Full Life

I just realized today that my life is starting to feel full again. After I began having miscarriages, I withdrew from many aspects of life. I dropped a Jazzercise class I had been taking because I hurt my back, but also because I was so sad, and I couldn't hide it, but everyone there was trying to make me happy, and they wouldn't leave me alone. I stopped volunteering at my favorite community farm because it became a meeting place for mom's with toddlers and preschoolers. I stopped going to church because there were too many nosy people and I didn't know what to say when they asked about my life.

But I also began doing some other things, slowly, over course of the past year. I've made several new friends. I teach Sunday School to stay involved at church (instead of attending services) and lead the children's choir. I volunteer as a music docent, and this year I'll be teaching two classes! I taught my first lessons this week, and they went fabulously! I liked the classroom teacher's I'm assigned to, and they made it clear that they like me, too. :-)

There are some things that I've done all along that I still make an effort to do, like going to my local library and the Farmer's Market, that at least get me out of the house. I also still try to walk or ride my bike for errands whenever I can. And so, after the initial disappointment that it will be 5 or 6 months before we can start TTCAL again, I realized that I can handle the wait. Because my life is once again full of fun, exciting activities. And because there is a time-line to the wait, and every few weeks we will be doing something else testing- or treatment-wise that will put us that much closer to getting cleared to start TTCAL again. I've put up a immunology pre-conception check-list in the side-bar, to help myself see that we are getting stuff done, even in this waiting time.

March 2012

I calculated it out, and, what with delays because The Mister can't get time off to travel until mid-late November, and then all the wait times between treatments and retesting, etc, the absolute earliest we will be able to TTCAL again is March 2010. Which means our chances of a baby in 2012 are slim. Because, although Dr. I was optimistic that this would work for us, Dr. R has been just as optimistic every time I've seen him. I'm getting tired of doctors and their optimism. Just because I'm young and I ovulate on my own, it doesn't mean the treatments will work. Nothing has worked so far. Why should I believe this next round of treatment will do more than tell us that we need to look further for our solution?

I'm not very optimistic tonight. Maybe that's because I was hoping we'd be TTCAL again in January, and even waiting that long seemed hard. March is 4-5 months away. That's an effing long wait. Maybe it's also because I overstimulated myself today. And maybe it's also because it's past midnight, The Mister isn't home yet from second shift, and I'm lonely. I should at least get ready for bed . . .

More Waiting

I finally got the call I was waiting for--all my test results are in! Yay!

So now *they* have my results . . .  but I don't.

And the next available consult is on . . . wait for it . . .  October 13th.

Yeah. I have to wait another 4 weeks to actually talk to someone. Which *sucks*. I'm glad the waiting period is defined, and not open-ended, but I wish it wasn't so long. I was hoping to start TTCAL again in October. Now it will probably be November at the earliest before we can start. :-(

So, in the meanwhile, while I wait, I'm planning some posts on food. I'm trying to figure out how to get variety in my diet while staying low GI and gluten and dairy free. It's hard, but I'm slowing finding the resources I need. Look for recipes and cookbook recommendations in the upcoming weeks!

P.S. Thanks so much for the affirmations on my last post. I really appreciated all of you who recognized how big a deal it is for me to accept that this is my journey so I can shift my energy into fighting to bring a baby into my life, forever.

That was Quick

The biopsy is done. Thanks to Kate, and Mel's book, I knew to insist on pain relief. Taking a vico.den or val.ium was out of the question because I didn't know Dr. R. would do the test at my consult today. I even confirmed with the RI center that it wasn't yet too late in my cycle to have it done. So I took 4 adv.il, waited about an hour, and then Dr. R. did the biopsy. It was not painless. I was *very* glad I had taken the ad.vil, because it still hurt. But it was tolerable. And I'm glad to have it over with.

Now I just have two blood draws to schedule for next week--one for immune stuff and one for general stuff. And then it's just waiting for results. This is moving faster than I expected . . .

Thanks again for the support on my last post!

