KaybeyBaby's Journal

I learned today that I'm 12 weeks along, not 11.  So I think that's the end of the first trimester, isn't it?  I've heard both 12 and 13.

Today we had a great morning that comprised 2.75 hours waiting in the doctor's office and .25 hours watching miracle TV on the sonogram screen!  We saw the two babies not as lumps, but as little bodies with flailing arms and legs.  At one point they seemed to be kicking back and forth at each other.  Their heart beats were strong and the nuchal translucence test (the Down's Syndrome test that measures whether the black stripe in the back of the neck is abnormally large) was normal.  That was all really good news, but seeing them both move was the breathtaking part.  Just amazing.  I'm posting ultrasound pictures today.

I have been feeling very ambivalent about sharing this next part, because this is the kind of thing that would get to me as an infertile woman, almost as much as (or more than?) talk about heartbeats and ultrasounds.  On Sunday, James and I went to the mall to Motherhood Maternity: the maternity clothes store.  I'd gotten some clothes (more like burlap bags) from the maternity section of Target, but had been too sick to go to a real maternity store.  This weekend I felt up to it.  So we figured out where the store was in the mall, parked as close as possible, and went directly there.  As we got close, I squeezed James's hand harder and harder.  To go to that store, to go in and not feel like a fraud... to go in there and actually buy clothes!  It was a long-time dream come true.  I was so excited that even James got excited.  I got $200 worth of stuff: pants, shirts, a combo set.  The first handful of stuff I tried on.  And then I started fading.  The second handful of stuff I did't bother to try on.  I left James in line to pay and I made a woozy bee-line to a foodcourt table outside, where I drank my vitamin water and ate my granola bar from home, wheezing and reeling like my out-of-shape father-in-law.  I had to lie down the rest of the day.  But I lay down in pregnancy jeans and a cool stretchy top.

I can't believe the good fortune I've been given.  To finally get pregnant, for everything to go smoothly, to have twins, and (most of all) to get in to the heretofore most exclusive kind of mall store... what more could I want?

I could want for everybody to get to do this.  It's your turns next.  It will happen.  I just hate that you don't know it yet.

I'm 10+ weeks now, and the end is in sight. The end of the horrible part, I mean.  I hope.

I had this exact thought (at 9 weeks) just after I wrote my last entry.  It was a Sunday afternoon and as I sat on the couch, I noticed two things.  First, I was sitting up in a totally non-slouchy manner, and second, I was hungry.  Not nauseated, but specifically hungry.  I hadn't had a non-nausea hunger "notice" from my body in a month.

I was well!  The next day I walked to the end of the block (one house's worth) to a kids' lemonade stand.  I went downstairs to the basement to check on the comforter in the dryer, which my mom had put in the day before.  This kind of activity was unthinkable just the day before.  Hallelujia!  Thank God!

And the next thing I thought was "pride goeth before the fall," or "over-confidence goeth before the public humiliation."

Tuesday I went to my OB appointment and realized with fear and horror at 11:00 a.m., as I parked my puffy self in the only available waiting room chair, that I was hungry.  And I had nothing to eat.  I got worried.  Hunger pains (what before had been lying-down nausea pains) are followed quickly by light-headedness, nausea, and in this case, panic.  I tried to form a plan.  The office was in the hospital building, and if I could get downstairs and find the cafeteria, I could feed myself.  But would I pass out along the way?  Would I have to crawl?  Could I get halfway there and waive a $20 bill to passers-by, offering to let them keep the change if they could go get me ANYTHING to eat?

I swiped a piece of hard candy off the receptionist's counter, and sucked on the hot cinnamon as if my life depended on it.  As I got weighed (2 pounds gained) and gave a urine sample, I got shakier and shakier.  By the time I was ushered into the examination room, I was very glad to get to lie down.

But it wasn't enough.  The hunger had turned to severe nausea and I looked around at a potential receptacle.  The trash was overflowing, so I couldn't vomit into the trash can.  I made myself get up off the table and look in the cabinets to try to find a vomit pan or plastic bag or ANYTHING.  Nothing.  As the waves got stronger and more menacing, I opened the exam room door and asked the first person I saw, who happened to be my OB, whether they had something I could throw up in.  She suggested I go to the bathroom.  "But I'm not sure I am going to actually throw up.  I just need a safety net."  I looked down and saw a trash can right by the door.  I said, "I'll just use this," and ducked back into the room.  I put the can by the side of the table, lay down, and did deep breathing to try to keep from actually using it.

And then the most unbearable part happened.  A conversation.  A man, the doctor whose trash can it was, came out into the hall and asked where his trash can was.  My OB responded that "she took it.  She was feeling nauseous."  He asked why I hadn't just gone to the bathroom.  She said she didn't know.  He asked why she gave me his trash can.  She replied that she hadn't; I'd just taken it. 

