Fear

I need to start this post with the confession that I am quite unable to give my babies cute nicknames, only wacky ones. Sorry, my little ones. My first baby got stick with the moniker 'Bighead' at the second ultrasound when I was utterly struck by how huge his head was compared to the rest of him. This new one- well read on.

This post is about all my darkest feelings. As I continue to feel more of this new pregnancy every day (nausea, heartburn, uterine cramps), there is a part of me that is happy and hopeful but there is this sick, dark place inside me waiting for the Sword of Damocles to drop again, for me to go to an ultrasound and find out its all over all over again.

A huge part of this fear is because I have no idea what went wrong. Often when babies are lost its a case of slow doubling or low betas, when chromosomal abnormalities are discovered or at least, strongly suspected. My last pregnancy was not like that. My first baby ( poor little Bighead) was a champion to start off with. His betas were off-the-charts, unbelievably good and they doubled perfectly. His chromosomes were beautifully normal.  You cannot ask for a better start to any pregnancy, and yet, he was dead probably at the 10 week mark. Everything suggests to him being fine, that it was something else that went wrong. How can you box at shadows?  I'm hopeful yes, but there also lives this horrible place inside of me which is just mentally steeling itself for the worst.  I cannot shake it off, no matter how I try. Its almost like a defense mechanism, that horrifying news will be better tolerated if its anticipated. That of course is a load of crock, nothing can soften the blow if it comes at you again.

All of this fear is made worse by the fact that they DID find something wrong with me. If its just thyroid, then that, I think can be easily dealt with.  But then there are also the anti-cardiolipin antibodies. I had my consult with the perinatologist, and the verdict (which I had also come to) is to retest for them. If the repeat value comes back even at the slightly elevated, neither-here-nor-there value,  they start me on aspirin. Now, all the studies suggest that aspirin by itself possibly is not enough in case there is a real clotting problem. But my levels are not high enough to justify heparin, and moreover, giving somebody heparin when they don't need it is inviting trouble, you can have a bleed beneath the placenta which can itself result in pregnancy loss or you could end up in a potentially dangerous situation yourself. I will give blood to test for TSH and the dreaded cardiolipin IgG value this week.

I just need to genuinely believe that this will work, that my new baby (named 'Turbulence' because of the fact that she is tiny but already causing quite a bit of it,) will be ok.  She, like her older brother, is a strong, healthy baby.  I NEED to believe that my body will allow her to make it..I just don't know how. The proof is in the pudding, and I haven't seen the darned thing yet!

So everybody, put your hands together and pray for 'Turbulence'!

Introductions and explanations

I never imagined I would be a blogger, because my routine life, with its usual romantic/professional ups and downs never offered much to talk about.  Its been a fairly nice life to live, but making it engaging enough for a virtual audience would be a job for a true writer.  Which I'm most definitely not.  However, when I began  TTC as a single woman, all of that changed because I realized I needed people willing to listen and virtually pat me on the back as I go along this not-so-straightforward journey.

I had decided that if I had not met the right guy by the time I turned 30, I'd have a child by myself.  A pretty shocking and unusual idea for an Indian girl, but its one that I was oddly comfortable with from the start. Getting here has not been as easy or uncomplicated as these 2 sentences make them out to be, with plenty of tear-soaked pillows along the way. But still, here I am, at peace and even excited about the concept, although 10 years ago it would have seemed like something from a bad dream. 


My desire to be a single mother has been mostly secret. My employer or colleagues at work have no idea. A few of my close friends know, but its just a handful.  My immediate family does too, and they are incredibly supporting given the circumstances.  Problem is, we TTCers tend to be obsessed with this process.  Only women going through (or who have gone through) the TTC process will be even mildly interested in our lengthy regurgitations.  The others are a different cup of tea.  When you first break the news to them, you can have them in thrall for at least half an hour.  After that (if its not your poor, loving mother), you get a few minutes of an interested audience to provide a pithy progress report.  They care, make no mistake about it, but oddly enough, are not willing to listen to your every thought on the topic.  I was utterly and completely ok with this when the going was easy- now things are different.

My journey so far- I'm 30 years old and come from a family of of disgustingly good fertility.   Every test ever run on me looks fine, and I ovulate regularly. On April 17th (a date etched in my memory) I had my first IUI. 10 days later, a second beautiful (and terrifying) line appeared on my pregnancy stick. Thereafter I was in comfortable-and-happy pregnant woman land until my 12 week ultrasound where a doctor found that the my baby whose heart had been beating merrily 4.5 weeks ago was now shrunken and dead.  It was like being slapped in the face really, really, REALLY hard.  There are far worse things that have happened to people and so far I've been blessed in many ways in this process, but it was devastating anyway.

Almost 7 weeks later, I'm in a cycle I want to use to get pregnant. I'm changing REs and have an appointment with a new practice which is reputed to be wonderfully attentive (the doctors do the inseminations themselves) and they are supposed to actually listen  to you- shocking indeed. I'm pretty sure I will ovulate on the 3rd or 4th of September. I'm terrified to try again, yet terrified of waiting to know whether I am one of those who will have problems carrying children.  My baby had normal chromosomes, and for a while, all of it looked perfect. Why pregnancies fail are a mystery.  For somebody who is an scientist with a halfway decent understanding of the human body, having a mile-long list of possibilities of why this happened, but no real answers is agony. It might happen again. And again and again. Or it never might. If it does though, I think being able to talk about it more might help.

I need a boatload of editing, and I promise to make the next posts shorter. I'll get better with time, I hope. Thanks for reading.