Saturday, November 3, 2012

Goorak Lives!

So, if you've read my last couple of posts, you know I think I'm faking this whole pregnancy thing.  Well, on a good day, when I think I might actually be pregnant and all that ultrasound and pee stick stuff was real, I still like to worry that the baby has somehow died inside my tummy.  I mean, he's awfully quiet in there.  No kicks yet.  Nothing definitive, anyway.

I was worrying about that today, like I do, and texting a friend of mine.  I was lamenting that the floor I work on in the hospital has lost its doppler machine, and wondering if the progressive care unit I was sitting on that day might have one I could use to check and see if baby's heart was still beating.  She suggested that I go down to the OB department where they would probably do it for me.

Really?

Do they really do such things?  Would the nurses really be nice enough to just -- off the record -- check and see if my baby was still alive?  I mean, I had no other cause besides preexisting endogenous Crazy to think that the baby had died -- no bleeding or cramping or pain or fever or any such thing.  They'd be doing it as a favor.  It didn't even seem legal.

I went up to my home floor and asked a coworker -- one who had birthed two babies downstairs in the hospital OB department -- whether the nurses might do such a thing.

"I don't know," she said.  "Want me to call and ask?  I know 'em down there."
"Would you?" I gasped.  "I'd love that!"
"Sure," she said.

She called, and they said they would.  Well, to be exact, the nurse on the phone said they couldn't do it, but they could look away while I borrowed their doppler and went into the break room and did it myself.

Good enough for me.

So I went down to the hallway outside the childbirth center/OB unit.  Their door is locked to prevent infant theft (or to just limit traffic through such a sensitive area of the hospital).  I pressed the button on the intercom.

"How can I help you?" a voice asked.
"I, uh, need to borrow your doppler..." I said.
"Oh!  Come on in."  The voice chuckled.  "We heard about you."

Once inside, I was quickly taken under the wing of a very nice nurse -- a different one than the one my coworker had spoken to on the phone.
"So you want to hear your baby?" she said.  "How odd.  What a strange thing to request."  She winked.
"Yeah, uh, sometimes I just worry, you know?" I said.
"Sure," she said.  "Come with me.

She led me not to the break room nor to the restroom, but to an empty patient room.  She had me lie down on my back on the bed.  She spread a little goo on my belly.  As she searched for the heartbeat, she talked about baby kicks and demonstrated with a little tickle on my leg what the first kicks might feel like.

There were a few seconds there where I was worried she wouldn't find the heartbeat, and my fear was slightly consoled by the fact that in that event, at least I had had good cause to come to the OB department and get the baby's heart dopplered.  But I only had 10 seconds to pursue that line of worry/planning, and before I had had much time to think about it, a rapid, rhythmic swishing was emanating from the doppler's speaker.

"There it is!" she said.

I smiled, then closed my eyes for a moment, to let the beauty of that little heartbeat sink in.

Goorak's little heartbeat.

He was fine in there all along.  Just quiet.

I like to think about what, if any, Goorak's consciousness might be like right now.  I wonder if Goorak can feel emotion.  I like to think that Goorak is blissfully happy right now.  Filled with the
joy of existence.  He's so happy to exist.  He's never existed before at all and this is his first time.  I like to think he feels absolutely wonderful in my womb -- floating in soft, warm liquid, knowing no hunger nor thirst nor cold nor fear.  No real sensory stimulation whatsoever.  But maybe consciousness?

Pure existence. 

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Only Good Things

Well, I went to the doctor and it was great.  The medical assistant told me our first round of tests (the ones to tell whether or not you're carrying a mutant baby) were all negative.  My blood pressure was great, still under 120 systolic.  She hid my weight from me, per my usual request.

The doc came in and was super nice.  Totally not mad that I was three weeks late for my appointment (I was trying to get on a jury so I could get a few weeks off work).  He didn't even mention it; when I finally did, he said, "Oh, that's fine."  He answered all the questions off my list, even the one about vaginal tearing, though he murmured, "It's a little early..."  He felt the fundus (top) of my uterus (at 15 weeks it's halfway between my pubic bone and my belly button) and I'm pretty sure I could feel it too.  It was like a muscular sort of shelf, right where he said it'd be.