I felt like the world's biggest idiot.  Stealing needed personal property in order to vomit in it instead of in the toilet like a normal person.  And then hearing them talk about me, hearing that I had caused him not just inconvenience but disbelief, and thinking that they SHOULD have known I could hear them... it was unbearable.  So I started sobbing. 

Finally my OB was ready and came into the room.  When she saw me crying, she asked if it were nausea or pain.  I said nausea, but what it was was really panic and feeling so overwhelmed by the hunger.  She gave me a juice box of apple juice and as I drank it I instantly felt better.  I sat up and dangled my legs off the table, happy as a clam.  Happy as an infant who just got fed.  What a dork.  My mother reassured me that the OB is used to dealing with sick, hormonal women.  It was little consolation.

For the rest of the appointment, she looked for heartbeats with the Doppler microphone, but couldn't find anything (not to worry; it might still be early) so she took me back to the ultra-old ultrasound to try to see them.  In the end, she saw both babies, stacked one on the other, each in a black sac about the size of the first two sections of my thumb.  What she determined was that they were both wiggling too much to hear the heart beats.  But wiggling babies have beating hearts, so we were all good.

Before she sent me home, she told me never to go anywhere without some snacks and a drink in my bag.  Duh.  Yes, I got that lesson earlier in the visit.

So well fed, and limiting my outside activities again, I decided that it was time to chronicle the "high points" of the first trimester.  That was a week ago.  I've kept adding high points to my list.  Or low points.  Here are some:

- The time I threw up in my hand on the way to the bathroom (milk and banana), then squatted there with my dripping hand on one side of the toilet, vomiting into the remaining toilet opening.  As gobs and gobs of stuff came out of my stomach, I became aware of a strange, other sensation.  I realized what it was was that I was peeing in my pants on each heave.  Yep.  And not just a little.  I had a friend coming over any minute, so when I was done, I hurled my shorts and bathroom mat into the shower and hobbled upstairs, dripping, to get some more clothes.  I finally settled on the couch, calm again, and Aimee came over.  She brought food, which was good because, as it turned out, I was feeling pretty empty.

- I thought the peeing in my pants thing was a one-time high-light.  But it has become a habit.  James does not recall my having ever done this in the past, and uh, yeah!  It's because I didn't!  I think that, even so early in the pregnancy process, there is a special relationship between the uterus and the bladder.  And any time anything happens in the abdomen, the two organs hug.  And that's how pee is made.  Most recently I had the ironic honor of vomiting dry heaves but still peeing quite a lot onto the rug.  What am I?  A puppy?  I should have just sat on the toilet and vomited nothing into the air.  But hindsight is 20/20.

- After the dry heaves/wet peeing incident -- which happened at 5:00 a.m. the other morning when my hungry belly rejected the apple sauce I had just eaten, and the milk that I'd drunk to supplement it -- I made it back to bed wet.  I was shaking and involuntarily whimpering.  I went back to sleep and woke up a bit later when I felt moisture on my hand.  My nose was bleeding.  Apparently I burst a blood vessel in my nose when I fake-threw-up.  Nice.

- Several days after the OB visit, when I had a misguided resurgence of confidence, I decided I needed a bra.  I had rarely worn one for the last six weeks in bed, and once I had to go to the doctor I realized that I had grown out of the last one to fit.  So I went to Target to get a bigger bra, among other things.  I didn't wear a bra to the store, because I couldn't squeeze into any comfortably.  I just wore a t-shirt: the kind that has a little logo on the chest on the front, and a big picture on the back.  The trip went well, except that I had to abandon some of my merchandise (plastic bins) in the middle of the aisle when my "helpful" sales associate failed to come back with any lids for them.  I paced back and forth, got hungry and (smartly) ate a granola bar I'd brought.  I squatted on the floor.  I put my head down.  Eventually I saw a display of ottomans across the aisle.  I pulled one down and sat on it for a while.  And just before I completely melted down, I left the bins on the ottoman in the middle of the aisle, bought my bra, and went home.  Late that night I realized that my shirt was on backwards.  To think: all my braless righteous indignation in the store, all that pacing and sighing, was done with my shirt on backwards.  Lovely.

- I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but I had one task that I absolutely had to do in the professional world, no matter how I was doing physically.  This was when I was still really sick.  I had to write a fundraising plan for an NGO that I've helped found, which encourages DC high school kids to go to college.  But I couldn't even think, much less sit at the computer.  So after racking my brain, I remembered my mother, the person from whom I get my writing and making-stuff-up skills.  I lay on three pillows on the hallway floor and she sat at the computer in the little office, and the two of us brainstormed everything we had to write in the fundraising plan.  She put in the topic sentences, made everything organized and logical, and in the end I was able to send it off to the other board members... only about 3 weeks late.  Oh, what would I have done without her?  How nice that I can outsource my brain activity sometimes, and just get to lie on a pallet on the floor instead.

