When Eggs Go Bad...

Weekend of Doom

See, I knew God (or fate or the universe or whatever) wasn't finished fucking with me just yet. Saturday morning, Mr B and I decided that it really was about time we (ahem) got busy. Little did we know just how busy we would get, because following the, frankly, great sex we were greeted by the appearance of copious dark brown stuff all over the place (well, it seemed like it anyway).

Cue the miracle Doppler, which confirmed that the UFO's heart was beating away at just the right speed. But of course, with recurrent miscarriers, there is never a point at which you say, "Oh, good, everything seems fine." No...instead you dredge up the considerable (and yet incomplete) knowledge you have accrued on the subject of foetal death at every stage of pregnancy, and you convince yourself that something is wrong, regardless of whether there's a heartbeat present.

A breathless call to my GP's out of hours service culminated in possibly the worst instance of medical insensitivity ever:

Doc: Well, don't panic but there's really nothing we can do on a Saturday. You'll have to wait until Monday and attend the Bleeding in Pregnancy clinic.

Lola: Seriously? That's it? I may be losing my baby but I have to wait until office hours to find out?

Doc: Well, they don't do scans at the hospital on the weekends

Lola: (Stunned silence)

Eventually the doctor agreed to ring the hospital, and a wonderful gynaecologist (thank you, Dr Jawarha!) agreed to see me in the afternoon. She did a scan and all seemed well. She took a quick peek at my cervix during said scan, and said that there was no indication that it had dilated.

So, whatever the brown discharge was, it doesn't seem to have been an indication of any immediate danger. Though I'm sure you know just how much faith I put in that.

I really don't need this.

Still Flying, Still Crying

Twelve week scan yesterday showed everything progressing just fine. In fact, the UFO is measuring an entire week ahead. I find that highly amusing, because having inched my way forward week by excruciating week towards the hallowed 12-week 'things might just be OK' point, I ended up speeding right by it to 13 weeks! Of course, I know when I ovulated, so I know I am only 12 weeks in reality, but all the medical notes now say 13. And you can't argue with medical notes.

I'm not quite sure what to do now. I've relaxed a little bit more, to the point where I am now starting to feel survivor's guilt. I am keenly aware of all the women who are still trying to conceive or who have just experienced yet another miscarriage. Or those who have experienced their first, but know too much from the infertile sisterhood about recurrent loss, and wonder if they will be the next to be placed in that category. I worry about the women who are about to discover a missed miscarriage, who will have to go through the agony of knowing they carried their dead child within them for a week, perhaps two or three. I grieve already for that 1% of women who have had one miscarriage and have convinced themselves that next time it will be OK, but who will go on to experience recurrent loss. I feel the desperation of those who have just had a second loss yet know they will not receive help until they have had a third. And most of all I feel guilty that I seem somehow to have come out the other side on this one.

Of course, nothing is ever certain in this reproduction thing. I could still find myself the mother of another dead child. The hospital will scan my cervix at 16 weeks to ensure that repeated D&Cs have not left me with a potential second trimester time bomb. I also insisted that they swab me for bacterial vaginosis, another cause of late miscarriage. I found an article online that said that late miscarriages "are almost always the result of a rare catastrophic incident or an ever rarer genetic mishap". That means the likelihood is very low. Of course, so was the likelihood of three recurrent losses. So was the likelihood of a miscarriage after having seen foetal heart activity at 6 weeks. But they happened. I'm not counting chickens too soon.

Yet, I still find myself burdened by this sense that somehow I am betraying those women who are still suffering. No, burdened is not the right word, because it is not a burden. It is a memorial. A not-so-gentle reminder that babies die in their mothers' wombs; that sometimes our bodies betray us by consistently failing to conceive; that human reproduction is ruled by nature, and nature can be cruel in its emotionless, efficient disposal of less-than-perfect embryos.

To my sisters who are still struggling: I cannot forget, nor do I wish to.

Riddle

Q: What has two arms, two legs, fingers, toes, a stomach, a brain, a bladder, a spine and was sucking its thumb at about 4.15 pm BST yesterday?

A: Ohmyfuckinggod I think I'm gonna have a baby.

Crown rump length: 53 mm (that actually measures at 11w5d, even though I should only have been 11w1d yesterday)

Heart rate: 170 bpm

Down Syndrome risk: 1 in 17,000 (and 1 in 400 is considered an acceptable risk!)

Edward's Syndrome risk: 1 in 50,000

The UFO was moving around quite happily, though possibly he/she was a little cheesed off at the probing with the ultrasound thingie.

Mr B and I are over the moon, as is soon-to-be-sister Badeggs Daughter. We're actually starting to talk about names and which room in the new house should be the nursery. I can't quite get my head around being in the normal part of the statistical curve, you know?

Maybe I'm inviting doom by tempting fate, but I think I may actually have a baby come 3rd Janaury 2007.

Thank you ALL for your constant good wishes and (for those who believe) prayers. I am sincerely hoping that this blog is going to become incredibly boring now! But don't stop visiting. I'd miss you.