Then we listened to the baby's heartbeat with the Doppler.  The baby's big enough that we can do that
now.  He put the little thing to my belly, right to the top of the uterus, it looked like.  Right away we heard a nice, rhythmic, "Swish swish swish swish swish swish."

"What's that, 138 beats per minute, did it say?" I asked.
"I can't see the screen, but listening to it, to the rhythm of it, it's more like 150," he said, nodding his head to the beat of the swish.  I smiled, hoping I looked appropriately excited.

"Well," he said, as I sat up.  (I realized halfway up that he was offering me a hand to help me up, which seemed odd enough to me that I missed his gesture.)  "Everything's normal.  Only good things happening inside."

"Only good things happening inside."  What a lovely thing to say, given all the things one can worry about during a pregnancy.  It was like a little blessing.  "Only good things happening inside."  Ashe!

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Baby Crazy

One of the main reasons I started this Little Creatures blog was so I could ask the question, "What is a human being?"*

What are we, really?  We do ask ourselves this question, sometimes.  Other ways it is asked are, "Is there a God?" or "Do we stop existing after we die?" or "Are we just animals?"  or "Is there such a thing as 'free will'?"

Are we more than our DNA**?

Beats me.

It's heavy shit, though.  I mean, think about having children.  Especially when you are intentionally having children, as we are.  First, you have no children.  You are just you and your partner.  Perhaps you have no real plan or intention to have children in your life.


Then, one day, you change your mind.

And it stays changed.

So you and your partner -- necessarily a male and a female in this example -- decide to have children.  You decide to create new human beings.  To bring about people where there were no people before.

How exactly does this happen?

Sure, we all think we know -- it's sex, right?  We, educated enlightened adults, know what sex is and we know how babies are made.

But what are the details?  What are the steps in the creation of new human beings?

Well, if you are intentionally creating human beings where you had not been creating human beings before, you must first remove whatever barrier(s) you had in place to prevent the creation of new human beings, for making more of itself is, above all, the fundamental drive of your body.  Arguably, reproduction is your body's only true drive.  Much more so than longevity for its own sake, your body strives to stay alive only insofar as it enables it to make more of itself.

Ok, so you cease your efforts to prevent your body from reproducing itself -- IUD out, artificial hormones removed, latex away.

Then what?

Sex, right?

Right.

Sex.

You've been doing it for fun for years, but now is the time to do it with a mission.  It's like doing it for fun, but more stressful.  You have to do it at the right time of month.  You have to do it to fruition (or at least the male partner does).  Worrying whether or not you and your partner actually have working gametes is optional (I opted yes on that one).

Then?


 You wait.

What do you mean you just wait?


You just wait.

No, no, no.  This is a huge important deal.  This is the creation of a new human being.  Surely you should play a more involved role than just sitting around avoiding liquor and taking prenatal vitamins.

Nope.  That's it.  Just do basic take-care-of-yourself stuff -- eat right, exercise, get plenty of rest, laugh as often as possible.  Same old health spiel.

You mean I don't have to sit around focusing on the error-free copying of DNA?  I don't have to make proteins and differentiate cells and organize tissues with my mind?



Um, no.  You couldn't if you tried, now could you?  I mean, really, could you make even one single stem cell, even if you had all the right proteins and all the right information?

Well, no.

Before you started looking into this baby-making thing, did you have any idea that your eggs were arrested in Metaphase-II of meiosis until they are fertilized and if they are never fertilized, they never even complete meiosis??


 No.

Before you started writing and researching this very blog post, did you know that human blastocysts hatch??


No.

Did you know that the zygote itself carries the information, not just for the baby, but for the placenta as well?



No.  I guess I hadn't really thought about it.  I figured the placenta was kinda like part of the uterus.

Nope.  It's more like part of the baby.



Crazy.

Yeah.  This whole thing is crazy.  Crazy beyond you.  And if you think about it too much, you will make yourself crazy.

So relax.











And just wait.




