Write down your worries, we are told... this will stop the 3am worrying. So in the last couple of days I've been worrying about:
- work, irritatingly, since I have a week off - how far behind various people's expectations I am, how much I have to do when I go back, and how I am not doing any over Christmas, unlike, I suspect, many of my colleagues.
For some of them (D, who has a six-year-old with autistic spectrum disorder) this is because they really don't have time to get the basics done during term time, for others (perhaps S, whose main relationships before becoming a permanent member of staff were short-term ones with students, and who was warned off making this a habit so who has taken to teaching summer schools in order to meet new students...) because they don't have much of a life away from work, but for others (probably C, my mentor) because that's the way he meets his million obligatory obligations and million-and-one self-chosen obligations. Which is why he's a professor, and I'm not.
- my current round of symptom spotting, of course - CD27 and I still have sore boobs [usually they start around CD21 and stop about 4 or 5 days later, but once they continued into about the next CD3], but nothing else to speak of [no cramps, thankfully, as I'm a bit fed up of sharp, miscarriage-style cramps before my period].
- not sleeping well in my worry about whether or not my period will start - a common one, this.
- driving to the snowy NE of England tomorrow, taking ages and/or getting stuck, or alternatively, staying an extra night at my mother's, having told our friends we'll be there tomorrow. And all the food we need to buy for the stay in the cottage as three of the other guests are coming on the train and the fourth is my empty-larder single-bloke cousin.
- poor Mr Spouse having to spend an extra night at my mother's.
- poor Mr Spouse having to drive in the snow.
- poor Dr Spouse trying to persuade Mr Spouse that she also doesn't want to hang around her mother's house longer than necessary, and that we really won't get stuck in the snow.
- that all the snow will have gone by the time we get to the NE.
People always talk of "losing" a baby - often they use the phrase even for babies lost very early in pregnancy - in fact later on, babies are allowed to "die" rather than be "lost". Very careless of mothers...
Well, last night I dreamt that we had been looking after someone else's 18-month-old girl, Grace (this is a ficticious child but I do remember the name) and we had our own baby boy (I don't know what he was called!). But we lost them both.
As in, mislaid them. Misplaced them. Didn't know where they were. Grace, I think, was left unattended for a moment and we thought she'd wandered off, but then in our panic we left the baby boy in the hospital nursery and then he vanished. We were it seems in the middle of trying to adopt but they wouldn't let us have any children because we had lost those we were responsible for.
At this point I woke up - noisily, I suspect, because I woke Mr Spouse up too. I went back to sleep fairly rapidly and oddly resumed the dream. It got more dramatic, but had a partly happy ending - it turns out Grace was snatched by her father, who was wanted for something else by the police - a trap was set involving £65,000 in cash (never say my dreams do not have realistic details), he turned up and Grace was found. Of the baby boy, I do not know.
when everyone sends out those Christmas cards, and, more annoying, those Christmas letters. We never do them (we made a small exception in sending wedding invitation/announcements when we were planning the wedding) and my usual rule is write a couple of lines by hand (shock horror) inside the card of people I haven't seen for a while.
So, when the news hasn't been great, what to do? I am afraid I did tell about four or five unfortunate friends about the miscarriage (and the two elderly relatives that died, and the fact that Mr Spouse nearly lost his job - told you the news hadn't been great). A few other people got a very cheery "Well, it's not been a great year, here's hoping 2006 is better!". Nothing like a bit of Christmas cheer, is there?
So this is by way of an apology to people who get inappropriate news in their Christmas cards... and thanks to my friend J, who I actually knew had had a miscarriage herself but at the time I didn't feel up to sharing the lovely news with absolutely everyone - and who rang me last night as soon as she got my card, and who I managed also to tell about our unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant again. I was welling up a bit on the phone, though.
It's good to talk...
I met Mr Spouse, in person, for the first time - we'd been emailing for about a month before that, but it wasn't Swoon at First Sight and in fact took another six weeks of emailing and MSN before another meeting and... well, the rest is history.
And it was a Friday... and I had said to a friend "why would I want to go on another blind date, all the rest were awful"... But I went, and I'm jolly glad I did.