Coping (or Not)

Thing have gotten hard again. Not as hard as they were *before* my amazing breakthrough, but hard, nonetheless. It's hard even to write about what's hard. I'm not a puddle on the floor, but I'm also not happy. The Mister is having issues, which are affecting me. Mostly, his issues are unrelated to baby-making, and TBH, it pisses me off that he can get so worked up about something else, and yet show virtually no emotion about all the $#!t we've been dealing with for the past year. Plus, these current issues are probably going to take on a higher priority in his mind than getting his test (a Sperm DNA Fragmentation Test) run.

In my mind, this test for him has taken on gargantuan proportions. Not because I think it's going to be the magic issue, the reason for all our problems but because, if I am going to take the immune treatments (which I can get my head around, although I am still not happy about having to use them) then I d@mn well want to be sure that The Mister's contribution is high quality. The problem, for me, is that the suggested treatments take 90 days to take effect. Which means that just when I'm getting to the point where I'm emotionally ready to TTCAL again, we may have to go on another enforced break. So the longer The Mister puts off getting the initial test run, the farther the end-date of that enforced break gets pushed back.

I promised him I'd be patient with him, because he was so patient with me while I was trying to get my head around doing the immune testing. But he has outside interests. He can forget about all this crap, at least for short periods of time. I'm consumed by preparing to TTCAL again. Every time I prepare a low GI meal, I remind myself that I'm doing this so my body will support my next pregnancy. Every day, every minute, that future baby is on my mind. It is very hard to act patient when I feel so impatient.

I cannot face another useless loss. Our next pregnancy *must* be planned. I still hold a lot of anger about the way our third pregnancy happened. Part of me still wants to believe that it was because of starting the meds at 11dpo, instead of 1dpo, but I am not willing to try again without more tests. I don't want to spend my hope without a higher chance of success. (It feels a bit like hope is a currency, and with every loss, my hope-account will deplete a little bit more. I don't want to risk the level of hopefulness I have managed to rebuild since Poppy's loss on something with a low chance of success. I want to stack the odds in my favor before I play pregnancy roulette again.)

On top of everything else, my cycles have gone haywire, and I am beginning to worry about whether we will continue to be able to get pregnant easily. This whole journey sucks so hard.

Oh, and Astin's Angelversary is coming up next week. That doesn't help, either.

Wordless Wendesday

Waiting for a Sign

That's what I'm doing. Along with coming up with questions for Dr. R, Ms. Bird, and people here in the ALI community about RI. I am doing some research, but mostly, I'm just waiting for some sort of sign as to whether I should move forward with the immune tests before we TTC again.

I'm amazingly calm and patient with myself during this waiting process. I am usually a very impatient person and hate waiting. But right now, I'm okay with not knowing what I'm going to do next, as long as I can wait until I know to take action. That seems to be the key for me. All my life, it has taken me a long time to get used to changes and make the decision to try something new, but once I decide to do it, I go full steam ahead. So I'm waiting for that feeling of knowing what the right choice is for me, right now.

Which, apparently, leaves me with not much to say on my blog. :-) I mean, how many times can I say, "I'm still waiting to know what I want."? That would get old really fast. :-)

Limbo Land and a Rant about Fertiles

One of the things I hate most about trying to resolve my RPL is the amount of time I seem to spend in Limbo Land. There are so many different kinds of limbo. There's the obvious limbo of the two week wait. There's the limbo of waiting for a doctor's appointment to discuss next steps. There's the limbo of waiting for test results. And I've just discovered a new limbo: the one where I'm waiting to be well enough to get my immune blood work drawn. I have this lovely cough that is hanging on long after all my other flu symptoms disappeared. I asked Dr. R., hoping that it wouldn't make any difference, but he thinks I should wait for the cough to go away, too. So more limbo. Ugh.

