CD25, 10dpo

My current mantra: I will resist the urge to POAS until Saturday Friday.

Is Friday acceptable?

CD22, 7dpo

This is that crappy time of month where I sit around and wait until it starts becoming rational to POAS. I'm trying to hold out until Saturday, which would be 13dpo, but I know I lack self-restraint (and am not sure I didn't ovulate a day earlier, on CD14), so we'll see. (This is also that time of month where I imagine that everything happening in and around my body is a sign that I am pregnant rather than a sign that I am obsessing and losing it, but I'm going to ignore this issue for now.)

It's sad to me that tomorrow is New Year's Eve and I have no real plans other than not drinking on the off chance I might be pregnant or might have a chance of becoming pregnant in the coming days. It seemed as though no one we knew had plans, so I think my brother and SIL and a few other friends may be coming to our place and then heading to the city to see fireworks at midnight. I wish we had a child (or that I was still pregnant) so we would have an excuse for having such a lame NYE. Maybe next year.

CD20, 5?dpo

My chart this month looks weird to me. Looking back at my last 2 charts, I haven't had temps anywhere close to the coverline post-ovulation (until the day before AF arrived), but this month my temps have been back there a couple of times already. And my post-ovulation temps are normally quite a bit higher than my post-o temps have been this month. Have any of the rest of you experienced this? Does it mean anything, or is it just one of those things? Our bedroom temp has been the same (we have a digital thermostat), and I've been wearing more clothes the past few days than before, so, if anything, I would have expected the opposite pattern from what I'm seeing. Monday and Tuesday were mornings in other people's houses over the holidays, but I didn't notice the bedrooms being especially warm or cool. I would have thought based on CM that I o'd on Saturday (CD14), which is what Fertility Friend says if I tell it to discard Tuesday's low temp, but that feels like cheating.

I am also wondering if it is perhaps time to replace my thermometer. This is where I fess up to having used a regular digital thermometer rather than a BBT since I started charting. Since my charts had looked pretty much as expected, I didn't give a lot of thought to it. Now that they seem odd to me, I'm wondering if I should go get a BBT. Also, today, my temp was more than half a degree higher after I got out of bed and walked ten feet to the bathroom (I don't normally check twice; I was trying to test the thermometer), which seems like a big shift without much movement. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Finally, in case I decide to make the purchase, can anyone recommend a good BBT (and tell me where to buy it, if you know -- our local pharmacy doesn't carry them)? The features I'm looking for are: (1) backlit, at least when turned on, as it is dark still when I temp; (2) doesn't beep constantly -- ideally, beeps once to let me know it's on and beeps a second time when done (my current one beeps every few seconds to let me know it's working, which drives me (and P) nuts); (3) saves the most recent temp, in case I fall back asleep before checking the reading and need to use the recall function to learn what it was. My current regular thermometer does 1 and 3, but not 2. It is sensitive to a tenth of a degree, and it seems that people's BBTs are sensitive to the hundredth, though I'm not sure I really care about that. Much thanks in advance for any advice.

CD8

For a while now, I have been feeling like P and I aren't in the same place in terms of dealing with the miscarriage and, more generally, starting a family. When I have attempted to express the sadness I feel, or even merely give a glimpse into it, he has seemed frustrated -- when one time he responded with "Stop it," I stopped talking to him about it at all. When I instead have expressed excitement or anticipation with respect to trying or, more often, actually having kids, he has ignored me completely, not even acknowledging that I have spoken at all. We normally communicate with one another well, but the last couple of months have been difficult. And it has left me feeling like I am alone in this, not just bearing our sorrow alone but like somehow I am the one who wants kids and he is just along for the ride, humoring me to avoid confrontation. I know intellectually this isn't the case -- he was so excited when we first started trying and when I was pregnant, and I know how excited he is to have kids -- but it's hard not to feel that way given the way he's been acting.

Yesterday, while Christmas shopping, I allowed myself to slow down in the children's section at Macy's, looking at tiny outfits that for the first time in a while didn't make me want to erupt in tears. I picked up an especially cute one and asked whether we could dress our kid in it one day. As usual, he ignored me. For once, I called him on it. Evidently, being excited seems too much like July to him, and leaves him feeling way too vulnerable. The thought of putting himself out there and getting hurt again is excruciating. So he has remained guarded, figuring if he doesn't care it won't hurt as much if we don't get pregnant, or if we do and miscarry again.

Somehow it didn't occur to me that we were actually in the exact same place -- because I definitely feel the same way, and it has made it hard for me to get excited again too. I think not talking about it has made it worse for both of us. And I think it's made it really hard for me to get beyond the sadness, because it's the only thing I've been allowing myself to feel. Not being vulnerable to avoid getting hurt has just left me living with and dwelling in the hurt I already feel, and that really sucks. I suspect it sucks for him too. So we decided to commit to moving past the pain, to embracing the excitement and concomitant vulnerability. And I actually feel a bit better.

Admittedly, we started this process last month in Vienna when we bought our pig clock to put in the room-that-shall-not-be-named-that-is now-a-storage-room, but I think we both felt burned again when that cycle was a bust and went back to the way we had been, which, at least for me, was a major setback. I'm hoping we'll be able to keep it going for a bit longer this time. At least now it seems like we can talk about it.

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.

CD24, 8dpo

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

CD21

I felt nauseous all day today and decided it was a sign I was pregnant, even though I'm only 5dpo. It's far more likely to be a sign that I should stop drinking hotel tap water, or that breathing smog for 7 hours on the drive from Prague to Budapest was not an awesome idea.

CD19

I had a series of recurring/repeating dreams last night that I was pregnant. Not visibly pregnant -- I just kept seeing a positive digital pregnancy test (oddly, in addition to saying Pregnant/Not Pregnant, it said how far along you were -- in my case, 4w4d for some reason).

This morning, I recorded my temp, and Fertility Friend decided I ovulated on Saturday, making today 3dpo. Hope is a crazy thing.

(This is my first attempt at mobile blogging via Blackberry -- our hotel's "Internet access in every room" is a phone line, and Czech dial-up is a bit beyond me. Apologies for any issues -- I'll fix when I get online again.)

CD17

It's our first month trying again, and, according to Fertility Friend, I didn't ovulate. Stupid, fucking, uncooperative body.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We did decide to have a quickie in this morning to get one last shot in before we leave for Europe tonight. Poor P -- that was a lot of pressure, as my dad was scheduled to arrive in 20 minutes :)

I'm going to attempt to post from overseas, but they may be short (and supplemented when we get home).

Hope everyone has a great week!

CD13: The One Where K Asks A Bunch Of Stupid Questions

Okay, so I realized last night that I have some truly inane questions, and I'm just going to ask them in case anyone has any insight. Feel free time chime in with random thoughts on such matters, whether you have actual answers or not.

1. Preseed: P and I decided to give it a try this month. The packaging says to "apply 10-15 minutes before intercourse" in order "not to interfere with sponteneity" (okay, I don't have the packaging in front of me, but it's something like that). Applying 10-15 minutes in advance seemed to do more to interfere with sponteneity than grabbing midstream. Any advice on usage? I'm still not entirely sold on it anyway -- I don't think I suffer so much from a lack of CM as a lack of arousal fluid, generally, and it is really a substitute for the former rather than the latter, according to the package insert. Do you use it?
2. Preseed and odor: Following an evening of preseed usage, I feel like my lady parts smell like my dorm room my freshman year of college, back when I had a sex addict for a roommate. Is this normal?
3. Tipped uterus and optimal post-coital position: Everything I have read says that folks with normal uteri should lie on their backs with hips propped for 10-30 minutes, while those with tipped utes (like me) should lie on their stomachs, some suggesting doing so with hips propped. I seem to have some trouble visualizing what all is going on in there and therefore don't understand the mechanics of why this is the case. Anyone able to explain this?
4. Sperm lifespan: If sperm live for up to 5 days, and you have sex five days in a row, is all the sperm just hanging out in there? Does the quality degrade over time (i.e. is there a chance that a crappy 5 day old swimmer will be the victor in the race to fertilize, creating a less awesome zygote than the 1 day old swimmers he somehow beat out who are also kicking around in there)?
5. Sex timing (or: are we doing it too often or not enough): Based on my BBT and the fact that it didn't dip today (which it did last month on the day I o'd, in a rather pronounced way), I probably am not o'ing today, which means I likely will do so tomorrow. If we do the deed tonight, should we bother doing so again tomorrow morning? We won't be able to tomorrow night, as we'll be on a plane, so this may be our last shot. (I suggested renewing our membership in the Mile High Club, but P declared that no child of his would be conceived in an airplane bathroom. ;) )
6. Temping: Will I get thrown off the plane and/or arrested if I try to use a digital thermometer that beeps constantly to take my BBT on an airplane? I just keep thinking about this girl.

Yeah, so sex ed seems like a really long time ago. As we started TTC, I figured so long as I knew my cycle length, a guestimate at ovulation date, and how long sperm and egg each lived, I knew enough. I now know a lot more, but clearly nowhere near as much as I feel like I should. I should probably go buy a book. Or spend more time with Dr. Google.

On an unrelated note: In case anyone wants to know a little more about my feelings about my career, read this blog post: Why You Shouldn't Go To Law School -- kinda wish I read this 6 years ago, as much of it rang true for me. The added thing he fails to mention: cognitive dissonance -- I am not the only lawyer who has convinced him-/herself that s/he enjoys the practice of law in order to explain the numbers of hours s/he spends doing it.

Vacation plans

So, P and I are leaving Thanksgiving night on vacation. We had originally (back when I should have been 20 weeks pregnant on Thanksgiving) planned this as a last pre-kid vacation. Instead, it'll be my first 2WW post-miscarriage. Hopefully it'll make the time go faster.

The itinerary: We leave Thanksgiving night for Vienna, arriving Friday early afternoon. We are in Vienna for a couple of days, then head to the Czech Republic. We will be a couple of days in Cesky Krumlov and a couple of days in Prague. We then head to Budapest. A couple of days later, we head back to Vienna and fly home. The whole trip will be 9/10 days (depending on whether you start counting when we leave home or when we get there).

