Wednesday, December 31, 2008

wow.

my sister just called.

she's pregnant. she doesn't know how far she is, being one of those crazy heterosexuals. between 6-10 weeks. she thinks probably 8 or 9.

wow.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

9w ultrasound

Yesterday was the 9w ultrasound, our graduation from the RE. The whole experience was less dramatic and less traumatic; I knew to tilt my hips immediately, thus avoiding the OWOWOW drama.

In short: there is a critter in there, it is the right size, it has a heart and (I am assured) a head. My sweetheart and the doctor both said they could see limb buds, but I think they were lying.

Here's the ultrasound, if you like that kind of thing!

It was best described as "fetus in a snowstorm". The enormous round thing off to the left (far bigger than the fetus or sac) is an ovarian cyst... doc thinks it should start to recede in a week or so.

We have an OB appointment next Wednesday.

Yesterday I was just shaking and exhausted and happy after having had every muscle in my body tense for a week or so, out of fear of the 9w ultrasound. And now..?

If I'm happy, is that arrogant? Does that assure that something's going to go wrong to knock me out of my smugness? I am haunted by this happy chirpy post I made the day before I found out that the pregnancy was over. Logically I know that the happy post didn't make that happen, but my brain is a small primitive animal that links proximal events and sucks at figuring out causation.

If I'm scared, is that ungrateful? So far there has not been one single thing wrong, not one result for me to point to and say "meh". I haven't bled a drop. What more do I want, really? Women would kill to be where I am right now. Shouldn't I just shut up and enjoy it?

I'm covering all my bases by having wild mood swings, from elated to terrified. I'm both gratefully happy and humbly frightened! Of course, that also means I'm ungratefully frightened and arrogantly happy. Welcome to my brain. Over the lintel, in old English letters, it says YOU CANNOT WIN.

I do feel like I can be grateful for one thing: I feel pretty damn good. Morning sickness has been minimal; some waves of low-level nausea, but no pukin', not even close. In fact, I'm eating like a horse; I'm hungry every hour or two. Some waves of exhaustion, but mostly I'm just enjoying the fact that I slip off to sleep easily at 10pm, as my non-pregnant self struggles with insomnia. My breasts are sore, but they don't bother me unless I poke them. Other than the swollen abdomen I'm having a picture-perfect time. This scared me when I thought it meant nobody alive in there, but now that I know it's possible to feel this good and have a good-lookin' fetus I'm grateful for how much I've lucked out so far. My body really seems to like this just fine. GF says I look fantastic*, and I'm inclined to believe her.

And that's the 9w1d story.

Love to all of those who surrounded me with warm words and thoughts on my last post. I love knowing that y'all are out there, and that this tiny scrap of proto-humanity already has friends.

*She may have been looking at my mammary glands when she said that, I don't rightly recall.

Monday, December 15, 2008

7w ultrasound

I will not tell this story with any sense of drama, because I hate it when news is buried.

So: we have a heartbeat. We have one appropriately sized embryo with a heart fluttering at the right sort of rate.

Now the tiny bit of story:

Of course I've been worrying steadily for the past week few days. After a fitful night, I hit the worrying-crescendo this morning. The doctor's visit started out differently, because now everything is different. I've been there for a thousand ultrasounds -- pants off, up on the table, see ya later. This time there I got my weight and blood pressure taken (rather ineptly -- the med assistant was clearly asleep when they taught "how to get an accurate blood pressure reading". No, the patient's arm should not be dangling by her side) and gave a urine sample. Then I waited on the table, cross-legged under my modesty drape, trying desperately to remember my yoga breathing. I watched the girlfriend knit and held her ball of wool, which was very soothing.

Finally he came in and I eagerly scooted down on the table, knowing that in a few seconds my suspense would be over. But it was not to be because OW OW OW OW OW OW OW. It hurt like hell. Even when I had 25 mature follicles a transvaginal ultrasound never hurt like that. I yelled and I think at one point I said "YOU HAVE TO STOP THAT RIGHT NOW" (he did, because he's a nice man and good like that). We tried three times and it hurt so much that I just couldn't lie there. Turns out that because of my swollen OHSS-y ovaries, my uterus is now located somewhere around my chin. My left ovary is so large that it is behind my uterus, pushing it forward into a very unhelpful position. This also explains why I look five month's pregnant still.

So everyone in the room is standing there, a little appalled I think, and he decides to try the abdominal ultrasound. And he gets a picture that, to him, looks like a flickering heartbeat. I am barely used to reading the vaginal ultrasounds, and what he was able to get on the abdominal looked like nothing to me. But he said "there's the heartbeat" and of course I burst into tears, which must have made the ultrasound jiggle, but I couldn't tell because I was crying. I pulled it together pretty quickly, though, and asked if we could give the transvaginal another go.

This time I squirmed down and, on some instinct, tipped my pelvis up (that's "bridge" to you yoginas). And this time it worked and was no more that somewhat uncomfortable.

Um, it's also possible that -- although it didn't feel that way to me -- my incredibly tense muscles were incredibly tensely spasming for the first round, and that once I got some good news they relaxed enough for the ultrasound to work. But I prefer to think that it was my clever pelvic tilt.

Anyway. He took four CRL (crown rump length) measurements; 6w4d, 6w6d, 6w6d again, 7w1d. All plus or minus two. Even the worst of those wouldn't send me into a frenzy. He eyeballed the heart rate and said it looked like around 130 to him, which is perfectly normal.

I am exhausted and I am so, so grateful.

Friday, December 12, 2008

I keep starting posts...

and then abandoning them. There's nothing I can type that doesn't feel like a jinx.

I'm just sitting here, very quietly, making the time pass until the ultrasound on Monday.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

24DPO beta

3838.

Doubling time: 49.7 hours.

There's no progesterone because I wasn't due for another beta. I've been cramping a whole lot (no spotting though), and my OHSS suddenly got all better, and I was utterly convinced that I was miscarrying again. So I fished out one of the many beta lab slips from my last miscarriage (m/c betas don't care about progesterone). I just waltzed right in and gave it to lab and got my blood sucked. I figure what are they gonna do, put the blood back? Not tell me the results?

Anyway, the take home messages are
  1. As of 8:30 Thursday morning, I am still pregnant and everything is still in normal range;
  2. I have truly never been crazier than I am right now.
Really. Everyone else must be feeling really, really sane right now because I am using up all the crazy.

I'm going to go home and sob with relief and bury my head in Animal Crossing. I figure this set of results will give me 24-36 hours of relief before the crazy starts up again.

Monday, December 1, 2008

21DPO/16dp5dt beta

1406.
Progesterone: 321
.

Doubling time: 45.28 hours.

For those for whom these numbers do not immediately translate: the all-important doubling time is good at less than 48 hours. Not okay, good. The overall number is normal, just a titch off the mode. The progesterone is crazy, crazy high -- first trimester numbers are supposed to be around 15-50; by the third trimester it can reach 200. I haven't been able to find much information about what "ridiculously high progesterone" means, but the doctor doesn't seem concerned... probably it just means that I had really a lot of follicles, which have left behind them really a lot of corpus luteum-ses, each one of which probably thinks it's the only one and so is pumping out P4 as fast as it can. Bless their little yellow hearts.

Me: relieved, grateful, still scared, officially pregnanter than I've ever been.