« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
Well, what do you know? Writing yesterday's post freed something up in me because today I am reading all the pregnant bloggers, women at about the same stage as me, and I feel fine. Oh, I love it when things are this easy. I even found stuff I could relate to. I love the infertile blogging community.
As I caught up on my blog reading, I noticed that I don't jump to the blogs about other pregnant infertiles, I go straight to the blogs about loss and miscarriage. I thought about my "From the Armchair" post and I thought that it doesn't even touch on how I really feel. It's just the face I present to the world most of the time.
A friend with a 3 month old came to dinner last week. She was full of questions about my pregnancy and my due date and how I was feeling and it made me feel very uncomfortable. I don't like talking about this pregnancy with people. I don't feel comfortable having the standard pregnancy chat, "Yes, we would love a little boy but H would be such a good father with a little girl and imagine how pretty she would be! And I'm eating like a horse, I've put on 4kg already!" because I feel like a fake. I know that this pregnancy could no longer exist in 5 weeks' time, that it could all vanish in one horrible day and then what will people ask me? "How is your grieving going?" I just want to let it develop in its own time and let each week pass to allow this baby more time to grow and hopefully to survive, to grow up big and strong and to outlive me and H.
So I read the blogs of loss and I can relate to the stories of grief and grieving but at the same time I have to believe that this can work, that this time things might be different and they might work out ok. I feel isolated in an isolation I choose; not wanting to talk about pregnancies and not wanting to read about so much sadness. I guess that is why I knit. It occupies me and as something grows out of each line of knitting I do, even if I just do four lines a day, I can see it as a symbol of my child growing every day, slowly and in its own time, and all I can do is live in the present and feel blessed that now, at this moment, I am still pregnant and things are going fine.
(What's the bet that as I hit Save I start to spot? Oh, I crack myself up. H finds me less funny.)
All is going fine. Phew. I am off to see my OB on Thursday and my endo on Friday so now is a good time to get off a cheery little post before entering the swamps of medical information which always depress me.
I'm still spending a lot of time in the lazyboy armchair. A skinny friend sat in it the other day and said, "Mmm, the springs seem to be going, it's not actually that comfortable anymore." Funny, I don't notice that. I can sit and knit all day without any problem, because, yes, I am still knitting (did I tell you I was knitting?) and it's still fun and can occupy me for hours at a time. As soon as we get our camera back from the Halloween party where I left it, I will post some photos.
Aside from the knitting, I'm watching lots of TV. Knitting is great for that. You can watch garbage but if you're knitting, you still feel like you are something constructive and inane TV is quite acceptable. I watched Click last night and despite not really liking the main actor, I thought the message was good. Predictable ending but hey, what can you expect? What did annoy me though was the main actor's wife. Two kids and she looks like she stepped out of a Victoria Secret's catalogue! I hate her and her big hair and little pyjamas. Actually no, I just want her body. Although I could not put up with her movie husband for 5 minutes.
Hi y'all, how are things? I have been very absent on the blogosphere, actually I am very absent in general at the moment. I've been on sick leave from work since the middle of September and pretty much all I do is hang out at home reading and going for the odd walk. Friends have asked if I'm getting bored and it's a difficult question to answer. The best I can come up with is that it comes and goes. Sometimes I'm just fine and then other times I will wander around the flat and feel all mopey and fourteenish and left out of life. In general though I am glad to be at home with nothing that I have to do, except be pregnant. I've also just taken up knitting with an ancient My Fun with Wool book that my godmother gave me when I was 5 and that is occupying me very nicely. I've even started prowling around the wool shelves of a local fabric shop (only 5 minutes drive away and I drive like a granny, wincing at the bumps in the road). If anyone knows any good, easy patterns to try, I'd love to hear about them.
Otherwise things are going fine. I saw Dr. Nice View on Wednesday and the child is fine and my cervix is 2.7cm.
'How's that possible?' says H when I phoned to tell him, 'Last time it was 2.3.'
'Mmm, I don't know,' I said vaguely, 'I was just so happy to hear that things were looking ok that I didn't ask any questions.' Unusual for me, very unusual but as I said, I'm a bit absent at the moment.
I'm also trying to finish projects at home and so I am finally doing the last chapter of Walking in this World. Julia Cameron says how important it is that one is grounded in one's life as an artist. Interesting. I have always turned to more creative outlets as a way of escaping my life. I started this book to help my writing habit but now, after 6 weeks as a stay-at-homer, I think I'm just not one of those people with much professional ambition and wanting to be a writer was just a way of reassuring myself that there was actually something I wanted to do. Guess I must just face up to reality; I am a born loafer. All these years of trying to find a job I love and trying to motivate myself about work and actually all I want to do is NOTHING! But you cannot say I have no ambition, my next goal is to learn to increase and decrease stitches.