- For the heyday of my sickness, I was too exhausted to wash my hair.  I could sit in the bathtub and slowly rub some soap on my body, but I couldn't imagine the effort it would take to raise my hands over my head and move them around while shampooing.  So for a few weeks James had to wash my hair.  I would sit naked in the empty tub, slumped over like a little rag doll, and he would wet my hair with the shower head that comes off the hook and has a cord attached to it.  He'd lather me up, rinse, condition, rinse, and all I had to do was keep my eyes closed and hold my breath at the appropriate moment.  Then I'd get up and he'd dry me off and I'd go to bed.  What would I do without James?  Yeah, that's the question that runs throughout this whole process.  Maybe it should be, "What would James have done if I hadn't washed my hair in a month?" 

- The last thing I can think of is really unimpressive, highlight wise.  It's what made James, about 6 weeks ago, say that he hoped I was still keeping my journal because he would hate for us to forget these things.  As soon as I got my BFP, I switched from progesterone shots to progesterone suppositories.  I put them in twice a day, and after a few hours, when the hard pill had dissolved, it would release a wet goo that I could feel "leave the building."  I got in the habit of announcing, "Oops, I'm leaking," and running to the bathroom.  Little did James know, but that was just the beginning.

But it's the end of this entry.  The upshot: my trips out are for absolute necessities only, I never travel (even upstairs) without a snack and a plastic vomit bag, and with all these thrills, I'm pretty sure I'm still pregnant.  Pregnant and infantile.  Babies and mother are one. 

I wouldn't have it any other way.

And to my frends who are still in the thick of the infertility fight, don't give up.  If I can throw up, so can you.  Just hang in there, and know that I keep thinking of you.

A few nights ago I was contemplating the idea of misery.  I thought about the scene in Stephen King's book/movie where Kathy Bates slams the guy's ankles with a sledgehammer.  I thought about the song "Misery" in "Into the Woods" (the musical) where the princes try to one-up each other with tales of woe -- like Rapunzel's prince laments that her tower has no doors to get to her the normal way.

My own misery, the other night, was fleeting, and was somewhere between the horror of Stephen King and the hystrionics of Steven Sondheim.  I had a terrible sore throat, the kind that makes you not want to ever swallow again.  The next day when I went to the doctor, I found that I had a half a degree of fever, which radiated in heat and pain from my ears.  My head ached and mucus was building up in my sinuses, but I was determined not to involve my throat at all in getting rid of it.  Pregnancy or not, I'm never more miserable than when I have a sore throat.

So you know what the doctor said, then?  Vomiting.  Of course.  Why didn't I already know it?  The vomiting was eating away the skin on the roof of my mouth and throat.  My babies were eating me alive!

I don't really mind.  Within a couple days the red spot on my soft palate turned white and the pain has let up a little.  The rest of the head cleared up and has been easier to live with.  And I haven't thrown up in three days!  My fever is gone and all I've been left with is my baseline nausea and fatigue.  No, I still can't get up, but I'm approaching the sixth week of that, and I'm getting used to it.

My friend JShayne told me recently that she'd give anything to be in my shoes.  I'd still give anything to be in my shoes; I'll keep giving for the rest of my life.  I feel so lucky that I crossed the line six weeks ago; I crossed the second pink line, you could say.  It's different on this side.  I had thought that nothing could be more physically challenging than IVF, and that if I got pregnant, it would all be downhill from the IVF.  But in fact, this is harder than the IVF.  I'm still on estrogen and progesterone, so you could say that I've just added nausea and hunger on top of the original state. 

But there is nothing, nothing, NOTHING that can rival the fear we have all had that we would never have a baby.  That gnarled tangle of hope and fear that we have all been stuck in for years and years is the worst place on earth.  I know that I'm not out of the woods with this pregnancy yet; I'm still very far from having a child.  But at least now I know James and my eggs and sperm can conceive an embryo.  Unless and until I take on the next challenge of bad fetal health or miscarriage, just conceiving has allayed my fears a whole lot.  It convinces me that future baby(ies) will not be "inconceivable" again.  So even though nausea has knocked me on my ass, the despair has gone.

It makes morning sickness, even if debilitating, a glorious walk in the park.

And I wish it for all of you. 

______________________

And now for some fun facts.

On Monday I'll be 9 weeks along.

Next Tuesday I go off the estrogen and progesterone.

Next Wednesday I'll have my second OB visit.

In a little over 2 weeks I'll go for the first bit of genetic testing - the nuchal transparency (translucency?) test when they ultrasound you to measure the babies' necks for Down Syndrome, etc.

In a little over 3 weeks we can finally tell James's parents.  He wants to take a trip up to upstate NY and tell them in person.  I HOPE I'll be on my feet by then!