2012-09 sad stuff

7/18 - Finally, I am pregnant again. My first 2 pregnancies were natural ones, but i didn't manage to hold on to either. Actually DURING a D&C, whilst vacuuming out my baby from between my legs as I wept silently, one doctor suggested I try IVF as I was "getting on a bit" in age. Talk about awesome timing for that comment, but sure, might as well? After 4 rounds of IUI and 2 rounds of IVF, and God knows how many hormones, drugs, scans, and doctor's appointments, I am finally pregnant again. I don't think we even know the sex yet. She is just over 3 months along. Although this is our third pregnancy, this is the first time Trevor has actually seen any of ultrasounds. She finally looks like a baby now though, in the first few - she just looked like a jelly bean in space! We don't want to tell anyone yet. I am past the first trimester, so we are safe from miscarriages probably, but we want to do the CVS before we tell all of our friends. (Anyone who is reading this - sorry! I know it is going to be a huge pain to read, since the comments don't scroll properly. it wasn't mean to be a blog! I started keeping the photos on Smugmug, just to have a place to store the ultrasound pictures so I wouldn't lose them. I have also noticed that the tense is all over the place, as is the spelling and punctuation. Oh well!)

I'm sorry the way that this started as a place to store pix of the baby, and ended up as a blog. It is really inconvenient for people to read this way and a silly way to blog. I think I just needed an outlet. It is funny, I used to write a lot as a kid, and I have let that slip away over the years. I might pick that back up. (It doesn't matter if nobody reads anything, at least I will have written. I am finding it incredibly cathartic - even if it is all about me!)

During our first pregnancy, I had already seen the baby, but Trevor hadn't. When we went in for our 13 week scan (same "stage" this photo was taken at), we knew something was wrong immiately. They couldn't find a heartbeat. The baby was dead. I don't think I cried then, but I couldn't stop as we walked back up the hill to the car. We decided to switch to IUI as I didn't want to waste time getting pregnant again. Lukily, I fell preganant IMMEDIATELY. They called that one a "chemical pregnancy" and I was only able to keep it 2 weeks :( Finally they do another set of scans on my body and tell me I have a "heart shaped uretus". It sounds good, but it isn't. I had to have that surgery (you are comletely unconcious for that one), and heal from it before you can try again.

Only just over 3 months preggers here. Taken at Trevor's parents house. The day after we told his mum and dad. We waited til the last minute to tell them until we got the results back of the CVS. There is no Down's Syndrome, no trisomy 13, no trisomy 18. Trevor and I both have extended generics test (some are blood tests, some are spit tests that we have to send away.) All the signs show clear and healthy baby. IT IS A GIRL :) We are going to call her Grace.

Still less only 4 months preggers here - but I can see her. Trying to wear clothes to work to show her off. I am pregnant, dammit, I am pregnant. I am so happy I want everyone to notice!

18 weeks preggers. Just over 4.5 months. I can't wait to meet her! This skirt buttons at the waist and my clothes are finally starting to get tight. People at work still haven't noticed I am pregnant, but I have told all of my friends. I am still going to crossift, but I am wearing a heart monitor and being very careful with the running and the lifts.

Nearly 20 weeks. 5 months preggers :) It is so awesome. I can feel her move and kick now! I couldn't wait to put this picture on facebook, which I do as soon as we get home. (We are camping on East Lake Reservoir with Anton and Fedi.) This is one of a couple of T-shirts I have bought myself. It feels sort of bad luck to be buying things before she is born, I have completely resisted buying anything for the baby yet - but I have bought a few tshirts and pair of leggings for me (both pictured here). My tummy is starting to push out of all my other T-shrts. I think I will be able to wear my jeans for a couple more months yet. Mikol bought me 2 huge bags of community prego clothes, so I don't think I will have to splash out money through the rest of the pregnancy.

Bee made roast dinner Saturday I hold it together for most of the day, but when we go swimming I start crying.

Breakfast in bed.

September 14th. It's the day of the op, which is totally painless - although they tactlessly only have one book in the waiting room - and it is about a weird Indian called Mustard and how he has his multiple children. I sit in my hospital gown and Trevor reads it aloud to me until they come and get me. I am calm as they put me out although I know I start to cry. The op is completely painless. I am out for the whole thing, but I wake up screaming. It is 20 mins before I can be transferred to the right place to see T. I am calm by then. He takes me home and puts me to bed. View from my bed (where I spend a lot of time!)