Oh dear, going back to work is going to be soooo hard.
I have finally succumbed to the pressure and joined Facebook. (I also need something to keep me occupied and away from premature birth thoughts and it worked marvels for a friend who was on bed rest). I was doing the search of who I know and I showed H a picture of a guy I haven't seen for years.
'Everyone's bald in South Africa,' he says, 'What happened? Let's hope he gets the Latino genes.'
'Let's just have it,' I said.
'We feed him vitamins and fluff his hair up and do stuff to make it stick,' persisted H.
'It could be a girl,' I suggested.
'Well, bald girls look really ugly. Need to give her even more vitamins!' was H's response to that. I think we can safely say that H never went through a gothic phase.
I started to come out of my blue funk and went into crisis mode, which for me involves phoning all of my medical team and getting an appointment AS SOON AS THE DOCTOR CAN SEE ME! from everyone who will answer the phone. So today I saw my diabetic endocrinologist and the other obstetrician I was considering, Dr. Nice View, and I see my therapist on Tuesday (not officially a doctor but she sort of falls into that category of "people who can help me", I am a sucker for certificates, what can I say?)
The diabetic endocrinologist was very reassuring. I have had diabetes for less than ten years, I have no complications and I fall in the lowest risk group for high blood pressure. She's happy with my blood sugar readings and did a urine test and the arm pressure thingy to check my blood pressure. I also have an open invitation to go back anytime to check my blood pressure, "Come at the beginning of every month," she suggested. I have a theory that one of the reasons why I go to see so many doctors/therapists/naturopaths is because I am bored and the adrenaline rush gives me a boost, but I'm playing drama queen at the moment so now I have a standing appointment for my blood pressure check and I feel better already.
Then I went to see Dr. Nice View and looked out his window at the farmlands below and breathed in deeply and felt calmer. He was less reassuring and more factual but he assured me he has had patients who have carried pregnancies to term without a cerclage with my length cervix and he is happy to wait and watch. He even said he would take three measurements before taking a decision. He will see me in two weeks.
So, I take a deep breath and feel a little stupid for having hysterics but at least I'm less angry and I feel reassured about my appointments lined up for the next month and I stood up for myself and managed to get more information. Maybe, just maybe, this might work.
So yesterday I went for my 12 week scan and to meet the alternative obstetrician I might be seeing for the rest of the pregnancy. It was a spectacularly unsuccessful meeting.
The scan went fine. Everything is normal, nuchal fold seems a normal size, heartbeat present, blah blah blah. I have seen it all before. I don't even want the photos they hand out after a scan.
"Here is a lovely photo of your baby, Mrs. H. Look, you can even see the hand and the little fingers," says the ultrasound technician, very proud of the shot.
Meanwhile all I am thinking is, "Six centimetres, it's only six centimetres and there are miles to go before it is viable."
We have photos of a perfectly healthy baby at 19 weeks and that all went to hell.
Anyway, so the scan went well and then I went to meet the doctor who has my huge file on his desk. He's read my file and he thinks a cerclage is likely. I explain that I don't want a cerclage, that last time things went very badly and that this time I would like to observe the pregnancy and see how things go. He explains that cerclages are usually performed at this clinic when there are two antecedents and I have two antecedents; one: the cone biopsy and two: the loss of the last pregnancy. I explain that as I understood things, I lost the last pregnancy as a result of an infection probably brought on by the cerclage which, as every doctor never ceases to tell me, is a foreign body and therefore increases the risk of infection.
"Well," he says, "It's your decision but we will discuss it."
We then proceed to stare at each other for two minutes. Neither of us breaks the stare. Neither of us says anything.
We move on with the consultation. He explains that I am at an increased risk for:
I feel that I was a fool to even contemplate falling pregnancy with such a slim chance of carrying a child to term and have been in a blue funk ever since.
I just wonder what doctors think. Do they imagine that I skip into their consulting room, with diabetes and having lost a pregnancy at 19 weeks, and blithely imagine that everything is going to go hunky dory because now I am pregnant again? Do they think I read nothing about the risks of pregnancy with a short cervix, not to forget the diabetes? Does he think I went home and slept like a log and now imagine everything will go fine between now and next year when my supposed due date is? I just wonder.
H says it's his job to inform me of all the risks. I think there are ways of doing that less upsetting than listing the myriad of things that can go wrong and pretty much overriding me when I tell him I do not want a cerclage. At least it's an easy decision. He is not going to my obstetrician and if we run into each again, I will take a much firmer hand. We are so not amused.
