Post D&C

Well, it's over. We just got home from the hospital. Everything went well and I am sitting here eating some soup on the couch. I am still sort of woozy from the anesthesia, and a tiny bit crampy, but other than that, I am feeling pretty good. I'm bleeding quite a bit, but apparently that is normal. I'm just going to sleep, read, and watch tv for the rest of the day and take it easy. Thanks for the words of encouragement!

Change of Plans

Everything happened so fast yesterday - all of a sudden I was talking to my RE and the IVF coordinator and my OB and the OB nurse trying to find answers to why my hcg is so high and we can't see anything. I guess they all got freaked out thinking that something could be wrong, like a molar pregnancy or something, and my RE decided that I needed a D&C asap. So. I'm leaving in 5 minutes for my D&C at the hospital. To say I'm terrified is an understatement. But, at this point I'm terrified of having it pass naturally, too, so at least this way it will be over and done with. Surgery just scares me. Everyone reassures me that this is an easy procedure with minimal pain and a fast recovery time. I hope they're right! My regular OB is doing the procedure, so we don't have to travel 2 hours to the RE's office. That's a nice change. I'll update when I can about how it goes. Wish me luck!

Hcg Level

I just got a call from my RE's nurse with my beta from yesterday (what should have been 7w5d). It is over 20,000 still! I thought it would be SO much lower. So, it seems I have a ways to go before my body decides I'm not pregnant. We'll check the level next week to see if it is going down appropriately.

Update

Yesterday we went back to the doctor for another ultrasound (no change from last week) and to discuss my options. The RE gave me 3 options: 1. Expectant therapy, which means we wait for a natural miscarriage to occur. 2. A D&C, which is surgery to dilate and vacuum out the uterus. 3. A shot that causes cramping and expells what is in the uterus. None of these sound particulary appealing, but I had already decided that I wanted to wait and have it happen naturally. My body has been through enough lately and there is no way I want to have surgery or another injection that has yucky side effects. We are monitoring my hcg levels weekly and hopefully when they get back down to zero, my body will realize it's not pregnant and take care of things naturally. If that doesn't happen, then we'll revisit the D&C option.

I guess I am still in shock. I am not crying as much or nearly as upset as I was after our 1st IVF. I am just very, very bitter. I don't want to try again for a long time. I'm not giving up, but I need a break. Mentally and physically. I need to step away from all this crap and feel like a normal person for a little while. We'll use our frozen embryos eventually, but definitely not in 2008. Again, thank you to all of you for your kind words and support. It means so much to me and really gives me strength.

Thank You

Thank you so much to all of you for your kind words. It means so much to me that you all are out there thinking of us and praying for us, even though I don't even know you. I will update you on Monday after my appointment. Please keep those prayers coming - I really need them.

7 week ultrasound

Today my worst nightmare came true. There was no fetal pole, no yolk sac, and no heartbeat. Just an empty gestational sac. The pregnancy is over. It's called a missed miscarriage. I've had no bleeding or symptoms that things were going wrong. I go back on Monday to discuss the D&C.

My cute new maternity shirt

I found this super cute maternity t-shirt today at our neighborhood shops' sidewalk sale. It's a fortune cookie shirt that was 75% off so I got it for $6.99! I'll be able to wear it when I am showing and obviously pregnant. I think it's so fun! :)

6 Weeks!

6 weeks today! I've really been bloated the last few days...like unbuttoning the pants bloated. A friend of ours came over tonight and said that I definitely look pregnant! I haven't developed any new symptoms and luckily the morning sickness hasn't hit yet (thank you, Lord!). Maybe I'll be one of the lucky 20% that doesn't get it!

Next week is our ultrasound and I can't wait! I think once we actually see the baby and the heartbeat, I'll finally believe it's real. Right now, it's hard to believe that there is actually something growing inside me. I can't wait until I can feel the baby kicking and know that everything is okay. I know I have a long way to go until then and I'm trying to be relaxed and have faith that everything is going the way it's supposed to inside me.

Literary Meme

I've seen lots of these on other blogs and decided to do it myself. Mainly because I LOVE to read. I LIVE to read. My baby is going to be reading when he/she comes out of the womb. Feel free to comment on any of your favorites! Happy reading!


Here's how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold/italicize those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE - mine are in red.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (I've read parts...does that count?)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - (I DESPISE this book!)

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -- Another all-time fave. Sydney Carton is my hero.

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I wrote my AP English essay on this!)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Beta #3

Wow - the last beta is in and I feel like we've reached another milestone. It was 1228! That's a doubling time of 47.72 hours, so we are exactly on target! Now we just hang out and wait until my first o.b. scan on August 13th. That's a week and a half away but seems like years!

Yesterday I had an ultrasound but it was too soon to see anything. I had a bit of a scare because I started having bad chest and upper back pains yesterday morning. I couldn't tell if it was my chest hurting and radiating to my back or vice versa. Anyway, I called the RE because
chest pain = scary in my book. She wanted me to come in right away to see if I had any fluid or bleeding in my abdomen or lungs. She did an ultrasound to make sure everything was clear, which it was. She focused on my ovaries and basically just breezed past my uterus and said it's way too soon to see anything. I knew it was too soon, but I was still hoping she'd check it out and we could see a black hole or little dot or something. Oh, well.

So we never did figure out what was causing the chest pains...she said it could be a million things. Since it is gone today and I feel fine, I'm assuming it was not pregnancy/gynologicallly related and was either serious indigestion or something. I'm still gratefully for every day I wake up pregnant!