This is the second bouquet Elana bought me. She arrived at my door one day carrying great foods from the farmers' market and flowers. She won't even stay and bother me, she leaves the meter running on the taxi and is in and out - just leaving the house stocked with perfect easy-to-make/nibble-on things in her wake.

Zynga sent these flowers. They are on the doorstep when I arrive back from the hospital. I don't know why, and I guess the timing is a coincidence. I don't think people knew about today.

Dana bought these stargazers. Of course she would remember what my favourite flowers are. They go by my bed so I can smell them at all times. I think it was somewhere around this time I decided I wanted to capture the condolence gifts people had given me, so I would never forget their generosity.

This was sent to me by Jack.... It is a giant red ball, in my seat. With a rum flask., I guess that kinda represents me? :) I will never ever in my whole life forget Chris and Mags teaching me what real friends are and ignoring my requests for them to not help and just being there creating an assembly line to fill the flasks for the team party before I even got into the office that day!. This was the Wednesday. The day of the first dilation. definitely the most painful day of my life (including all motorbike mishaps and broken bones!) I cried on the table at the doctor's office and they had to give me a valium. They gave me valium and vicodin to take home. For some reason I thought the valium worked better and didn't take the vicodin. It is only 2 weeks later I am wondering if it was because it was also mental pain.

Strapped boobies, before they got ginormous and before the milk came in. These days we pack them every single day with cabbage and ice and they are so painful. The doctor recommended drinking sage tea, so I do that too! (Sage tea and cabbage, really? And this is the Western doctor recommending this!) I do WHATEVER is possible to make them stop swelling and the milk go away sooner. I still cannot believe that in this day and age the doctors still recommend cabbage to shorten the period of your impactation and milk coming in!! They give you a printed hand-out on it! Sometimes I wake up and they are squirting boiling hot milk into the air. I prefer the evil super hero name "milk mistress", but Trevor prefers "milk maid".

Bee came over on Sunday and made us brunch

This is all food that I made from the organic stuff Elana got from the farmer's market. The fruit salad has raw honey on it (she specifically bought some as she knows you can't eat it when you are up the dufff!) The coddled eggs I made were yum. Trevor's had lots of meat - mine had an organic mushroom base - both were topped with fresh heirloom tomatoes, basil and Gruyère cheese.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night one night looking for Trevor and tripped on the stool and got a couple of carpet burn boo boos. It is a small scar and i know it won't last, but now people look at me like I am a moron!! Or just special ed!! I flew to LA this week to get my global traveler permit. It is kind of a shame that the photo of me on that card is going to immortalize this scar! Meh, whatever, it will just remind me of a time in my life.

From JP and Nikki. I love it and it will last and won't need too much watering, Just one of the gifts they gave me - along with a book and some goodies. I was more touched that I could express!

These are from lee and elizabeth. They have lasted longer than any of the other flowers. Even 2 weeks later I still have a couple of the lilies that have just opened. I love the smell of them.

Do I have the "green vision" now? (I love George R. R Martin!)

This is from Mags, Margaret, Chris T and Bill. I have had 2 very very small shots of the Blue Label in the last 2 weeks. I expect I can make it last at least 6 months.

From the management team of my game at work.

boo boo starting to look better. they don't hurt at all but steve makes me put neosporin them,

From Rob & Laini. So classy.

From ZXS. My favourite flowers, I am wondering which of my old team knew that? (Elana? Steve?)

From Trevor's parents. These were some of my favourites as the roses smelt so strongly and the vase has shells in the bottom :)

You seriously won't believe the size of my boobs. The milk is fully in and we have them wrapped in cabbage leaves (as recommended by my medical gynecologist, not some whackjob!) and strapped as tight as possible. They hurt like a mother fucker (to use Stacey's expression!)

Tennessee hike with Chris T

Pimms cup. Chis facebook-challenged me to make one at the same time as hers. She won, as the picture she posted was outside in the garden. I take mine back to bed.