*Other great questions are "What is life?" and "What is love?" though only one of of those will have you bopping your head to a catchy tune.  
**Note: This does not look like human DNA to me; it looks more like bacterial DNA.  But I don't really know my stuff.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Gandalf of Embryos

I keep worrying about the baby.  I mean, how do I know it's ok in there?  I can't see it.  I can't feel it.  I can't check on it.  How do I know it's not growing deformed?  Or worse, how do I know it hasn't died in there?

Luckily, throughout our pregnancy, T has been optimistic and reassuring.  It's a role reversal for us; usually I'm the sunny, optimistic, everything-will-be-alright one and T's the more pessimistic, "realistic" (as pessimists like to say) one.  But ever since we got our first positive pregnancy test, when I was sure it was a chemical pregnancy and we'd have a mini-miscarriage within hours, T has always been like, "This is the real deal.  You're pregnant.  We're going to have a baby."

It's been wonderful to have him there reassuring me.  While I've kept up a steady hum of worry about miscarriage, he has never engaged in that, never thought we were going to miscarry.

This morning I woke up at my usual 4:40*am for work.  T got up off the couch where he tends to sleep on my work nights.  Even though I was feeling nauseated and constipated -- two symptoms that mean my pregnancy hormones are flowing well -- I worried to T:

    "How do I know the baby's ok in there?  How do I know it hasn't died?"
    "Because it's good at living," he answered.  "It knows what it's doing."
    "It does?"
    "Yeah.  If you're trying to imagine all the things it has to do in there to grow and form, and if you're thinking you could never do it, don't worry, because it's way better at that than you are.  It's like Gandalf in there.  Just when you think it's gone, turns out it's just TCB at Isingard.  It's got everything under control."


Wow.  Gandalf the Embryo. 



* 440 hertz is Concert A.  It's nice to have one's wake-up time have a musical reference.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

One Month Down. Eight More to Go.

It's September 1st.  The interminable August has finally ended.  It has been exactly one month since I found out I was pregnant.

Embryo at 8 weeks, average length 0.63 in
The last 31 days have passed so slowly.  Unbearably slowly.  I haven't had such slow days since I was at army sergeant camp in 2003.

I guess it's the discomfort that makes time go so slowly.  The discomfort, and the eagerness to be at a time in the future.

I'm mentally, emotionally, and physically uncomfortable right now.  It's easiest to explain those in reverse order.  Physically, my symptoms are pretty textbook: fatigue, nausea, appetite changes, mild pains in my lower abdomen.  The nausea is unpleasant all by itself -- a queasy, seasicky feeling whose only upside is that it makes my pregnancy feel a little more real.  The other symptoms tie in more with my mental and emotional discomfort.  The fatigue makes me feel like I'm depressed.  It also makes me feel less able to tackle the daunting tasks of packing up, repairing, and painting the house before putting it on the market.

The appetite changes make me feel sort of guilty about eating so much.  It doesn't feel right.  It's not how I used to do things.  My changed appetite also makes me feel less able to tackle our weekly local organic produce boxes.  Summer squash with beets and radishes sounds unstomachable to me right now.  Even the cute little orange cherry tomatoes don't go down without a fight.  The pains in my abdomen are fine -- thank goodness the books and internet told me they were normal -- and let me know that I'm pregnant.  If I get an unusually sharp twinge, however, it starts up the miscarriage worry.

Miscarriage worry is one of the things that makes me most mentally and emotionally uncomfortable.  The books disagree on miscarriage rates -- one said that "experts estimate that up to 50% of all conceptions end in miscarriage."  So my baby has a 50% chance of dying right now?  That's terrible.  Just terrible.  I wonder what the rates are if they adjust for chemical pregnancies, though.  And what if they adjust for smoking and drinking and other behaviors that might put one's fetus at an increased risk for spontaneous abortion?  What are the rates after one reaches 7 weeks 3 days of term, as I have today?

Another upshot of feeling nauseated is that mild to moderate nausea is associated with lower rates of miscarriage.

*sigh*

Once I've stuck it out to my second trimester, things will be better.  The risk of miscarriage will have plummeted to a mere 1%.  An ultrasound should be able to show that our baby is growing well and healthily.  Physically, I should have less nausea and fatigue.  Some of the books claim that, come second trimester, I should have "more energy than I know what to do with."  That would be wonderful, for I have so much to do.


