Thalia's fertility journey: hopefully more comedy than tragedy

To sleep, perchance to not sleep

Until 10 days ago, we regularly thanked our lucky stars that we got a baby who sleeps. She went through from midnight til 8am-ish from about 12 weeks, and apart from an occasional early morning wake up (at 6am, say) she stuck to that pattern for about 2 months. 10 days ago she woke at around 4, inconsolable, and wanted a feed. So I fed her. The next night the same thing happened. The following night she came down with a cold, and woke at 2am and again at 530ish, needing a feed both times. The following night the same. Then most of last week she woke at 530 demanding a feed. I prayed it was down to the cold and kept going. The last two nights I've been able to settle her without a feed. Friday night she woke at 4am, while last night she woke up every 10 minutes or so between 210 am and around 345, then started waking again at around 630, although I managed to get her through til 715 before I gave in and fed her.

What is going on? I'm sure the cold has something to do with it. She might also be doing the 19 week sleep regression 3 weeks late (?). Or starting the 26 week one early? Or going through a growth/development spurt? She has just learnt to roll over from back to front, doing it for the first time when she was having naked time before her bath yesterday, and has been doing it constantly since, although she can't do it while she's swaddled. Or, and my best guess, she has become dependent on the dummy to get to sleep, and so when she goes through a lighter sleep part of the sleep cycle in the middle of the night, she can't get herself back to sleep without it and needs me to put it back in. Again and again until she gets back into deeper sleep and spits it out.

We're still swaddling by the way. I've experimented twice with sleeping bags, and both times she's fussed and cried until I've given in and swaddled her. I've just put her down for her nap with one arm out of the swaddle, thinking that if we can get her to sleep like that, she might be able to self soothe with her hand if she wakes in the night. We'll see. She, miraculously, has gone down with that one arm out, so maybe she's ready for a bit more freedom. We'll see.

Just in terms of background info, she sleeps well during the day, at least 1 hour and often up to 1h45mins in the morning, about 2 hours after lunch, and a short 40minute-ish nap at around 1715 before we start the evening routine. The advice I heard that babies under one need a nap after they've been awake for 2 hours has been invaluable to us, and helped us recognise her sleep cues. Oh, and she will NOT go down at 2000ish after her bath, book and singing for anyone but me. She screams blue murder if H tries to put her to bed, although she will go down for a nap happily with either of her grandmothers or with H. For me, she goes straight down at 2000 with no fussing.

Any advice much appreciated.

American goodies

An American friend is coming to visit in 3 weeks time and has volunteered to bring stuff over for us. I'm at a bit of a loss. What fabulous baby stuff do you all have that we might want for Pob? Assume we are, if anything, rather over-supplied with clothes (I can't help myself, plus we received lots of lovely stuff when she was born, some of which she is just wearing now). Any fabulous gadgets?

Mother's work

I'm feeling thrilled at our recent successes with feeding, at the same time as finding it a little bittersweet. It's wonderful that we finally seem to have the hang of breastfeeding, but sad because it will have to at least reduce, if not stop completely, when I go back to work.

Thank you for your comments on that latter point, by the way. I will try to keep up with one or two breast feeds a day once I go back to work, but given the uncertainty of my hours, the fragility of my supply, and the occasional need to travel, I'm not convinced it will work. My mother is convinced it's very important for me to try, however, as she worries that Pob will get depressed when I leave her. I'm constantly fretting about  my decision to go back to work in May, but so far not enough to change the decision and leave going back until the end of my alloted year of (unpaid after 4 months) maternity leave. I'm going back in May not because I have to financially (although we'd have to move to a smaller house and change our lifestyle rather dramatically if I chose to quit completely), but because it's going to be harder and harder to get back into the swing of things the longer I leave it. Relationships with customers move on, and after a year I would be very out of touch with the work we are doing with my customers.  In addition, if I don't go back in May things will start to slow down for the summer and I might end up sitting around twiddling my thumbs for a couple of months which would be bad - frustrating for me as well as bad for my evaluation next year. So on balance I think it's the right thing to do to go back in May. What I might do is go back part time, which would give me at least one weekday with Pob, even if that day might have to change from week to week so that I can be responsive to my customers' needs.

