Houston, we have a heartbeat!

It’s been three years and three pregnancies since I last saw that little flickering on the ultrasound screen, but the good news is that today I got to see it again!

Since I love me some stats: I’m 6w6d, both according to LMP and ovulation date, and the fetal heart rate was 125 (anything over 120 is great).  The CRL and gestational sac both measured 7w0d, so right on target.  And there was only one embryo in there (phew).  As a point of interest, I’ve now gotten pregnant four times in a row on the right side, which suggests that that’s the only functional side left thanks to the scarring from my first pregnancy.  The summary: everything looks good so far.

Given my history, the RE wants to see me weekly until I graduate to co-management by my local OB and MFM.  So after the ultrasound today I called both of those offices to set up my first appointments.  I’m also supposed to re-start Lovenox, and possibly progesterone depending on the results of my blood test today.  Fun, fun, fun!

I also sent in the waitlist form for campus daycare.  We never sent in the form for either of my last two pregnancies, since we figured there was no point before seeing a heartbeat, so it felt like kind of a big step to do it today.  But with spots as hard to come by as they are (since they only take four infants each year), it’s important to do it as soon as possible.  It’s a little awkward now that we’re part of that tiny community — the director will see the form, and she knows us now, but I’m sure she deals with knowledge of early pregnancies (and losses) all the time.

So, even though my face is pounding with the Sinus Infection That Will Not End, I’m pretty excited.  Not too excited, mind you… I’ve been here twice before, and only one of those ended well, but it’s a really big step in the right direction to get past the point of my previous 1st-trimester losses.  And seeing that flickering little heartbeat… well, I can’t help but think about that tiny little life just starting to take shape.  It’s hard not to get just the slightest bit attached.  I hope we get to meet it some day.

Good betas

Well, I’ve got good betas.  Friday’s number: 926.  Monday’s number: 2500-something.  Doubling time: just under 48 hours.  Right on the money.

Of course, I’ve been here before.  At least three times, to be precise (we didn’t have betas drawn for the fourth pregnancy, so I don’t know if they were good or bad).  One of those times resulted in a live birth, and the others didn’t.  So, while this is an encouraging development, I’m not exactly counting any chickens just yet.

I also wanted to record a conversation that has been bugging me all day.  I was walking to a faculty meeting in a different building with my department chair, who also happens to be the closest member of my department to me in age, and with whom I am friendly.  He is currently the only person in the department who knows that I have had three miscarriages, including two since S’s birth.  As we headed over to lunch he said: “Oh, I just sent you an email about this, but remember my recent postdoc X and his wife Y?  Well, X just sent me the news that Y is 9 weeks pregnant and wanted me to share it with everyone!”

I said, “That’s great. [pause] Wow, 9 weeks… oh, to be that optimistic… But, good for them.  I’m happy for them.”

And he just kept talking, as though it was nothing.

Now, I know and like this guy.  I don’t think he meant to upset me.  But it was upsetting.  I was able to handle it OK in the moment, I think… I only expressed the twinge of wistfulness about feeling confident enough to announce a pregnancy to an entire department of your former mentors and colleagues at 9 weeks(!).  But… I would much rather have gotten the news by email, in the privacy of my office, where I could work through my feelings without needing to respond in the moment.  There was no reason for him to bring it up with me in person, other than general cluelessness surrounding my feelings about early pregnancy.  I get that he was excited for his former mentee — my colleague is a father of three young kids, and just loves babies and little kids.  I just wish he had been even a little bit sensitive to the fact of my previous losses, when clearly it didn’t even occur to him that this news might hit a nerve for me.  It made me feel lonely, and reinforced the reality that most people, perhaps especially men, don’t understand the emotional impact of pregnancy loss, particularly recurrent pregnancy loss, on women.  What it communicated to me was that he doesn’t see my losses as a big deal, and doesn’t even understand that they might be a big deal for me.

Of course, it helped that I was able to hear the news while I was pregnant, rather than two weeks ago when the testing and treatment seemed to be dragging out interminably.  It’s amazing what an emotional roller coaster every pregnancy is for me, even the fifth one.  You can bet I wasn’t in the mood to tell my chair that I was pregnant (I mean, 5 weeks is basically like 9 weeks, amirite?!), but at least I was able to feel a little bit hopeful, and then getting the news of good betas later in the day helped me feel even more hopeful.

Now I have to wait two weeks for that all-important heartbeat ultrasound, since I’ll be traveling from the 12th to the 16th of the month.  Please keep sending good wishes, especially until then!

The two-week wait after the two-week wait

I’ve gotten pretty good at the two-week wait over the years.  I am a model of patience and restraint: I never test before a missed period anymore (why would I?  It’s just a waste of a pregnancy test that I most likely wouldn’t need if I just waited for my period to come in its own time).  I’ve been pregnant five times, which means a heck of a lot of two-week waits, so I guess I’ve finally worn down my anticipation.

But the two-week wait after the two-week wait?  That’s a whole different story.

In my four previous pregnancies, I’ve always had an ultrasound at 6 weeks.  In our first pregnancy it was because we’d had some difficulty conceiving and were being followed by the RE, and after that it was because I was supposed to start Lovenox at the first sign of viability.

That first six-week ultrasound was magical.  We saw a heartbeat right away.  There was a living creature.  Inside of me!  It was amazing!  I was elated!  I cried!  I fell in love at first sight.  It was just incredible.  Later we found out it was a daughter, and that was a magical moment as well.  There was so much anticipation in that pregnancy.  Which probably made it all that much harder when it ended at 18 weeks.