Saturday 9/22, just over a week afterwards. On the bike, thinking I could be invincible. What a numpty! My boobs are still extremely painful and very hot. It is 90 degrees where we are going, and I thought I might enjoy the ride (!) We had to stop twice. Once for me to take my jacket lining out and the second time in a parking lot of Vons (or something like that)., Where I stood around in my sports bra sobbing loudly and uncontrollably while Trevor tried to stuff ice cubes down my bandages. My favourite part of the day is when we got to the house for Trevor to buy the truck and I curled up under their sprinkler with the frozen peas down my t-shirt and their dog kept licking my face. Trevor was playing it off like it was pretty normal. "Yeah, my wife doesn't feel too well... I forget how hot it is down here..." :) I know anyone reading this thinks I am a weirdo for keeping memories like these, but hey they are our lives. And they really make me laugh!!

Third eye - not improving - oh well, who cares? Maybe this day, or they day after this, the scab falls off. I am taking my bra and top on and off to re-pack the boobies with ice and cabbage that maybe it is the kitchen. (That would be good, I sweep that floor at least 1 - 2 times a day.) Maybe it is in one of the beds, or a yanked it off with a t-shirt and it is in a washing pile, or went down the shower. Or.. eeeewww!!!!!

Breakfast one morning (whilst actually working furiously on Zynga stuff) was a weak Pimms cups. Just think of all of those vitamins in the fruit. Yep, still haven't poo-ed!!

You have to drink the "green hell" because:a) it is good for you, b) it is delicious (a whole head of parsley, a whole spinach, one lemon, maybe some apple/onion/garlic if you fancy!) and c)- it makes you poo (jesus christ, please. I am not even taking one painkiller a day!). This was 9/26 10 days after the operation. I also made the mistake of walking to work and back (a 2-mile round trip). It totally did me in. We also had ticket to see Amanda Palmer at the Filmore. Although we went, we left before the encore and I woke up bleeding a lot the next day. Back to juice, the stupid thing is I remember a friend of mine trying to make me a juice when I visited her in New York because they were all into it and I said I didn't want one. Now I am a believer! (Steve Olson got Trevor into juicing - so funny that one of these woo-woo things came to me through Trevor. He actually called me on the phone to tell me how amazing the juice was and how we should get a juicer. I was wedding dress shopping with a friend. I thought he was high!)

9/27 11 days after the openratoin, Scott dropped this off at the door and didn't even bother me by coming in! (Dana told him what my favourite wine was ;-) There are good days and bad days and this was a reminder to me that even on your bad days there can be good food, thanks to having friends. Thank you so much! I fancy a glass of wine, so I order some from winery. They delivery it to my door within an hour (cheaper than you can buy the individual bottles online). Rewinery - how I love you. You remind me of Kosmos in the first dot com- except you have a business model!

9/27 11 days after the operation, Virginia turned up unannounced with enough delicious (gluten free, as she is!) sushi for the three of us :)

This may be my favourite gift of all. It's a coffee cake, you don't even have to refrigerate it. It comes beautifully presented, and says it will last 2 weeks (no chance of that in our house!) Thanks to Cara Ely for this, Reason number 407 we should have those guys over for dinner!!

9/29 - 2 weeks after the operation and I feel so much better. My boobs are not spurting hot milk all the time, and although I still have ice packs on them, I am not doing the cabbage all the time. We sort of took over the pool at the Sofitel for the day. Moved all the chairs and the shade, blew up our floaties and camped out for a few hours. The barman agreed to put my spare ice packs in the bar freezer, so I could still swamp them out (stuffed down my swimsuit) to cure the boob inferno!

No tweaking except a crop. The colour really looked like this. I really feel like I am 90% better. I guess I thought too soon. This was Saturday October 29th.

Antoinette had brought gin over for us to drink by the pool at the Ritz and we never got around to it. Trevor ended up making us a drink out of the book Steve Olson had given him as a birthday gift. It was called "Death in the Gulf Stream" and was apparently something Earnest Hemingway created as a hangover remedy (!) Well, it does have sparkling water in it - maybe that is the re-hydration part of the hangover remedy? In case I ever want to keep score, I cried very little today - and towards the end of the week, so perhaps I really am getting better. But Sunday (when the downstairs tenant's friend wake me up by ringing the bloody doorbell), I wake up in FLOODS of tears - and bleeding so heavily I am faint and sad and can't walk much.

