Heroes

"We're nothing... and nothing will help us
But we can beat them, just for one day..."



The hardest thing for me, besides keeping my fear and anxiety in check, has been the absolute lack of recognition of all I went through to get here and how that experience challenges my ability to be happy about it.

Since no one else will do it, I want to send this message to all of you, courtesy of the charming Mr. Bowie. No matter where your road takes you, I, as someone who's seen that road, know that you are heroes.

Viable

I never thought I'd fall for that word. But we've reached 28 weeks. It's all just cruising from here on out.

Womb, don't fail me now.

Apples and fireflies

...and the thrilling glucose threat test. I must admit: It is awful. Especially the first nauseating, so dizzy I might faint in the waiting room hour. I'm still not feeling right, several hours and several bowls of chickpeas and basmati rice later. That glucose drink is pure fruity evil.

Yesterday was lovely, again, thanks to my guy. He did not make any great plans--alas, the dude's been working 11 hours a day--but after our birth class, we stopped at this amazing little apple tree growing unnoticed at the edge of a university parking lot. We blasted Bach from the car stereo and collected windfall apples, as well as a few I managed to get down from the tree itself. Ever see a pregnant lady climb a tree? It's really funny.

Then for some reason we decided to stop by a park on the edge of town which has the most amazing playground, one scaled so that adults as well as kids can go nuts. It backs on this tall stand of trees which were all netted with hundreds of fireflies. So we talked, climbed, and swung before heading home.

The Life Aquatic

My guy has been doing some of the sweetest things for me of late. Since we can't afford a vacation or babymoon or whatever, he's been secretly plotting various local outings and taking me on all sorts of adventures. My old adventures all involved really, really long walks or something of that nature, and they just don't happen anymore.

But he's found some new ones. Despite the peal of thunder that woke us at 5 am, he drove us down to our local reservoir and rented a little fishing boat. He packed a picnic of yummy treats. We hit the water, under overcast, cloudswept skies and had a great few hours tootling around the lake, watching the birds and fish. We got caught in several rainstorms and ate our picnic merrily under some trees as lightning flashed across the sky. I nearly puked and begged for mercy as we attempted to return to the marnia while my husband slammed us with great male glee through white capped swells stirred up by the inexplicable Midwestern wind. This last bit, I don't recommend it.

Yes, I went boating with my man in a thunderstorm. It was great. I feel great.

And it also bothers me...

Achtung! Pity party.

...that I can be doing everything right--exercising, and I mean really exercising, at least 30 minutes a day, eating like I did before I was youknowwhat--and still not pass the GD screen and still be gaining something like two pounds a week! It's like my body's gotten all turned around: "Oh, she's not eating any sweets or fun stuff that many preggos get to enjoy, so I'll have blood sugar funkiness!" and "Oh, now I need even less food than before!"

Can I just say that I feel for my PCOS sisters right now? I finally get it.

So, yeah, I get to go to the 3 hour torture test, with 12 hour fast and four blood draws and even more disgusting shit to choke down. Because I scored 138 when the cut off is 140 and "there are risk factors" (i.e. I'm 34 and gaining ridiculous amounts of weight for reasons known only to my mysterious body). Blech.

Frankly, I'd rather just go on a diet. One even more restrictive than the one I've put myself on, that is. I'm sick of getting bled, poked, tested, and evaluated. I want to go on strike.

ETA: On second thought, all the sample GD diets I saw are DISGUSTING. Designed by some pap-loving well-meaning elderly aunt who serves prune juice on a regular basis and thinks salsa is exotic. Just shoot me.

It still bothers me sometimes...

...when friends and colleagues get pregnant easily. They get the gold ring after a dinky dash to the car, whilst I ran a marathon for it. They squished a pillbug, whilst I battled a dragon.

A friend just told me she's 7 weeks pregnant. She's very sweet and responsible and smart, but somehow, I'm annoyed on some level.

I wonder if I will ever stop caring.

Love needed...

Please go over and give some love and support to Stace and her family.

***from here down, pg crap mentioned. Sorry.

As for me, I'm fine. Had GD test (gross, but tolerable). Had good midwife appointment: Bruiser's growing, bopping, running a great heartbeat. Weight gain (yes, despite everything, I'm still getting heavier) is acceptable, so long as I'm eating well and exercising very regularly (which I am).

Progress is being made swiftly on the dissertation. Husband is working 12-14 hour days. Insane.

That is all.

Respect (pg and birth mentioned in general way)

I learned something I never knew before: Apparently, when the suffragettes were working their asses off to get the vote and to win a more active, visible role for women in society, they also fought for pain control during childbirth. This both surprised me and made absolutely perfect sense. Many of them advocated for what was called "twilight sleep," a deep narcosis first developed in Freiberg, Germany as a way of avoiding the pain of labor and birth. Women activists argued that they should be given the option to be pain-free.

However, twilight sleep and narcotics during birth meant physicians often had to slap newborns awake once they emerged from the birth canal. Literally flip them over, holding on their feet, and give them a hearty wallop.

So twilight sleep went the way of the corset. My grandma used it, I know, for one of her deliveries, due to some confusing and unspecified complications my mom didn't really know much about.

Then came the seventies, when women fought not to have narcotics and painkillers be a requisite part of a physician-dictated delivery regimen. Birth has gone from a curse we should be released from through science, to a "natural process" requiring no science at all.

But most importantly, women now have a choice--at least kind of sort of.* Pain relief or comfort measures, birth with medical support or home birth. And that's all thanks to our foremothers who raised the question of who gets to decide how a woman gives birth.

It fills me with profound respect for their efforts.

On a side note, apparently around 80% of women at our local hospital opt for an epidural. That really surprised me; we live in liberal Hippytown and I expected it to be closer to 50/50.

*Midwifery, except as practiced by CMN, is illegal in my state. Which is really pitiful, because many women in our community opt for midwifes to attend their births and these midwives are occasionally prosecuted by the state for practicing medicine without a license (even if the family involved did not want to press charges). So your choice is labor at home or in the one regional hospital that has an L&D ward.

There will be meltdowns (pg mentioned, but mostly IF oriented)

So, I had my first childbirth class last night. At first, I thought I was going to have to go by myself: My ever hardworking hubby had training for a part-time job all day, and had to do his regular job at night. However, thanks to our slow economy, he could slip away with me to the exciting world of hippy birth class.

Now, when I say hippy, I don't mean the old-school, hard-core, Flower-and-River-build-a-birth-teepee-type class. Not even a home birth-oriented class. They take all comers, and are very, very sweet, thoughtful, and exceedingly well-informed (the main educator has a PhD and a brain like a steel trap). But, yeah, we were all sitting on rocking chairs and eating organic apples and hearing about the magic of the birth ball.

People at random meetings like this are always the most fascinating part. There was a woman there with her mother (single mom by choice? I wondered), a couple very scared looking gals who seem nice enough, a couple hipster/hippy couples working with a completely kick-ass local midwife whom I love and adore and would have gone with if... Well, IF. You get it.

***(if you're in a bad place, skip the babblings below)

My midwife does hospital births only, and that's fine. She's all about vaginal natural births, so I feel like I've found a good compromise for my insane anxious self and my side that sees childbirth as a totally natural biological process, albeit with complicated sides sometimes.

Anyhoo, the class was fun, the educator excellent, the information familiar but with some cool added facts and twists. It was amusing to watch the guys--the hipster with his eyes wide with wonder, the sullen shy guy-guy repressing gentle waves of terror and disgust and discomfort (his wife had introduced him, and he hadn't said a word). One guy even left in the middle of the class, leaving his nervous and very young partner? wife? to deal on her own.

Interestingly, the people who knew most about their own births had the most positive reaction to the mechanics of normal labor. Something for us gals to keep in mind.

***(Okay, it's all about IF now)

However, when we were introducing ourselves, I found myself using the wierdest formulation to describe myself and our state. Nothing too out there--I just said that our kid was "apparently male"--but enough to make my husband bristle. After the class, he brought it up with me, semi-seriously.

And what do you know. I had me a meltdown. I told him that it was all going to be provisional for me until I held a living child in my arms. I couldn't be sure that any of this would end happily, and I still had doubts about what my body was able to do, as it had so often left so much to be desired... the miscarriages, the bizarre inability to get pregnant except with injections and catheders. At first, this frustrated my man, but soon he understood--and I told him he could feel confident, he just needed to acknowledge my anxiety and pain.