I must work on this transformation, you see.  Our family is undergoing an incredible transformation right now, changing from a couple of adults in a simple romantic relationship with each other, 
to two adults in a romantic relationship, who are also parents to a brand-new human being who will be experiencing existence for the first time -- surely not an easy thing for the little tyke to do.









In addition to this massive internal transformation, our family needs to undergo an external transformation as well.  T is graduating from college and will go from college student to family bread-winner.  I will go from family bread-winner to homemaker, from career woman to full-time mother (and maybe part-time or per diem nurse -- like one shift a week -- I don't want the kids to be in day care too much).

In this process we also need to physically relocate.  We need to move from the sleepy, foggy, hippie northwest to a more bustling and prosperous area -- somewhere that offers T opportunities to excel professionally.  Somewhere that offers something for the children besides, well, drugs.  Much as I love this area, I can't raise my children here.  There's just not enough.  And there's too much bad stuff.  Too much meth and way too much weed.  This area is so physically beautiful (stunning, breathtaking, magical), but so socially and economically rotten.

So as our family transforms, so must our home.  This cozy little house that has been our home for 7 years -- twice as long as any other place has been my home -- must go from comfortable reflection of our selves and personalities -- thoroughly decorated and made our own.  Bits of our character are everywhere -- guitars on the walls, musical instruments everywhere, paintings, posters, records on the walls, tchotchkes and souvenirs on the shelves, a thorough coating of our very own personal family dirt on the walls and floors and in the nooks and crannies.

All that must go away.  Everything must come off the walls and get packed up.  The house must be cleaned and painted, made shiny and desirable to passers-by.  Our house must go from our home to a model home.

It pains me to do this.  I've grown so attached.  I've never had this in a home --cards and pictures on the fridge, even on the inside of the front door because I ran out of room on the fridge.  My little writing dojo is a hommage to Oingo Boingo and a few of my other favorite things.  It's messy and cluttered.

I've been able to indulge my inner packrat here.  I've given myself over to keeping cards and postcards and letters and photos.  I realized, "Hey, we only live but so long.  It's not like I'm going to acquire an infinite amount of this stuff; it's bulk will be limited by my own very finite lifespan.  It doesn't take up that much space.  This stuff is important to me.  It represents my relationships with other people, their communications to me.  I want to keep them.  So I did.

I have lots of other little things I've kept.  Miscellany.  Little bits of paper.  Toys.  More paper.  Little important things spread all over my room.

But I don't really need any of this on a day-to-day basis.  Hence, it is in this room that I will start my packing.  Tchotchkes and records and posters can go in boxes first.  Their absence will make the biggest visual difference and, as I've said, it's not like they're useful.  So this is where I will begin my work on the transformation of our house.

My work on the transformation of myself is more nebulous and difficult.  Much less straightforward.  Luckily nature is taking care of the physical aspect for me... 

Monday, July 23, 2012

May-be Baby

So I've been feeling like it really just isn't happening this month.  The whole getting pregnant thing.  I've had this feeling that "the baby is going to be born in May," meaning that next month (August) would be the month to conceive.  I don't know if this is my woman's intuition, or psychic vibes, or just the five days after the midwife at Planned Parenthood told us to wait "a couple of cycles," during which I cemented it in my brain that if I got pregnant immediately after that waiting period, the baby would be born in May.


Some of my favorite people and favorite musicians are born in May: my lovely and talented cousin, Tyler Gaffaney, physicist Richard Feynman, musicians Danny Elfman, David Byrne, and Martin Carthy, to name just a few.  All males, I guess.









I also feel like the baby will be a boy.

A baby boy born in May.

Then again, it could be a girl born in April.


Or a little Goorak born  on Leap Day.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Kid Success?

Well, I finally broke down and took a pregnancy test last night.  The suspense was killing me: I kept feeling all these pregnancy symptoms and wondering and wondering and hoping and wondering and imagining -- is it my period about to start?  or is it my period disappearing for nine months?