We are renting a car and driving across a number of borders. I've only done one border crossing on land in Europe, and it sucked -- I am hoping this will be different (the last time I was crossing between Turkey and Greece by bus, and there were a couple of people aboard who were not permitted to cross the border, so every other person aboard had to wait at the border with their luggage while the bus drove them back into Turkey -- I am hoping it won't be like that!). The whole trip already feels rushed, and we haven't left yet. We wanted to try to see a lot of different places, but I think we're going to kick ourselves for having too little time in any one. We can always go back to anywhere we feel shortchanged, I suppose.

Anyone out there traveled to any of these places? Any recommendations?

Also, what am I supposed to do re temping while on an overnight flight? Fertility Friend says that your first day after changing time zones may have a wacky temp but that this won't make a difference unless it's right when you ovulate. I am supposed to ovulate tomorrow or Thursday. So not only will I have the time change affecting my temps, I'm going to be sleeping fitfully and uncomfortably, if at all, on a plane and waking at some unknown hour, which I can only imagine will have a major effect on my temp. Ugh.

CD11

As I vaguely hinted at before, I am not feeling too optimistic about this month. Call it magical thinking, superstition, or just a touch of the crazies, but I think on some subconscious level this derives from the fact that we're going to see the Pats take on the Steelers on December 9.

I am a huge Pats fan, as is P. We get to as many games as we can each season, which gets increasingly difficult with each successive year of success. This year, we went to the pre-season game against the Giants in August. That was the the day after the first ultrasound, the one showing something was wrong with the baby's heart and it was probably going to die. We also went to the home opener against the Chargers in September. That was the same week as the second ultrasound, the one showing the baby had died, and only two days after the D&E.

The 9th will be CD32. I will probably test at some point during the preceding week, depending on when I ovulate. I am thinking it will be a BFN, in part because a 2007 Pats game wouldn't be a 2007 Pats game if we didn't get bad reproductive news the week of the game.

CD10

When we last saw our OB, for the 2 week follow-up after the D&E, she reiterated her directive to wait until I got my period back and then had another full cycle before trying again. She also reminded us of the statistics on how long it typically takes couples who are trying and have the right timing and have no known problems to conceive. Finally, she told us that when we got another BFP, whenever we should be so fortunate, we should come in right away, that she would want to do bloodwork, check betas and whatall.

I'm not sure if I want to, though. I hate having blood drawn and am having trouble seeing an upside at this particular moment in time. Last time around, I doubt bloodwork would have shown any signs of a problem. An early ultrasound may have shown something going awry earlier, but we still would have had to wait it out, praying and trying to remain hopeful while we waited for the heart to stop beating. And it's not like seeing nothing obviously wrong in the early stages is really going to give me any great confidence in having a good outcome. So, is earlier knowledge that something is wrong something good? Because it's the only upside I see right now.

CD8

The first time around, I was super excited to try. It felt like an adventure. Even though I was working crazy hours and had no free time, all my extra mental energy was fixated on TTC. I cut out alcohol, soft cheeses, deli meat, etc. the minute Flo left town, happy to give it all up indefinitely, unable to indulge again until we had a baby. I was as devoted to the task at hand as I could be.

This time, I'm just not there. I'm no longer wallowing, and I have finally stopped with my incessant sob-fest, but I can't seem to make the transition from no-longer-depressed to whatever it is I was before. And I'm not sure what to make of that.

CD6

My friend A and I had a chat a while back. It was a couple of weeks after my D&E, which was the same day as her HSG showed that her tubes were blocked, explaining her lack of success in the preceding year of TTC. She commented that night that the use of acronyms on infertility blogs and message boards bothered her. She had learned three acronyms during the preceding year -- TTC, 2WW, and HPT -- but had no intention of learning more. She didn't say it directly, but I got the impression that she didn't like that she would have to learn a new language in order to participate in a club she didn't want to join in the first place.

When P and I first started to try, I too checked out various message boards, and I too was put off by the acronyms. It all seemed foreign to me, and I hoped I wouldn't be around long enough to have learn the lingo. And I wasn't, then. But then things went awry, and I had time to kill, and all of a sudden charting BBT and keeping close track of my ovulation date seem purposeful and wholly necessary.

I know that I am likely to ovulate next Wednesday or Thursday. In fact, I knew that weeks ago when we booked our vacation to eastern Europe, leaving Thanksgiving night. We have plans to have a quickie Thanksgiving morning, before anyone shows up at our house, just to get in that one last shot. I am nervous about taking my BBT on Friday morning, since I will be sleeping (and therefore waking up) on the plane, at some hour that is not at all close to when I normally take my BBT. How will I know for sure I O'd? When did being certain of that start to matter? Crazy.

PS C is pregnant -- about 5 weeks. She and her husband are in the midst of a sh*tty 2WW -- waiting to find out if the baby has implanted on a uterine wall and therefore has a chance or on the septum and therefore doesn't. Keep her in your thoughts.