A Raspberry Sized Bundle of Nerves...I Mean JOY!

     I have always been a cry baby.  Crying has always been a thing about me that I hated but also had to come to accept about myself because as hard as I have tried to be better about not crying, I have just never been successful at it.  As a society, we look down on crying.  We see it as a sign of weakness or hysteria, especially in women.  We praise women who keep calm under pressure and show no sign of emotion.  We love characters in movies or on television who keep their crying in check only to hold it in long enough to get somewhere private where they can really let loose.  So, while crying is often portrayed as something akin to using the bathroom, something that makes you uncomfortable but you can hold it in long enough to get somewhere private, I have always felt it compared more to sweating, something that happens when you get a little too uncomfortable and it can show up at any time in any place for any reason.  I have always been really ashamed of it too.  I have cried at work, I have cried in public, I even cried when a police officer gave me a fix-it ticket for my tail light.  Ridiculous behavior!!!  In all of those scenarios, though, I wasn't forcing it.  If anything, I was trying my hardest not to cry.    It was only recently when I heard an interview with Kristen Bell who spoke about how she cries if she doesn't stay between a 3 and a 7.  That means that anything on the sad level below 3 and on the happy level above 7 will make her cry.   She shared a funny moment of her crying over a sloth coming to her birthday party and everybody laughed, including me.  I shouldn't have, though.  I am exactly the same way.  In fact, I am probably closer to a 4-6 range normally.  And now, with the pregnancy hormones, the added injected hormones and the anxiety about first trimester and whether I should do an amniocentesis (due to my advanced maternal age) let's just say that if I am not rocking a steady 5, I am probably in tears.  I have made a lot of tears recently.  While I know it is normal to be emotional during pregnancy and that I am not experiencing anything new, it certainly is worth mentioning.  Everything is heightened and just a little more difficult.   I am right on the verge of tears at any given moment.  I even sometimes think I am about to throw up from morning sickness when instead I just break down crying.

      I am about to be 8 weeks pregnant in 2 days and to even say the words, "I'm pregnant" feels like a dare.  I seriously feel like I am standing on super thin ice with this whole deal and at any given moment it can all be lost.  Every cramp or twinge I feel, which is quite often, makes me feel like I am going to miscarry.   I am terrified.   I just feel like we tried so hard to get pregnant and to be fair we should be able to stay pregnant now that we made it this far.  Yes, I know that life does not work that way but don't you sometimes wish it did?  I guess that's why it is so nerve wracking.  Just because we had trouble getting pregnant doesn't mean we will have trouble staying pregnant.  Just because I am 35 doesn't mean my child will have chromosomal defects.  But, it does increase the chances as far as the statistics go and boy do I ever hate statistics.   I had a horrible statistics professor in college.  I didn't think I could hate that word more then I did back then...until now.  There is nothing worse then pregnancy statistics.  It's a constant threat level on your head and the doctors throw numbers out as often as the internet does.  It doesn't necessarily help the anxiety and worry.   So, what do I do with all this anxiety inside of me?  I was told not to exercise too much and that is usually a great stress relief for me.  However, to modify I have been walking and swimming  and once the nausea eases up, I have found a prenatal yoga class to attend.  I think that will really help.   The statistics on the evil internet have made me really worried about my weight because I am already big and bigger then usual because of the IVF weight.  I have also found that morning sickness is similar to hangovers and tends to be soothed by cheeseburgers.  This is not good.  I wanted to be one of those women who didn't eat for three months.   No such luck there.  Instead, I am more hungry then I have ever been in my life.  And when I am hungry, the nausea is so much worse.    I am going to have to get a lot better about nutrition.      There really is so much to think about.   So much to consider and I haven't even gotten into all there is to research on parenting styles.    I know that it feels like because I went through IVF, I should be all smiles and gratitude now that it worked.  I am certainly grateful and excited but I am just as nervous as any expecting mother.  Maybe I shouldn't be?  Maybe I should just be happy we made it this far?  I am not sure.  There is nothing to be sure about.  I just want what every expecting mother wants, a perfect pregnancy with a perfect baby at the end.   Is that too much to ask?  

     So, to sum up, I cry a lot these days, my thoughts are all over the place, and I am super nervous.  I am really excited too.  Maybe I am weak and full of hysteria.  Maybe my kid will be too.  Then again, maybe crying is not so bad.  It always makes me feel better then I did the moment before I cried.  It's certainly better then that horrible feeling you get when you try to swallow it down and it feels like a rock in your gut.  Anyway, I don't have room for rocks in my belly right now anyway.  I have a raspberry in there...a very important hormone secreting raspberry trying to fix the drought in California with its mother's tears, that I love more then any other thing on the planet.  My cousin recently told me that she tends to just trust the world.  She really does too.  I never thought about her that way but once she said it, I reflected back on her difficult moments in her life and realized that she has an amazing ability to just trust that things will work out and to tell the truth, they have.  I really should take a few pages out of her book.  Life doesn't have a check and balance system but maybe there is a way to just trust that it will work out if I just keep moving forward.  Breathe in, breathe out, repeat.  Worth a shot.

The Wait is Over/Just Beginning!! Now on with the Weight.