The worst of it is, I know it won't end really with a positive beta, an initial ultrasound, or any milestone except a healthy baby. Pregnancy will be one long stint in Limbo Land. Learning to live with uncertainty is so incredibly hard. Even though nothing in life is ever really certain, some parts of life seem more within my control than others, and this business of RPL is so far out of my control that it is also way outside my comfort zone. Much as I hate to apply the term "control freak" to myself, I really do like to be in control of my life. Having no control over the most important goal I've ever had is very, very difficult for me.

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On another note, I have had a couple of recent run-ins with the fertile crowd that really rubbed me the wrong way. The first was yesterday, on my way home from a really productive therapy session. I ended up behind a car with a vanity license plate holder that said "Papa's Final Score: Girls 4, Boys 2." Reading that was like a slap in the face. It hurt so much. I considered the possibility that it might refer to his children, but it seemed to me more likely to refer to a count of grandchildren, partly based on the car he was driving and partly based on how old I thought he was from what little I could see of his head.

Once I'd got that idea in my head, I had two more reactions. The first was irritation at the arrogant assumption that this guy knows the score is "final". How does he know that there won't me more babies? How does he know that his kids are done having kids--that none of them are struggling privately with IF, or planning to try for another child? My final reaction was disgust at the smugness of the sentiment. Which made me think about other ways people publicize their success at family building. I realized that even the window decals I have always seen as super cute are smug. I think what really struck me was the fact that this guy was (presumably) bragging about kids he didn't have an active hand in creating. Parents bragging about their ability to create live offspring is bad enough, but the idea of a grandparent taking credit for his grandchildren's existence bothered me so much more.

The other fertile run-in was really minor, it just rubbed me the wrong way. I was walking home from the library, and at the last stoplight a mom with a toddler in a stroller came up to wait beside me. What bugged me about seeing her was really silly. It wasn't that she was a mom, or that she had a stroller I know to be super expensive. It was that on top of everything, her hair was bright pink. I think the pink hair bugged me because just yesterday I was talking to a friend and the subject of dyeing our hair came up. Neither of us do, but I've been fantasizing recently about going bright red, and my friend confessed to a desire to go pink. So seeing this other woman with pink hair was just a little too close to home right now. Especially since I probably won't dye my hear when I'm hoping for a successful pregnancy soon. I wouldn't want to add harsh chemical hair dye to all my other risk factors . . . But it would be fun . . .

Anyway, rant over. I just needed to get that out of my system.

Going to Erehwon

I've had a really rough weekend. It started on Friday at acupuncture. Don't get me wrong, I love Ms. Bird, but I wish she hadn't waited so long to mention how serious blood deficiency is, both in general, and for me specifically. On Friday, I mentioned how I'm trying to add some more animal products to my vegetarian diet--specifically chicken. Ms. Bird probably meant to encourage me when she said how good that was in light of my blood deficiency, but she also mentioned how she had been blood deficient during one of her pregnancies and was in bad shape afterwards. Boy, did that ever start me worrying.

Over the weekend, I started to remember that a healthy pregnancy isn't just about the baby's health, it's about my health, too. If I go into it in poor shape, carrying to term will be that much harder, especially considering that MTHFR increases my risk of developing pre-e--something I definitely don't want to mess around with! So now I'm getting cold feet about TTC this cycle. I think it's still early enough to call it off and wait a few more months. I just wish Ms. Bird had explained all this to me a couple weeks ago! I hate not having complete information!

I'm worried though, that even if I wait 2 or 3 more months to try again, it won't do any good. I'm not convinced that diet and herbs will ever make much difference--or if they could make a difference, I don't see how 2 or 3 months would be enough for a significant change. I want to continue to believe in alternative medicine, but it's hard. I've spend years living what I thought was a very healthy life-style, relying on alternative medicine, and look where it got me. Two miscarriages. It's hard to trust again. Even though TCM is a different system, and I am making some changes, I'm making them so slowly, I don't know how long it will take for them to have an effect, and in the meantime, I want a baby. I want to be a mama. I don't want to go on longing and grieving with empty arms. I want some comfort. I don't know where the balance point is anymore.