In tears, I finally said out loud that I still felt like a fake and a failure, with all those seemingly blithely ignorant gals around me, hoping and planning for a beautiful birth experience. I still felt that my child would somehow be more precious, more shockingly miraculous for having required the long, dark journey, and that in the end, if this little boy lives, I will have no complaints about labor, birth, interventions, whathaveyou.

In the end, my birth plan could be summed up in a few, bitter words: Oh please don't let him die. Let me die first.

I've never felt this way before.

Good Times and Antarctic Exploration

Happy, happy ramblings about a good day, followed by bizarre musings on IF...

Lucky me: I got to have dinner with one of the coolest gals in the IF blogosphere: Io. And we ate Indian food. And she gave me a Pack and Play she found at a garage sale (where she also found not one but two pairs of perfect, awesomely green shoes for a quarter--I told you, she's cool). We had a great time chatting, chaating, and trading stories. I'm so grateful that this online community has allowed me to meet her, and it's about way more than simple support for our IF trials. It's about meeting an awesome free spirit with loads of joie de vivre and talents.

My guy and I spent the rest of the day in the Big City (where Io resides), enjoying Big City things: the zoo in the rain. Not for the faint of IF heart--everyone was toting idiotic kids and saying stupid shit to them about the animals: "Oooh, look at that cuddly [Amur] tiger! He's like a big kitty cat!" Uh, no it's not, moron: It's one of the most effective predators on the planet and is respected as a fearsome spirit by local indigenous people in SE Russia. Kind of like that polar bear you thought was really cute. It would tear your toddler to shreads without a second though. That is, after all, it's job.

No respect for animals and their natures! This is one of the many reasons why people still have such reactionary beliefs about "environmentalism." They just don't get what's really at stake.

But the dolphin show was really cool. Dolphins rule.

Anyway, we also went to the art museum and got really into the late medieval art and some very intriguing video installations. When video/multimedia stuff works, it can really move you.
****
So, I'm reading this very engaging book: Endurance, by FA Worsley. It's a surprisingly engrossing account of Shakleton's total polar fail. You might think this would be as dull as reading about ice melting, but it's not. There's also no mention whatsoever of pregnancy, so it's a very safe distraction for folks in the trenches.

It nonetheless reminded me of how many IF journeys unfold.

The expedition was a disaster: The main ship foundered and sank in some awful pack ice and the crew was stranded on Elephant Island, a towering hunk of rock and ice battered by some of the severest storms on Earth. A handful of men set out in a small boat, in the dead of the Antarctic winter, to find help. They make it, but what really struck me was some of the comments of the guys left behind on the island.

You'd think the physical suffering would be the biggest problem. But it wasn't: It was the waiting, and the despair. The monotony and the endless unknown of when help might come--if it was going to come at all--was their biggest deamon to conquer. Not the cold, the glaciers, the pounding swells, the poor food.

I sometimes felt vaguely like these men: cut off from the rest of the world, trapped, and bored with the seemingly endless wait. It took a greater part of my courage to manage the darkest days, and to keep looking out to sea with the fading hope that something might change. It's the mental challenge that's the hardest.

Off my chest

I used to think I didn't really get the jokes and gripes about in laws. Until recently. My guy's mom has flipped out, and this is the only place I can really come to grips with it, as my guy (understandably) feels very sensitive about it. Any advice/sympathy/similar tales welcome.

It all started when her house got broken into for the, oh, third time this year. Yes, you read that right: three robberies in seven months. For a long time, she'd taken to leaving her door open, as "they'll just break in anyway." After the second robbery, we convinced her to start locking her door. But for number three, the amateurs (who I suspect are meth heads--she's way out in the styx) broke a window in the door. For the third time, she called my guy in tears.

But my guy is a man. A manly man. He doesn't want merely to comfort; he wants to SOLVE. She got really upset with him for refusing to simply be her shoulder to cry on and hung up on him. A couple times. He was urging her to get some gates from her driveway, or a dog, or an alarm system. Anything. But no, she wouldn't hear of it. So my poor guy's left feeling so angry at the thieves, he could strangle them, and so angry at his mom for her seeming willingness to be repeatedly victimized.

