Thursday 6th September 2012

Drink: strong tea with just a little milk
Soundtrack: grey’s anatomy

We’re approaching what would have been baby #1’s first birthday ish. It has been on my mind quite a lot. Hearing people talk about the first birthday party they are organising is hard, every time I have been thinking ‘that should have been us’. But last night I realised that my language was all off, how it is now – that is how it was meant to be for us. What other people have, it is how it could have been but it isn’t. The glimpse of parenthood that baby gave us has enabled us to be the parents we are, we cherish our little man in a way I don’t think would have been possible if it had been any other way. There is a lot to be grateful for in a weird sort of way.

such beauty in the sky

{source}

A year ago today I had surgery for our miscarriage.  It drew a line under the month of tests and scans, false hope and tears.  That baby gave us BabyH, we wouldn’t be 6 weeks away from meeting ‘it’ if we hadn’t had that miscarriage.  I’m not glad that I miscarried, it still hurts sometimes and I still think of that baby.  But I can accept it now.  I understand that this baby doesn’t replace the baby we lost, we can be happy and sad all at once.  So today I am grateful for the blessings we have and will gaze at the stars with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye.

A look back through 2011

This year has been a strange year, in many ways it has been incredibly difficult emotionally and in other ways it has been incredibly joyful.  One thing I have said a few times is I feel like this year has been necessary inorder for 2012 and beyond to be wonderful.

love Amy x

~~~~~

Here are a few thoughts on different events that have occured and what I have learnt from them:

January – sometimes your world seemingly falls apart and you feel like you are falling through a black hole.  But with the right friends and family around you they will always be there to grab your arm and pull you back up.

February – sometimes just being near the sea with someone you love and who loves you back is more restorative than any amount of therapy, menthols or wine.

Spring and Summer – the grief of miscarriage and infertility are similar but different.  Understanding one doesn’t mean you understand the other.

April – therapy is more like chatting with a wise, impartial friend

May – I am a pretty wise, balanced person ‘for my age’.

June – never underestimate the kindness of a stranger or the impact {positive and negative} that you can have on another person’s life.

July – you don’t need a transformative experience, especially not somebody else’s version.  With time you are evolving and transforming within yourself.  And to be honest – you’re pretty centred as it is, more so than some people your senior so just enjoy the ride.

August – work is 60% people, 40% the role.

September – in a professional setting I am not as delicate as others think.  But sometimes them thinking it works to my advantage.

October – people don’t always have the answers to give you that you need.  Once you stop pointing the finger at yourself and accept they don’t have the magic answer you can let it go.

December – choosing paint colours is hard when it actually comes to it, maybe I have commitment issues hehe?!

” habouring bitterness and anger is like drinking posion
and expecting the other person to suffer “
{Peter Andre 2011}

Miscarriage – humour helped our medical staff be able to concentrate on treating me physically.  I had other people to help me emotionally.

