Numb is Normal
Hands down. Longest, most stressful, most eventful week of my life.
Two weeks. We can count from the decision to even go with IVF Tuesday the 6.
This past Tuesday, I got up early and went in for my blood test and ultra sound. I was sad. It was like admitting defeat. Right, my body won’t let me make a baby with my partner of 15 years. And we’re literally the most perfect couple in existence. Not to toot my own horn or anything.
I had a different phlebotomist, Rich, and thankfully he was amazing. Got it in one. That was a small miracle. I cried through my ultrasound. Doctor said everything looked good. As long as my medication came and my blood test came back normal, then yes, I could get started that night.
I had a different phlebotomist, Rich, and thankfully he was amazing. Got it in one. That was a small miracle. I cried through my ultrasound. Doctor said everything looked good. As long as my medication came and my blood test came back normal, then yes, I could get started that night.
Of course, because of how fast this all happened, I didn’t even know what the prescribed medication was or how to take it. My doctor had a nurse who’s not mine meet with me. She seemed unhappy with me that I hadn’t read my calendar or watched my videos that I had been e-mailed. Okay, to be fair, the schedule of meds was just called “calendar” in its attachment, and the instructional videos were “IVF videos.” I didn’t know that meant medication schedule and instructional videos! No one told me that was on its way! And a pet peeve of mine is anyone thinking I’m stupid because, hate to break it to you, but I’m not. Anyway, we got past that, and the nurse showed me how to dial things into a pen I’ll be using and stick myself with that. And how to fill a syringe with something else and take that. Easy, right? Just stick yourself with two needles! No big deal! If it was hard, she told me, we wouldn’t let people do it at home!
Right. Relief. Not.
I walked around in quite the funk that day. I know. This is a happy occasion! I should be ecstatic that science is going to let me make a baby in a petri dish. That’s fun, right? That’s how all the cool kids are doing it these days? What a medically miraculous time were living in! Yay us!
Then around 2:39, my nurse called and said NOT to start the shots that night. After hours of stressing about it and trying to coordinate with a family friend to come over and help me out! No, one of the blood tests hadn’t come back yet (isn’t that someone’s job?) so I would hear from them the next day.
Wednesday morning, after breakfast duty, my favorite time of day where I watch some terribly behaved kids eat breakfast and leave their garbage all over the cafeteria despite us reminding them not to, I had a voice mail from my nurse asking me to call her immediately. My heart dropped. What the hell could that mean? Did I have some kind of blood disorder and I’d never be able to have a baby? (Look, my brain is in ridiculous mode these days.)
My prep period came after homeroom, so I gave the nurse a call, my heart hammering away.
She told me not to get excited, but the reason I had been asked not to take my meds was because I was pregnant.
BUT.
My hCG levels were REALLY low. They were a 5 (I had no idea what that meant) and they’re supposed to be around a 50 when the doctors look for them. Of course, that could just mean it was very early in the pregnancy, which it would be - 2 weeks. Super early. So maybe those levels were okay? They wanted me to come BACK in the next day for another blood test.
Not gonna lie, when my nurse said I was pregnant I screamed, “WHAT?!” Two or three times. How the hell does that work out?? I had my period, right? I know she said to be cautious, and I was feeling that. I wasn’t getting too excited. I was surprisingly calm. But I did tell a bunch of people. I got Jon on the phone. Told a few friends at work for support. Some I’m close with, some have been through miscarriages. I know you’re not supposed to tell anyone until after the first trimester, but I’d be an emotional wreck if I had a miscarriage anyway, so everyone would know. Whatever. Support system.
The really nerve wracking thing was that I was still bleeding, and it didn’t seem to be slowing down. I did the bad thing and I did some internet medical research, and I shouldn’t have been bleeding as much as I was. I e-mailed my nurse, who was great at getting back to me. She said that yes, I should be concerned despite the exciting news. Keep being cautious and come in for the blood test.
No pain. So that was a good sign. (And a lie I told myself. I had pretty bad back pain and mild cramping.)
I came right home from work and told my visiting MIL. She’s very calm and British about these things. My mom came over and offered to go with me to the clinic the next day, which I took her up on. I figured if I was going to get bad news, it'd be good to have someone with me. Despite being calm at that moment, I didn't know when or if I would break.
