will be reasonable (we just have to wait until we know how many are in there!). I was able to get hugs and congrats from all those women without feeling like running away. They have been there through two years of my infertility, and lord knows I’ll need them if I miscarry, so I needed to share the (very early) news with them so they could have a bit of the joy too.

Anyway. My first fetal ultrasound (holy god, how I never thought I would type that) is on Thursday, so I’ll know then how many chiclets we got in there. Maybe at that point all of this will really sink in.

So now I just have to wonder where I can get maternity clothes for fat chicks. And don’t say Wal-Mart. I’m not giving those creeps my $$.

Oh yeah—and go see Fahrenheit 9/11. I don’t care what your political affiliations are; you will find something there to think about. It is not the left-wing missive I expected. It is very supportive of the troops, and shows some stuff we don’t usually get to see. This movie shook me to my core for a lot of reasons, and many of them where not the ones I expected (although, yeah, most of them were).

917

And that, my dears, is a very good jump.

First fetal ultrasound is scheduled for Thursday morning at 11am. Which surprises me; for some reason I thought I had to wait another week or two. Does anyone know what they can see that early?

Now I'm feeling kind of weird; maybe it's the hormones, or maybe it's the fact that I wasn't able to sleep again last night (so much for first trimester exhaustion--I can't sleep more than one night in three). I feel sad, and weirdly blank; it's like someone pulled off my infertility banner before the pregnancy one got made at the factory, and I'm not sure how to be. I'm snapping at my husband, I called out sick to work, and I can't seem to make myself not watch TV.

What's wrong with me? I'm supposed to be ecstatic!

Oh, and it could have something to do with weighing myself at my neighbors this morning. I went over there to check my new email account, which is the new Google email because I have a MAC at home and gmail only works with PC's. Yeah. So of course I saw their scale (I don't own one) and weighed myself.

I have gained 45 lbs in the last year of fertility treatments, and now, pregnancy. I'm totally disgusted with myself. I stopped working out back in February. I feel pathetic. And now, I'm pregnant, and have to gain more weight. Holy shit.

Oh, I'll stop typing, I'm even annoying myself now. Bleck.

That Sinking Feeling

Last night my husband and I went to see a movie. We were going to see Farenheit 9/11, but friends wanted to see it with us, so instead we decided to go for the full-on schmaltz of The Notebook.

I've mentioned before about being half white-trash, right? OK. So I LOVED this movie. Admittedly, I'm a little emotional anyway, but it was wonderful. I haven't been in a movie theater so full of crying people I think since Steel Magnolias. Even my husband cried. Three teenage girls sitting next to us wept for the whole second half of the movie. It's completely and utterly cliched, and predictable, and silly as all get out, but MAN. Awesome.

It also allowed me to shed some tears and that seemed to help the knowledge of our positive BETA sink in. I woke up this morning knowing that I was pregnant.

So I got online to visit my little circle of friends (all local to my area, and a great bunch of women--we've actually gotten together in person twice) on the message boards of a fertility webpage, and was devasted to see that the first one of our group had lost her pregnancy at nineteen weeks.

I remember being at my doctor's office once and seeing a woman there with two children, a boy and a girl. I remember resenting her being at the RE's, as if there is only a certain number of babies available to infertile women and here she was trying to STEAL MINE.

I feel like by getting pregnant now, I've stolen my friend's baby.

My husband reminds me of the ridiculousness of this--that the population of the planet has grown by nearly 500% in the last 100 years, so that can't possibly be true. But I already feel guilty enough being pregnant on my first IVF cycle, when I know women who have tried much harder and have still not gotten pregnant. It feels like I'm going to be kicked out of the only cool club I've ever been a member of, and rightly so.

I don't know, of course, what's in store for us with this pregnancy. If my friend's loss taught me anything, it's that I have to take this pregnancy one day at a time--enjoy each day I'm actually pregnant, and not have any expectations of tomorrow. Thank god with sobriety I've had some practice with that.

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My neighbor loaned me her copies of What to Expect When You're Expecting and Your Pregnancy Week By Week. While the latter is better than the former, both of them were written for all those fucking baby dust people. I know almost everything in those books hands down. Tertia recommended the Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, so I know there is hope, but MAN. What a bunch of condescending crap! If any of us actually acheive a successful pregnancy, we need to write a book about it. So that for those of us who know more about rising beta numbers and ectopic pregnancies etc etc etc there will something out there.

