Today is grocery day and we bought cherries. I don’t even like eating them in their raw form, but they’re just too gorgeous and summer-y to pass up. After a week of depression/entitlement eating consisting of mostly fast food and carry-out we are determined to get back on track and eat real food at home this week.
I was emptying out my pockets today before doing laundry and found this fortune in my jeans. I got it at lunch on Tuesday about two hours before I received the call informing me of my impending miscarriage. One of my pet peeves is when fortune cookie fortunes aren’t really fortunes – just advice or proverbs. I finally got a real fortune and its a total lie.
The cramping is much worse today and I’m finding myself hunched over to walk. The timing is unfortunate, because I have so much prep work to do for bags the girls are making at Girl Scout camp, which begins Monday. We got the supplies on Tuesday and my plan was to work on them throughout the week, but I haven’t felt up to it.
I also haven’t felt up to being alone, but Randy had a band show tonight. So my parents and sister came over and brought dinner, dessert, bags full of movies, and willing hands to help me with camp bag prep. They stayed with me til 11:30 (Kelli until 1:00am), cutting, stitching, trimming, and comforting. They rescued me and I am humbled by their devotion and amazed by how vulnerable I feel right now.
At the end of the day when I reflect on the fortune, I’ve decided that its not as off base as I originally thought. I was showered with good luck in the form of friends and family who have been such life-lines to us right now. Its a hard concept to reconcile, though. Its good luck that I wouldn’t need if I’d had good luck in the first place. But I’ll take any good luck that’s offered to me right now.
Our Coreopsis is begining to bloom as I loose the baby we went to hell and back to create. The physical miscarriage began today as I went back to work. Its mild since its so early, but the cramping is like getting kicked while I’m down….salt in the wound.
Today is a little better than yesterday but still rough. Things seem very gray. I was able to work from home today and Randy drove in to work so that he could come back and bring me lunch and check on me. I am well taken care of.
Roses my mom brought me today:
This is so much harder than I had anticipated. I can’t even fathom what it must be like further along in a pregnancy. I don’t want to find out, but I fear I will before this journey ends. I’m told that things will go back to normal and I will be happy again, but at the moment I can’t even imagine it.
My first, longed-for, hoped-for, faught-for pregnancy ended as quickly as it bagan. Over the weekend I started having inklings that something was wrong. It first came as an ominous gut feeling and was then fueled by gradually fading pink lines on the pregnancy tests I (maybe unwisely) kept taking twice a day. I was so worried about it that I had a pretty miserable day yesterday, despite the yarn-dyeing party, and Randy drove three hours to Wooster, Ohio to get me and drive me home so that we could be together. He said he’d have driven 10 hours if I needed him to. I don’t deserve him.
This morning I woke up and took another test before driving up to my fertility clinic for my scheduled follow-up blood test. There was maybe a faint pink line…maybe. A shadow of where a line should have been, used to be. So it wasn’t a surprise when the clinic called me this afternoon to tell me my hormone levels had dropped from 40 to 5 and that it is all over. The embryo(s) stopped secreting the HCG hormone, which means they have stopped developing and I am having an early miscarraige. I got the phone call in public, in a busy store, with Mary Ellen where we were shopping for camp supplies. She took care of everything and had me go to the car where I could lose what was left of my composure in private.
What I feel now is complicated. I’m devastated that another chance at motherhood is gone after just a taste. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that I suck so much at this – I couldn’t even stay pregnant for a week. I feel stupid for already announcing the pregnancy, only to let everyone down. Yet at the same time I feel backed into a corner by the nature of the treatments – unless we keep the treatments a secret (which isn’t our style) we can’t really keep anything a secret because people can do the math and figure out when we should have news. I feel both ready to try again to get back that glorious fleeting success and battered and drained like I can’t put myself through this again. I feel like everything about this is too hard and I wish that I didn’t want it anymore. I wish the desire for a baby was gone and we could just take our money and go to Hawaii or buy a bigger house and be happy. I feel like God isn’t looking out for us or just isn’t there. I feel like so many people come by their pregnancies too easily and don’t appreciate thier kids and don’t deserve to have them. I feel like the world is completely messed up and unfair and that life is nothing but pain and chaos. I feel like I hate our embryos because they are losers. Then I feel guilty for hating them. I feel like we’ll have better luck with our frozens. I feel encouraged by the statistics that show that women who get a positive test (even followed by an unsucessful pregnancy) are much more likely to go on to have a baby in the future. I feel like there’s something wrong with our DNA or my uterus and we’ll be among the unlucky few who never find IVF success. I feel foolish for taking so many home pregnancy tests but glad that I did because it led us to get an early official test. And while its hard to know that we lost something, I think it would have been harder to think that the IVF didn’t work at all (which would have been the case if we hadn’t taken any home tests and kept today as our original first testing date).
