This Week in Baby

Subtitled: "Vignettes pulled from Edison-Albright family life."  If you have any squeamishness about bodily functions (the word "vomit" makes you want to vomit, for example) you'll want to skip the first one.  How often in the history of writing do you think that warning has preceded a "vignette"?

***
It's sometime after midnight, Monday blurring into Tuesday time.  I'm sitting on the floor of the bathroom, adjacent to my good porcelain friend.  Sean is nearby ... reading to me, reminding me to breathe, trying to distract me.  We've had a long night.

The doctor on-call chides me for calling at such an hour (really? When should I call the emergency help line about going to the emergency room with non-stop vomiting and a migraine?) But then she gives some good advice: if you're still peeing, you're not dehydrated enough to need IV fluids.

I tell Sean the vomiting is never going to stop, the migraine is never going to go away, and I will probably need an ambulance.  He encourages me to focus on how overtired I clearly am and try to sleep instead. Suddenly filled with a wave of courage and determination, I announce: "I will try ... to pee!"

At this point my memory gets a little fuzzy.  I think I fell asleep for a minute or two.  I remember the bathroom floor mat felt very comfortable and my body felt impossibly heavy.  I came back to reality when Sean said (very softly, gently, lovingly):

"Are you peeing?"

I was not.  But I was laughing, and that laughter lifted me from the floor and eventually got me back to bed for a few hours of fitful-but-healing sleep.  Little known fact: if you can laugh like that, you are not dehydrated enough to need IV fluids. 
***

You would think that merely hearing a baby's heartbeat after actually seeing the baby jump and kick and squirm around on an ultrasound would be anticlimactic.  This is what I told myself, anyway, before our appointment with Dr. M on Wednesday.  I was trying to prepare myself for the very real possibility that we wouldn't hear anything; at this early stage, you can't really tell with the Doppler if no heartbeat is a problem or if no heartbeat means the baby is just really good at dodge ball and hide-and-go-seek.

Dr. M also tried to prepare us for this.  "Your uterus tilts to the back," he says.  I nod, sagely.  Sean gives me a look that says, "How could you possibly know that?"  A woman knows.  The good doctor continues: "Given that, and even under ideal circumstances, we often can't hear the heartbeat until 14 weeks, and you're at 12 weeks.  So you MUST NOT worry if we can't find it today."  Everyone in the room silently acknowledged that we would worry anyway.

Dr. M stared into the middle distance as he tried one spot, and then another.  The nurse did the same, and I wondered what they could see that I couldn't. Another try.  One more just in case and then ...

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump

There's our Little Scooter!  Found you!  The doc mercifully lingers on the spot, and we all just listen.  And cry.  At one point there's a sound like a record scratching.  Dr. M's eyebrows fly up: "Your baby is KICKING!  Did you hear that?"  Yes, we did.  Two words: soccer scholarship.

More crying ensued, followed soon after by pie.  Banana cream.  Mmmmmm.
***

For the record, Hank also enjoys napping.

For the past three months, my interaction with Hank the Dog has mostly taken the form of napping.  I haven't had a lot of energy and I feel bad about it.  On Monday I tried to make it up to him by taking him for a beautiful walk in the early springtime.  We set out, some of us hoping to suddenly realize the benefits of exercise during pregnancy, some of us hoping to kill and eat a small woodland creature or two.  It was a day full of promise and potential--a celebration of new and renewed life.

We'd gotten about a block from our house when it started to hail.

Me: "I'm so sorry, buddy.  We gotta go home."
Hank (with his soulful eyes): "You must be joking.  It's just a little hail!  Ow, something's hailing in my soulful eyes!"

We made up for it today with a nice long morning walk.  Hank was pleased to get his nose and paws dirty in the melting snow.  I even let him look menacingly at a robin for awhile.  It must be Spring.

***

And that's the news from the Edison-Albright family, where all Scooters kick mightily, all the pie is gladly shared, and all the dogs are above average.

Project Delayed

Hi all. We've been sitting on this decision for a couple weeks, but putting this blog on hold isn't as easy as it was to start it up. For a whole bunch of reasons, we've decided to delay project: baby for a couple years. But it has not been for nought! Here's the recap:

• On the plus side, I am completely free of prescription drugs for the first time since 1989 (when I started prescription allergy meds.) I have had a drastic decrease in migraines--one or two a month instead of 3 or 4 a week.
• Unfortunately, my endometriosis symptoms are returning, a little bit worse each month. I can live with it for now, but may need to remedicate if it keeps getting worse.
• As much as we both know it's the right choice for us right now, we're sad. We've gotten to the point now, though, where we can talk about hypothetical baby without being sad, knowing that he/she is still in our future.

Thank you for reading, thank you for lurking and commenting. We'll take this up again when the time is right.

Will it be Dorothy or Theodore?