Holy Shit!

272.

What the hell do I do now?

Anxiety!

Another positive home pregnancy test this morning.

Blood given for BETA.

Awaiting results. Will have to wait until at least 4pm EST.

Between now and then? Insanity reigns.

Fuck? Not so much...

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I tested again this morning. Even though getupgrrl reminded me that home pregnancy tests are the tools of Satan, and even though I couldn’t sleep most of the night due to being really hot (even in air conditioning—I had a temp of 99.4) and I peed 651654 times before I finally fell asleep at something like 4am, and even though I fucking knew better.

So I got up around 9, saw the tests sitting there so innocently on the top of the bathroom radiator, and went ahead and popped one into my urine stream. To my surprise, when I glanced at the toilet before I flushed it, it actually looked like I’d peed in it, so apparently my urine was a tad more concentrated this morning than usual. I took it back to the bedroom, and my husband was awake and looking at me expectantly. I said, “Yeah, I tested again.” He rolled over and sleepily said, “How long do you wait?” and I said, “You can read your results in a soon as three minutes!” and then we stared at each other for a minute or two.

When I glanced at it at that point, I was surprised to note that while there really wasn’t a second line visible, I could see where the line would be (you know what I mean, all of you who have peed on a stick time and time again), like a comment on a second line. A minute later, it was faint, but there.

Ten minutes after I tested, the line could be seen from four feet away.

When my husband went to shower an hour later, the second line was nearly as dark as the first.

Now. I’ve had two false positives on home pregnancy tests in the last two years. One was early on, maybe six months in, and I was devastated when the next two tests were negative. The second one was super faint only an hour later, so I knew better, and ignored it until I took another one. Both of these tests were very faint, and never got any darker (not even the next day, because you KNOW I dug them out of the trash to check them again). So I’m feeling pretty good, cautiously optimistic, and looking forward to doing another test either later today or tomorrow before my beta (uh, since I have one more test left, of course). Of course, my beta will be the definitive answer, so Hope is being held in check until I get that result tomorrow (although she’s currently bearing her bonds quite gleefully with an I-told-you-so look on her face).

My husband is a little more excited. He was looking at our dressing room (the third bedroom, other than ours and the office, which will clearly be a baby’s room) and saying, “We have to paint! And get a team of stencilers in here to paint bunnies and ducks!” (Don’t worry—I promise that there isn’t a chance in hell I’m painting a baby’s room with bunnies and ducks. I will clean the room, though, that I promise).

Then the whole drive to work we had a conversation about baby names and godparents. Yep. We’ve lost our minds.

We chose names over two years ago, before we even started trying. Of course, we’re open to the idea that the baby may have other plans, and arrive clearly looking like they should have a different name than the ones we picked, like maybe Ralph or Ethel. I won’t tell you the names, because then I will be clearly cursing myself.

After the names, we then launched into the whole issue of christening. We’re not Christians, but most of our families are, so we were discussing the level of damage we’ll cause if we don’t do a christening, and instead have some sort of vaguely spiritual baby naming ceremony instead. We don’t want to do anything to cut off the flow of checks from our more wealthy family members, obviously.

Now, I realize how incredibly ahead of the game we’re getting here. But you know what? It felt good to talk about it. To feel positive and hopeful. To think of something other than medical procedures, statistics, and yeah, even miscarriage. While it was a few moments of indulgent fantasy, it was worth it, even if tomorrow’s test is negative. I don’t remember the last time we had such a happy discussion about parenting.

So I’m gearing up for another day of waiting. I’ll let you know when I know tomorrow.

____________________________________

On a funnier note, the other day I heard a rap song blaring out a car as I walked my dog. The chorus went like this:

I hate
I hate
I hate
I hate
I hate
I hate
My baby’s mama.

Somewhere there is a rant about how unfair the gods are, how it’s not fair that the asshole who would write that song, put it on an album, record it for prosperity so that the child can be sure to hear it, gets to have children, and Karen and Tertia and Julie and everyone else have to struggle so hard.

But I’m too damn chipper to write it.

Fuck

This morning I broke down and took a home pregnancy test. I took the First Response Early Detection Test. And in that blank white space next the first pink line? Big fat fucking nothing. One line only. The test was about as negative as you can get.

