BrooklynGirl

Beta Day + One Year

The most common kind of email I get from readers who stumble across this blog is from those who want to compare low beta experiences.  Sometimes they' re looking for a magic bullet--something they can do to make that hCG number magically climb into the normal range--but mostly they're just looking to commiserate.

Because low betas suck.  They suck so much.  It's an extra cruel twist of the infertile knife, which was plenty sharp to begin with.  Are you pregnant?  Are you not pregnant?  Were you briefly pregnant, but now not so much?  Were the embryos just rattling around in your teflon coated uterus for awhile before finding a place to implant and start producing that lovely, lovely hCG?

Who knows?  Nobody knows.  The nurse who calls to give you the results doesn't know.  Maybe she's new and has been told that anything over a 5 is positive so she says congratulations even though you know, courtesy of the internets, that it should be at least 50.  The doctor doesn't know, when you talk to him to double check what the nurse has said.  "Anything can happen," he says, but he's grim when he tells you to come back in two days for another blood test.

And what do you do during those two days?  What do you tell the people who knew that you were cycling when they ask, "Well....what's the news?"  How do you explain that you don't know?  That even though you've spent $12,000 at this leading edge clinic where even Celine Dion went to get pregnant, nobody can tell you anything for sure.  "You can't be a little pregnant," those friends might say, trying to make a joke, but of course you know that you can, that you are, and that maybe being a little pregnant is worse than not being pregnant at all.

But what makes it worse is the same thing that keeps you going.  You still have hope--hope that this will end differently than it did last time, that the next blood test will be better, that the first ultrasound will find something no one expected to see.

What you can't bring yourself to consider, though, is that a year from now, you'll still be brought to tears remembering that phone call from the clinic, but you won't have time to sit down and have a good cry because you're too busy taking care of this.

It's a Boy

My son was born on Friday, August 26th, at 10:18 a.m.  He weighed an even 8lbs and measured 21 inches long. His father and I think he's just about perfect.

My "wish" for a high intervention birth was granted, and somewhere in the middle of all of those interventions, it occurred to me that I would really hate to have to eat my words, but further thoughts on that will have to wait until we get some sleep.

For now, please know that we're happy, exhausted, and feeling unbelievably blessed.

Induction Junction

There is a plan:

I'm to report to the hospital tonight at 6 pm for cervidil, with pitocin to follow tomorrow morning.  The OB anticipates delivery sometime Thursday afternoon/evening.

I got the "this is a big baby so you might need a c-section" speech, and while I'm not itching to have a c-section, I'm not all that worked up about the possibility.

I'll be back when there's news, but it's not likely to be until we're all home.  Wow.  How strange it is to type that.

In the meantime, if you haven't read Malcolm Gladwell's article about the state of health insurance coverage in the U.S. in this week's New Yorker, it's an interesting read.  Especially today.   

Phone Calls I Have Never Made

I'm not a big phone person.  If I could do all my communicating in person or via email or IM, I'd be happy.   True, there was that dark teenagery period when the phone was surgically connected to my ear, and I spent hours doing that three-way calling trick when you call one friend and get her to say bad things about another friend who is silently listening (and fuming) on the other line, but I'm much more mature now.

So, even though I have friends and family who are phone people, the fact that I am known to respond to a phone message with an email has generally persuaded folks not to call with great frequency.  Except for now.

Oh no, now that I'm 39.5 weeks pregnant, everyone who's anyone finds a reason to call me on a daily basis.  Sometimes there's a pretense for the call--my mom who called to give me the update on her doctor's visit (she's switching to Allegra-D); my dad who called to give me his review of March of the Penguins (apparently the male and female penguins share responsibility for caring for the penguin egg equally--isn't that nice?); a college friend who called to see if the phone number she had for me was correct (?????); my mother in law who called to let me know her schedule for Thursday morning just in case I, you know, needed her for anything. 

Pretense or not, eventually a caller will say, "So, you know I was really calling to see if you'd had the baby yet."

And I've tried to come up with a clever retort, but--never having called someone to ask them if they've had a baby--I'm a little stymied.  Because it seems a little, I don't know, rude?  I mean, it's not like we're going to forget to tell anyone that we had a baby.  It's the kind of event that gets your attention and that you probably want to share with your nearest and dearest as soon as is practical, right? 