It seems both like much longer, and much less time. But you will be able to calculate on your fingers from the fact that we've been "trying" for over a year now, and that we got married in May last year, that I haven't exactly been "defying nature" as a certain irritating gynaecologist would have it - unseemly haste would be more like it.
Although I did spend some of my 20s and 30s gallivanting round the world, having children has always been on the agenda, just not on that of any of the men I met - nor, indeed, has pairing off with me. I'm heartily grateful, in retrospect, that it didn't work out with anyone except Mr Spouse, perhaps he could have crawled out from under his stone* a little sooner but given the age gap, and the kind of people we were in respectively our 20s and 30s, we are not too sure that would have made much difference.
*this is where we reckon he must have been hiding all that time, and the reason why no-one else snapped him up earlier.
Without any "props", the fertility meter from the trial I was on, any ovulation predictor kits or anything, I actually feel a lot more relaxed about both trying to conceive and whether I do or don't this cycle.
Whether this will last is another thing - this is the cycle I got pregnant last year, so emotions could still take over. And it could have something to do with the fact that I've been feeling like cr*p, with an inner ear infection that's made me dizzy and headachy for a week now - I was starting to come out of it yesterday, when we foolishly spent the day in Nearest Big City shopping, followed by a fairly quiet but quite late night at the house of a friend of Mr Spouse.
I didn't think my blog was googleable yet, but apparently it is, because someone got here by googling "does early pregnancy feel like impending menstruation".
I am faced with a bit of a dilemma. I am not sure (and scanning old posts doesn't help me, partly because I'm dreadful at skim reading and skipping things) if I've actually told Mr Spouse about this blog. I was reminded of this for a slightly circuitous reason, when I was using his smartphone and he said he had a link to my other blog (light, frothy, tales of knitting and snow and such-like) - I know he reads that one - I don't (think) I post anything here I wouldn't want him to read, and I know he always wants to hear if I'm upset or dwelling on something... but some of this blog falls into what a newly married, long-time bachelor aged 50 would count as "too much information". I am training him in the ways of womanhood and the fact that, when you are married and trying to get pregnant, there is not any such thing as too much information, and he is a quick learner, but he isn't entirely there yet.
No, not me, honest. I seriously thought I'd already blogged about this but perhaps the computer at work ate it. If you spot it in a previous post do tell it to make itself known...
I have a friend at work who is a year younger than me, and her husband is a couple of years older than Mr Spouse (early 50s), and they have been undergoing fertility investigations and also investigating adoption. Based on the publicly available information, they were told they couldn't adopt a child under 7 in the UK, and they already had various tests showing that she has no problems at all but he has borderline to low motility.
So far so irritating. They were talking about adopting from Russia, and then found they had an adoption information evening and a fertility clinic appointment on the same day.
Fertility clinic: Your only hope is IVF, we'll put you on the waiting list straight away, [they don't want to consider IVF], it's your eggs dear, you are too old, there is nothing wrong with your husband, we'll give you C.lomid to give you a bit of a boost (no mention of monitoring ovulation while on C.lomid).
Adoption information: yes, adoption of a younger child (under 5, anyway) IS possible where one of the couple is older, transracial ditto, for at least their local authority and another one neighbouring (neither of which is ours, but both of which are close enough that it might be possible to apply to them).
We had one weekend to ourselves before Christmas, which would have been a good time to either a) get excited about being pregnant (ha!) b) have a bit of bonding before another month of trying again or c) do some productive things in the house/related to Christmas.
So, instead, I choose to have an insecurity fit. This is where I decide I am being ignored and throw a wobbly, and Mr Spouse feels very guilty and hides in a corner.
And he's not sleeping (at weekends) and I'm not sleeping (during the week). Joy.
about the spot.
Also didn't sleep at all well last night, and managed to lose my purse between buying a coffee on my way from the bus stop, and reaching my office.
I think this is what's known in the business as a Bad Day.
So far:
- I got a letter this morning to say I didn't get the grant. "Resubmission is not invited".
- Negative test also this morning - truly, clearly negative, not even "well, part of that line is a little blue even if it doesn't go all the way down" as has happened twice before when I've been late.
- I have a large spot. Highly predictive of impending menstruation.