Maybe a week or so later, she calls from a local eye clinic with a torn retina. She's being sent to a city an hour away for urgent surgery, maybe, and thus, "I need you to be on standby." I unfortunately, in my sleep-deprived, hormone-fogged haze, didn't think to pass the phone along to my husband. She was whispering rather disjointedly into the phone, and I barely understood what was up. Then, as my guy who was rightfully frustrated at my poor secretarial skills, tries over and over to call her cell, to page her through work, but no reply for several hours. We had friends coming over for dinner, something we had had planned for months. She did find someone to drive her there and back, but she decided that we didn't give a shit, even though her son desperately tried to reach her for hours. She, as a policy, just doesn't answer her cell.

Then, a week or so after that, a pipe bursts and her entire house is filled with several inches of water. Instead of, oh, I don't know, calling a plumber, she calls her son in a hysterical panic about the feet of water, how everything is ruined, and how he has to come over right away with a broom. He replies that he'll bring the shop vac and a pump as soon as he can, but that he just got home from a long day's work and need to grab a quick bite to eat, she hangs up on him. He spends five hours that night, helping her.

The next day, after getting read the (inappropriate) riot act by irrational me for putting up with behavior that made him crazy, he wrote her an email. It was somewhat scathing, noting that he couldn't think of any of his friends' parents who would call their kids instead of a pro, and then hang up on them when they said they were going to eat quickly before heading out. He also noted that while she likes to talk the talk about being an independent woman who can look down on men, she doesn't walk the walk. All true, by the way: she loves drama on some level, and gets mileage from playing the victim. Men are usually the ones doing the victimizing.

Things got worse from there: soon my MIL was accusing my husband, one of the most soulful and empathetic people I've known, of being heartless and cruel. Some typical passive-aggressive moves were made ("well, I just won't call you about anything ever again" and "I've printed out the email and will save it"), without the slightest recognition of my guy's feelings. She hung up on him several more times, before the final hang up that promoted my guy to throw up his hands. They haven't spoken since.

The problem isn't that she has problems or crises in her life; it's the completely self-centered hysteria added to a tendency to denigrate my husband when he doesn't obey, all while relying on his skills and strength to carry her. I know my guy will work something out eventually, and I tell him that she's wrong about him being a bad man. But the whole thing is kind of hanging around out there, with a grandkid on the way. I'm not sure how to deal with this kind of behavior on her part, especially if a kid's involved. It's really hard to stay neutral when someone's acting so crazy with so little provocation...

Halfway to an Elephant (pg mentioned)

I did the math. As of the middle of this month, I will have been pregnant--at least technically, thanks to the molasses-slow recovery from last year's ectopic--for 11 months. With four still to go.

As my guy noted, "No wonder you're so sick of this."

Who else but an IFer would rival one of Nature's noblest beasts, the fantastic pachyderm, in this? And no wonder I'm about the size of a small elephant at the moment.

Book Giveaway

To the first taker via the comments, I have a copy of Randine Lewis' "The Infertility Cure" (a very thorough introduction to traditional Chinese medicine's approach to IF and treatment) and "Fertility, Cycles, & Nutrition" by Marilyn M. Shannon (a pretty good guide to nutritional treatment of various states and problems, put out by the Couple to Couple League). Let me know if you want them, and I'll send you an email or post how you can email me...

Hope all the Americans had a good 4th weekend and that everyone else had a good regular old weekend.

Greener grass

This is a typical train of thought for IFers, but it's still troublesome. You know those blogs you have to stop reading for a while because you're uncomfortably green with envy? Maybe someone got a BFP doing exactly the same thing as you, when you got nuthin'. Maybe it's just the simple fact that they had more follicles at trigger or, in my case, that both of their twins made it past eight weeks.

I've realized that I don't really want twins. That I was terrified when we found out that we had them, afraid of having a truly shitty and medicalized pregnancy after a crappy medicalized conception.

Yet that seemed to have no effect on my sorrow and frustration--see, yet again you're broken, some little voice said--at losing poor little Runty. I felt oddly competitive. An unusual set of feelings.

Now, however, a gal who got knocked up around the same time as me is in the hospital, hoping to keep her little ones in for just a few weeks more and struggling with life on bedrest. And my heart is bursting with compassion and sorrow for her, whom I had envied a few weeks before.

That's the funny thing (for me) about IF: it wrings you dry and leaves you hollow. But that hollowness is a space that can accommodate new empathy, new desire to reach to someone and let them know you care and understand. That's the light plunging into the darkness.