I’m trying to console myself because I know that my urine was pretty dilute. I drink about two gallons a day of water/juice/seltzer (and used to be diet soda, before the transfer). I had to go to an emergency room once after my cat Dylan bit me several times (note to self: don’t attempt to bathe him alone), and they wanted to do a pregnancy test before they chose which antibiotics to give me. Even though I’d had nothing to drink for over twelve hours, my urine was still too dilute to do the test. Yesterday I did drink a lot, and I had two large glasses of water before bed, not to mention the water I keep beside the bed. I peed (I know you need to know this, but come on, I’m trying to comfort myself here) at least three times between 11:30pm and 1:30am (when I finally fell asleep) and woke up at 4:30am needing to pee again, but managed to hold out for an hour before I got up and did the test at 5:30. So there’s that.

Plus, it’s only ten days post transfer, so maybe it’s too early…right?

I’m going to limit my fluids all day today and try again in the morning. But I gotta say, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to work out this cycle. Even though I haven’t felt pregnant since Saturday, and even though I have fought to keep my hope down this whole time, I’m still really fucking disappointed.

Damn it. I want off this merry-go-round.

Prayer and Welts

I recently attended the Bat Mitzvah of a sober friend of mine. She was raised as an psuedo-atheist, but decided at age 22 that she wanted to explore her religion and culture, and spent two years studying for this ceremony. Having watched her grow over the years, it was an amazing thing to witness.

I’ve often wished I was Jewish. The rare times I’ve attended a Shabbat service (twice, I think), I’ve been struck by the fact that Jewish prayers contain so much hope and gratitude. Considering what’s happened to the Jewish people over the thousands of years of their existence, it’s amazing to hear so much love in the prayers.

I was raised Methodist, which is on the super pale end of the Christian spectrum, and even spent a few pre-teen years with my mother at a scary Born-Again-Christian Church (it was scary because of the whole speaking in tongues thing, and the fact that my Sunday School teacher told us about a woman who was raped at the college library and claimed the woman deserved it because she was wearing a see-through shirt). Most of the prayers I’ve heard in church were pleas for forgiveness because we were all such sinners that we needed help. With the exception of Thanksgiving weekend, I don’t think I ever heard a prayer of gratitude.

At the Bat Mitzvah, they provided a prayer book so all us goyim could follow along. I fell in love with the writings in there, so naturally I stole it (come on, it was just photocopied). Here’s a sample segment of a prayer: it’s from the Candle Blessing. The italics part is the congregational response.

May the door of this synagogue be wide enough to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for fellowship.

May it welcome all who have cares to unburden, thanks to express, hopes to nurture.

May the door of this synagogue be narrow enough to shut out pettiness and pride, envy and enmity.

May its threshold be no stumbling block to young or straying feet.

May it be too high to admit complacency, selfishness and harshness.

May this synagogue be, for all who enter, the doorway to a richer and more meaningful life.

It’s practically poetry. I could almost worship in a place that welcomed me that way!

Almost even more interesting than the prayers themselves are the explanations/interpretations in the margins of this prayer book. Next to a prayer called Kedushat HaShem (The Holiness of God), it says:

The discipline of blessings is to take each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor, its aroma and its use.

When I read this in the middle of the ceremony, I nearly burst into tears. The whole last two years, particularly the last nine months that I’ve been aggressively pursuing technology to help me have a baby, it has seemed like it all hurts. The testing hurts, the procedures hurt, the side effects of the drugs hurt. That horrible moment of loss each time you don’t conceive hurts. Hurting becomes normal.

Sometimes in recovery you hear people blather on about needing “An Attitude of Gratitude!” as though there is some internal switch you can just flip on and feel great. In my experience, people who say thing like that haven’t yet experienced any real pain in sobriety (it usually takes a while for the agonies of life to surface—most of our lives are such a mess when we first get sober, there’s not much left that can go wrong).

In the last few months, finding anything to be grateful for has been impossible. But I realized that there are actually several wonderful things that I have in my life that don't hurt...

My relationship doesn’t hurt. The fact that my husband and I have become closer than ever in this process is just miraculous. I love him so much—he has been so kind, so supportive, and so loving in these last months. I would not be able to survive without him. He is also the reason I am willing to try so hard to have his baby—he has the most beautiful eyes, and a lovely nose, and gorgeous hands. I want our child to have a shot at having those beautiful features.