I didn't work out. We went out to dinner. I won $218 playing HQ trivia on Harry Potter night. (I know I'm a big HP fan, but those questions were HARD, and it was dumb luck that I won.) But yay! A win, finally! Maybe things would look up.
Wednesday morning. Mom drove me to my appointment, which really was just blood work. There wasn't anything they could tell me until after the testing. I just had to sit on pins and needles all day until the phone call came.
That was around 12:30. My nurse's tone of voice? The one that says she's trying to let you down gently. "Hi, Shauna." Like the corners of her eyes and mouth were turned downwards.
"Hi."
"Um, it isn't good news."
You don't say. My hCG levels, instead of increasing, had halved, down to 2.5. Practically zero. Meaning, yeah. Pretty much no baby. (I'll come back to this.) I took it okay, but I was more upset when I was told that I was going to have to wait another month for my next cycle to start IVF. Just what my brain needs! Another month of sadness and despair. Not to mention the fridge full of medications I had. Would they hold up? I would have to call the pharmacy to find out. So I might have wasted $200 on that on top of having another month of misery.
As it happens, the nurse called me back a few minutes later to say that my doctor said as the levels were nearly 0, I could go ahead and start that night. Anxiety of sticking myself with needles aside, yes, that did make me feel better.
I felt less better when I got home that afternoon, and the medications that I had did not 100% match up with what my nurse had told me to take. I had to call her, leave a voicemail, and hope she got back to me in the 15 minutes that were left before she went home, if she hadn't gone home early due to the crazy snow swirling outside. She hadn't; she got back to me; the brands my insurance covered must have been slightly different. I had everything I needed.
(Something about a blizzard. Something about going out in that blizzard to see Crimes of Grindlewald on its opening night and it being so god-awfully disappointing. So another negative moment in the week. Yeesh.)
And when I got home, it was time for the needles. I had watched instructional videos before the movie, and they had made me incredibly anxious. I had Jon and his mom gather around me while I watched the videos again and prepared my two needles. One is a pen that you just dial in and put a needle on top of; one involvs pulling some liquid into a syringe, mixing that with a powder, then pulling the mixture into the syringe. And both involve sticking needles into your abdomen and injecting yourself.
Have you ever actually imagined doing this? Take a second right now and really think about it. Taking a syringe. Sticking it into your own stomach. Leaving it in there while you plunge medication into yourself. And then doing it again.
Yup. Sounds like fun, right?
I didn't even really know what to do. Sure, there are videos, and a nurse had shown me on a spongy block of stuff, but how do you do it on yourself? What if you get the needle all the way up to the skin and then find you can't do it? How hard do you have to press to stick it in? How fast?
Absolutely terrifying.
I prepared the pen first, and was surprised how quickly I got it in. And how little it hurt. It wasn't bad at all! Took it out, applied gauze despite no bleeding. Started to put the video for the second syringe on...
...and promptly felt like I was going to pass out. I had to sit down in a chair. Then I tried to prepare the syringe again... and had to lay down on the kitchen floor. It was awful, and I didn't even know why I felt so bad. The shot hadn't even hurt! My MIL proposed that I had just gotten myself so worked up that it had made me, as she put it in her infinite Britishness, "giddy."
I finally managed to get the second one done, and that one was quite painful. I had to lay down again for a bit until the feeling abated.
But yay! I had done it! Go me! I'm so brave and badass, yada yada yada. (I simultaneously want to shot from the rooftops how brave I am and don't want a single person to acknowledge it. More proof of how sane I am.)
Friday was pretty calm on the baby front. Well, okay, except for the thing that I alluded to before.
Processing the fact that I had a miscarriage this week. It's a really strange thing to come to terms with. I know from friends who have been through it that a lot of times, having a miscarriage can be extremely painful physically. I didn't have that as I was only two weeks into a pregnancy. In fact, I wouldn't have even known I was pregnant if I hadn't been going through IVF treatments. Without getting blood work done, I would have just, as far as I knew, gotten my period, and that was that. I guess my period wasn't actually my period this month. It was my body expelling a fertilized embryo.
Which is horrific to think about.
It's also horrific to think - has this happened before? Does this mean there's some kind of larger problem with my uterus? (My nurse said there's no reason to think this will affect us moving forward.) How many women go around having early miscarriages like this and not knowing it?
And would I rather just have not known?
