Transition!

I have been hot and cold with this blog for a while. The pressure of having to post daily or even just a few times a week got to me. I dropped it all instead of just posting when I wanted to.

I started the blog as a way to decompress from my wedding planning (I planned it all myself in like 4 months). It definitely helped. Then life got busy and I had nothing to say.

But now, as you can tell by the blog design I have plenty to say and talk about. I am going to try to post often, but it will be much more about posting when I want to share or document something. I am keeping a journal for my pregnancy, but I wanted to post here as well. I am going to use this almost as a diary to my baby as we progress through this pregnancy and beyond.

I already have some posts that I pre-wrote, but before I post those I wanted to do a little bit of a transition post. The last time I posted here it was a lot of venting about my miscarriage so I didn’t want it to be so cut and move on as it otherwise would have seemed.

So… this post might be a little long.

I found out about my miscarriage on March 15 th , 2016. I was 10w5d pregnant
and I was going in for a regularly scheduled midwife ultrasound. It was obvious pretty quickly that something wasn’t right, but I tried to keep my hopes up initially. My husband couldn’t make it that day so my mom came with me instead. My midwife was training another one so they were both in the room. At first they had tried to do an abdominal ultrasound, when that wasn’t showing anything they gave me a vaginal ultrasound. It was obvious that the midwives were getting nervous at this point and didn’t know what to say or do. They went ahead and called the OB on call.

He took quite a while to show up. He did and wasn’t able to find the baby, or if he did, he did not point it out to me. He gave me time to get dressed and went out. In the time it took for him to get back I called Thomas and he was able to make it to the hospital.

The doctor explained that it was most likely a chromosomal defect that caused the miscarriage. He said that the baby was destined to not survive since conception. He also said that “at least you know you can get pregnant”. As you can imagine this was not helpful at all (I have learned since that this particular doctor has been a pretty bad doctor to two of my friends).

I requested to have a more thorough ultrasound done by radiology just to ensure that the baby was indeed gone. A stage of grief I suppose. My sister had told me that they had told her something similar when she was pregnant with my youngest niece and so she insisted on a more detailed ultrasound in which they were able to find the baby hidden. That was not the case for me, but I couldn’t just let it go without making absolutely sure. At this ultrasound we were able to see the baby, who had stopped growing at 7w2d (per measurements).

I passed the baby just before midnight on 3/16/16, at home, in my bathroom. Thomas was sleeping. He got up, but he had to go to work the next day. I think it was his way of coping. I stayed at home for the rest of the week. My family visited me and I tried to take it easy. I definitely was going through some denial. I didn’t cry too much at first.

It was something that happened over time.

I don’t think I will ever be done grieving. I was recently speaking with someone who had a couple of miscarriages over 45 years ago and she still thinks about the baby’s that she never held.

I knew that I wanted to try and conceive right away. Partly it was the need to fill the void (although one baby does not replace the other in no way whatsoever) and partly for the same reason I was in a hurry to conceive to begin with – I’m not in my 20’s anymore.

I tracked my cycles using Ovulation Prediction Kits (like a pregnancy test, but it tracks when you ovulate) and in my 3 rd cycle after my miscarriage I conceived again – on July 1 st , 2016.

I was happy, but I was also super-duper nervous. I had a panic attack at my first ultrasound and I just couldn’t look at the screen. Thomas did well and I glanced over. The doctor understood my anxiety and asked if I would like to come in again two weeks later to help me keep calm. Normally the next appointment wouldn’t have been for a month. From that point (I was 6 weeks at the time) I had an ultrasound done every 2 weeks until I was 15 weeks.

The posts that I will be putting up in the coming days were written in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I am now almost 18 weeks along with an estimated due date of March 24, 2017.

Ribs O Pain

I was going to write about my week today but I need to feel sorry for myself for a little bit. This is a long post, and it deals with my chronic pain and my fears of being able to be pregnant. I’d appreciate you reading it, but I understand that there are a lot of words and nothing in ways of pictures. 

I know that there are many, many people who are dealing with a lot more pain than I am. But that does mean that my pain doesn’t matter. It does. 

I’ve always had upper back pain. Okay, not always, but from about the age of 14. I’m a couple of months away from my 30^th birthday now. That pain, though, would be strong some days and less severe other days. I was prescribed a muscle relaxant that I would take when the pain got to be too strong for me. I remember that from about 6/2014 2012 and before I was maybe taking it once a month. 

Then in July 2014 I got hurt. I don’t know how, exactly, though. The only thing I remember is zipping up a dress and feeling pain down my arm. I thought I pulled a muscle or something. Nearly a year later I found out that I had broken 5 ribs on my right side. During that year I was in so much pain I didn’t want to do anything. Towards the fall I couldn’t get up or lay down without help. I had to lay on my right side to have some type of relief.  The doctor’s I went to told me it was just inflammation and to take some anti-inflammatory medication – which never seemed to help. 

Finally in May 2013 a doctor at my new insurance through Kaiser ordered me an x-ray, which revealed 3 broken bones. An MRI (or was it CT scan?) later on revealed 2 other broken bones.  

I got the call at work and started to cry. I wasn’t imagining the pain after all! There was a reason that I felt stabbing pain under my right breast. 

Then came another problem. Why was I still in pain if my initial injury was nearly a year earlier?  

After seeing different doctors, having scans, blood work, and countless other things done I was given the sad news: if you’re still in pain you will probably always be. It’s unlikely it will get better. 

The bones had healed somewhat. They are still healing now, though, 2 years later. So the pain that I feel now is not the broken ribs, but the result of the ribs being broken. 

Nerve damage. The doctor explained that when the ribs broke they probably damaged the nerve that runs from the spine in between the ribs. While nerves do heal, they should have healed by now. 

So the answer is medication. I’m on a nerve pain medicine called Gabapentin. I’m at the highest dosage (800mg, 3 x a day) and I’m taking Tramadol along with it twice a day. 

I’m still in a lot of pain. I feel it all the way from under my right breast to my back. Sometimes, when the pain is more unbearable than other times, I take a Norco instead of the Tramadol. But I’m afraid that I’m hurting myself taking so many medications.

The last few days the pain has been worse than it has been (maybe the adrenaline of the wedding and honeymoon masked the pain?) and so I started thinking about when I have kids. 

When Thomas and I decide that we want to have a baby I will have to be taken off the Gabapentin. It’s not compatible with pregnancy. Thinking about this makes me cry. I want more than anything to be pregnant and have babies, but how can I do that if my body doesn’t agree with it? If my body will betray me and give be so much pain that I can’t handle being pregnant. 

I’m so afraid of not being able to have my own children. I worry about our finances. While I won’t lose my job (a positive of being a government employee), I only have so much paid time off, and it’s nowhere near enough to cover 9 months off. 

If you’ve read this, thank you. I needed to get it off my chest. I needed to talk about it.