Good Strong Knicker Elastic

I'm taking my title from Ann (Harvey & Dot's mum) and her comment to me on this post.

                                                           (image from here)

Good strong knicker elastic is indeed what I need - the kind that keeps your favourite saggy pair going until the holes make them  too rude to wear.  Persistence and strength in its most domestic and vernacular form.  Adzuki gave us a scare last night - bright red blood and a trip to the local maternity emergency department.  Our fabulous midwife was there before the doctor saw us, and took us into the birthing centre to use their Doppler - and found that lovely swishy heartbeat straight away.  (She seems to know everyone - I take that as a good sign)  The bleeding eased off very quickly, and we had to hang around to see the doctor and for blood test results and an Anti-D shot with the biggest needle El Prima's ever seen (I wouldn't look at it!). 

All that fear came flooding back - and we felt stupid for having already told so many people I was pregnant - as though we could have caused this just by having a little faith in the pregnancy.  It's hard to shake, that feeling that everything is going to be ripped out from under your feet again.  Who knows what will happen.  There's been no bleeding since, and the fact that there was no pain accompanying the bleeding is, I'm told, a very good sign.  I never had any bleeding with Z (even when the accident happened - that's one reason why I thought she'd be okay), and I'd dismissed the crazy scary bleeding back in March as related to that pregnancy being a blighted ovum that was tenuous from the very start.  Somehow, with my obstetric history, I've preserved some image of myself as a healthy pregnant woman.  But this pregnancy after loss caper is not for the faint-hearted.  Good thing I've got some sturdy knicker elastic on my side. 

the pieces

I'm still picking myself up after being bitch-slapped by last week. Partly, the telling is too exhausting, partly I'm now very wary of telling because of events at work last week. In dot points:

- diagnosed via a letter? Or maybe not. Seems to have been a hospital mistake...

- mucked up a work thing. Then made it worse. To the point that I've now been told my duties have been changed. Yes, yes, my job is not on the line here, they are all very understanding. But I'm kicking myself (and frustrated at being left out of the "what do we do with a problem like maria" discussion) nonetheless. There's nothing to make you feel like an incompetent crazy-lady than people treating you like one.

- best friend has had her baby, and he is alive and well - Yay! But whoa - intense emotion-bubbles. Thankfully she's the kind of friend I can weep on (and who was there to be wept on when Z was born).

- oh, I miss Z so much. More than the baseline, everyday, where is my baby missing. Big peaks of "I want her here", "I wish she was making 15-month old noises", "maybe she'd be wearing the trashy-fabulous gold sequined baby-sneakers that El Prima bought her for Mardi Gras by now" etc. At least I've seen her star again the last couple of nights - for a couple of weeks there I couldn't pick it out, and felt so lost without her.

- went to see stand up comedy to feel better, ended up laughing so hard I hit my tooth on the chair in front and broke it. (Yes, I have enormous front teeth) And it was the same tooth I chipped in the accident, which has been repaired three times, but is still weak. Gah.

The intensity-knob on all of the above has since been turned down, thank god, and I'm feeling much saner as a result. Suffice to say, I'm still waiting on the results about the molar pregnancy thing, but my doctor reckons it is pretty unlikely given that my HCG levels seem to be dropping rapidly. Tooth is fixed, thanks to delightful dentist recommended by best friend. Work thing is okay - not my preferred outcome, but I have let the colleague in question know that next time I'd like to be included in the conversation. It's all back down to a crappy but manageable level.

Thank you all so much for your thoughts and kind words, and especially for the various offers to kick the universe in the balls for me (but said nicely). You are all ace. xxxh

More uncertainty

I was gearing up for a cheery post about having El Prima's family (or rather, 7 of them) stay at our place over the weekend, and how lovely it was that her sister mentioned the accident, and said she was so sorry we'd lost our baby. This was the first time I'd seen them since mid 2009 (though El Prima and the girls had visited them in Sydney a few times since we'd moved), so I was very nervous about what might happen. But it was all good.