PS. I will endeavour to scan and post one of the scan picutres, but let me know in the comments if you would rather I didn't. I know a lot of you are having a hard time getting pregnant or are grieving recent losses (or even not so recent ones). I don't want to upset anyone.

Is Today the Day?

Having reached 11w1d with a heartbeat still present, I'm starting to get really antsy. I mean, God (or fate or the universe or whatever you want to call it) has not left my recent pregnancies alone for this long. Surely he/she/it is starting to get an itchy trigger finger, no?

Today is the day for my nuchal scan. And as utterly amazing as it is to have actually got to this point (and not had to ring up sobbing to cancel after yet another loss), I have to wonder if today is the day when my luck changes. At 37, the chances of a Down syndrome baby are relatively high. Not as high as at 40 or 45, I know, but then the chances of miscarriage are higher at those ages and I still managed to beat, say, forty-something-year-old Madonna coming and going in terms of foetal loss. Is today the day when the other shoe drops and I get catapulted back into the thin end of the statistical curve?

I know that I should be thinking positive. More than that, I should be feeling grateful for every day that I hear that wonderful thumpity-thumpity-thumpity through the Doppler. And I am. Truly. It's just that, well, having had the legs kicked out from under me so many times, having had three times the number of pregnancies go wrong as went right, and having experienced first hand how statistics are only reassuring when you get to be in the 'good bit', I just can't shake the dread.

When the radio alarm goes off in the mornings, one of the first things I hear is a short spot called 'Pause for Thought'. The station gets various spiritual leaders, from all faiths -- Christian, Jewish, Budhist, Muslim, Hindu, Baha'i, you name it -- to give a short meditation on some little aspect of life. It's supposed to be uplifting and thought-provoking, in a very anodyne way. This morning had an Anglican vicar talking about his 10-year-old Down syndrome daughter. Was it a sign?

As close as I got to not being insane (with the Doppler and the reasurance it offered) I can honestly tell you that the mania is still there, and today it's very close to the surface.

Wish me luck.

The Most Beautiful Word in the World

Doppler....

Say it with me: Doppppplllerrrr

Finding myself on the verge of utter panic again, I went online a found a place that hires out home foetal heart monitors. Great place: I ordered at 2.45 pm on Friday, and at 7.00 am on Saturday my doorbell rang, and there stood the postie with the package.

I raced upstairs, flung the batteries in, and set about to heartbeat hunting. Now, I was fully prepared not to find it and not to freak out. After all, they say 10 weeks is pretty early for these home machines to pick up heart sounds. But within 10 minutes, there it was, all 165 glorious beats per minute of the Badeggs Foetal Heart.

I tell you, I am a changed woman. I have actually relaxed, yes really, for the first time in WEEKS!

Anyway, it's beautiful sunshine here, so I am heading out to the garden to do a spot of sunbathing and thriller reading. Safe in the knowledge that the UFO seems to be doing just fine.

PS I have been tagged apparently, but I'll get to that next time!

10w1d

If this morning's vomiting was anything to go by, the UFO is still there. It's a bit of a struggle not having the scan this week. I'd be far happier if I could have arranged it (and by a stupid twist of fate, I discovered that I probably could have come home from my business trip on a morning flight and made it in for a scan after all, but them's the breaks).

Today was the first time I've had actual spewage. Once or twice I've lost a tiny bit of my morning ginger tea while trying to brush my teeth, but today was a full on, out of the blue, 'oh dear God I have to get to a bathroom quick' episode. The kind where I couldn't actually catch my breath in between, well, you know, heaving. And this was while I was at work, too.

Hmm...this is a nice post...

I've discovered in the past couple of weeks that two ladies who I know from the ether (they are also recurrent miscarriers) are both pregnant. One is 9 weeks, the other is 6 weeks. I am of course happy for them, but I also get irrationally scared when I hear news like that. I see myself at the very, very narrow end of the statistical probabilty scale, where only a very lucky few recurrent miscarriers will go on to have a healthy baby. And when I hear of other pregnancies in RMs, I immediately think, "Dammit, now my chances are worse!" I know that's utter tripe, but such are the vagaries of the psyche of an RM. I think we'd all agree that we're insane now, when it comes to pregnancy. I even suggested to my OB that she just put me in an induced coma for the next 7 months as it was the only way of calming me down. I was only half joking.

Anyway, Mr Badeggs is out of town, enjoying the hospitality of the United States' fair capital city. So I am on my own (unless you count the cranky cat) and feeling very lonely. Sometimes it worries me how much I depend on Mr B, how much I need his presence. God knows how I would cope if I ever lost him. I can't bear to think about it.

Still, I'm filling the time with mindless TV, thriller novels, and eating takeaways (Mr B is very disciplined when it comes to takeaways; I would happily eat them every night of the week and be as big as Cleveland. So while the cat's away...). And  of course there's the small matter of counting down the days until my next scan (Thursday 15th June at 4.10 PM BST in case you're wondering). I'm hoping hard that the UFO will be floating around happily. Maybe I'll even get a wave.