I decided I wanted to know.  I was at work when I decided this, so I didn't have a pregnancy test handy.  I also didn't have any more first-morning's-urine coming to me that day. 

 But end-of-twelve-hour-shift-urine is actually pretty darn concentrated, unless you make a concerted effort to hydrate, which it is easy not to do, especially if you don't have a break nurse (which you don't if, like yesterday, you only have 8 patients on the floor).  That is, if you don't have a break nurse, you're not getting many breaks (even with so few patients, it's easy to be busy nonstop, especially if the other nurses on the floor are new and you are helping them), which means you're not getting many chances to eat, drink, and pee (We're not allowed to have drinks at the nurses' station anymore, not even water.  We can use little water cones, or paper cups to drink water in the pantry, or we can put a drink in the break room or manager's office, but still, hydrating is hard.), so your urine is pretty concentrated by the end of the day.





 So when I got home, I put what little urine I had inside me into a cup.





Then I dipped the test strip in for exactly 5 seconds, just as the box instructed (T timed it).
I saw the control line appear right away, but the instructions said wait 3 minutes.  The control line was so dark and the rest of the result window so white, I could tell right away it was negative. 


We waited the full 3 minutes anyway.  I hosed dog poop off my shoe while I waited.  To distract myself.  And because it needed to be done.  And because it would make a funny story if the test ended up being positive.  I could hear myself telling the story to our first kid, "Mommy was so excited to get pregnant with you.  Waiting for the test result was so nervewracking..."  I can hear myself telling our kids a lot of things, actually, and spend a lot of consciousness-time listening to myself doing this.


Three minutes passed in no time.


                                  It was negative.



Negative.

*sigh*

*cry*

*more cry*



I did cry quite a bit.  I didn't mean to, but I just couldn't help it.  I had gotten my hopes up.  And I'm just so excited.  This baby represents so much...

Also, I had just worked 12 hours on 4 hours' sleep, and, though not pregnant, I had raging PMS.  That's a cruel one, isn't it?  That you're in the throes of PMS just as you're getting your negative pregnancy test result.

T wasn't as bummed out as I was.  He hadn't gotten his hopes up as much as I had.  And he's just much more pragmatic and even-tempered than I am.

I told myself that it wasn't meant to be this month and that, better yet, this was for the best.  Hadn't the midwife at Planned Parenthood told us we needed to wait a cycle or two?  Didn't she have a reason for saying that?  Doesn't my uterus need a month or two to rest and recover and restore itself after having a foreign object in there for so long?

Yes.  Yes yes.

And isn't this an expected finding?  Didn't the doctor say he would be very surprised if I got pregnant the very same cycle that I had my IUD removed during?  Didn't he tell us not to stress about it?  Didn't one of my patients, an old woman with 8 children, tell me not to "Try"?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.


And don't you have enough Pisces in your family??

Tee hee.  Yes.  Even though I don't believe in astrology, yes. 







All of that did make me feel better.   There really is something to Pollyanna's "Glad Game."  That's the game where you try to find something to be glad or grateful about in every situation.  I play it a lot and find that it can improve my mood quite a bit.  So much so that I fancy myself a bit of a Pollyanna at heart.  That, deep down, I always have a core of bright, hopeful optimism, no matter how rough a time I'm having or how depressed I feel.  A bit of a contradiction, I know.





So I just need to be ok with not getting pregnant on the very first try.  To trust that my body knows what it's doing.  That when the time is right, it will happen.  To let go and let God.

Besides, the longer we have to wait, the more we'll appreciate Baby when s/he finally arrives.  Already I appreciate how much I'm able to empathize with those who struggle with infertility or with long waits before pregnancies.

Really, it's kind of funny how heartbroken I was.  Of all the times I've done home pregnancy tests over the years, this was the first time I'd ever been sad to have it come back negative.  In the past, I'd always felt much more like this kid:


Thursday, June 28, 2012

No, I Would Not Crush Your False Hope

I woke up this morning thinking, "I could test today.  If that First Response pregnancy test is right about being able to detect pregnancy six days before your missed period, then today would be late enough.  I could do it."