I don’t know exactly where we go from here. Our next step will be to transfer our frozens. But we don’t know when that will be. We need a break. So we’re taking a little break. And I think we’ll keep the next cycle a little more private for a little longer to protect ourselves. So that next time I make excited announcements they can hopefully be a little more pemanent.
Thanks to everyone for your continued support and patience.
Today we dyed a little. Ha-ha. Brooke’s mom graciously allowed us to turn her back yard (and kitchen) into a yarn dyeing studio and we went to town.
Brooke gets serious about knitting at the Great Lakes Sheep and Fiber Festival…
On my way the Great Lakes Sheep and Fiber Festival with Brookie and Dani. I think I’m glad I don’t go to this church…
After six home tests and one official blood test at IRH Clinic I can write words here that I couldn’t imagine myself ever actually typing into the keyboard.
A bun (or two) is in the oven. I am a pregnant woman. A Mom-to-be.
I actually don’t really believe it yet and my hands are shaking a little as I type. It started with my first home test on Wednesday. It came out positive and I was astonished because it was still rather early andbecause I was beginningto think I would never see what a positive pregnancy test looked like in real life. I took about 17 pictures of it and called Randy at the gym to tell him and ask him to buy me some more tests. He dutifully purchased a three pack and even went back in and exchanged them for a different type when I realized they were not the “early” tests. This was a big gesture as the tests are (for some reason) behind lock and key at this store and he had to get someone to open the “vault” again as well as convince them that we had not tampered with the tests.
I took another test Wednesday night which confirmed the first test. Same deal Thursday morning. So after three positive tests I called the clinic to confess my cheating and move my official blood test up to Friday (today) from its original date of May 26th. After work Thursday I purchased a digital test that actually says it in words. These tests have mocked me before, flashing NOT PREGNANT at me. Okay well maybe the words didn’t actually flash but that’swhat it seemed like. And I wanted to make it eat its words and tell me what I want to see. When it flashed up “Pregnant” I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. They cost a little more but it is totally worth it to see the words when you’ve been working so hard for so long.
Randy took the day off work today since he hasn’t had a day off since Christmas and we went together to get the blood test. One of the cruel aspects of pregnancy blood tests is that you have to wait several hours to get the results. We were expecting a positive result after 6 positive home tests (I took two more this morning – couldn’t resist) but you just never know until the official test. It is much more sensitive and can tell you the exact amount of the pregnancy hormone you have in your blood. So we decided to make a day of it and distract ourselves with lunch at Mai Thai and a matinee – Star Trek (I was interested because the director is the creator of Lost and Randy was interested because he enjoys the occasional Star Trek movie/episode – he was not as impressed as he thought he would be).
Once the movie was over I had a message from the clinic on my phone. We hurried to the car and listened to the message on speakerphone, my heart racing about 1000 beats/minute the whole time. The nurse said it was a positive result and that my number (hormone level) was 41, which is good for how early we did the test. I will go back in on Tuesday the 26th for a follow-up test. They like to see the number roughly double every 48-72 hours.
So its super early and anything can happen, but this is further than we have ever made it. We are cautiously optimistic and of course a little on edge, hoping that it sticks. But we have given ourselves permission to be excited and celebrate and dream about the future. We still haven’t really, fully comprehended it and are largely in disbelief. We are also nervous, anxious, worried, hopeful, ecstatic, in awe, and (at least I am) completely exhausted!
Thanks to everyone who has supported us so selflessly throughout our rocky journey. Anything can happen still and nothing is a sure bet. But we are moving in the right direction and couldn’t have done it without you!
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