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. 

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!

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.

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.

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... 

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.

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: