go to dust, 2010!!!!

Happy New Year everyone!  May 2011 be a better year than 2010.  For me, it would be almost impossible to have a worse year than 2010, so I am pretty sure I am stepping forward in the right direction.  I am kicking 2010 in the dust, and stepping on it while grinning my evil grin, may you disintegrate in peace, stupid bad-ass 2010!!!

Just as a fun reminiscence of my 2010 New Year "celebration", I was in the hospital, on bedrest, 5 days after my emergency cerclage that didn't work.  I had diarrhea and was lying down, not allowed to lift my head off the pillow so that I don't create intraabdominal pressure.  I was also too embarrassed to allow the nurses to clean up my mess, so MrH had to clean up my shit.  That was one great way to click into the new year.  As a special dinner, we had two cups of Save on Foods parfaits (that probably created the diarrhea to begin with), and a hospital sandwich each (disgusting indeed) because the hospital staff in the cafeteria was off for New Years.  We were so lost, that we didn't even realize that it was the New Year's celebration until about dinner time Dec 31, when we realized that I wasn't getting any dinner, and the sandwich came with the above explanation.

On Jan 2 at 2 am I woke up in labour.  The rest is history.
Enough said.
To a better 2011, for everyone.

PS.  I can only say one thing for 2011:  I just bought pregnancy clothes.  I phoned my OB today to ask if he thinks I will jinx it if I do, and he said "no, go ahead, I have a very good feeling about this pregnancy".  So I did.  Three pairs of pants and two tops.  I can't wait to wear them.  Is 12 weeks too early to start do you guys think?

7 weeks

I had to change the blog background because the brown was making my nausea worse.  I am not kidding.  Will go back to the brown once the nausea subsides.  At the moment, something simple such as this background is more soothing for my stomach.

7 weeks today.  I feel so very sick on most days, that I spend most of my time in bed.  I go to work, sometimes cancel half the day and come home to throw up in my own bathroom, but overall I survive.  Being pregnant is very demanding physically for me, but I would not trade it for the alternative any time.  The constant nausea and the daily vomiting are definitely uncomfortable, but I accept them with more serenity than the first time.

Having Adrian has changed me a lot.  His stillbirth was on January 2, 2010, and as that date is approaching, I am thinking more and more about him, about what I want to do on that day, about my life and how it has changed.  I have become a mother.  It is difficult for others to grasp this concept, and sometimes for me as well, but it is a significant mind shift that permeates every action and thought I have taken since having him.  I feel that I live my life for him, as well as for myself, and hence I cannot let any unlived life pass me by.  I grab at opportunities, and launch myself into what I want to do with both feet.  I am not afraid of death.  I feel comfortable knowing that my remains will join the same thin air into which his smoke vanished, and that our ashes will be merged at one point, and maybe buried together at the root of a big tree.  I feel free knowing that I will go the same way that he went.  Without fear of death, life is a lot easier to live.  I want something and I go for it.  I don't stop to wonder too much about consequences, and I realize that no amount of preparedness will prevent disasters from jumping out unannounced.  A bit of planning, a lot of navigating, that is my life right now.  It used to be a lot of planning, and then more obsessive planning, followed by a fear of launching the boat at all.  I am so different now!

I also have a different attitude towards pregnancy.  This is not my body now, this is my unborn child's body to do as he or she needs to with.  If it means non stop nausea and throwing up daily, then I surrender to that, I don't fight it, I don't compare myself with others, I don't expect it to be different, I don't feel sorry for myself.  If it means gaining weight and building cankles, then so be it.  As for my previous morbid fear of operations, c-sections included, I am pretty happy to report that it is the least of my worries right now.  Having a live baby is the only thing that ultimately counts in a pregnancy, everything else is fluff.

Pregnancy is such an alive time for both me and babyH, as it was for me and Adrian as well.  It felt like a constant fight for survival, with a very sick-feeling body, joyous milestones (seeing the heartbeat, hearing the heartbeat, then feeling movement later on), occasional bleeding, and a lot of worrying.  Every day is a struggle to get through at this point, and although it might improve, it did not get that much better last time.  This time it is going to be a psychological struggle.  And I take on the battle with joy, because as long as I am doing this, I am engaging in life and going after what I want, for all four of us: MrH and myself, Adrian, and babyH.  My little family.

on men, part one

I am going to start a series of posts about the men in our lives.  I don't know everything about the topic, but I do know a little bit, and this little bit was hard earned, hence it is a gift to whomever cares to listen.  It will come in short posts that need to be individually digested.  I would love love love to get your guys opinion on the topic, since I am hoping that I will learn something out of this sharing of knowledge as well.

I am happily married to a wonderful man, MrH.  He is older than I am, and much wiser in a lot of respects, but when we got married, we each had to learn how to make the relationship work, because if my memory serves me right, the first year of marriage was a little rocky.  We even thought of divorcing during our honeymoon.  We were not very serious about it, but it reflects the fact that we used to have real conflicts, real hurts from this relationship.  Nowadays, after learning how to treat each other in a more nourishing manner shall we say, we just about never fight.  I can't remember the last fight we had, it must have been almost one year ago, around the time when we lost Adrian and we were both raw and tired.  And it was not a remarkable fight either, it had to do with our speed of recovery being different, and frankly I think with the enormous stress we were under.

I cannot speak for him, but I sometimes give my girlfriends tidbits of advice from what I have learned, and it crossed my mind that I should put some down in writing, in case I need to re-read them at a future date (when I regress under stress again, perhaps).  Here is one that I really need to remember:  men really need to make us, women, happy.  It is part of their DNA.   Just like we, women, need to make our men, and our mothers, and our kids happy (and everything else that moves as well), men are also hard wired to make their women happy.  They need to know that their mate is satisfied with the life that she is leading (that he is providing, in man-brain speech).  They need to know that their Christmas present made us happy.  They need to know that their hug made us feel special.  MrH needs to hear that I appreciate him putting the soup in the fridge and especially folding up my laundry when all I asked is for him to bring it upstairs, so that I can fold it.  This effort that they make on our behalf, it is something that they need us to recognize and appreciate, or else they wither and die like an unwatered plant.  It is NOT a weakness on our part to say thank you, I love that, I really appreciate that.  It does not mean that he will get lazy and complacent.  It does not mean that he will keep score and ask us to reciprocate in kind.  They just need to feel like they PROVIDED for us something, something that we value, that made our lives a little better.

And, just as some women are about to say "but he doesn't do anything right", we need to remember that he does his best.  And his best, like our best, is not perfect.  However, it needs to be acknowledged as the gift that it is, even if it was not what we hoped for, even if we could have done it better.  He could not have done it better.  He could not have guessed our mind.  He could not have measured/bought/sold/made X decision better.  He did his best to please his woman, because he really is hard wired to do it, and it comes naturally to him.

Any thoughts?

A better day, 6w4d

Last night I vomited so violently that my esophagus felt like a raw wound the whole night.  I was pleased to sleep a further 12 hours, not that I needed it, after having slept about 10 hours of daytime as well.  I practically slept my way through this Christmas holiday.  

Imagine my shock when I woke up feeling NORMAL.  No tiredness, no nausea, no vomiting.  How weird is that?  No rumbling stomach.  Afraid not to upset the pregnancy demons, I started out timidly, by eating two carrots for breakfast.  Carrots for some reason don't upset my stomach, and are pretty hard to regurgitate, so I eat them in industrial quantities as my main source of nutrition.  So far so good, still not sick.  I went out for a chai tea latte at Starbucks to celebrate feeling well, and I kept that one down well.  I even went for a 5 km walk on the indoor track, where I ran into my obstetrician (small town) and told him that I don't think I am pregnant anymore.  Really, I feel so NORMAL, it is hard to describe the huge contrast between the time spent as a half dead beached whale on my bed, and the full of life albeit a little pale and gaunt-faced woman that I was today.  

Too bad that I can't enjoy my brief time out of prison because I am too worried that something is going wrong.  Although now, towards the evening, the nausea is coming back in reassuring waves.  I hope it won't interfere with the Danish Butter Cookies that I had planned for my little tea party later on. 

Having finished Mad Men, I am now engrossed into a new show, called Nip/Tuck.  It is a about two plastic surgeons.  One of them is married to a woman who wanted to go to medical school, but had to give up her plans because she fell pregnant and had two children, who were now teenagers.  In the movie, she returns to school as an adult student, and of course falls pregnant again.  (If only my time in school were the miracle fertility drug that it seems to be for others, I would have had a whole litter by now).  In this pregnancy however she is diagnosed with incompetent cervix (don't know how) at 8 weeks, and is told that she needs to get a cerclage and spend the rest of her pregnancy on modified bedrest.   She tells the obstetrician that she does not think she can do it, for seven months, and he replies:  "You'd be surprised at what you can achieve if you want something badly enough".   She does not want this pregnancy badly enough though, so she goes to school to write a midterm, and miscarries.  (She gets a good grade in the midterm however).  

