I'm Back

Oops. June 19th and then...nothing. Except: morning sickness that lasted all day, bouts of insomnia (2 a.m. to 6 a.m. is my most awake time, wierd), exhaustion, wierd pains (especially when walking or standing) and generally getting giant.

Here are some updates: we are expecting two boys! yipes!!

• have been having very vivid dreams - some about not being able to do things (i.e. it's snowed 3 feet but i get to the mountain having forgotten my poles, helmet, gloves and goggles so I can't ski with everyone else) others about going back to work - and coming home to my kids who cry for their nanny instead of me, and some about John either leaving me or having an affair (couldn't be further from actuality - i could not go through this without his amazing help!)
• apparently, according to Dr. C, everything I experience is "normal." Horrendous headaches, vicious heartburn, and the wierd pains above my cervix that feel like a combo of weights and clamps and jabs, to not feeling the babies yet - even though I'm almost 21 weeks pregnant
• you will be different pregnant with twins than you would be pregnant with one baby - bigger, more exhausted, sicker, more round ligament and other wierd pains.
• i skipped almost immediately from morning sickness (ended at about week 18-19) to having back pain and trouble sleeping and getting comfortable - no second trimester honeymoon for those of us expecting twins!

For all the pain and suffering, being an infertility vet, I couldn't be happier to be at the halfway mark to having not only one, but two, hopefully healthy babies!

Oh Boy Oh Boy. Or Oh Boy Oh Girl. Or Oh Girl Oh Girl.

Wow. That's the polite version of what I've been repeating all day. The other version starts with Holy. Or, as my husband has been saying as code for, I can't believe we're pregnant, Oh Boy.

So I had my 8 week ultrasound today. At first, I followed the nurse without my husband. Something made me ask her if he could be there - and she said yes. So I went back out and got him. Thank God I did.

Almost immediately after inserting the "wand" (very polite term), the nurse asked, "How many transfers did you have?"

I knew that was a bad sign.

I said, "I didn't have IVF. I had an IUI."

Then she said, "Well, take a look at your two babies. "

I started crying. I honestly couldn't - and still can't really - believe it. But there they were. Both of them.

Little hearts beating like crazy and side by side, like they were looking at each other.

I know I should be just happy - overjoyed - I'll get a complete family (if everything goes okay) all at once. And I am happy - but I'm also terrified.

What if they aren't okay? What if they're born too early? What if I get so enormous my stomach never recovers? What if my back (which is already very bad) can't handle the weight and strain? How will we afford two cribs, two high chairs, double amounts of everything? A bigger house?

To make it short, I'm freaking out.

The doctor told me that with my number of follicles - just three - he had only seen twins once or twice in twenty five years. As usual, I seem to be in that crazy 1%.

My husband was great about it - he was calm, excited and supportive - trying to hug and kiss me in the waiting room (I didn't want to talk about it in front of all the couples I knew could be finding out that yet another IVF cycle had failed) and asked for scissors so he could cut off the best ultrasound picture of "babies A and B" to keep in his wallet.

My sister was also amazing - she was incredibly happy and pointed out all the great things her friends with twins have told her (built-in playmate, only having to be pregnant once, getting sleep deprivation over all at once, learning to share from the start....).

But still, I'm really nervous. I read that I need to eat more - I feel like it's been a struggle to eat as much as I'm already eating (I'm nauseous and exhausted all the time, and I guess that makes sense now). I was planning to try to gain only about 15-20 pounds, because I'm already overweight, but that's off the table now.

Wow. Or, as my husband has started saying, wow wow.

Wow...WOW!

More Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

So, I'm on day 40 and it feels like each day is a week long. Why? Well, when you've been through infertility, you are desperate for those "safe"milestones, like 12 weeks. Speaking of 12 weeks, is it 12 weeks pregnant, or 12 weeks fetal age - since those two are different? Apparently, because they normally can't tell when you got pregnant (this makes me laugh, since I wasn't romping four times a day for weeks on end - no, I was racing at 80 mph to get a sperm sample to the lab in time and then lying on a table staring up at a flourescent light) so they time it from the first day of your last period.

Well, whether I'm six or eight weeks pregnant, it's starting to feel real. If I don't eat approximately every 1-2 hours, I start to feel sick, and I get tired - I mean exhausted - really easily. This morning I got out my workout clothes, and felt like I'd just run a marathon.

My sister told me that she started feeling tired at week 7 - and it was like clockwork for me too.

As annoying as the nausea is (I wake up about every 3 hours having to pee, and by 3 a.m. I'll throw up if I don't eat something - bizarro) I am so glad for it, because it tells me that I'm still pregnant.

I go to see my doctor for the first time this Thursday for an ultrasound, and the whole thing will be such an enormous relief (if everything is okay).

I thought that once I got pregnant, the endless waiting game I played on the infertility treadmill would be over. Ha! Not to complain - I feel incredibly lucky to be waiting to have an ultrasound to see if the little thingy (that's the technical term) inside me is okay, instead of waiting to have an ultrasound to see if my ovaries are reacting to stomach injections of hamster hormones. But the waiting continues, and is definitely the hardest part.

The No No List

Not that I'm complaining - because after trying for a year and a half to get pregnant (and knowing that we were really, really lucky not to battle for longer than that) - there's not much that's more obnoxious than a pregnant woman complaining. So, these are just facts.

I have arthritis of the spine - spondylothesis - which causes me a lot of pain occasionally. Last week started one of those occasions. I haven't slept for longer than two hours at a stretch in over a week because when I do, my back seizes up and spasms and wakes me up. I have to get up and walk around (lots of fun at 1, 3, 5, and 7 a.m.) to slow the pain a little. Last night I slept sitting up for part of the night.