My friendships don’t hurt. The way my close friends have stepped up and taken care of us has been amazing. The depth of their support and the generosity of their love blows me away. The fact that they all, but especially J. (who always says, “I want to be a good IVF friend!”), work triple time to not step on my overly sensitive toes when I’m feeling down is amazing. My best friend, currently vacationing in Arizona, actually bemoaned the fact that she would be away for my beta, instead of thinking what a great time she’d be having (by the way S.—miss you like freakin’ crazy! I’m in serious IM withdrawal!).

Laughing doesn’t hurt. And thanks to all the wonderful women I’ve met online, I laugh a lot. Both my message board friends and the 65165419516516 bloggers I read everyday help me laugh at myself, at my situation, and at the world at large. Without all of you, I’d be bonkers, and desperately, terribly lonely by now. I’m so grateful for you I can’t even say.

All of you—my husband, my friends, and my online friends—you are the huge blossoms on my tree of life. Thank you. While I’m not sure about my tongue singing your fragrance (sounds kinda dirty), I know my keyboard does.

________________________

And now, on to my ass.

I stopped in the doctor’s office today so one of the nurses could check out my hot and itchy red welts, brought to me by my progesterone in oil shots. She seemed alarmed, (they are really huge, and hot, and red—plus, my ass is alarming in and of itself) but perplexed by the fact that they didn’t start until I was ten days into my injections. She promised to relay her impression to the IVF nurse (who is at a different, and farther away, location) who would call me back.

She also told me that my husband had been doing the shots too close to the center of my ass (suddenly I thought of some psuedo anti-crack slogans, like “Don’t touch the crack!” or “Don’t go down the crack! You’ll never come back!”). So after I got back from my appointment, he did an injection in the permitted location. We also decided to try changing vials of progesterone, and wouldn’t ya know it, I didn’t get a reaction. When I spoke with my husband later I said, “You did the shot pretty far to the outside, right?” you know, cause I wanted to be sure I wasn’t reacting, and he said, “It’s an easy spot to remember. There is a perfect little ‘X’ of veins right next to it.” Thanks honey. Glad to know my flabby vein-yness is so helpful.

The IVF nurse called back and told me to stop the injections. I told her an itchy ass was a small price to pay for a baby, but she said they were worried about Cellulitis (yee-ha! There’s my afternoon Internet project!). I told her I hadn’t reacted to the new vial, and she said I could continue as long as I didn’t get a new reaction. Thank god, since the idea of stopping the progesterone terrifies me; my progesterone level last week was only 33 (over 30 is good, but higher is better) and this is with two vials of progesterone gel a day and 2cc of Progesterone in Oil. If I actually am pregnant, stopping the progesterone might make me lose the baby.

Then she cheerfully said, “Well, your test is in a couple of days anyway, and you may be able to stop it then.” That is, of course, only if it’s negative. Thanks so much. Glad you’re hoping for me. Sheesh.

So I will continue to slather my ass in hydrocortisone and Benadryl cream and pray that the welts start to quiet down. I’m almost getting used to the itch, you know, like you get used to a yeast infection. Ah…

But I don’t feel pregnant…

Yeah, I stopped feeling pregnant on Sunday.

Saturday was the first night I really slept since my transfer (and having to give up Melatonin). I finally broke down and bought some Benadryl, which, thankfully, is permitted during pregnancy, and slept like a log all night long.

And when I woke up on Sunday, all my symptoms were gone. Apparently they weren’t pregnancy symptoms; they were signs of exhaustion.

It’s a shame, really, since I was convinced all day Saturday that the sharp and stabbing pains in my uterus where probably related to implantation. My husband and I spent the day toodling along the small towns on the northern part of the Delaware River (in Pennsylvania and New Jersey). It was a lovely day, with beautiful weather, and we realized it was the first time in several weeks that we’d spent the day alone together just enjoying ourselves. We ended our trip eating at the best Thai restaurant in the universe (ok, maybe not in the universe, but it’s damn good—the chicken coconut soup is an orgasm in a bowl). It was a great day, made even better by these occasional stabbing pains that boded so well for the future.

I managed to not think about testing, not once. I’d thought I was going to test for the first time Sunday, but I didn’t, and I didn’t today either. With any luck, I’ll make it until Wednesday, at which point I’ll be bitterly disappointed and won’t cry when the IVF nurse calls with my beta results on Friday.

I think my Hope Addict ditched me in New Hope, one of the towns we visited on Saturday. She was all like, “See ya! This town is NAMED for me!”

