Thalia's fertility journey

Alive!

Am alive, I promise. Just unbelievably busy at work, travelling and suffering from a really awful cold which laid me low all weekend. You wouldn't think a cold could make you feel this bad. The passenger, however, seems perfectly happy and bounced around all through my coughing fits. I can feel movement most of the day now, but still sporadically - sometimes once an hour, sometimes she has a real party in there for a few minutes. During one of these, on Monday night when we were both ill and feeling very sorry for ourselves, I managed to get H's hand in the right place and he felt her move. To say he was chuffed would be an understatement.

More probably not til the weekend when I'll be alone in a hotel room since I've got meetings in US City on Friday and again on Monday so it's not worth coming home. Sure I can find something to occupy myself.

One-sided views of infertility from the media. Again.

I don't usually read the Sunday Times. I don't really need to justify this, it's a matter of taste but what the hell. I don't read it because: (i) it's big and unwieldy and I don't know what to do with all the pieces, (ii) the political commentary is somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun (although from the owner of Fox News, not sure what else you'd expect), and (iii) it annoys the hell out of me. But this morning it was the paper delivered to the lovely hotel room in Paris where we were spending our anniversay weekend, and I do love to read the paper with my Sunday breakfast, and so I succumbed. And of course, it did annoy me. Specifically, this article, which contained the immortal quote:

Female fertility declines with age, so that women who have postponed childbearing discover they are unable to conceive when they want to do so. However, this is not the whole story: men are not only reluctant nowadays to commit themselves to women and children, but their own fertility is declining. More than half the patients at American fertility clinics are men.

Let's just consider that final sentence for a second, shall we? More than half? How many more than half? Because given that most patients at American Fertility clinics (and why the emphasis on American? Does he not have the figures for UK or European clinics?) are couples, surely approximately half will be men. So the sentence really doesn't mean anything helpful as it stands. Presumably the sentence should have read something like this:

Of the couples attending American fertility clinics, more than half find the cause of their infertility lies with the man.

However, this doesn't fit with the known stats. NIH says, for example, that approximately 30-40% of couples with infertility are dealing with 'male factor', while female factor accounts for 40-50%, and the rest is either combination or undiagnosed.

So what precisely was Mr Dalrymple trying to say? Perhaps it's just lazy journalism, he's copied it from the original book without thinking what it means. Or perhaps he is the victim of a poor copy editor. Either way, it's a very silly sentence.

And sadly the rest of the article is no better. Just a reiteration of stuff that's in the book he's reviewing, revealing a very slanted perspective on the topic. It's really barely a book review at all. Which is a shame as it doesn't help me decide if the book is worth a read or not, which is surely the point of a book review. Certainly if you read this article with an unjaundiced eye, you'd think the book is poor, but to be honest the reviewer seems to be so caught up in his own prejudices, and certainly hasn't invested any time in understanding the issues, so I've got no reason to believe he's pitched the review right.

There you go. Reason number 847 why I should never read the Sunday Times.

Typepad ate a post about our lovely weekend, I may or may not drum up the will to write it again. If not, lovely food, lovely husband, rubbish weather, baby kicking away, I'm a lucky woman.

The Labour and Delivery story

Sorry for wigging anyone out on the last post. I really wanted it to be about our lost son, which is why I didn't get distracted with the L&D visit. But I appreciate the throwaway mention wasn't very helpful. So here is the story.

I've learnt through pregnancy that any number of pullings and often sharp pains in various places in my abdomen, groin and hips are perfectly normal (for me). Some of them can be really painful, but they are over in seconds. Last week I started to get some shooting pains which appeared to be inside my vagina. This was a bit more worrying, but several of you have mentioned that you had something similar, and that they have the same cause as the abdominal pains - ligaments stretching. On Thursday I did a day trip to Rome, and was without water for a few hours in the afternoon, in a meeting in pretty hot room. On the way back to the airport I realised I was feeling much crampier than usual, and started to drink. I got through a litre before I got on the plane, but the cramps didn't really seem to go away. They also felt more like cramps and less like shooting pains. Not hard, full-on contractions, but lots of cramps, like mild period pain.

