13w3d: Shopping Time

First of all, my NT scan went great – before the scan, due to our ages, the babies had a risk of down syndrome of about 1 in 700.  Now, baby A’s risk is about 1 in 7,500, and baby B’s is 1 in more than 10,000.  So it seems pretty safe the say that we’re in the clear!  Risks for all of the other trisotomies are way down, too.  My only hope going in was that the risk of a problem after the scan would be less than the risk of miscarriage with an amnio so that we would know not to do the amnio, and I’m SO happy that it worked out!

The ultrasound was a little long, but spending an hour looking at the babies was fun – we even started to get a sense of their personalities.  Baby A is going to be our troublemaker; no matter how much the tech jiggled my stomach, she refused to get into the right position (at one point, the tech even thought she might be holding her feet in her hands!), and the entire time we were looking at her face she was opening and closing her mouth… I’m wondering if that means she’ll be hungry, talkative, or both!  Baby B, meanwhile, was super cooperative, and even waved to us!  Well, sort of… he made a hand movement that the tech described as “saluting” us, and Henry thought looked more like he was giving us the finger.  Haha.  And no, despite the fact that I assigned them genders here, the tech would not make any guesses on sex.  However, I get to go back in three weeks for them to start checking my cervix, and she said they will most likely be able to tell then!

This weekend I’m going on a very important shopping trip: maternity clothes.  It’s time; I pretty much exhausted my closet finding things to wear to work this week, and I’m doing only slightly better outside of working hours.  The point that I really need maternity clothes was really driven home this morning as I dressed for work.

 

I planned to wear a pair of khakis that have always been a little too big, but I hadn’t worn in a while.  I ironed them (and I almost NEVER iron so you know I was desperate) and proceeded to get dressed.  I pulled up the pants, tried to close them…. and a good three inches remained between the button and the button hole.  I considered it for a second, sucked in everything that can be sucked, and just managed to get them to close.

Great!  Until I turned around – there on my butt was the world’s most obvious panty line.  And could you even sort of make out the pattern on my underwear through the thin pants?  Yup, you could.  I signed heavily, walked over to my underwear drawer, and started searching for the pair of nude, no-line briefs I’d bought for a wedding with a thin bridesmaid dress, all the while wondering if I’d be able to button the pants again.  No luck on the briefs, but there staring up at me was another possible solution to my problem: my one and only thong.

I know some women love thongs, but I am not one of them; I’ve just never been able to get comfortable.  And this was a particularly evil thong, a cheap novelty thing I got as a gift at my bridal shower when my butt was at least a size smaller than it is now.  But, it was a light color and would mean my ironing efforts were not in vain.

So, that’s how I ended up walking around all day with pinching pants and a permanent wedgie from a too-small thong with the word “bride” emblazoned across the crotch.  I can’t wait to go shopping!

13w1d: Confidence Rising

So, after that last post, I realized how silly I was being and decided to tell the rest of my friends.  I called them up, everyone was happy, and I haven’t worried since!

Yeah, right.

Actually, after that last post the achiness in my pelvis continued to nag at me.  It didn’t hurt much but it was constant and didn’t seem to be improving, and I started to worry that I had a UTI.  Finally I decided to call my doctor to ease my worries.  Everyone online calls their doctor and is told, “If it doesn’t hurt more than menstrual cramps and there’s no spotting, it’s normal.”  It didn’t and there wasn’t, so I made the call confident I’d get that reassurance and be able to move on.  I didn’t - instead, the nurse said, “We have an appointment open at 9:15 tomorrow, would you like to come in then?”  Once an appointment was offered I couldn’t say no (obviously they suspected something was horribly wrong if they weren’t giving me the standard line about spotting!), so I made plans to go in the next morning.

Of course, when I woke up the next day the pain was almost gone.  But since the missed appointment charge is almost as much as my co-pay, and I’ll never pass up the opportunity for an ultrasound, I decided to go in anyway.  The doctor was really nice (I’ve now met three out of the four doctors in this practice and like them all) and told me not to feel silly about coming in; since they have the ultrasound machine right there in their office, she said that they don’t mind taking a quick peek when we’re worried.  So that’s what we did and – shocker – the babies were fine, even moving around.  She also checked my cervix and – shocker again – it was long and closed, just like it’s supposed to be.

I was there for less than five minutes but it was very reassuring, especially since at the time of that ultrasound I was past the 12 week mark so starting to be in the range where some people say that the first trimester is over.  And with that reassurance, we really did tell a LOT of people over the weekend!  There are still a few friends left in the dark, but just because we haven’t seen them in person since we started telling and haven’t gotten to the point of calling people with the news yet.  I even told my coworkers!  And, amazingly, I haven’t had my post-telling panic attack thinking that we jinxed everything!