So, why call?   The only possible outcomes I see are these:

A) You're going to be talking to someone who has not yet had a baby and therefore has nothing to talk about except how she's sitting around waiting to have a baby

or

B) You're going to be talking to someone who has just had a baby but has been so completely overwhelmed that she hasn't had the time to let you know that she's had the baby and therefore has no time to talk to you now.

What good can come from that?

I'm mostly kidding.  It's nice to know that people are thinking about us.  Kind of.

Alien Life

There's a scene at the beginning of Aliens in which Ripley is having a nightmare that there's an alien in her stomach that's about to burst through her ribcage. She's lying in a hospital bed and pulls her gown up to reveal her stomach where we can see the outline of something decidedly foreign moving within. The thing protrudes more and more from her stomach until it seems certain that something's going to give. And then she wakes up.

I'm feeling a certain kinship with Ripley these days.   It's only in the last few weeks that I've been able to see actual movement, and there's something just plain freaky about recognizing that there's a critter in there.  And it's going to have to come out. 

I've been so consumed with the pregnancy that I haven't given that much thought to the parenting.   I have no idea what kind of mother I'm going to be, either in the short-term or the long-term.  I look around the small bedroom, decorated and stocked with supplies, and try to imagine a critter living in there, but it still feels unreal.

Alien, indeed.

It's the Hormones, Right?

If you don't live in NYC, you may not know that the parking situation here sucks.  In my little corner of Brooklyn it sucks less than it did in Manhattan, but that is not saying much.  Generally speaking, what makes it suck (besides too many cars and too few parking spaces) is alternate side parking: to wit, on some days you cannot park on some streets for some number of hours.  It's not a lot of hours, but it's enough hours to prevent you from just parking your car there and forgetting about it until the next time you need it.

So, when you park your car, you drive around a lot looking for a space, and you often wind up parking somewhere that is not necessarily close to where you live.  I mean, it's close enough that it's convenient when you're going on a field trip to Target, say, but not so close that you necessarily walk by it or see it on a daily basis. 

And since you don't see it all the time, sometimes you forget exactly where it is.  The last person to park our car was my husband.  His doing so was an act of generosity, as I desperately needed to pee at the time and lacked the fortitude to hang in there for the parking hunt.  When he came back, he reported the location of the car, and I made a mental note of that location, as well as the fact that I wouldn't have to move it until after I splurged and drove to my doctor's appointment mid-week (the splurge is that the hospital has valet parking that costs about $20--yeah, I know).

So, this morning, I headed off for the car and ultimately the doctor.  I arrived at the place I believed the car to be and....it wasn't there.  I looked around, walked up and down the block, and then called my husband.  We speculated for a moment about whether the car had been towed or stolen or whether we had merely "lost" it and then I made a dash for the subway and the doctor.  I was trying to be a good sport, but I was obsessed both with being late for my non-stress test and with wondering how we would get a child home from the hospital without a car (yes, I know people in NYC do this all the time, but we installed a car seat, and I wanted to use it dammit).

My husband met me at the doctor and then accompanied me home--though it was the middle of the work day--to help locate the car.  I manned the phones at home.  Not 2 minutes after he left, he called to report that he was standing in front of the car--which was exactly where he had told me it would be and exactly where I had not found it.

I was...mortified.  I have since gone and looked at the car with my own eyes, and it is most assuredly there.  I can't imagine how I missed it earlier.  It's like a hallucination, only not. 

******

Anyway....38 weeks tomorrow and still dilated 1 cm.  So, no surprise induction tonight or anytime soon.   Alas.

Hurry Up and Wait

I was getting used to the idea of early induction.  We assembled the stroller.  We installed the car seat.  We bought and laundered an ample supply of onesies.  I wouldn't say we're ready, but we're approaching ready.  Ready-ish.

My cervix, however, is pretty far from ready--barely 1 cm dilated.  My OB feels that inducing at this point--even a week from this point--wouldn't be too much fun for anyone and would more than likely end in a c-section.  Since the kid is holding its own with reactive NSTs and an estimated weight of 6 lbs, 11 oz, we're going to wait. 

So, unless something changes, we'll wait until my due date--August 25th--and induce if the kid doesn't decide to come on his/her own.