Then I got a call from the Women's hospital this morning. The pathologist had looked at the pregnancy tissue from my miscarriage and was concerned that it may have been a molar pregnancy. It will take about 4 weeks for the pathology tests to work out whether or not it is actually molar, but during this time, they told me it is important not to get pregnant again, as this can be dangerous. No chance of that happening.

F#$k. Just when I manage to swallow one nasty reality, there's another waiting for me. It is a pretty tiny chance that this will be molar, or even if it is, that it will require serious treatment. It may just be that I have to have further testing to ensure my HCG level goes down. And even the worst case scenarios (requiring chemo etc) still have good prognoses for survival and for subsequent fertility, though you may have to wait 6-12 months to start trying again. But whatever faith I once had in statistics is pretty much gone now. An old friend contacted me via FB after we lost Z, to send her love and thoughts and to let me know that she'd just been through a molar pregnancy. I had no idea what that meant at the time. The good thing is, she's recently had a healthy baby girl. I'm holding onto that thought for the moment.

Blighted

This morning's scan showed not much more than Thursday's - the beginnings of a yolk sac, but nothing more, and the gestational sac itself was way behind the size it should be by now. This means (according to our doctor) that it's a blighted ovum, "though that doesn't mean there was anything wrong with your eggs", he added helpfully.

So what now? Wait to miscarry naturally, or a suction curretage to speed things up. Our doctor recommended the second option, because apparently for miscarriages after 6 weeks, they are often incomplete and require a curretage anyway. Gah. As my best mate put it, I want neither of these options.

I've cried so much today, and now it has peeled back into a white hot rage - at our stupid extortionately expensive clinic, my stupid body, our stupid car, every stupid f$#ing 4WD on the roads, the ridiculous car-dependent culture I live in and this stupid little thing that was persistent enough to stick around through all that bleeding, but not persistent enough to grow into a baby. And which is still making me nauseous and giving me sore boobs. It is a destructive, petulant, three-year-old anger and yet I can't throw enough things to satisfy it, and calming adult voices only infuriate it. I'm not a very nice person to be around at the moment, as El Prima has found out.

Please don't tell me any stories about blighted ova you have heard of that grew into lovely healthy babies - we've already put this scenario to our doctor, and with three scans, he is 100% certain that this one's going nowhere. That doesn't mean I'm taking his advice and booking in for the procedure. At the moment, the idea of bleeding my guts out is almost appealing.

oh man.

I'm back in bed on a day when I should be teaching after some scary bleeding yesterday. I'm trying to think of how I can convey 'scary' without grossing people out too much. And having been this scared in the last 24 hours, I don't really want to put others through the same fear. We've just had another scan showing that the PLB is still in there (yay! though a fetal pole hasn't magically appeared yet). It is amazing news, given that yesterday, when I was I trying to leave work, and I realised I wasn't just bleeding, but passing big clots and blood suddenly gushed down my legs and onto my new white sandals, I thought it was all over. Horror movie scary.

Our clinic was closed so I spoke to my GP on the phone, and he told me to go to emergency at the womens. We did, and after an hour's wait (during which time we bumped into friends coming in for a 38 week check up... arg!) saw a doctor. They weren't able to scan until the morning, but they took bloods, prodded a little and monitored me. The blood draw was the worst I've ever experienced in 4+ years of fertility treatment - apparently my blood was sticky and my veins elusive. Ow. Thankfully El Prima was there so she could make faces at me and distract me. The doctor was lovely - he told me my HCG was in the 10,000s which was a good sign, but he wanted me to come back in the morning for a scan.

The next morning, we turned up at the appointed hour only to hear that the doctor had gotten their policy wrong, and they wouldn't scan me unless it had been more than a week since our last scan, and since I'd just had one on Tuesday, they couldn't do it today. Gah. At least the nurse did tell us the HCG level from the night before (14,515) and suggested we contact our clinic. Thankfully, our clinic were willing to 'indulge' us with a scan, and there it was, the little gestational sac, still bang in the middle of the uterus, saying "What?" as if nothing at all had been happening. Cheeky little bastard. No sign of a fetal pole or yolk sac - still a bit of a worry, but still consistent with the embryo implanting maybe a week late. Or with various other not so lovely scenarios. So we're back to where we were on Tuesday - waiting and wondering until next tuesday.