Speaking of telling, I also figured out the solution to a problem that’s been nagging at me.  See, I’ve been torn about what exactly to do when we “announce” on Facebook (I’m not a huge fan of Facebook “announcements” but whatever).  I want to acknowledge my infertility in some way, since I’m sure there are others out there having problems and I want them to know that they’re not alone, but I don’t want the news of my infertility (which has been kept 100% OFF Facebook) to overshadow the happy news.  Basically I’ve been trying to figure out a secret code that only infertiles will be able to decipher.

What I’ve finally decided to do is to “like” my fertility center on Facebook at about the same time that I announce my pregnancy.  I’ve always wanted to like the center, but haven’t been brave enough to publically do it.  By doing it at about the same time as I go public, I figure that anyone who is curious will put two and two together, and people who don’t think about infertility probably won’t even notice.  I’m really happy with this plan, and Henry even said that he is going to do the exact same thing!

So we’re almost ready to go public.  Assuming everything goes well at our NT screen tomorrow, there will be nothing holding us back!

12weeks: Superstitious

Want to hear about one of my family “scandals?”  Don't get too excited - I use scandal in the loosest sense of the word, since the only one who thinks it’s more than a juicy tidbit of family history is my 91 year old grandmother.

Are you ready?  Ok.  My grandmother was born as the result of a tryst between my great-grandmother and – gasp! – a Jewish man.

Jews and Catholics are, of course, not all that different – we’re all neurotic, feel guilty a lot, and have overbearing mothers (joking, of course!).  So being one eighth Jewish was never something I considered much until recently, when I discovered how superstitious Jews are about pregnancy.  The most superstitious Jews, it turns out, won’t reveal a baby’s intended name before the bris, won’t buy anything for the nursery until the baby is born, and have all sorts of customs to ward off the evil eye.  My Jewish co-worker tells me that when she was pregnant, her own mother wouldn’t even look at the ultrasound pictures.

Jews, it turns out, are excellent at not counting their chickens before they hatch.  And in that sense I am 100% Jewish.

I am 12 weeks today and, despite what I said in my last post, still not comfortable telling anyone about my pregnancy.  (The dull, consistent ache I’ve been feeling in my uterus for the last few days hasn’t been helping matters, even though intellectually I know that it’s probably the result of my uterus growing really fast + me doing a lot of walking this past weekend.)  No one at work other than my boss knows, most of my friends don’t know, my dad’s family doesn’t know, and Facebook most definitely does NOT know.  I cringe whenever someone gets excited or squealy about the babies.  Henry and I are getting close to buying that house I wrote about before, and it makes me so nervous to make such a big life change for two beings the size of limes whose heartbeats I haven’t confirmed in nearly two weeks.  I don’t even want to post about the pregnancy here, because I don’t want to jinx myself by saying everything’s fine when I haven’t had recent reassurance that it is.

Even though my lips are sealed, the not telling is getting a little ridiculous.  I’m starting to show enough that my friends have been pulled aside by acquaintances who ask if I’m pregnant (the “or getting fat” remains unspoken).  The majority of my pre-pregnancy clothes don’t fit; in a few days, I’ll be down to one pair of work pants and one pair of non-yoga casual pants.  As my exhaustion eases up and I go out into the world more, I won’t be able to help people finding out, whether it’s me or my belly doing the telling.  Or, more likely, Henry, who feels no such qualms about announcing the status of my uterus to everyone he sees on the street.

But, dear God of Jewish superstition, please just grant me nine more days of secrecy.  On May 30, I will have my NT screen.  I will see the babies, hear their heartbeats, hopefully be reassured about their health, and recharge my faith that this pregnancy is real.  And then I’ll come home and, I promise, tell everyone I see before I have the chance to get worried again.

First OB Appointment

Something about having my first OB appointment yesterday seems to have flipped a switch in me.  Suddenly, I actually believe that I am PREGNANT!  I’m even tempted to put it on Facebook (I’m not that crazy, but we have roughly doubled the number of people who know).

 

Part of my excitement is because of the 10 week milestone.  While it’s not as big as the one that I’ll hit in a few weeks, a lot of things that I’ve read point out that 10 weeks is when the baby makes the jump from embryo to fetus, and risks go down significantly.  My odds of miscarriage, it seems, are now down to about 2-3% – still greater than the .5% risk after the first trimester is over, but pretty small.

 

But I think mostly, it was the OB appointment itself that made me feel so good.  The doctor I saw is part of the same practice that my other wonderful doctor (who is now on maternity leave) is part of.  I liked this doctor as much as my previous one – she was funny and energetic, and she has a set of IVF twins so immediately understood how I was feeling and answered a lot of my questions before I asked them.