I wrote in the last post that I pretty much always think I'm pregnant. A monthly ritual that grew out of this in the past was me calling Sean and opening with a cheerful "I'm not pregnant!" It felt different to say it this month, but not so bad. We weren't expecting to get pregnant in the first month of trying, and I haven't been to a doc about the triptans yet, so it's not terrible news. I got a bad migraine Wednesday night and popped a triptan without any worry, which was nice. And it hasn't been so bad, endometriosis symptom-wise. It turns out the vitamin B-50 I take every day to prevent migraines is also good for preventing cramps. Excellent!

But yeah, it's still disappointing. So, based on my recent research, I think we made need "a touch of destiny" to jump start this project.

So, solemnly and according to the pirate code, I vow that if I get pregnant this summer, resultant baby will have a name derived from ancient Greek.

Speaking of Greek ... let's not speak of Greek right now. Certainly not in Greek, though I'm amazed at how much I've learned in four days. I'm going to go put my 100% quiz up on the refrigerator when I'm done writing this, but I'm putting in 8 hours of studying outside of class (which is four hours) every day. Getting pregnant under these conditions would definitely be a miracle--I haven't learned the word for that yet, but I bet I will soon.

Oh, so the subject line ... names help us as mnemonics for vocab words, like in the lesson we learned today there's a word that transliterates roughly to "dorahn" meaning gift ... Dorothy and Theodore both mean "Gift of God" because doro/dore=gift and thy/theo=God. Anyway, I'm keeping my eye on the Greek names.

One small step for Anne ...

I'm not sure how to write this post without getting all gross and graphic ... yeah, not sure it's even possible. I refer you first to this excellent wikipedia article on endometriosis -- it's a good, squeamish read on quite a common thing very few people talk about. I was 12 ("my mother slapped me, my father went out for a bottle of Sangria ... We all wanted it to come!") I'd had my period for about a year and was exhibiting a lot of the classic endometriosis symptoms: long, heavy periods; debilitating cramps; gastrointestinal problems; fatigue and bleeding between periods. There was no way they were going to laparoscopy (although they did do a CT scan and found some little cysts, which is really neither here nor there for endometriosis diagnosis, but sucked, I mean ... 12 years old ...welcome to womanhood.) My gynecologist reasoned that I had enough scar tissue already: they would just start me on birth control and see if that helped.

I know a lot of women have a love-hate relationship with The Pill, but birth control and I have so much history together, I feel I have a word to add on the subject. We tried a bunch of different types, trying to find something where the side effects wouldn't completely negate the benefits. I was on pills that gave me morning sickness, made me lactate, gave me facial hair, made my acne worse, and made it awfully easy to gain weight (and difficult to lose it). It made adolescence just that much more .... more. But birth control also made my periods shorter and more predictable: the cramps and other symptoms were terrible once a month, not all the time. As I got older and we narrowed down the options, the birth control seemed to be doing a better and better job of handling the really bad stuff. When I was giving my medical history to the physician's assistant at the MFM office, I completely forgot to mention endometriosis--it's been that long since I worried about it.

So, tonight I'm not starting another pack of Yazmin ("Yaz! I will pretend I am having a casual conversation while I very quickly list all the side effects of this drug! I didn't go to med school for nothing! Yaz!") and I have, unsurprisingly, mixed feelings. The only time I've been off the pill in recent memory was when a random student health doc at MSU wouldn't refill my prescription because she thought it was irresponsible to give birth control to a woman with chronic migraines. So I had to skip a month before I could go back on (with a scrip from a reasonable doctor) and ... cue the worst migraines of my life, the worst cramps, bleeding all the time ... I couldn't wait to get my normal life back, nicely regulated.

I'm in a different place now: I want to try to have a baby. I worry about scarring, pain, all of that ... but I'm also feeling adventurous. This is totally new territory for me, with potentially life-changing results. Glad I'm not in it alone. =)

Song for Maxalt

Da na na na nuh
Woke up this morning
Da na na na nuh
With a migraine
Da na na na nuh
Took a triptan
Da na na na nuh
Went back to bed
Da na na na nuh
B ...
E ...
D ...
Bed.

Sometimes I feel really hopeful about getting my medical act together pre-pregnancy. Not on migraine mornings, when I wake up and reach for a triptan. I try to wake up at the same time every morning and go to bed around the same time each night (that part is more difficult). The only coping strategy I have right now is to take a pill and go back to bed for an hour or two with npr on to make sure I don't sleep all day. This usually results in weird, lost hours of non-sleep and anxiety nightmares mixed with npr stories. Like, this morning, I think I cried a lot at Story Corps but I don't remember the story or whether it really happened at all. I did force myself fully awake when I realized they were interviewing someone about reproductive rights; the interviewee turned out to be one of the people I interviewed for my senior thesis in journalism. Cool!

I'm looking forward to giving up the triptans--they make me dopey, sleepy, grumpy (insert Disney dwarf name here.) This has been "the fix" for so long, though, that I'm nervous about experimenting ... I know from experience what happens when I don't treat or under-treat a migraine, and the best part of it is the long and expensive emergency room visit. Those visits are another reason I'm glad we're figuring this out pre-baby.

My thoughts aren't cohering, I may go back to bed for awhile. Better dreams listening to the Diane Rehm show?