2011 – my non-professional self is very different to my professional self, maybe that is why friendships with colleagues have struggled.  At work I am tough, assertive and confident.  As a person I am more sensitive and unsure of myself than is often realised.

2011 – my relationship with my Mum has changed this year, there is a deeper sense of unspoken understanding and respect.  This year has been made so much easier to endure with her on my team.

Renovations – I can live through pretty difficult situations and remain pretty amazingly calm at a time when I should be super sensitive to sources of stress as long as I have twitter, a to-do list and a bit of beauty in my life.

As 2012 approaches I turn 30 weeks pregnant.  
What might I tell my pre-pregnant self:

1. people around you will all have a sense of ownership of your pregnancy, birth and baby.  This is because they care and because it is their niece/nephew/cousin/grandchild.  Managing their expectations and your own is hard.  Accept you have little control over it, pick your battles and preserve bridges you may need once babyH arrives.

2. enjoy the sense of relief and satisfaction you get from having a wee.  Once you are pregnant you will desperately need a wee but actually only pass about 10ml of fluid and that sense of ‘ahhhhh’ never happens.

3. in pregnancy you lose yourself and find yourself all at the same time.

4. you won’t want to talk pregnancy 24/7 as you thought you would but you will need people there to talk about it 24/7.

5.  whilst you’re no hippy you are going to become intrigued by homebirths, waterbirths, breastfeeding, natal hypnotherapy and cloth nappies – this will freak other people out as they see it as a judgement on their own choices.

6. once biten, twice shy.  You will be worried that you haven’t bonded enough with baby.  But next time you walk through a crowd look at your arms, see the protective hand and elbow that covers bump and know that everything is going to be ok.

living with the fear

In January we had a miscarriage.  We had weekly scans and tests.  My HCG levels continued to rise.  Finally after almost a month, in one final huddle of Doctors, they decided that it really was over.  My body never caught up, the conflict between what my heart was telling me and what my brain was processing broke me.  But once the surgery was over and my heart and brain realigned I could start to heal.

I know people who live with the pain of {in}fertility.  I have not experienced this, only the pain and fear of expected {in}fertility due to PCOS.  I try to understand and to imagine, and although I can get close, I have not been in their shoes.  During my miscarriage and the time immediately after people try to offer words of comfort, try to demonstrate that they know what it is like. But here are my observations.  ‘At least you know you can get pregnant’ is of no consolation.  Just as ‘well there is always adoption or surrogacy’ isn’t of any consolation to a couple undergoing fertility treatment.  I understand that if you have never ‘caught’ then to you someone who has miscarried is a step ahead but that’s not how it works.  When I saw those two thin lines, something within me changed. I was going to be a parent.  A miscarriage didn’t cause that change to be reversed, I’d made the emotional shift to almost-parent but had no baby to show for it.  And who was to say that getting pregnant meant I would get pregnant again or that, if I did, I wouldn’t miscarry again?!  It is of no consolation.

Please believe me that I don’t trivalise the pain of {in}fertility, and I don’t think that the pain of miscarriage is greater, but neither is it less.  They are two similar but different pains, they are not the same thing and experiencing one doesn’t mean you understand the other.