Huh.  Looks like I need to find a way to amuse myself for the next few weeks.

It's a Cliche Because It's True

I bet you've seen this in a movie or a televisions show: it's late on Christmas Eve and Mom and Dad are sitting in the soft-glow light of the Christmas tree.  Half eaten cookies and/or half-drunk cups of eggnog are close at hand.  Beyond the window, snow is falling.  It's a beautiful and peaceful scene except that Mom and Dad are glaring at each other and some half-assembled toy at their feet that they *must* put together before Christmas morning or else they will shake Junior's faith in Santa and the notion of justice in the world. 

Well, that was us--minus the cookies and eggnog--with the Snap-N-Go this weekend.  For the uninitiated, the SNG is a supposedly universal carrier into which you snap your car seat to create a stroller-like ensemble for itty bitty babies.  There are slight adjustments that you make to the frame to accommodate your specific car seat brand--and though these adjustments require a screwdriver and pliers, they seemed relatively straightforward.  I monkeyed around with it for an hour or so on Friday before throwing up my hands in frustration and putting my husband in charge of figuring it out.

My husband is rather a handy fellow, I must say.  He installs air conditioners, builds bookshelves, and replaces planks in the deck with aplomb so I wasn't too worried about the SNG.  Over the course of a few hours, however, it became clear that the poor man had met his match.   It is uncommonly difficult to position the various bars and such where the good people at Baby Trend suggest they should go.  The screws don't want to screw (insert your own double entendre here).

I didn't have to look too hard before I found similar stories from other SNG assemblers online--as well as various work-arounds.  Somehow I missed these prior to purchase.  Besides, half of New York City has the SNG/Graco car seat combo--did everyone struggle this much?

Anyway, I think we've mostly got it covered.  Next up: replacing the car seat cover that I removed to wash.  Like I'm ever going to figure out how to thread that harness back in correctly.  Yeah, right.

Tempus Fugit

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the induction possibility--lots of interesting food for thought.  To be clear, the induction is being considered because of the Factor V, a type of thrombophilia with which I was diagnosed last fall.  This particular mutation means that I have a greater proclivity towards producing unwelcome blood clots, especially during pregnancy when blood volume goes up, and especially in the vascular nirvana that is the placenta.  I've been dosing myself with heparin twice daily to stave off this possibility, but at some point, apparently the clots become inevitable, and so before that happens, the doctor wants to make a break for it. 

It makes sense--it's just the potential soon-ness of it all that's mind blowing. 

In the meantime, we've kicked preparation up a notch.  The room is not only painted, but also contains a crib, a dresser, and a changing pad.  There is a car seat in the house (if not the car).

We took a newborn care class earlier this week that freaked us both right out.  I felt much more confident as a potential parent when I arrived than when I left, which I don't think is the way it's supposed to work.   We spent an inordinately long time talking about how one picks up a baby--something it hadn't even occurred to me to worry about.  And let's not even talk about the swaddling.  There should be Ph.D. programs in Swaddology.  And they shouldn't admit me.

How Much Intervention Is Too Much?

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a fan of medical intervention in general and for this birth in particular.*  As I see it, Mother Nature had plenty of time to dazzle me with her omnipotence in the getting me pregnant and keeping me pregnant departments, but Her track record in that regard is not so good.  So, in doctors, nurses,  and hospitals I trust. 

Not that the high intervention care has been perfect, mind you, but it has at least been...scrutable.  If I don't understand something the doctors/nurses are doing, I can ask questions and get answers.  Mother Nature has been a little less responsive. 

But here's the issue: from very early, my OB and my hematologist told me that they would not have me go past my due date.  Factor V carries with it some nasty birth-related risks that we'd all like to avoid, but we never talked specifically about what not going past my due date entailed.

Until today.

When my OB said she was thinking about induction.  At 38 weeks.  Or 2 weeks from now. 

Factor V stuff aside, I have to say that induction has its appeal: it would be nice to put aside some of those night terrors.  The baby would be here, actually here, instead of in the limbo we have now.

But induction 2 full weeks early?  I need some time to cogitate on that.  We'll decide next week, after an ultrasound and some gnashing of teeth.

Holy shit.

*Disclaimer: these are my choices for me--I in no way believe that this philosophy is appropriate for everyone.