 

Aside:  Fun moment from the exam room…. I’m sitting on the edge of the table in the very warm, very small room waiting for the doctor to walk in, when I’m suddenly hit by one of my most awkward pregnancy symptoms: incredibly stinky gas. I turn to Henry and whisper, “I really have to fart so the doctor is probably going to walk in right…” And then the door opens. Having an exam while clenching is NOT FUN, but I managed to save us all from the misery of my pregnant gas.

 

But the very best thing was that she treated me like I was a boring, low-risk patient.  She didn’t even take an exact reading of the babies’ heart rates – she eyeballed them, said they looked good, and that was that.  She quickly measured the babies, and when I mentioned my concern about the small sac, she looked at it, said it seemed fine, and moved on.  She checked my cervix and felt my uterus, declared all was as it should be, and I was on my way out the door with a bag full of vitamin samples.

 

Yes, eventually I’d like to get to spend a little more time with the doctor, ask lots of questions, get all of my measurements, etc.  But after spending the last ten weeks getting way too much information at the fertility center, it was such a relief to walk out of a doctor’s office with absolutely nothing to worry about or Google.

 

Oh, and the very best thing (besides, of course, my healthy babies!)?  I was cleared to stop taking my estrogen and progesterone supplements!  There are no words for how wonderful it feels to walk around without the progesterone suppository slowly leaking out of my vagina; I am panty liner-free and it is AWESOME.  Henry had better watch out – between stress and my less-than-fresh-down-there feeling, I haven’t been much in the mood for husband and wife special snuggle time (no, we don’t really call it that).  With no worries and clean lady parts, that might be changing soon!

9w6d: My Day So Far

I was away from home this weekend, which meant that I ate pretty badly and my body feels a little out of whack.  Then, when we got home I took an awesome nap, but it meant that I wasn’t that tired when it was time to go to bed at 10 and I did a lot of tossing and turning.  And we accidentially left our pillows in the car and didn’t feel like going to get them, which meant we were sleeping with fewer pillows on the bed than we are used to, which further exacerbated the sleep issues.  Here's how my day has gone so far with all of those factors working against me...

7:00 a.m.  Wake up after a horrible night's sleep.  Have awful taste in my mouth from the crackers I ate in the middle of the night when I felt nauseated.  Go downstairs to eat breakfast but there’s only a tiny bit of milk for my cereal because we didn’t do our normal Sunday grocery shopping.

7:30  Get in shower, feeling like a zombie.  Fantasize about calling in sick, but don't because I'm already taking Thursday off for my first prenatal appointment.  Beg Henry to walk the dog, which is usually my morning chore.

7:45  Get out of shower.  Headache hasn’t gone away; guess it’s here for good.  Fantasize about going back to bed.

8:00  Thank Henry for walking the dog.  Get dressed.  My shirt is tight; this might be its last wear for the next nine months.

 

8:10  Grab few remaining pregnancy-friendly foods (last apple, cheese stick, granola bar) to take to work.  Tell dog sorry since he still thinks I'm going to walk him, especially after I reach for my umbrella (which is right next to his leash).  Leave for work.

9:00  Arrive at work.  Decide that I’m not going to be a martyr – Tylenol is safe during pregnancy, and I have a horrible headache.  Raid the office first aid kit.

9:30  Headache is gone but Tylenol has upset my stomach.  I hate being nauseous.  If I was offered a deal where I could escape all morning sickness in return for not being allowed an epidural during childbirth, I would take it in a second.  Unfortunately no one arrives to offer me that deal and the nausea persists.

9:40  Eat all of the food I’ve packed in the hopes of watering down the Tylenol and settling my stomach.  It kind of works.

10:00  Try to make grocery list for after work trip.  Thought of grocery store makes me want to vomit, then take a nap.

11:00  Get e-mail from Babycenter about this week in my pregnancy.  How big is a kumquat?  Add kumquats to grocery list.

12:00 p.m.  Office meeting briefly distracts me from feeling horrible.

1:00  Head down to deli for lunch.  Plan on getting a BLT on a bagel, but there’s no bacon.  Have choice between deli meat (listeria!) or tuna (mercury!).  Decide on tuna since everything that I’ve read has said its ok to eat in moderation.  Feel guilty anyway.  Also get a ginger ale and a bag of chips.

1:05  Google eating tuna when pregnant before biting into sandwich.  Thanks to a typo, instead pull up information about playing the tuba while pregnant.

1:10  Tuna is delicious!

1:30  Ahh, my stomach feels so much better!  But I’m still exhausted.  Maybe I can put my head down on my desk for a second and take a little rest?

1:31  No, that’s really uncomfortable.

 

1:32  Am I sure?  I’m really tired.

1:33  Yeah, that just doesn’t work.

2:00  Nausea has returned.  Doubt tuna will be delicious on the way back up.

2:30  Wonder if I’m going to get any work done today.  Probably not.

2:35  Decide my only hope of feeling better is to complain on my blog.