Almost everyone I tell about this (because I am candid and frank and can't keep my mouth shut for love or money) thinks it's a good thing because it lets me know that I can conceive and Jon and I will be able to have a child. Maybe you should just try to conceive naturally now, everyone says.
Yeah. Maybe we should. That'd be great. Except, again, fridge full of expensive medication, and $2,700 has already been charged to my credit card for whatever fees from the clinic. To turn around and back out at this point... I don't know if I could. Would I want to? If I had a choice, I know myself. I would go back and forth about whether or not I wanted to do this until I was utterly confused, I would cry a lot, and I would end up making no decision. Even now I criticize myself all the time. I'm too young to do something this drastic. We've been trying for two years, but so many try for 5-10 years before they get to IVF. Why did I go here without giving this more time?
I know why I went here. The mental state I was in when I saw people's babies and heard people's pregnancy news, etc, prior to this wasn't pretty. I'm doing this to keep my sanity. (Which feels selfish, as to a degree is. But yeah, also I think we'll be great parents and give the future generation hope with our progeny. And all that jazz.) I feel a little removed from that now as a whole different kind of crazy has taken over. I've been feeling a little better about seeing babies for the last few days, as I now have injections to worry about. (I say this, but last night I saw a stupid baby gender cake reveal on Instagram, and that made me bitter. So I'm only partially better. It varies from minute to minute.)
The vast majority of the time, I don't think about the miscarriage because of how minor it felt. But every now and then, the fact that this little life that I've been trying to create for two years did exist inside of me for two weeks hits, and I can't breathe, and I want to go into full on breakdown mode.
I haven't, thankfully. I've sat down and taken a few gasps of air, and then I'm okay. But the ache in my heart is there.
I did have massive amounts of anxiety on Friday about giving myself the injections again. A friend of a friend recommended icing the spot before the shot to numb the skin, and that really worked. The actual injecting is still uncomfortable, but the sticking of the needle isn't bad at all.
Saturday, I barely worried about it.
Sunday morning I had to go for more blood work and another ultrasound. On weekends, only one clinic facility (in a network of many) is open, so I thought it would be a mad house. When I walked in, there was no line at all. No one in the waiting room. I went through the two pieces of the puzzle so quickly that I didn't have time to put my coat down anywhere, let alone go to the bathroom like I needed to. (During the ultrasound, the doctor said, "Wow! Your bladder is really full!") Amazingly, when I came out, the line was incredibly long at all stations. Some small miracle that I got there at the exact moment I did and didn't need to wait.
I was foolishly praying for another small miracle; that I'd receive a call that said, haha, j/k, your levels are way up, that pregnancy was for realz, stop taking your hormones. It didn't happen. I was told that my follicles are already forming, so last night I got to add a third injection to my cocktail, one that will stop me from ovulating. Hopefully, the fact that I'm at that stage already means that I'll have to do all of this for a little less time, maybe 8 days instead of 10.
More blood work and an ultrasound tomorrow before work. After that, I believe I have to start going in every morning before work for a week or so.
The truth is that this process is not particularly well explained before it begins. Maybe it's my fault for not asking more questions. Maybe it goes back to the timing and how rushed into this we were due to my cycle. (And maybe that's because to these people, I'm nothing but an insurance paycheck. Honestly, that's how I feel sometimes. I wonder if that's why we were so rushed, why no one really took the time to lay it all out for me. Or maybe they just wanted me to be at peace with this and figured that if I was already coming to them, I knew what I was getting in for. Probably some combination of the two.)
I've tried to lay out a calendar for how I think the rest of this is going to go. It's mildly insane and disruptive to some life plans. I guess that's how having a kid is anyway. But I'm going to have to ask tomorrow for a tentative time frame so I can figure out if we're going away for Christmas as planned, and if I can go to NYC for an exhibit I've had tickets to for months this weekend.
Because egg retrieval, I think, could happen as soon as the end of this week.
And then starts a whole long waiting game.
A lot of my feelings at this point are stuck in an "I don't know" phase. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about having had a miscarriage. I don't know if I made the right decision to do this. I don't know if this will work. I don't know if I want everyone to tell me how brave I am for injecting myself three times a day.
I don't know.
What I do know is any woman who has gone through this process is my hero. It is thankless, nerve wracking, terrifying, and unpredictable. It doesn't guarantee anything, either. It is long.
I hope it's worth it in the end.