This indecision on my part is making hiring a nanny difficult. We've seen one great candidate and I've spoken to another good-sounding one on the phone, but since I can't confirm if I want them full time or part time, it's a bit hard to hire anyone. Plus of course in reality I don't really want a nanny at all, so I'm being very very good at procrastinating at setting up appointments to see candidates.

I love this baby so very much, I really really don't want to leave her. At the same time as I recognise that I'm very good at my job, that I often enjoy my job, and that my having a rewarding job will bring something to Pob that she wouldn't otherwise get, particularly as she gets older. Not to mention the financial benefits it brings to our family. I'm being pulled in two different directions and I'm still two months away from going back.

Boob update

Thank you to everyone who has been enquiring re boobs. I'm now fairly sure that the little lumps on the nipple are blood blisters. A bit similar to 'blebs' or milk blisters, but with blood inside due to over-enthusiastic pumping (I think). I've tried squeezing them but can't get them to go, and the same squirt of milk comes from in between them if I test it while Pob is feeding. But she now seems to be feeding ok on that side, and that boob has stopped hurting, no more shooting pains or nipple soreness, so I'm just leaving it for the time being. I know that's a head in the sand thing, but since I've got no breast lumps etc., and it's not hurting, I'm not worried.

In other boob updates, I've been weaning off the domperidone and am now down to 90mg/day, down from 120mg/day. As I mentioned before, I saw an immediate drop in how much I could pump, and it's dropped a bit further since then, but Pob has also taken to refusing or taking only a very little top-up at each feed, so I think she has simultaneously got a lot better at emptying the breasts. As this has become clearer, it's helped me see that the challenges we had with breastfeeding were indeed partially due to Pob's poor sucking rather than just the problems with my supply. Of course secretly I thought all along that it was 'all my fault' despite everyone's diagnosis of the contrary. It's good to know it wasn't all me - not sure why that matters, but it feels like an important realisation.

I can't really express how very glad I am that we persevered with breast feeding. Although many people told us I was bananas, what we have now is close to what I always wanted (well, I didn't imagine the pumping, but that has become less onerous as the feeding itself has got better). Pob strokes what she can reach of my breast and chest while we're feeding. She pulls off and grins up at me occasionally. She opens her mouth like a baby bird as I pull her in towards me and makes little contented 'hmm hmms' as she sucks. It's tremendously satisfying, and I feel very lucky that we got to this place, even if our time here will be short. I don't know what it would be like to have stopped earlier, of course, and it would certainly have given us more time when we could have gotten out of the house, but for us, for me, I'm glad we chose to persevere through the crap, that the domperidone built my supply sufficiently that it was possible for us to get here.

Grrl

Does anyone else regularly visit Chez Miscarriage just to see if by any chance Grrl has posted something and bloglines didn't pick it up, or if, quelle horreur, she's finally taken the site down, the "next bloggy idea" having never materialised? No? Just me then?

Why I'm angry

I feel a tremendous amount of joy. Even while Pob screamed at me this afternoon in her anger at me allowing her to be hurt with injections, even as I slog through a bedtime routine on my own, as she shouts in irritation as I put her vest on after her bath, I am awed by how lucky I have been. And when I return from ensuring the bathwater is the right temperature to find she has rolled off her mat and onto the carpet, and is grinning at her own cleverness, well then I am overwhelmed.

In the middle of feeling that joy and that sense of good fortune, I am still very angry about infertility. I am angry that it took us three years to conceive Pob, even though I know if we had conceived our take-home baby any earlier, that that baby would not have been her, and she's perfect, so how can I regret the three years?  But I am angry about those three years nonetheless because it means that if we want to try for another baby (and just how greedy does that make us) we need to start pretty much NOW. Well, my OB made us promise to wait at least six months, which is five weeks away. But at that point we really should start trying, at least trying without intervention if not gearing up for an IVF cycle or an FET.

Trying NOW is difficult. It's difficult to start again. It's dificult to know I need to stop breastfeeding to give my body a chance to ovulate again, let alone start pumping it with puregon, baby aspirin, clexane etc. It's difficult to be putting H in the position of needing to perform again. It's frightening to think of engaging in those painful emotions again. It's worrying to think about the unlikely but possible scenario of having two children 15-20 months apart. I worry what we'll do to Pob if we introduce a sibling so early. I worry what it will be like for her if we can never give her a sibling. I worry about managing my emotions around her as we go through the pain of trying to conceive again.

