Saturday, December 31, 2011

BFN and biliary colic

In February of 2010, we were in Mexico. J wasn't feeling well, and we assumed, having eaten at a restaurant we had never been to, that she had food poisoning. She threw up all night and was in agony, however it passed and I chalked it up to what I thought it was: food poisoning. Done deal, it's out of her system.

A week after we got home, she started having periods of excruciating abdominal pain and cramping. I'll shorted the story, but it turned out she had a very distended and blocked gallbladder, resulting in pancreatitis (a stone blocked the pancreatic duct), cholecystitis and hepatitis. Fortunately she managed to pass the stone and no real damage was done (pancreatitis can be fatal). She wound up having a cholecystectomy (removal of her gallbladder) in April of 2010. She now has post-cholecystectomy syndrome, resulting in episodes of excruciating pain if she strays from a fairly low-moderate fat diet. She WAY overdid it at Christmas and was in agony on Boxing day, requiring me to dust off my acute pain management skills.

Christmas Day, DPO 13, we had a BFN and the start of a period. We had it, I know in my heart that we achieved pregnancy. Our hippy/granola/super energy sensitive RMT said that she was sure. We're pretty sure that her body knew what was coming though, and ditched the pregnancy.

We were so devastated. I was hard on Christmas day to carry on, especially since we were both SO SURE that this round had worked. I cried, the first time, over a negative pregnancy test. In a way though, I'm glad. If it had been positive, dealing with J in agony for hours at a time, worrying about the impact of high dose narcotics (plus all the drugs to combat the side effects) would have found us a trip to the ER department. Also, since we are getting on a plane on the 11th, I'm not sure I want to expose my tiny developing zygote to that much radiation (about as much as an x-ray, which is HARDLY NOTHING), but I am paranoid. My whole body says "stay off the plane" when we're pregnant. We will drive to our close family friend's wedding next summer in Calgary (14 hour drive, but we'll take it slow and actually SEE our beautiful province!).

January will be a missed month, because we'll be on vacation, but I have good feelings about February.

In the meantime, I found this beautiful and heartbreaking blog. Stella, the moms' 2.5 year old, is dying slowly of an untreatable brain tumour. They found out in June, and she's made it to Christmas (and seen the birth of her new baby brother), however she is most definitely dying. I feel utterly sick reading the blog, but I also take from it many lessons I put into practice in my job. One of the babies I cared for lost his twin brother when they were only 10 days old. I cared for him the day his brother died, it was so so so heartbreakingly awful. I still see the mom regularly, since the surviving twin is still around, and I try very hard to not shy away from talking about his twin. When his brother died, someone erased any reference to being a twin on his white board (we have white boards that we/parents decorate and write names and family and whatever on). I thought it was so sad, that his brother was just being erased out of remembrance. I cracked out my white board markers and wrote "My twin brother, XXXX, is my hero!", and there it stayed until he moved and his board was re-written. His mom thanked me for that.

I have had conversations with parents who have lost a twin, and read a couple of different blogs by parents who have lost a child (or more than one), and the biggest thing they are afraid of is that people will FORGET their child. I learn something new each time, and I am deeply grateful to the parents who open their hearts to share with me.

So, on that note, it's New Years Eve. We're not pregnant, but that's how the universe has deemed it. It will happen when our spirit baby is ready (or when it's patiently waiting for us to be ready!). Both of us had dreams last night about our baby. J was pregnant in hers, and I was watching the face of our beautiful daughter who was 8ish months old and looked exactly like her Mama.

Happy New Years to everyone, may 2012 bring you many joys!

Friday, December 23, 2011

DPO 10. Or 11.

I have always been the calm, cool and collected one toughing it out through these inseminations. J has been the one going a little nutty, wanting to pee on a stick CONSTANTLY, while I just stay chill in the background.

Well, it's a bit of a role reversal... except not. I've gone totally neurotic this month, and J is her normal post-ovulatory-two-weeks-of-waiting self. I couldn't sleep on Sunday night before my first day shift (typical), so I was just allowing my brain to drift, and I was envision the tiny little cell cluster digging its way into the side of her soft and squishy endometrium. I was impatient for a result, but a little voice said that I had to be patient just a little bit longer for my proof. That little voice was coming out of the ball of cells. WHOA. LIKE. WHOA.

We saw our chiropractor yesterday for our weekly adjustments and she mentioned that J's body felt a little bit different. Her RMT the day before (who does cranio-sacral therapy and is *very* tuned into energy) said "maybe", but J got the distinct feeling that she wasn't comfortable saying "YES" yet. Or that it was too early for an actual YES.

Anyways, we will find out Christmas morning if it's a positive, or negative, since J should start bleeding around there.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm gonna be pretty crushed if this cycle doesn't take. She's been feeling pretty crummy the past couple of days, so I'm hoping it's just the zygote secreting all it's fancy hormones to make it stick around and enjoy spring.

I FEEL different this month, my intuition knows something is up, so I'm really hoping it's not just intense wishful thinking. I did a ton of research this month too, research I somehow missed doing ages ago (seriously, what were we thinking, no wonder we couldn't get pregnant).

Anyways, it's crazy making with Christmas upon us. We're hosting dinner for twelve! :) It will be fun, lots to do in the meantime, and I'm all done work now for Christmas! Even better!!!!