~~~~~

Through this pregnancy I have lived with the fear that again I am an almost-parent…but what if I don’t get to hold my baby.  The fear gripped me so hard that for weeks I lived from day to day.  We didn’t use the P word for days, infact we could barely acknowledge the test result.  After caving and having a private early viability scan I relaxed a little and began to look toward our 12 week scan.  That went well too and I now feel some movement but a few weeks ago I realised how little I had truly bonded with babyH or Probie as we call him.  Eventually we bought a doppler, hearing his heartbeat and move helps. I’m not obsessive about it every night but it has helped me believe that things are going ok and I feel a bit more connected.

And so now as my 20 week scan approaches another fear has crept in.  My brother is severally disabled and we have never really known whether there is a genetic link or not.  No one has said there definitely is – but equally we haven’t been told there definitely isn’t.  As a young adult the idea of having a child who was biologically my own terrified me.  I had no desire to have my own child predomintely because I don’t know what I would do if I found out our child had issues of any type. I have watched the pain of being my brother’s parents, he brings so much to our family but I would be stupid to ignore the way my parents have had to constantly fight the system to ensure he gets what he needs and deserves.  My nucal transluency scan came back as low risk so I know our baby’s risk of Downs syndrome is minimal.  But I am nervous about the other conditions that this scan may identify and the decisions we might have to make.  I know this is a may and might situation – in all probability everything will be fine. However, the ‘what if it’s not?’ question sits heavily on my mind.

~~~~~

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that rationally the evidence around me indicates a normal, healthy pregnancy without complications.  But that doesn’t make my fears any less genuine.  If I confide in you of the fear, you will probably just tell me “everything will be fine”.  You don’t know everything will be fine, you hope everything will be and so far it has been, so you think it will continue to be.  But unless you can guarantee there is nothing to be cautious about then please don’t say otherwise.  Tragedy helps, we tend to live in a bubble of ignorant bliss that that sort of thing doesn’t happen to us.  It happens to normal, everyday people all the time…but…

a wish gone by

Before I was pregnant my best friend and I used to while away the time over a glass or three of wine imagining how amazing it would be to be pregnant at the same time.  We imagined working through the excitement together, reassuring each other through the scary bits and watching our children hangout together as we sipped Starbucks and talked about the latest sleepless nights and favourite nail polishes.

Back then, it didn’t even occur to me to consider that
1 in 3 pregnancies ends in miscarriage

Ironically we did fall pregnant within about 4 weeks of each other although I didn’t know that at the time.  I have often wondered if my miscarriage was a key contributor as to why our friendship dissolved.  Maybe I was almost a symbol of ‘bad luck’.  Who knows.  But now, when I think about the future and the hope that we will be pregnant again I know that noone close to me has similar dates.  Not because I don’t want to share it, anything but.  I just would hate to have that barrier develop once again if either of us were that ‘1’ in 3.

And there it is again!

Today was a toughie.
Tears rolled down my face uncontrollably on the train home.
And I was fairly inconsolible in the car home.
My boss is pregnant, about 3 weeks ahead of where I should be.
With triplets.

I have dealt with the miscarriage mentally ok.  I am ready to move forward.  But hearing about the heartbeats and how amazing the midwife appointment was 3 times in a day, followed by the normal oooos and ahhhs is tough.

It’s like being on a tv show and them saying:
“Here is what you could have won!!”

Would really like to convince work to send me to Singapore for a month or two.  Runaway from having to watch it infront of me for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  But it wouldn’t really be fair to Prince Charming.  But selfishly, I still want to go.

The pictured quote is from Lindsay over at Designer Wife

I’m fine…sorry what was the question?

I have sat with a ‘new post’ page open in front of me for hours, literally.  All day I have thought how I need to sit down and just type.  But somehow it just wouldn’t come…fear of being depressive and whiny got in the way.  However, I promised this was a warts and all blog {and mainly I write it for me} so here it goes.

There are only so many times you can say ‘I’m fine’ until you swallow down the ‘how the fuck do you think I’m feeling’ response and say, once again, ‘I’m fine’.  But still your eyes well up and your heart screams out ‘No, I’m not ok.  I’m hurt and angry and disappointed and confused.’

You see there are a couple of things that have complicated the last few weeks…

My boss is pregnant…with triplets.  She is about 3 weeks ahead of where I should would have been.  We had been really excited about being pregnant together.  She is like my mum, given I live a mile or so* away from ‘home’.  This probably makes me jealous but I’m not.  Fortunately I haven’t come away from my miscarriage with a ‘fear’ of pregnant women and babies.  I couldn’t cope with triplets {sometimes I not sure I’d cope with a single child} and I would never chose for her to miscarry instead of me.  But recently, as everyone finds out about her pregnancy and gets excited about it {on the desk diagonally opposite mine, you know, right in my eye line} I feel like I have walked into a brick wall.  I can do the pregnancy bit with her, no forcing or faking – I am genuinely excited and happy for her.  But the cooing just gets me every.single.time.

{coping tip 1} make a playlist of upbeat songs you love, there shouldn’t be any you want to skip.  Make sure you have a fully charged phone and headphones at all times to block out the noise and avoid the wall

Why couldn’t I have been ok too?
Why couldn’t I be sitting here complaining that I can’t eat goats cheese and have bucketfuls of chilled vino?!

~~~~~

Added into the mix, somewhere along the line of January, I got dumped…by my bff.  And I don’t know why, I don’t understand it and I am hurt and angry and worried for her all at once.

Everything just feels so fragile, like so much is changing at once that you can’t centre.  Did you ever play dizzy dinosaurs as kids? I am ready to lie on the ground, let the world still and find my feet.

Some times being a friend means mastering the art of timing.
There is a time for silence.
A time to let go and allow people to
hurl themselves into their destiny.
And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.