My husband (you know, the one who used to believe that the end of the world is coming and we deserve it?) continues to be positive and believes I am pregnant. He’s even willing to spend $70 on a cleaning lady since I can’t vacuum until after Friday’s test (he would vacuum, except that he sucks at it, and I won’t let him) and since we have five cats and a dog, vacuuming CAN NOT WAIT another five days or we won’t be able to actually enter our house for all the fur. Maybe I can get the doctor to say I can’t clean next week either…

In other good news, my ass has decided it hates the progesterone in oil shots, and has exploded into giant hot red welts that itch like a motherfucker (benadryl at night or no). This only started on Saturday, after I’d already been getting the shots for ten days. When I asked a nurse about it, she asked me if I’d started a new bottle (I had) and told me to come in and get it looked at.

Ironically, after having so many people hanging out in my vagina, I feel oddly shy about having to go see a nurse to have her check out my large and flabby ass.

I have only briefly considered the possibility that my new allergic reaction to the shots could be because of the various changes a body goes through when it’s pregnant. I swear.

I continue to have weird stabbing pains or low aches in my uterus even now as I’m typing this. I think possibly Hope has returned, revived and refreshed from her trip up river.

Friday (beta day) is a really long ass ways away, isn’t it?

Whacko

So last night, and this morning, and even a little now, I’ve been nauseous. Plus, I swear to you that my pee smells funny (through my no-decongestants-allowed nose). My boobs hurt just a teeny bit. I’m popping Tums fit to beat the band.

I’ve officially become insane.

I’m a whopping three days post transfer, so I know these symptoms are probably related to the progesterone/Estrace combo I’m taking daily. My ass is blue cheese from the Progesterone in Oil shots. I know this.

So why am I so frickin’ excited?

Sigh.

Well, today I had both a diet Pepsi AND a Crystal Light Slurpee (the best thing 7-11 has invented). Embryos are now dying a slow and horrible death (similar to the witch in the Wizard of Oz—“I’m melting, I’m melting”) from the toxic Nutrasweet.

Maybe I should start smoking again. Or drinking. Or shit, might as well get out the big guns and start shooting speedballs.

Sigh.

Well, at least it’s been two days since I’ve had any Cheetohs. And I’m eating a little pineapple every day, since we all know that will make the embryos implant. Yep. Whack job, that’s me.

_______________________________________

Here’s a nice general rant.

My mother-in-law is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. She really wants to remain independent as long as she can, so my husband has been taking care of her, along with a home care aide a couple days a week. She’s been doing pretty well on a new medication.

Before she got sick (this all started, actually, with her contracting viral encephalitis while touring Alaska right before we got married), she wasn’t exactly what you’d call a nice woman. She’s German, and believed whole heartedly that not making your bed in the morning was a crime as serious as murder (I swear, I am not making that up).

But since she’s gotten sick, she’s become very sweet and very insecure. This, sadly, sets her up to be prey for a sick, sick group of people: telephone scammers.

My husband had to take control of her money, because she’d given away her account info so often. Usually, the people on the phone tell her they’re going to give her money by depositing it directly into her account, and that’s why they need her routing numbers. They often claim to be from the bank.

Yesterday, one such company called while my husband was there. He told them to take her off the list, that she was sick, and that she didn’t have access to any of her money anyway, so to leave her alone. They claimed she’d already agreed to purchase something, and he hung up on them, after saying TAKE HER OFF THE LIST.

They called her later that night, berating her for a half hour until she gave them her credit card and her social security number.

So last night and this morning my husband had to contact the credit card company, flag her social security number with the three major credit reporting agencies, and (after extensive urging on my part) file a report with the police.

It’s clear she’s on some list. We’ve changed her phone number, and taken nearly everything away that they could get, and they still stalk her.

We don’t know what more to do. Cut off her phone completely? Some of these people have actually come to her house. The only way to really make this go away is to place her in a home, exactly the thing she doesn’t want.

Sometimes they border on the legitimate; usually, ironically enough, they’re selling some sort of kit to protect yourself from telescammers. The kit costs about $3.92, but they charge her anywhere from $300-$500. The gall of these folks, to call back after my husband TOLD them she was sick, and didn’t have access to her money, to still call and badger her.

The thing I don’t understand, and perhaps I should, is what do these cocksuckers think of themselves, while they lie awake at night? I wish we could find them, and beat them about the heads until they turn out their pockets for us. Bastards.