Miscarriage news round-up: November catch-up

With vacation, I fell a bit behind, so these are stories from the last ten days in November:

• Australian doctor pioneering new testing for women dealing with recurrent miscarriage and unexplained infertility. By identifying high levels of a harmful type of "killer cell," he has been able to develop drug treatments to keep the levels under control, resulting in successful pregnancies.
• Smoking while pregnant increases the risk of miscarriage (and of birth defects), and West Virginia is doing something about it -- the state plans to begin with a seven month blitz of ads; if that doesn't work, they may introduce legislation. Apparently, more than 27% of pregnant West Virginians smoked last year. Has anyone seen the ads? I am not sold on the efficacy of any such legislation? What do you think?
• Cambodian woman suffers stress-induced stillbirth while in police custody. The articles all call it a miscarriage, but she was seven months pregnant, which I would think would render it a stillbirth.
• British woman miscarries while suffering work-related stress. It's hard to figure out what happened from the story, so I'll just post the article. Here, the woman appears to have been full-term (since November is referred to as the month after the baby was due, and the stress seems to have occurred in late October, with the loss coming on Halloween).
• Man who impregnated mistress accused of inducing miscarriage by slipping her RU-486. This story is disturbing on a lot of levels. Additional coverage here and here.

Next

Three years ago, I went to the wedding to two good friends who I have known since junior high and high school. Our other mother (the mother who acted as a second mother to all of us in high school and since) was at my table (Ps father had just died, so he skipped the wedding) and somehow got to talking about who would be next to have kids (one friend had an unplanned then-two year old). Everyone at the table looked at me. Apparently they were all in agreement.

At that time, P and I were engaged but not yet married. Two of our other friends had been married for a few years. And we were at the wedding of other friends. And the friend with a child had already said she wanted a second relatively soon so they wouldn't be too far apart in age.

Fast forward three years. The friends who were first to marry have a two year old and are thinking about trying for a second. The friend with the unplanned first is pregnant with a planned second, due the week I was. Another couple who got married this summer is trying now. And two other couples have gotten married this year and may start trying soon. And I am sitting here, bleeding. Hoping to be the next next.

The Morning After

Yesterday got progressively worse until, by evening, I started to recognize my usual tell-tale signs that my period as on its way. Of course, I then cried myself to sleep. My temp dropped this morning, and I started spotting, so it'll start tonight or tomorrow.

To be fair, I never had a good feeling about this month, so I suppose it's not that shocking. The months I felt/feel positively about were July, when we got pregnant, October, when we were on hold, and February, which feels far away. All of Ps relatives, including P, have April birthdays, making July feel promising, and my family is full of Novembers, hence the February. Plus, my mother walked out on us on Christmas Eve when I was growing up, and that's around when I'm due to ovulate this month, and her birthday is the weekend I'm due to ovulate in January, so neither of those months gives me a good feeling, but I'm hoping it's wrong.

That said, I am feeling much better today, as the hormonal insanity that always hits me right before my period has eased up a bit, leaving me with just actual sadness, no longer enhanced by hormones (and the stomach bug I was dealing with all week and hoping was early morning sickness).

I'm now trying to think on the bright side:

• As a fabulous side effect of the hideous depression that took over my life, I gained quite a lot of weight this fall (I refuse to get on a scale, but I have been reduced to 4 pairs of work pants that fit for a while now). I now have another month to try to take some of it off without having to worry about eating for two.
• I can drink at the Pats game on Sunday and at the parties we have tonight and next Saturday. Next Saturday is our friends' annual holiday party, which is always a lot of fun, and they brew their own beer, so it's a lot better than getting psyched to drink PBR.
• I'm going to have runny eggs for breakfast. With coffee. Sweetened with Equal. And I'm gonna chase it with a Diet Coke.
  
• I won't be having a baby the week of my 3rd anniversary, so we can keep that week special, just for us. And I won't be 9 months pregnant in August (though I'm still hoping to be 8 months pregnant in August!).

I'm trying really hard not to let my mind drift and think about the negatives. P and I had always hoped to have a 2008 baby, and we still have a few months to make that happen.

Waiting to Bleed

I knew the digital HPT was a bad idea but, because I can't seem to help myself, I took it anyway, right before heading to my work holiday party.* Negative. As I knew would be the case but ignored, "Not Pregnant" was far more painful than the absence of a second line.