Surely it has to be my turn for something wonderful and precious and kind and life affirming to happen?

I try to do the right thing.
Say the right thing.
Be the right person.

It has to be my turn soon, right?!

And so it is, just like you said it would be…

And so they have decided it is over.  My body is now merely playing tricks on me to make me think everything is ok but really it isn’t.  Bloods today and Sunday to measure my HCG and rule out molar pregnancy.  Then, assuming my body continues to be mean, I can agree to a D&C.  I’m going to try to book in for next Thursday so I’ve got a few days to recover and then back into work on the Monday.

Mentally I am wrestling the rational ‘it is over’ and the irrational ‘but I still feel pregnant’.  I wish I had just miscarried normally, it would have been hard but removed this slow and painful 4 weeks of uncertainty.

~~~~~

Then there is the ‘what next?’ question.

This pregnancy came as a very special and wonderful surprise.

It has made us realise how much we want to be parents…

But work-wise it isn’t ideal…with a little effort the next year or two could be really positive for me professionally…

So who knows, we certainly don’t at the moment.

~~~~~

Firstly…

I think a little break away, some sea-air and real fires will be medicinal

Vino and yummy food also naturally!

Plus I have a 5km run with Kat to prepare for…

I’m debating whether to go back to being vegetarian – I stopped whilst pregnant because my iron levels fell so low…

And I am tempted by slimming world (if I don’t go back to being vegetarian)…
But that would break my ‘no diet on the #101’ task…

…just another week

Yesterday was d-day

I hit 7 weeks and we had a scan booked for 9.10am,
hopefully to see our baby’s heartbeat.

Unfortunately that’s not how it panned out.

First off I have a retroverted uterus…sometimes referred to as a tilted uterus.  Like this:

Which meant I had to have an internal scan rather than a tummy one the way you always see on the tv.

Secondly we saw an empty sac..i.e. no baby.  It was pretty much a case of ‘I’m really sorry but…’

There were a few tears, and a couple of “I’m sorry” ‘s to Prince Charming {you get this strange sense of female guilt} followed by a (what seemed like a lifetime) wait in the corridor for a Doctor.

We spoke about how we felt, how it obviously just wasn’t meant to be and how we would just try again.

We waited…

I told Prince Charming I didn’t want to be patronised with ‘at least you know you can get pregnant’ and ‘it’s just natures way’

We waited some more…

Because my bleeding hadn’t progressed I just wanted to organise next steps (probably a D&C) and go home.

And still we waited

Eventually the Doctor came and it went something like this:

‘erm, we want you to come back in a week and be rescanned because having looked at all your notes the sac has grown significantly in the past week.  I have spoken to the registrar and we don’t want to act too soon’

What?!
Are you saying that we might have miscarried but maybe we didn’t and after having already waited 10 days (and become more hopeful of a positive outcome during that time along with feeling more pregnant than ever) we now have to wait another 7?!!!

So yeah, that is pretty much it.

Confused?
I know we were totally baffled, didn’t know what to think or say or anything.
It felt like I was being made to spend a week pretending to be pregnant for no reason other than just because.
We felt hopeless.

~~~~~

Thank goodness for:

So I searched, and searched and searched.

Finally I came to this conclusion:

• Scanning a retroverted uterus is harder than a normal uterus

• Often this corrects itself by the 10-12 week stage of pregnancy

• An empty sac is called a blighted ovum

• It is possible to misdiagnose a b/o

• This is move likely in women who have a retroverted uterus

What now…?

On Friday we see if the sac has grown again.
I want to ask what age it is measuring.

It is best for someone in my position to ask to be allowed to miscarry naturally until I hit at least 9 weeks to ensure b/o is the correct diagnosis.  If the sac is still growing I may wait until around 11 weeks before agreeing to a D&C.

All just a big wait and see really, I flip between emotions…
It’s difficult to know what to feel most of the time.