But we are going to try. It's always been important to me to avoid having an only child. I know it can be fantastic but I've seen and thought about too many bad scenarios to be happy with not trying. The first scenario was when one of my university friends died of cancer when we were 23. He was an only child and both his parents were only children. I watched them at the funeral, and I've never seen two people more alone. There were no cousins, no siblings there to comfort them, it was just them and then the rest of us. I know that losing a child to cancer would be a disaster whatever your family situation, but somehow to me the pain seemed magnified because they were lacking any family support.

The second scenario was one presented to me by - I think - a New Yorker article about 15 years ago. In it a woman described returning to her family home to pack it up after both her parents had died within a few weeks of each other. She told how she had a sister, a sister she'd barely spoken to in the last 5 years. They'd gone different ways, didn't have much in common. But her sister was the only person she wanted to be there with her. She wanted someone who had a shared memory of her parents, who knew what her family looked like from the inside.

The third is a concern that the weight of parental expectations is awfully heavy for an only child. No matter how cool we try to be, both H and I have expectations of what we thought our child would be like, of what we wanted her to be. If she isn't a book lover, I will survive. If she doesn't like sport, H will cope. But at some point Pob will know how much we wanted certain futures for her and she will have to cope with that. She might rebel utterly. She might try desparately to please us but not be true to herself in the process. Yes, I know we can try our hardest to avoid this, but my own childhood tells me it's not always possible.

So I feel a strong obligation to try to provide a sibling for Pob. And it will be a biological sibling or none at all, at least given how H is feeling at the moment. No donor eggs, no adoption. We'll try naturally. We might do a fresh IVF cycle to see if I can still produce any eggs. We will use up our frozen embryos. And then we will be done. We'll see if we can stick to this plan but this is where we are right now. We have an appointment with Dr Candour set up for next Tuesday. We'll see what he says.

So I'm angry. I'm angry that we have to think about this now rather than simply enjoying Pob's babyhood. I'm angry that it might not work and that Pob will never have a sibling to love, to support her. I'm angry and I'm happy all at one.

Why the pain never goes away

Since Pob was born, the pain of infertility has dissipated somewhat. It hasn't gone completely, partly because in our community the pain is always present so there are constant reminders of how hard it was to get here. Others are still enduring the trenches. Pain similar to the pain we have endured, or tortures worse than we can imagine. There are constant reminders that it hurts, of how much it hurts, of the constant threat that joy can be taken away in an instant. It doesn't take away my joy, it simply keeps me connected to the pain I have felt and the anger I still feel about what infertility took away from us.

I have felt that hurt very profoundly over the last few weeks as the losses mounted up, and as usual I haven't known what to say, known what I can do, what any of us can do except stand by silently and form a virtual circle around those suffering those losses. An author I admire has used language that has stayed with me to describe what I think this community does. It's Christian language, but I get it, I think, anyway. She says that what we do in this situation - all we can do - is to stand by the foot of the cross as someone goes through their own personal Good Friday. Mary Ellen, Steve, Alexa, Scott, I hope you knew how many people were and are standing there with you.

The boobs, they are not happy

A week ago, I decided it was time to reduce the domperidone dose. The extra weight is starting to make me really grumpy, and I thought it was worth a try. I dropped one pill a day, from 12 to 11, starting on Saturday. On Friday I pumped 460mls, on Saturday 400, on Sunday 325. Hmm. Who knew that dropping one pill would make such a difference? There may also be a Pob effect going on as she can now empty a breast pretty effectively in about 15 minutes, so perhaps she's taking more out. Odd how that coincided so precisely with the drop in dose. I'm going to drop another pill soon, so we'll see.

The real unhappiness in the boobs, however, is that I keep getting shooting pains in my right boob after feeding or pumping. It really hurts quite a bit. In addition, there are three little bumpy nodules on the nipple which don't want to go away. I have no idea what they are. One looked dark for a while so I wondered if it was a blood blister, but it has now lightened to about the same colour as the rest of the breast tissue. Pob has started fussing on that breast, so I'm wondering if these are blocking the milk flow in some way. When I hand express, I often get a real squirt from that breast, but it comes from in between these little nodules. Any clues? Is the sharp pain thrush?

I know I should go to the doc, but honestly I don't think my GP has any clue at all about breasts so I'm not sure how much help it would be. And I'm not calling out one of those unhelpful lactation consultants again. So for now I am grinning and bearing it.