I didn't work out. We went out to dinner. I won $218 playing HQ trivia on Harry Potter night. (I know I'm a big HP fan, but those questions were HARD, and it was dumb luck that I won.) But yay! A win, finally! Maybe things would look up.
Wednesday morning. Mom drove me to my appointment, which really was just blood work. There wasn't anything they could tell me until after the testing. I just had to sit on pins and needles all day until the phone call came.
That was around 12:30. My nurse's tone of voice? The one that says she's trying to let you down gently. "Hi, Shauna." Like the corners of her eyes and mouth were turned downwards.
"Hi."
"Um, it isn't good news."
You don't say. My hCG levels, instead of increasing, had halved, down to 2.5. Practically zero. Meaning, yeah. Pretty much no baby. (I'll come back to this.) I took it okay, but I was more upset when I was told that I was going to have to wait another month for my next cycle to start IVF. Just what my brain needs! Another month of sadness and despair. Not to mention the fridge full of medications I had. Would they hold up? I would have to call the pharmacy to find out. So I might have wasted $200 on that on top of having another month of misery.
As it happens, the nurse called me back a few minutes later to say that my doctor said as the levels were nearly 0, I could go ahead and start that night. Anxiety of sticking myself with needles aside, yes, that did make me feel better.
I felt less better when I got home that afternoon, and the medications that I had did not 100% match up with what my nurse had told me to take. I had to call her, leave a voicemail, and hope she got back to me in the 15 minutes that were left before she went home, if she hadn't gone home early due to the crazy snow swirling outside. She hadn't; she got back to me; the brands my insurance covered must have been slightly different. I had everything I needed.
(Something about a blizzard. Something about going out in that blizzard to see Crimes of Grindlewald on its opening night and it being so god-awfully disappointing. So another negative moment in the week. Yeesh.)
And when I got home, it was time for the needles. I had watched instructional videos before the movie, and they had made me incredibly anxious. I had Jon and his mom gather around me while I watched the videos again and prepared my two needles. One is a pen that you just dial in and put a needle on top of; one involvs pulling some liquid into a syringe, mixing that with a powder, then pulling the mixture into the syringe. And both involve sticking needles into your abdomen and injecting yourself.
Have you ever actually imagined doing this? Take a second right now and really think about it. Taking a syringe. Sticking it into your own stomach. Leaving it in there while you plunge medication into yourself. And then doing it again.
Yup. Sounds like fun, right?
I didn't even really know what to do. Sure, there are videos, and a nurse had shown me on a spongy block of stuff, but how do you do it on yourself? What if you get the needle all the way up to the skin and then find you can't do it? How hard do you have to press to stick it in? How fast?
Absolutely terrifying.
I prepared the pen first, and was surprised how quickly I got it in. And how little it hurt. It wasn't bad at all! Took it out, applied gauze despite no bleeding. Started to put the video for the second syringe on...
...and promptly felt like I was going to pass out. I had to sit down in a chair. Then I tried to prepare the syringe again... and had to lay down on the kitchen floor. It was awful, and I didn't even know why I felt so bad. The shot hadn't even hurt! My MIL proposed that I had just gotten myself so worked up that it had made me, as she put it in her infinite Britishness, "giddy."
I finally managed to get the second one done, and that one was quite painful. I had to lay down again for a bit until the feeling abated.
But yay! I had done it! Go me! I'm so brave and badass, yada yada yada. (I simultaneously want to shot from the rooftops how brave I am and don't want a single person to acknowledge it. More proof of how sane I am.)
Friday was pretty calm on the baby front. Well, okay, except for the thing that I alluded to before.
Processing the fact that I had a miscarriage this week. It's a really strange thing to come to terms with. I know from friends who have been through it that a lot of times, having a miscarriage can be extremely painful physically. I didn't have that as I was only two weeks into a pregnancy. In fact, I wouldn't have even known I was pregnant if I hadn't been going through IVF treatments. Without getting blood work done, I would have just, as far as I knew, gotten my period, and that was that. I guess my period wasn't actually my period this month. It was my body expelling a fertilized embryo.
Which is horrific to think about.
It's also horrific to think - has this happened before? Does this mean there's some kind of larger problem with my uterus? (My nurse said there's no reason to think this will affect us moving forward.) How many women go around having early miscarriages like this and not knowing it?
And would I rather just have not known?