Aside from the obvious mistakes made with regards to the incompetent cervix (the early miscarriage at 8 weeks, and the weird diagnosis made based on nothing), the movie does remind me that lying in bed for so long is a difficult task.  It was hard enough to be bedridden for three days during the weekend, I felt like I became sick of my bed, sick of my body, sick of the computer, and nauseated even looking at my own blog page (that's just a temporary association, but I might have to change the background if it continues), it is going to be seriously hard to do it for five months (from 18 weeks on).  However, as the OB in the movie said, if you want it badly enough...and that is not even a question.  I would be bedridden for a year or two if it guaranteed me a baby.  Perhaps this past year, as full of tortures as it was, was necessary to make me amass enough desire to want this badly enough in order to be able to stay in bed for such a prolonged period of time.  In the end, despite the fact that there are other things to do with my body and time, nothing seems as important as the task of gestating carefully.  

enjoying the affliction

Because I truly am an overachiever, I don't just suffer from morning nausea, I have morning-evening-and-afternoon nausea, with occasional vomiting to accentuate just how very well I do things around here.  It hit predictably at 6 weeks, just like last time.  Except, unlike last time, I recognized it this time and avoided all that worry about dying of some kind of septic shock.  I kid you not, the first time I was pregnant and the nausea hit, I thought that my uterus must be infected and killing me with a septic miscarriage, especially that I was coincidentally also bleeding.  I had never been this sick in my life, not even when I had the flu.  This time, luckily, I know and hence do not need to panic, but rather take it like a woman, lying down.

And lying down I am.  Today I tried four times to get out of bed, and the furthest I could make it without feeling faint and having everything in front of my eyes go dark, a buzzing high pitch sound in my ears, and the familiar vomit raising towards daylight, was about 2 meters.  Each time I had to lie on the floor, head between my knees, my favourite position when it comes to staying conscious in the face of adverse fainting spells.  That's how MrH found me when he got home, and, used to it by now, asked me to please get up slower next time, as due to my delicate condition I can't just hit the ground running like usual.  Although I hardly think that moving like a lovesick hippopotamus with a broken hip qualifies for hitting the ground running.

I don't know what you guys use in the United States, but here in Canada we have a nifty little white pill with a pregnant woman drawn on it (to reassure us that it is safe in pregnancy) called doxylamine, or Diclectin.  It is used for nausea, and it is not bad, if you don't mind sleeping about 16 hours a day.   In the US you can find doxylamine sold as an over the counter sleeping tablet, called Unisom.  Trust me, it works!  I have spent the past 48 hours in a coma, which is good, because when I sleep I generally don't do my other two favourite things, which are retching and fainting.

I hope I don't sound like I am complaining.  I physically feel like... the above description, but I am very happy.  It was entirely self inflicted, with full knowledge of what it would feel like.  And although occasionally I try to push out of my mind the fact that Charlotte Bronte died of this sickness (which, for some reason, is a scary thought), mostly I am a blissful blob gestating happily in my bed, thinking of the little ticking heart that goes on and on inside of me.  And I would not want a thing to change. 

heartbeat

We saw the heartbeat, 115 bpm.  Excellent!  And no source of bleeding on ultrasound again.  The embryo measured 5w6d, and I was 6w1d, don't know if the discrepancy has any significance, but I refuse to worry, I saw my baby's heartbeat today and I am planning on having a Merry Christmas, spotting or not.
Happy holidays and a Merry Christmas to you all today and tomorrow!

6 weeks today, and more bleeding

I spent a blissful four days this week during which I did not spot at all, and felt nauseated frequently.  I don't like feeling very nauseous, but a little bit is good, because it reassures me.  I was so happy that I would wake up at night of too much happiness, and then be unable to fall asleep again.  I even had a little break during which to start bonding with babyH, and realize that I am growing my husband's child, what an enormous happiness and privilege for which I have fought so hard.

Then, last night, just as I finally started going to the bathroom without examining every molecule of toilet paper for traces of red, brown or yellow, I got another tablespoon of bright blood, no microscope required, as it soaked through the paper.  I wish it would STOP!  It makes me so worried and sick whenever I see it!  I phoned my OB again today (no, he did not change his phone number yet, so might as well take advantage while I can) and told him that, although I know what he is going to say, I just need to hear it again.  He reiterated that it is harmless bleeding, and that it might be going on and off for the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, until the placenta covers the entire uterine surface area, and there's no more decidua left to bleed from.  I felt more reassured and made it through the day without further bleeding.  But what a way to take the joy away from a pregnancy, I tell ya!  (It's not like the second trimester promises to be more joyful, with worries about my anemic, dwarf-size cervix, so can I please at least have my first trimester in peace?)

Tomorrow I am going for my ultrasound.  I am 6 weeks today (the clinic recalculated my dates and put me back one day, for which I sulked for a while, because damn it, I am FIGHTING HARD over here to make it through every day and you can't just take a day away from me just like that), so the chances of seeing the heartbeat are a bit on the slim side.  However, with Adrian I saw it at 6w1d.  MrH thinks that babyH is a girl, and hence that she will be smaller and less developed than Adrian, who was quite big for his gestational age (was 409 g at 20w).  He does not know that all my offspring are overachievers by definition.

Perhaps I should stop comparing all of the gestational stages with Adrian's, so that babyH has his/her own gestational journey, but I can't help it, it is all I have for reference.  Wish me luck for a heartbeat tomorrow, it really will help in the reassurance sector.