Even though my temperature is still up thie morning, I am sitting here now, waiting for the inevitable. And it feels like late August/early September again, where every twinge, every tickle, every feeling of moisture in my nether-regions seems a harbinger of what I know is to come. And, again, every trip to the bathroom is accompanied by a compulsory check of the toilet paper, looking for the smear of brown or red, this time not marking death but merely the passage of time, the natural cycling of my body. But I am experiencing it as gut-wrenching nonetheless, each moment feeling like a reverberation of a moment past, bringing me back, making it hard to remember that it is now December, the leaves have fallen, and there is snow on the ground.

I am back to the days of sitting in my office with the door closed, sobbing uncontrollably, only this time I am humiliated, since there is no real reason to be doing this other than the echo of that other time when things went so horribly wrong. That time I spent waiting to bleed.

*I have no idea why I went to the holiday party -- I knew that too was a bad idea, but I went anyway and only narrowly avoided being the girl who cried at the holiday party. The minute I walked through the door at home, I collapsed in Ps arms, bawling like a baby, unable to tell him why, since I was ashamed to admit I had bought and taken that digital test at work like a person with no impulse control whatsoever.

CD28, 12dpo

So, because I have gone off the deep end, I POASed using a cheapie internet test strip yesterday and today, and both were negative. My now pregnant friend, though, used the same test strips a month ago and got BFNs repeatedly until one morning she got a very faint BFP. When at the doctor's office that same day, she had them run a blood test, and her HCG was at 200, which suggests that the test strips are not altogether as sensitive as they claim, or she had a doubling time of, like, an hour.

Because I am in fact losing it, I went to CVS today in the middle of the afternoon to buy a better (read: more expensive) HPT. It is sitting in my desk drawer, taunting me. I like that if you're pregnant, it says "Pregnant," but fear having to face the reality that it might in fact quite explicitly declare me "Not Pregnant." Now I'm trying to figure out how long I have to wait to get to the afternoon equivalent of FMU, which is, obviously, a ridiculous question.

Passage

One of my colleagues takes advantage of the color printer to regularly print out 8.5x11 photos of his son to display on the wall of his office. When I was TTC the first time and when I was pregnant, I would intentionally walk that way to the bathroom, even though it wasn't the most direct route, and frequently I would stop by and learn about his latest adventures in babyhood.

Said son is now almost ten months old, but in my mind he is still seven months old, as that was how old he was when it started being too painful to visit, or even to take that route to the bathroom. I wonder what milestones he has reached in that time. Or what anyone on that hall has been up to for the past few months.

Babies on a plane

There were two small babies on our transatlantic flight the other day, both two rows in front of us. One has a story worth telling, but I'm too tired to do so right now. If the other had a story, I don't know it; he was just adorable. The longer I sat there, the more I wanted to hold him and stroke his soft baby head. He cried for most of the flight, and his mother seemed to be having a lot of trouble calming him (and having her own parents on the flight only seemed to make her want to pass him off to them), which only made the desire to cuddle him and soothe him that much stronger. Mmmm...babies.

Doggie vacation

Whenever we go away, our dog stays with my MIL -- she lives nearby and says she likes having him around. Oddly, every time we come home, our normally hyperactive (or at least periodically hyperactive) dog is exhausted. He often sleeps for days straight, waking mainly to eat and go to the bathroom. Last night, he was so tired, he didn't want to get off his bed to go outside before bed.

I think we finally figured it out. When we're home, he hangs out at home during the day by himself when we're at work, and I suspect he spends much of that time snoozing. At night, he hangs out with us, plays, and eventually goes back to sleep. When he's at my MILs, he spends the day hanging out with her husband, who really likes playing with him (or at least pretends to). At night, like when he's at home, he hangs out and plays. But when he tries to go to sleep, he spends much of the night hiding from the cats, two of whom love to torment him. By the time he gets home, he's way behind on sleep. Poor Buddy!

(This was a few years ago but, well, same basic dog.)

CD24, 8dpo

So, when does it stop being way too early to POAS?

Thoughts on a Rushed Vacation

One of the main problems I have found with taking a vacation where you don't allow a lot of time in any one place is that you feel like you see the outsides of a lot of buildings without seeing much that could be described as actual content. There isn't really time to visit a lot of museums and the like when you only have a couple of days in a city. But man have I seen a lot of exteriors and a lot of churches (and done a lot of walking).