It was a little hard to pinpoint the first day of my menstrual cycle this month, which is too bad, because ovulation and, if you hit jackpot, due date, is all based on that magical day.  So, speaking of magic, I decided to call June 6th the first day of my cycle.  I think I like the way the two sixes in 6/6/12 add up to twelve.  Also, calling the sixth the first day, instead of the fifth, made ovulation later and made it more likely that we had caught it during our Trying.

I love having hope.

To that end, I decided not to test today.  Because what if it's negative?  I'd rather not know.  Sure, if I knew it was just me in here, I could go drink Sashimi Martinis on a roller coaster, but there's no roller coasters around here.  And I don't have a martini shaker.  And sashimi is very pricey.  No, I'd rather have six more days of magical possibility, even if they're ended by the disappointment of a period.



Besides, can't taking a pregnancy test too early give you a false negative?

That said, I spent the day seeing all kinds of symptoms of pregnancy in myself.  I felt sort of irritable and emotional.  I felt tired, dizzy, and, at one point in the car, nauseous.  My allergies were terrible (several sources have said that your nose can get stuffy during pregnancy, and one website specifically said that allergies can be much worse during pregnancy).  And tonight, best of all, I've noticed that my breasts are tender.

But that could just be because I sunburned them.

Or because I have PMS.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Mommy and Daddy's Second OB GYN Appointment

We got to meet Dr. W today.  Well, technically I had met him before in the course of my work, but this was the first time T met him, and the first time I'd exchanged more than a few, job-related words with him.



                                         It was a very nice visit.



This time they knew I wasn't pregnant (that I know of).  I got to keep my clothes on.  I got to keep all my pee.  Best of all, we both loved Dr. W's manner - very gentle and patient, almost effeminate.  Also, we got to spend 25 minutes talking to him, which is 4 hours in Doctor Time, so that was great.  He answered all our little questions, and I scratched eight more things off my To Worry About list.

Then we stopped at the outpatient lab so my scientist husband could indulge his desire to have my lead levels checked.  It only took 8 minutes.  Guess I can't see the doctor without giving up some bodily fluid.

The only bad news is that the doctor said he'd be very surprised if I got pregnant this month, immediately after removing the IUD.  The good news is that he said nothing bad would happen to the baby if I did.

I am trying not to get my hopes up.

But I am.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Mommy and Daddy's First OB GYN Appointment

Today we went to the OB GYN for the first time.  I called as soon as we got the IUD taken out and made an appointment for a  pre-pregnancy check-up.  I wanted to get in with my preferred provider and start establishing a relationship.  Also, I had a few questions.  Like whether I needed to purchase a plastic bubble in which to seal myself until the completion of my hypothetical pregnancy, so as to protect myself and my prospective offspring from the toxins mentioned in the packets Planned Parenthood gave me*.

The lady on the phone said that the first visit would just be with Dr. W's nurse, and that we would see Dr. W on a subsequent visit.

T and I arrived at the OB GYN group's office at 11am.  Before going in, we snapped a self-take of ourselves in front of the building.  For the Pre-pregnancy Scrapbook.  We'll paste it next to a lifelike replica of my IUD. 

We went inside and I filled out a health history form.  It was much, much less comprehensive than the one at Planned Parenthood.  Not only did they ask me about fewer physical diseases, but they didn't ask which genders of people I or my partner was having intercourse with.  They didn't even ask me which gender I self-identified as.  It's like they didn't even care.

They did, however, request a little cup of my pee.  Planned Parenthood hadn't wanted any pee; maybe these people were interested in my health after all.  The office lady said they would be taking pee on every visit.  They probably do that to all the pregnant women so they can distill out the HCG and sell it to people on the HCG Diet.  If so, I want a cut of all my urine HCG sales.  Depending on how much that stuff goes for, we can fund Junior's college education.






After I gave them the wee, T and I were taken to an exam room.  Dr. W's nurse came in with a puzzled look on her face.

"So, um, did you take a pregnancy test?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm not pregnant," I said.  "We're just here for a pre-pregnancy check-up.  I told them that on the phone."

"Oh..." the nurse said.  "They put you down as already being pregnant.  You'll need to come back and see the doctor for a 'family planning visit.'"