Since then, the six-week ultrasound has been a different story.  I am more wary, guarded, less attached to that little bean, less surprised whether I see a heartbeat or not, more clinical as I interrogate the ultrasound tech.  In my fourth pregnancy, I warned the ultrasound tech before she started that pregnancy didn’t tend to go well for me, so I wasn’t expecting good news.  Why did I feel like I needed to warn her?  Indeed, when she had nothing but bad news to give me after that ultrasound, she was fine.  I was the one who held it together until my doctor asked how I wanted to end the pregnancy, and then I lost it.  The six-week ultrasound has gone well for me twice, and poorly for me twice, and even in the cases where it has gone well, only half of the outcomes (i.e., one) were positive.

Same with betas.  I’ve had betas drawn in three pregnancies: my first, second, and fourth.  They’ve always been great — I’ve never had a bad hCG draw.  (I say, knocking on wood, waiting anxiously for the second round of betas for my current pregnancy.)  Yet 2/3 of the pregnancies with good betas have ended poorly.  So you’d think I’d be over them by now.  But here I sit, the night after my 2nd hCG draw in my 5th pregnancy, unable to concentrate on putting together my lecture for tomorrow because I’m wondering what’s going on with my betas.

After everything that’s happened, I don’t trust betas, and I don’t trust the six-week ultrasound.  But… I still get so obsessed with waiting for the results!  I’ve been thinking and worrying about them all day.  The two weeks after the two-week wait, while I wait for blood test results and ultrasound results, feel like the longest weeks of the whole pregnancy.  (Except for the days after my due date in my pregnancy with my son — those were truly the longest days of the entire pregnancy.  Each one felt like a week!)  I torture myself: have they not called yet because the news is bad, and they want to wait to deliver bad news tomorrow?  Even if everything’s fine with the betas, it’ll be two weeks before I can have the ultrasound, due to some poorly-timed travel… how will I make it that long???

At least if the news is bad, I won’t have to wait long to find out what’s going to happen in this pregnancy.  The only way I was able to make it through my pregnancy with my son was through continuous distraction.  So I’m just going to try to distract myself like crazy for the next two weeks.  Traveling to the conference next week will help.  Afternoons with a toddler who demands all of my attention will help.  What else will help?  How do you survive the two-week wait after the two-week wait?

Pregnancy #5

It’s been quite a week at our house.

Sunday and Monday we started to notice a weird rash on S’s face.  I put Aquaphor on it and forgot about it until I picked S up from daycare on Tuesday, and his daycare teacher told me he’d been scratching himself all day and seemed really uncomfortable.  “I think he has allergies,” she told me.  Then it clicked.  I’d been on amoxicillin for a week, courtesy of a nasty bout of bronchitis / sinus infection, and we’re still breastfeeding twice a day.  S had a reaction to amoxicillin when he was four months old, but his pediatrician had downplayed it and told us it was probably just a viral rash and not a true allergy.  Well, apparently it was a true allergy.

I frantically called the pediatrician’s office and my doctor’s office and after a couple of hours.  From the pediatrician: give him Benadryl for a couple of days, no breastfeeding for 48 hours after my last dose of amoxicillin, and bring him to the ER if he gets worse.  From my doctor: don’t stop the amoxicillin since your bronchitis was so bad (although the next day they called back to say that I could stop it after all, ugh).  By this point, we were already looking at a minimum of three days without breastfeeding, only a week and a half before I was to leave for a five-day trip.  It was unfortunately abrupt and not at all the way I’d wanted to do it, but it seemed like weaning was in order.  It’s after his second birthday, and I didn’t want to confuse him or stress him out with an off-again, on-again breastfeeding relationship.  After one evening of extreme weepiness and irrational irritability towards my husband on my part, I’ve been OK.  S has taken it well.  Surprisingly, he is more insistent about asking in the morning than at night, but there has been no crying or tantrums.  He accepts it when I say, “Mama has a boo-boo and can’t nurse.”  The first time I told him that, he looked really sad, but then I said, “big boys who don’t nurse get an extra story at bedtime,” and he brightened considerably.  So, I guess we’re doing this.

OK, OK, clearly I’m dragging out the punch line of the post.  I’m really glad I decided not to risk the MRI contrast this week after all.  My period was due on Wednesday, which came and went with no signs of a period at all.  I know my cycles inside and out at this point, so I was pretty sure yesterday, but I waited to make sure it wouldn’t start today, and then stopped by the drugstore to buy a test on my way home.  Lo and behold, two strong lines, right away.  Here we go with pregnancy #5.

After I told my husband, I called my mom.  I told her I was pregnant, and her immediate response was, “You didn’t tell me!”  Oy. 🙂 (I went on to point out that I was in fact telling her at that very moment, and I had only found out myself about five minutes before, so I’m not sure when exactly she would have liked me to tell her!)

At the moment I’m just sort of going with the flow (though not literally, thankfully!).  I’m not really excited yet, I’m not really scared yet… it’s just another positive pregnancy test.  My fifth.  I’ll feel a little sheepish when I call my RE’s office tomorrow, because she had told me to hold off on TTC until the hysteroscopy was completed, but she told me the day after the OPK turned positive, so it was just a bit too late.  Hopefully I haven’t doomed myself to another preventable miscarriage and the delay of the surgery that would have fixed the problem.

With every positive pregnancy test comes a little bump of hope. Smaller each time, I think, but still there.  Wish me luck.