Hello Friends!
I apologize for being out of touch for the past few weeks.  When last we spoke I told you that it would be 2 weeks before I knew anything and that was sort of true.   However, pregnancy with IVF is sort of a slow and steady up hill climb of hope mixed with anxiety and nausea.  In fact most people say that with IVF you don't know you're pregnant until you are out of the first trimester.   And that's because so much can go wrong.   But, today is not about things that could go wrong because today we had our 6 week ultrasound and confirmed after 4 home pregnancy tests and two blood tests that we really are pregnant with a baby in my uterus!!  Pause for smiles.

    Now, it is still extremely early and no woman in her right mind should be sharing this news publicly but I think it's pretty clear by now that I am not a woman in my right mind.  I never have been.  Anyway, as much as the process of going through IVF is sort of mind and body altering, early IVF pregnancy is even more so.   That's because every symptom I have felt can as easily be attributed to pregnancy or to side effects from the drugs I am taking.   The week before my blood test,  I started having menstrual cramps and they really freaked me out.  I am on Progesterone injections so even if I was supposed to get my period, I wouldn't.  I was totally convinced that my period was circling though and so disappointed.   With that in mind, I decided that waiting until the date of the blood test would be too much for me and I took a pregnancy test.  Now I have taken A LOT of pregnancy tests over the past year and I am very familiar with what a negative test looks like.  However, this test had a very thin line in the positive window.

 Normally I would say "Wahoo, any line means positive because when it's negative there is nothing there."  However, I had taken an HCG trigger shot before my egg retrieval and that can take between 10-14 days to get out of your system depending on your metabolism.  This can give a false positive.  I started doing a ton of math to see exactly by the hour when the test would be out and it looked like it should be gone.   This made me hopeful but I decided to take another test the next day.  This was a less sensitive test and the line was even more faint on this one, but it was there.  I called UCSF the nurse told me that this was pretty good news and most likely meant I was pregnant but I still had to wait until the end of the week to do the blood test.  At this point, the internet scared me.  I started reading stories about women who tested too early and it was only the HCG trigger shot.  So, then I took a regular digital test the next day because that is the least sensitive test and that actually said the word pregnant.   Well, it doesn't get more clear then that.  I knew at that point that this test was not sensitive enough to give a false positive based on leftover HCG.  I had to be pregnant.  By the time I went in for my blood test, I was pretty confident.   When the nurse called to tell me the results which were positive, I was so excited but still cautious because she warned me that the risk of ectopic during this time period was so high.  At that point they said to behave like I am pregnant but that I should not tell a lot of people because until the ultrasound, it's just a chemical pregnancy.  I of course wanted to tell every person I have ever met and even those in passing on the street but hubs asked me to keep it on the DL for a few weeks until after the ultrasound confirmed that things were as they should be.  So, I passed the time by going to Vegas with my mom and cousin and had a great sober time!  I was in bed by about 10:00 both nights.  Good times, indeed!

       I have had a lot of symptoms which are in part due to the pregnancy and also the injections.  My stomach is bloated so I already look pregnant which is fine now that I actually am.   I have only had a little bit of morning sickness so hopefully that will stick.  Maybe now that my body has been on a constant cocktail of hormones for almost a year, pregnancy won't cause as much of a shock.  Just a thought;-)  I guess the one thing that I really notice though is that I often feel crampy.  It feels like I am about to start my period and every time I go to the bathroom (which is quite a bit more then usual) I have a moment of panic.   Then I freak myself out by researching symptoms on the internet and convince myself that it's over.   It's not, though.  It's just beginning.  I feel like everything is just beginning.  My entire life from this point on will never be the same.  What a truly radical thought.

That big black blob is the yolk sack.
The jelly bean at the top is our little "Alpha."

     We had some friends visiting from Sweden for the past few weeks and it was actually really great to have what felt like witnesses to the entire process.  They arrived the day of the egg retrieval and left a few days after the second blood test.  They got to see all the fun stuff.  One particular moment comes to mind though.  Cindy, said friend, and I went to Beverly's fabrics to pick up props for her sister's wedding.  We were standing in the yarn aisle the day after the first blood test and I was looking at this baby yarn that I have seen a thousand times before.  I picked up the yarn and something inside me just burst and I started crying.  I mean heavy crying into this ball of soft creamy white yarn.  Cindy, being the excellent friend that she is, joined in and cried with me.  It was such a special moment.  I feel like it was the absolute first moment I really let myself believe that it might be true.    She commented on how excited she was for me that I was getting to have something that I wanted this badly for so long.  At the time, I had too many emotions going through me to really receive that so I just bought the snotty yarn and went home, but this morning when the doctor said "132 beats per minute" and we saw that little jittery heartbeat, I felt it again.  I felt that gasp of reality and awesome hope.   My body is growing a human with a heart that is beating.  This is really happening.  Yes, it is still really early and anything can happen but this is further then we have been before.    Normal pregnancies have high risks, though.   Children are risky once they're here too.  I am pretty sure I will be filled with a new worry for the rest of my life now.  There are so many risks but I guess all I can do is keep hoping and praying that things will work out.  Between science and faith, there is a pretty good chance.  But get ready folks, he's (or she's) coming!  He (or she) is on the train and in 7 months and 20 days, he or she will be here.  Oh I am so excited.  I can hardly wait.

Baby Heartbeat = 132 BPM
Maks and MK =  Roughly 700 BPM