"Ok," I said.

Nevertheless, we took advantage of our time with this knowledgeable OB nurse and asked some of our most pressing questions:

"Can I keep taking antidepressants while I'm pregnant?"

"No, they're really not safe.  Some people do stay on them, but it's better not to."

Darn.  I was liking those.  Oh well.  We'll go without and see how I feel.

"What kind of screening do you offer for birth defects and genetic disorders?"

She gave us an informative packet and said the screening would be offered every visit.

And, our most pressing question of all, "I just had a copper IUD removed -- do we really have to wait two or more cycles before we start trying to get pregnant?"

"No.  Not at all.  You can go ahead and start right away."

"Really?  It's really ok?  The doctor always tells people it's ok?"

"Yes."

"Nothing bad will happen to the baby because I recently had a copper-plastic doohickey in my uterus?"

"No."

Alright.


We are now officially TTC**.



*Could this just have been a strategic move to further the liberal anti-family agenda?  Were they just trying to scare us away from having children?  Maybe it's a way to sell abortions:  "Oh, your house was built before 1979?  Better abort just to be on the safe side...What's that?  You don't own a radon detector?  You didn't even know there was such a thing??  That's it, I'm getting the fetavac."

**Trying to Conceive.  It's a term I learned from my What to Expect When You're Expecting to Expect book.  I went looking for such a book months ago because I was so excited at the very prospect of getting pregnant.  I was stoked to find that just such a book existed.  Technically its title is What to Expect Before You're Expecting, but I like my version better.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Taking Out the IUD

Today we went to Planned Parenthood and had my IUD removed.  I was tempted to have T do it at home for free -- I have a pair of hemostats, after all (which I have yet to use at work). 

But there are some things which are better left to the professionals.  Feline euthanasia, for example.  Also gynecology.

So we paid a nurse midwife to remove this little device from my uterus.  T watched.  (Hey, he needs to get to know my vag.  It is going to be a major player in a very important event in about nine months.) 

The removal didn't hurt much and the device came out pretty easily, which was a relief.  After six and a half years, I was worried it had grown into my uterus and become a part of me.  I didn't see how it could not have done so.  And, based on an anecdote I heard from a girlfriend, apparently the cure for an IUD that you can't pull out is, well, pulling harder.

The IUD was much smaller then I had pictured it.  When my uterus was cramping down on it during my periods, it always felt huge.  But it wasn't.  Here's a picture of a copper Paragard IUD:



This isn't a picture of my actual midwife holding up my actual IUD.  My midwife was wearing gloves.  And my IUD was covered with thick, sticky mucus.  And the copper had turned dark, greenish-black.  I asked if we could keep the used IUD, but the midwife said we weren't allowed to.  One less thing to paste in the scrapbook.  *sigh*  And she probably just threw it away. 

So much for preaching re-use.

The midwife told me I had to wait "a cycle or two" before trying to get pregnant.  Then she emphasized, "a couple of cycles."  So I let Planned Parenthood give me some condoms.  Planned Parenthood loves giving you condoms. 

So, sex with condoms again.  Good ol' condoms.  The sensuous feel of latex.

*sigh*

 But at least the IUD was out.  Whew!  I scratched one thing off my To Worry About list.

Then the midwife gave me a bunch of packets on how all modern products, and all old houses, cause birth defects.

And I had to add 472 things to my To Worry About list.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Little Creatures of Love

My partner* and I have been discussing having children for some time.  Today, we decided that now is the time to get pregnant (hopefully).  The anticipation itself offers a lot of fun and excitement.  It's a joyous thing and we wanted to share it with you all.

So welcome to my new blog, Little Creatures (of Love).  The title is (as always) a Talking Heads reference.  If you're not familiar with the album Little Creatures, here is a YouTube vid of the song, "Creatures of Love":


There's no music video.  It's just this album art and the song.  It's an easy way to hear the song for free.  :O)  For lyrics, go here.

We are creatures of love.

So let's make more.


*Alas, ours is a plain ol' male-female marriage (which makes making babies easier), but we like the term "partner."  Given the vernacular of our area, "partner" sounds downright righter, actually.