Train-a-coming...

I am starting this blog as I think I need somewhere (relatively) private to vent. I have another blog but most of the people who read it know me in real life, too.

To cut a long story short, I had a miscarriage in February at 10 weeks pregnant - you may or may not get more gory details later - and not surprisingly was quite depressed on and off for a while after that. I went to see The Counsellor With The Scary Shirts (in a slight mixup, Mr Spouse had also been referred to the same bloke, and three visits later between us, three different scary shirts had been sighted).

TCWTSS recommended a "negative thought dispersal exercise" where I imagine a train coming slowly towards me, filled with my negative thoughts ("I'm never going to have children" "I'm doing really badly at work" "I'm fat and ugly" "I think I'll scrape that guy's bodywork with my pedal, serves him right for cutting me up"), and then I put up my hand to tell the train to STOP!, and imagine it going slowly away.

Okay, so this is a moderately successful technique, although my trains look more like they should be in The General (whizz whizz STOP! whizz whizz) than Brief Encounter (gliiide). Very much needed today - which is kind of why I've started this - as my period started, which is officially Depressing.

This is now number 8 since the miscarriage - we have actually been "trying" for five of these - not numbers 1 and 2, firstly contra-indicated following medical management of miscarriage (try saying that with a blocked up nose) and secondly just not ready. No. 3 yes, but then Mr Spouse put his foot down about no. 4 when he saw me in bits when my period turned up. Then we've been "trying" (dreadful word, sounds like we could "try" harder...) for cycles 5 through 8.

So that's 5 cycles - and if you are over 35 (I am 38), according to that extremely reliable source, The Internet, you are considered Infertile if you have had no luck for six. It took us four last time - so we aren't far over, but are we at the stage where it's worth bothering, where anyone would take us seriously? Are we infertile?

But then having had one miscarriage, I am wondering if I actually had a second - a possibly positive pregnancy test (fading lines, almost at use-by date) followed by a four-day-late period, but was it really late, did I ovulate late that month? Am I nearly at the three-miscarriage definition of recurrent miscarriage?

It would be nice to know - but as you can see, I am still asking, What am I?