And guess what? The treatment is high doses of anti-inflammatories (Advil, Motrin, etc.) which I can't take. Also recommended is heat - and heating pads are out while you are pregnant. Soooo, that leaves me with weight loss (not recommended but at this point, I feel like if I'm getting all the nutrients I need to, losing a few pounds definitely won't hurt) and physical therapy.

Of course, both of those take time. I guess it's just good practice for getting up 5 (7? 9? 12?) times a night with a baby.

While I'm thinking of it, here's the list of what's off-limits while you are pregnant (some are obvious, some are not):
drugs
drinking (can cause mental retardation among other problems)
smoking
heating pads
aspirin, advil, motrin - basically all pain-killers other than Tylenol
aspirin creams (Ben-Gay, Aspercream, Icy Hot)
swordfish, tuna and other fishes high in mercury (once a week is okay, supposedly)
deli meats (something called lysteria)
soft unpasteurized cheeses
raw fish & meat (goodbye sushi)
spray tanning (oh goodie, fat and pale)


I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch of things out...but that's what comes to mind so far. It's pretty much a nine (ten) month party of designated driving and cheese sandwiches. Oh, wait - you can eat deli meat if you heat it to 180 degrees. Mmmmmm. Nothing I like better than a hot bologna sandwich! Except being pregnant, of course.

Early Signs of Pregnancy

When I was trying to get pregnant, I think I googled "early signs of pregnancy" about 43 times. The results would tell me helpful things like:
If you missed a period, you might be pregnant.

That's really helpful when you're going through infertility treatments and you want to know whether you might be pregnant a week (or ten days) before you are even supposed to get your period.

I can only go by my own experience, but for me, I felt completely fine, normal and not wierd at all for the first week after ovulation. But about six or seven days after I'd had the IUI (that's intrauterine insemination, for those of you who are new to this) my breasts got really sore - in a way that was a little different from the way they get sore before my period. It was like the skin itself was sensitive - I hardly wanted the sheet to touch me at night.

I happened to be at an ob-gyn appointment with my sister about eight days after the IUI, and asked her about it. She said it was too early to have breast tenderness as a sign of pregnancy - that it might have been from the shots I'd been taking prior to ovulation (I used the Gonal-F pen to help me develop more eggs and a progesterone shot to trigger ovulation).

Soooo....

She was wrong.

I also had period-like cramps - slightly less intense, and only on one side (four weeks later, I'm still having slight cramps from time to time on that side - and apparently that's normal). But I didn't break out the way I usually do on about day 24-25 of my cycle (four days before I usually get my period), and my cramps didn't get severe on day 28, the way they usually did.

I was also really, really out of breath going up stairs by day 10 (after ovulation). I know it wasn't just being out of shape because it was happening on the same stairs I take all the time without any shortness of breath.

Some women claim that they "just know." I didn't. I was so busy and stressed out right after the IUI that the only reason I thought it might work was that I figured that there was no way that it would - making it more likely that it would (reverse psychology?).

I got the first fuzzy line eleven days after the IUI (11 days after ovulation). My blood pregnancy test was positive fourteen days after. My HcG level was 263, which is apparently "excellent"- whatever that means. I'm guessing (hoping) that it's been rising ever since because I've definitely been feeling nauseous (HcG is the hormone responsible for morning sickness - or all-day sickness as I think it should be called). Supposedly the level doubles approximately every 48 hours.

Other than feeling sick when my stomach is empty, I'm hungry almost all the time. Or at least my stomach makes me think I'm hungry - I get full much more quickly than I used to, and at night, I cannot tolerate sweets (used to have a Skinny Cow almost every night) or I get leg cramps and get jumpy. Wierd.

Two (Fuzzy) Pink Lines

For months - about 18, to be exact - I've been using early pregnancy tests (because I am impatient - and if you are dealing with or have dealt with infertility, you know what I'm talking about). They'd all been negative - through temperature taking, ovulation predictor sticks, IUIs and Clomid - all negative. So, you'd think that I'd know exactly what a negative test looks like.

But two weeks ago, as I stared at the EPT test, I couldn't tell if the faint, faint, faint second line I was seeing was a mistake or just the way a negative test looks - or if it was actually positive.

My advice to you - if you're as impatient as I am and feel like every day of your cycle lasts two weeks - is to keep the test lying there for a little while. I know they tell you not to - but when the tests were negative, no matter how long I left the test sitting, the one line stayed one line.

But this time was different. After a few hours, there was a second line!

It was fuzzy and much lighter than the test line, but it was definitely a second line. Or was it?

My husband thought so. So I called my sister - who has two kids - and after finishing screaming in happiness, she told me that in both of her pregnancies, she got a fuzzy second line when she was pregnant. "Oh my God!" she yelled, "You are totally pregnant!"

And she was totally right. I had a blood test three days later which confirmed the fuzzy line (and by the way, if you get a fuzzy line, spring for a digital home test - you'll get a YES or NO or PREGNANT or NOT PREGNANT - lots easier than deciphering the fuzziness of lines.

So, I'm now a whopping 23 days pregnant - or five weeks - since they count the pregnancy from the first day of your last period (wierd). And every day I am convinced that it's not real or that it won't last - every time I go to the bathroom I expect to get my period.

What's normal that you might think is not (or at least it's what I'm experiencing): period-like cramps, sore and wierd-feeling breasts as early as a week after ovulation, slight nausea (mine is worst in the afternoon) and feeling hungry all the time (but not wanting to eat more than a small meal).

More on those - and other info - later.