Almost everyone I tell about this (because I am candid and frank and can't keep my mouth shut for love or money) thinks it's a good thing because it lets me know that I can conceive and Jon and I will be able to have a child. Maybe you should just try to conceive naturally now, everyone says.
Yeah. Maybe we should. That'd be great. Except, again, fridge full of expensive medication, and $2,700 has already been charged to my credit card for whatever fees from the clinic. To turn around and back out at this point... I don't know if I could. Would I want to? If I had a choice, I know myself. I would go back and forth about whether or not I wanted to do this until I was utterly confused, I would cry a lot, and I would end up making no decision. Even now I criticize myself all the time. I'm too young to do something this drastic. We've been trying for two years, but so many try for 5-10 years before they get to IVF. Why did I go here without giving this more time?
I know why I went here. The mental state I was in when I saw people's babies and heard people's pregnancy news, etc, prior to this wasn't pretty. I'm doing this to keep my sanity. (Which feels selfish, as to a degree is. But yeah, also I think we'll be great parents and give the future generation hope with our progeny. And all that jazz.) I feel a little removed from that now as a whole different kind of crazy has taken over. I've been feeling a little better about seeing babies for the last few days, as I now have injections to worry about. (I say this, but last night I saw a stupid baby gender cake reveal on Instagram, and that made me bitter. So I'm only partially better. It varies from minute to minute.)
The vast majority of the time, I don't think about the miscarriage because of how minor it felt. But every now and then, the fact that this little life that I've been trying to create for two years did exist inside of me for two weeks hits, and I can't breathe, and I want to go into full on breakdown mode.
I haven't, thankfully. I've sat down and taken a few gasps of air, and then I'm okay. But the ache in my heart is there.
I did have massive amounts of anxiety on Friday about giving myself the injections again. A friend of a friend recommended icing the spot before the shot to numb the skin, and that really worked. The actual injecting is still uncomfortable, but the sticking of the needle isn't bad at all.
Saturday, I barely worried about it.
Sunday morning I had to go for more blood work and another ultrasound. On weekends, only one clinic facility (in a network of many) is open, so I thought it would be a mad house. When I walked in, there was no line at all. No one in the waiting room. I went through the two pieces of the puzzle so quickly that I didn't have time to put my coat down anywhere, let alone go to the bathroom like I needed to. (During the ultrasound, the doctor said, "Wow! Your bladder is really full!") Amazingly, when I came out, the line was incredibly long at all stations. Some small miracle that I got there at the exact moment I did and didn't need to wait.
I was foolishly praying for another small miracle; that I'd receive a call that said, haha, j/k, your levels are way up, that pregnancy was for realz, stop taking your hormones. It didn't happen. I was told that my follicles are already forming, so last night I got to add a third injection to my cocktail, one that will stop me from ovulating. Hopefully, the fact that I'm at that stage already means that I'll have to do all of this for a little less time, maybe 8 days instead of 10.
More blood work and an ultrasound tomorrow before work. After that, I believe I have to start going in every morning before work for a week or so.
The truth is that this process is not particularly well explained before it begins. Maybe it's my fault for not asking more questions. Maybe it goes back to the timing and how rushed into this we were due to my cycle. (And maybe that's because to these people, I'm nothing but an insurance paycheck. Honestly, that's how I feel sometimes. I wonder if that's why we were so rushed, why no one really took the time to lay it all out for me. Or maybe they just wanted me to be at peace with this and figured that if I was already coming to them, I knew what I was getting in for. Probably some combination of the two.)
I've tried to lay out a calendar for how I think the rest of this is going to go. It's mildly insane and disruptive to some life plans. I guess that's how having a kid is anyway. But I'm going to have to ask tomorrow for a tentative time frame so I can figure out if we're going away for Christmas as planned, and if I can go to NYC for an exhibit I've had tickets to for months this weekend.
Because egg retrieval, I think, could happen as soon as the end of this week.
And then starts a whole long waiting game.
A lot of my feelings at this point are stuck in an "I don't know" phase. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about having had a miscarriage. I don't know if I made the right decision to do this. I don't know if this will work. I don't know if I want everyone to tell me how brave I am for injecting myself three times a day.
I don't know.
What I do know is any woman who has gone through this process is my hero. It is thankless, nerve wracking, terrifying, and unpredictable. It doesn't guarantee anything, either. It is long.
I hope it's worth it in the end.
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