10/1. These arrived today from Mark Lamport. I absolutely LOVE them. Saw the doctor for a regular 2-week checkup today. Thought I was doing much better but yesterday started bleeding really badly – like PINTS!! She did an ultrasound today and it still shows a lot of blood in the uterus. She prescribed a ton of drugs to get that blood moving out (gross). I am supposed to be on complete bed rest today and tomorrow (although I will very likely taxi into work for an hour). She said that should be okay, but absolutely no walking anywhere. (she thought I was nuts to hike, even a short one.) I have an infection, so I have to take antibiotics for that, anti-inflammatories for the boobs, vicodin for the pain (which I am actually not taking at all – I am afraid I will bloody rattle if I take another pill – not only that I might never poo again!!!), sage tea to drink and cabbage wraps in the sports bra to stop the milk, nettle tea for the inflammation – continue with the ace bandages, she wants to me to do acupuncture as soon as I can walk for rebalancing hormones.

Okay, I am kind of assuming that I am keeping this record for anyone else that goes through this - since my rocks of support are women that did something similar. These are called Methylergometrine. This is the piece I didn't understand - and why it is only now (2 weeks after the operation) that it is more painful. I looked up the drug online. I have been trying to take as few of the pills as possible and they said only to take these ones if I bled a lot (which I didn't), so I didn't take them until yesterday's fiasco when I did take one (or Trevor thinks I took 2, one in the evening, too). The important part of the info seems to be this "It is most commonly used to prevent or control excessive bleeding following childbirth and spontaneous or elective abortion, but also to aid in expulsion of retained products of conception after a missed abortion (miscarriage in which all or part of the fetus remains in the uterus) and to help deliver the placenta after childbirth." Since this pregnancy was so far along, it is actually known as a stillbirth not a miscarriage. A lot of people choose to go through labour and have the child breathe, named, christened, photographed, casts made of hands and feet and buried. In fact, most people choose this option. I thought it was unnaturally morbid and sounded like a lot of unnecessary pain for the baby! So I guess these drugs can either speed things up or slow them down? Awesome. It hurts a lot though. A LOT. Cramps are pretty bad. Or maybe it is just that I am so sad it seems worse? My boobs are still on fire, and I can't get through frozen packs quick enough - and of course this is the week SF chooses to be 90 degrees. I can appreciate the irony, if not quite see the funny side today. Dear god I hope my sense of humour comes back tomorrow. I am going in to work for an hour or so (against doc's orders, and mostly only because Chris Trottier has offered to pick me up and drop me back home!)

I know this is really narcissistic, but my hair has been AMAZING since I have been pregnant. It is completely different. Thicker, a little curlier. I took this picture because I wanted to document the hair - but I was vain enough to keep both versions, as I couldn't decide which I liked better. I went to work for an hour or two today. I wasn't supposed to go, but Chris Trottier both picked me up and dropped me off and it was a session I was hosting and really wanted to attend. Whilst I was there, I realized how ill I was, but I am still glad I did it. It is my only commitment this week. I emailed Bill and cancelled the rest of my meetings with him. I should have taken this a bit more seriously. I feel physically much worse this week than last week, although I am not crying all the time. But for the first time in my life, I pretty much do want to just stay in bed. Going in to work had a bonus - I picked up lunch and dinner for me and Trevor!

I don't have the cabbages round my boobs when I go into work. On the way back from buying the truck we had stopped for some Mexican food and I asked Trevor to buy the cabbages at that market. They were 8 for $1. I wanted to get around to making sauerkraut with all the leftover hearts, but I didn't. We only really use the bigger outside leaves (sometimes we do jigsaw the smaller leaves together if we are running out). My boobs are so hot they actually cook the cabbage. LOVELY!

Antoinette came over to hang out - and she did my laundry!!!! I think I must have gone a little mad through all this because I am starting to realize how blessed I am. My friends are amazing. Dana came over after Antoinette left and we were chatting and she said it was the same for her when her brother died. You realized how much love there was in the world. I guess you have to feel grief to know that. I suppose I am lucky I have got to 40 and not felt grief :). But I feel the love now and it makes me giddy!