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Maybe?

We are DPO 5 or 6 (depending on which chart you're looking at), I'm estimating conservative so we'll go with DPO 5.

J has been nauseous all day. Her sense of smell is super keen. Although she's eaten a lot today too. Yesterday she felt her uterus twitching.

Weeeeiirrdd............

Monday, December 12, 2011

Lucky round 7?

So this is our 7th TTC round. We set it up slightly differently, thus am hoping for a different outcome.

We did a yoga class before one of our inseminations, and the little voice in the last post (shavasana?) told me that tonight was THE night. Cool. And ever since then I keep having to remind myself that J is not yet confirmed pregnant.

She looks different to me in the past 2 days, slightly rounder, softer. Is this possible? Am I hallucinating?

We'll find out a BFN or a BFP right around Christmas, conveniently during the Winter Solstice.

In the meantime, I have a work set to finish off and sleeping to do!

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Hormones

Our naturopathic doctor sent J to get her hormone levels checked. Everything is perfect. Her egg retrieval score (which would be helpful is we were needing to do IVF) is 15 (anything about 11 is considered good, above 15 is superior).

Now that we're into our new schedule, I'm not sure why it took us so long to get to this point. SO MUCH LESS STRESSFUL.

My FIL sold his house and so we're helping to clean it out. A lot of J's baby/childhood stuff is there, so I got to see her childhood room for the very first time (she has aqua ceilings! Covered in glow-in-the-dark stars! NIFTY!). We rescued her Beatrix Potter collection, and there's some other cute kids stuff that we can hopefully keep (including a very cute red table and chair set, although I'm not sure *where* we would put it). Also lots of family heirloom furniture, that is in serious need of a makeover. However I think we should be able to get it sprayed or painted or something (I could do it, but lets be realistic, I can barely keep my chores under control AS IS!).
We're also in the spot of needing to deal with the very real possibility that we're going to get kicked out of our house sometime in 2012. Since we're hoping to produce offspring in 2012, I don't really want to be moving and packing when J is super pregnant/we have a newborn, so we're looking for a new place to live. Looking to buy. Should be interesting.

That's all for now.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Redraw!

So, I totally ate my words with my last post. A lovely friend, one of my TTC buddies, who had been trying FOR A VERY LONG TIME, is now pregnant (although very early, so not sharing). I am not bitter at all for her. I am so pleased, we talked *a lot* about it. I'm sad to lose my TTC buddy, but excited that the potential always exists to become a about-to-be-mommy buddy.

Last May, when we started this whole thing, we decided to just pick a day and start, and then do every other day until a thermal shift.

I'm not sure how we totally ditched that plan and went into a stupid plan. We're ditching the stupid plan and picking a much more regimented system (start day 10, continue every other day until thermal shift, do no more than 2 consecutive days). BD also expressed concern about losing sperm viability during it's 30 minute transfer (sometimes longer), so he's now coming to our house so the turn around is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 minutes. Much better.

It also means less of me hanging around outside his building looking like we're doing a drug transfer. We've set him up with a Zipcar membership, so the he can just pop in a car and run down and then run back. So much easier for all involved.

I don't know if it's because I'm a NICU nurse, but I can't shake the feeling that we're going to end up in the NICU, or that something's going to happen. And I *need* to shake it, because if I obsess over it, I'll channel that energy and it will come to pass. I think it's because all the blogs I seem to read about new Queer parents involve a stint in the NICU. I will *LOSE MY MIND* if we have to stick around in the NICU.

J's naturopath has put her on a progesterone supplement to help even out her post-ovulatory hormones. Everything's looking better though, she's noticed a big change in the 4 months she's been on fish oil (I've been on fish oil for 3 years and notice a big difference when I stop taking it). Her hormones are a little more balanced. We're working *really* hard to tweak our diet still, and now we're onto the whole getting-more-exercise thing. She's not needing to see our chiro as often, which is good. We got a Groupon for a yoga studio that's sort of close to our house, but when I read the fine print it said it was only good for new clients, and both of us have been there before (but not for a LONG time), so we'll see how this pans out. I may end up selling them or giving them as Christmas presents to someone whose never been to this particular studio before. There's a really great online Yoga community, the fee is super cheap, and we'd only have to pay for 1 person. It can be done at our weird times (seriously, 8am doesn't usually work for me, neither does 5 or 8pm on my working days! And I like to do yoga in the daylight).

We're trying to hand onto stress, J's dad is on the mend now, but he had JUST sold his house, so that will be our week project, which I am honestly curious about. A lot of J's childhood is stored in that house, so I'm anxious to see it. She's sometimes very private about her pre-me life, which I have a hard time understanding, but I think I'm being oversensitive.

Anyways, I have to work tonight. Work has been busy busy busy, we have *very* sick babies and are chronically understaffed, so mistakes are starting to happen, which is *terrifying*. They're also trying to change a lot of things right now, which is not a good time to do that, not when we're just trying to keep the ship upright and on a relatively steady course. Teach people different knots when you're not in the middle of a huge storm... Granted this storm's been going on for almost 4 months now, with no signs of slowing down (although by the end of December/middle of January we'll have discharged something like half of the nursery...).

Crazy to think that life is just moving so fast.