They continued on Friday, and by the evening I was worried. I felt around in the abdomen and realised I could feel lots of what felt like fast muscle contractions going on low down, where I imagine the uterus is relatively accessible. I remembered Mainland Girl's advice to always ask the doctor rather than trying to be a big strong girl, so I called the 'emergency' number we've been given, which is the labour and delivery ward. I spoke to an extremely harassed-sounding young woman, who after about 1 minute of me talking, told me to come in since she couldn't check anything over the phone.

So we went in. It was around 2245 by the time we got there, and a few people were milling around in the reception area, but no one was there to talk to. After a while a nurse in scrubs came in, dealt with the people ahead of us, then talked to me briefly. After a few minutes she came back to let us into the ward (they are very hot on security in L&D wards here). She couldn't have been nicer, despite the fact they were clearly snowed. She showed us into a private room, and told me she'd be back shortly. Within 5 minutes she'd checked the baby's heartbeat (fine), my blood pressure (fine) and temperature (fine). She told us that a doctor would be in as soon as possible, and then left us to wait. We waited not more than 30 minutes before a doctor in scrubs, who looked about 15, showed up. She was also very sweet, and very apologetically told me she wanted to do an internal scan to look at my cervix. I told her they held no fears for me, and she laughed. She checked my abdomen, which was soft (good) and then did the internal exam, which was no more uncomfortable than usual. She was busy telling me to relax as she put gel on that metal instrument of torture, the speculum, and H and I both had to laugh, it was such an incongrous remark given the images conjured up by the equipment! If they want us to relax they need to make them in nice warm plastic and in nice, friendly colours, or at least amusing ones (polka dots perhaps), IMO.

She reported that my cervix was long and closed, and that she'd done a swab for any infections, and left us, promising to return with a bottle for a urine sample. I was in the bathroom doing that when our OB showed up. He confessed to being disappointed that they'd been so efficient that they'd done everything before he arrived! He had another go at my abdomen, reported again that it was nice and soft, and then spent a good 10 minutes going into the details of exactly what I was feeling, and getting me to rate frequency, pain levels etc. He finished with a detailed description of what kinds of pains I needed to be worried about, and what were fine. This included the highlight "if you feel something like a knife, stabbing through your vagina, that's perfectly normal and nothing to worry about, it is your pubic symphysis opening up." The ones to worry about are when your uterus closes up like a fist, and stays that way for more than 30 seconds or so. Sharp stabbing pains have to be lived with. I can do that.

At no point did anyone make us feel bad for coming in. I did feel a bit silly, but the OB told me they weren't going to take any risks when a 20 week patient called saying she felt crampy, and that it was totally correct that we came in. Then he told us to go home and chill out. I can't tell you how much better I felt throughout the rest of the weekend, knowing that what I was feeling was normal and that everything still looks fine.

And then on Saturday (during a waxing session with my usual lady which didn't hurt any more than normal, so yah boo and sucks to that awful woman who did it last time), I started to feel the baby move. It feels like bubbles, or tiny pushes on my insides. I'm not feeling them regularly, but the baby had a good sesssion last night while I lay on the sofa watching West Wing. It is totally amazing, and bewildering, and joyous, that we've got here.

This time last year

This time last year, I thought I was pregnant. If we take Saturday 13th of May as a year ago, I didn't know for sure, but I was, in my own words, scarily hopeful. I had suspected that I was pregnant for a few days before that. I'd never been pregnant before, to my knowledge, but I knew that this felt different. That those uterine tuggings and pullings I was feeling were like nothing I'd ever felt before. I didn't want to believe it until I knew, but it was hard not to hope.

The following morning I eventually took a pregnancy test just after 4am. And it was positive. I have rarely been that happy in my life. I woke H up, we laughed, we cried. I wrote you all a long post, and I went back to sleep for a while. It was a wonderful feeling.