Emotionally, things are really stressful right now, and not only because of trying to integrate this new information and decide, again, whether to continue with TTC now or wait. The other thing that went wrong at acupuncture was that I didn't get a new set of "ear balls" (little metal balls on a sticky plastic circle that press on an acupressure point on your ears--I find them very calming). I took last weeks' set off before my appointment, and forgot to ask for a new set. I'm on the verge of e-mailing to ask if I can come in today, just for a new set of ear balls. I was so able to be calm and even tempered the past 2.5 weeks, while I had them in.

So, collapsing plans with no idea what comes next and the loss of an extremely helpful coping tool, resulted in a minor breakdown last night. Feelings of helplessness, frustration, and panic abound. How was your weekend?

Complications

The past week has brought innumerable complications. Life has become so convoluted. Well, planning to TTC again has anyway . . . Here is the blow-by-blow:

Acupuncture

The acupuncturist wanted to do a hormone panel with 7dpo progesterone and cd3 labs before prescribing herbs. Now, after a month of treatment, she's ready to prescribe the herbs, and I find out that she wants me to be taking them for 2-3 months before we start TTC again (3 months in an ideal world). Here I was thinking we were gearing up for TTC in January, because then I'd have had 2 months of meds and acupuncture. I didn't realize the herbs were so important.

At first, I was disappointed. I wanted to be pg again by Valentines Day. I never memorized the due dates from my first two pregnancies, but with the second, I had it in my mind that we would have a baby by Valentines Day. Because of that, I don't think I can handle the stress of being actively TTC in February this year. So that would mean pushing things back to March.

My first reaction to that was "NO! I don't want to wait that long!!!!" But the next day, I noticed that I was feeling better. Less stressed. The acupuncturist had done an emotional treatment, but I don't think that was the main issue. I guess I'm really not ready to face the stress of TTC, getting pregnant, and worrying about another miscarriage just yet. I'm actually relieved that I'll have a few more months to prepare . . .

Therapist Search

I've talked to all four therapists now (For the moment, we'll call them A, B, C, & D). I met with therapist D yesterday. I meet with Therapist A on Monday. The other two (B & C) aren't taking on new clients at the moment. Therapist D has her office in the same place where my midwife meets with clients. Not good. Personality-wise, experience-wise, it would have been a good fit, but in that location? No thanks. I don't want to have to pass rooms full of bellies and babies on my way to and from RPL therapy. Therapist D was sensitive to this issue and offered to collaborate with therapist A (assuming I like her) if I need some of therapist D's special skills. This sounds like a good, if complicated arrangement. Therapist A was sympathetic on the phone, and I like her so far. Also, she is in-network--a major bonus. So now I just have to meet her and hope she is okay with collaborating with therapist D, should I need it. Like I said, it sounds like a win-win, but still, it's complicated!

Medical Stuff

Now for the most confusing bit. I asked Dr. R. about betas, and told him I wanted to go ahead and start Love.nox and progesterone each cycle. Here is what he said:

would use 30 mg of lovenox every month starting on the day of the iui and would start the progesterone twice a day starting 2 days after the iui. would stop it if not pregnant.

yes, we always check the hcg in the beginning of pregnancies.

Sounds good, except the Love.nox that he prescribed for me to have on hand is 40mg and I'm not doing IUI's! (Bangs head against wall.) Sometimes e-mail conversations are so frustrating! So back I go with another e-mail and more questions.

I also noticed that my Fol.gard script will run out of refills before March, so if we wait that long to start TTC, I'll have to get that script updated. Which may mean another long trip to his office, probably through traffic. Unless he can call the script in without me having to go there . . .

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I think I know what you veterans out there will say, "Welcome to the club." I know my situation is probably far less complicated than most of yours. But that doesn't change the fact that it is far more complicated than I ever anticipated getting pregnant would be. (I always thought the staying pregnant part would just take care of itself--miscarriage won't happen to me and all that lovely, ignorant denial.) Ignorance was bliss . . .