It didn't last. On our wedding anniversary I still believed it, but the weekend before our 6w scan I stopped believing it. I didn't feel pregnant any more. My boobs shrank. I 'knew' I was no longer pregnant. It didn't end then, but it ended 2 weeks later.

That baby would have been born about 3.5 months ago, or about 1 month into this pregnancy. There was nothing wrong with him genetically, we don't know why he didn't make it. But he never got as far as having a heartbeat.

It's hard to think about him now. In all the discussion of whether the baby of this current pregnancy is a boy or a girl, and how I felt about that, I did think about him, but found it too hard to mention him in the posts. If he had survived, I wouldn't have had this pregnancy. I wish he had survived, but I also don't wish this baby away. I had a dream early in this pregnancy, I can't remember if I typed about it or not, and I can't remember the details now, but it involved 2 babies, or being pregnant with twins, and being told I could only have one of them. In the dream I screamed and cried, but in the end I had to give one up so the other could live and thrive. It seems pretty bleeding obvious what that was about, no?

I know I'm lucky. I got pregnant 3 times in 8 months, after all, that barely qualifies as infertile, even if 2 of them were through IVF or FET. I know I'm lucky in that nothing seems to be wrong with this pregnancy or this baby (but remind me to tell you about our Friday night trip to labour and delivery when I get the chance. Short version, nothing's wrong, but it felt wrong enough to get checked out). I know I'm lucky in so many other ways. And I'm not saying I'm suddenly too sad to appreciate what I've got. I haven't woken up this morning and felt suddenly bereft. I'm still so very excited about this pregnancy. I miss him but I'm happy to be pregnant with his sister. It's the usual mess of feelings that we all walk around with every day. We're happy to be pregnant but worried what it does to our community and how it will make our friends feel. We're relieved that the failing pregnancy is finally over, yet we are still grieving the loss of the baby that didn't get to be. We're thrilled to finally be submitting our home study, but a part of us still mourns the biological children we lost. None of it is easy, none of it is straightforward, but we're all just doing the best we can to get through it ourselves, and to support others as they suffer, too.

This morning I'm remembering my son who didn't made it. 

It's good to be home

I'm buzzing with good energy, having just finished my second pregnancy yoga class. Or more accurately, having had the second session with a yoga teacher who comes to my house to teach me. Yes, I am utterly aware of my privilege at this point. The teacher was recommended via my previous trainer, the one who moved to New York, through another client of hers who also went through IVF. The yoga teacher is lovely, although perhaps on the chatty side, but she's rapidly diagnosed my issues and choses the exercises to deal with them - particularly how tense my shoulders are. Having just arrived home this morning after a really rough transatlantic flight, it was a particularly good feeling to stretch everything out and feel looser and more relaxed.

It was tough to be away for a week. I missed H, and I missed the doppler. I did think about taking it with me, but thought that was a bit pathetic. In retrospect it wouldn't have been a big deal to take it, but I did ok without it. Most of the time. I have lots of cramping and quite a few of these cramps feel like a little creature is stamping on my cervix. This increases my nervousness that the cramps actually signify incompetent cervix. But my cervix looked fine 10 days ago, so I've spent a lot of the last week alternatively freaking out and feeling happy that so far everything has looked so good. Having said that, I arrived back through the door around noon today, and the first thing I did was to check in on our passenger. And there she was, heart pumping away. What a lovely noise.

Both H and the yoga teacher think that my bump has grown considerably over the last week. I noticed the same thing when I was looking down at it to do the doppler. Of course it's not a very attractive bump, with considerable components of fat, and covered in bruises from the clexane (lovenox), but it's a bump, nonetheless, so I'm trying to cherish it and enjoy it for what it is.

Tonight H is cooking me guinea fowl, and I'm going to relax on the sofa and catch up on all the crap TV our sky box has recorded for me over the last week. Tomorrow back to the fray.