Let's Talk Donuts

I hear and read about things such as "baby brain" and about crazy cravings and I wonder, "who makes this shit up?"  I'm convinced it's simply another way of pigeon-holing women as strange creatures with little in the way of common sense.

Except I have had an occasional freak-out if I cannot find a donut store within a short time frame.  It happened a few weeks ago, and I thought little of it then, but it happened again today, when I scoured the town where I work for one, measly, donut store.  By "scoured" I mean that I drove up and down streets looking for the word "donuts" on any building in town.  For a full thirty minutes. 

I concluded that there are no donut stores in this town.  Can you imagine a place without donuts?  An entire population without access to fried and sugared dough.  It's nothing short of a tragedy.  Luckily for this place, I'm quitting soon, never again to return without the armature of an apple fritter to protect me.

So maybe I have some cravings.  Maybe.

Baby brain -- well, I have always thought this to be something made up by the same people who invented PMS.  But now I have reason to worry that it might be somewhat accurate.  Just last week, I was eating a banana, and I set it down.  Moments later, I COULD NOT FIND THE BANANA.  And let me tell you, I searched high and low for that thing.  Hours later, I found the half-eaten fruit in the trunk of my car.  Oh, yeah, THERE.  Of course.  That makes sense.  Incidentally, it was a really hot, sunny day.  Not good.

Pregnancy is a funny thing. And I don't mean miracle-of-life funny, I mean funny as in odd, and mystifying, and truly hard to relate to from a distance, in my opinion.  I never thought I would turn into a sugar-craved, bumbling idiot.  But when I tell these stories to friends who have been pregnant, they say, "Yep, been there.  And there was this incicent with a chocolate cream pie..."

Which is all to say, that pregnancy is elusive and weird and but it has its moments, like when you don't give a rat's ass if everyone sees you stripping the meat off a drumstick while wearing a bikini.

And then it slaps you in the face with a rotting banana.

Truisms: Standing, Sober, but Not Hungry

A Few Truisms

1. It absolutely sucks eggs that you can't drink.  No two ways about it.  I know that popular thought, current research, and the French consider it OK to drink a small-to-moderate amount of alcohol while pregnant, but the act of having to moderate at all makes drinking wholly unsatisfying to me.  Every small sip I take is a reminder that my little allotment is near its end.  And this makes me want it all the more.  When my husband and I walk past the bars and pubs in our neighborhood, I sometimes stop at the doorways to leer at the bottles behind the bar, while I plot my future drinking lineup.  I can't decide if my first postpartum drink will be a pina colada, a margarita, a whiskey sour, a gin and tonic, a martini, or a jug of sangria.


2. If you are on a crowded subway train/bus, the only person who will offer you a seat is not the dapper gentleman in a three-piece suit, but rather, the tired-looking woman on her way home from a job where she's been on her feet all day.  That guy thinks that reading the Wall Street Journal and trading cow patty futures entitles him to extra time on his ass.  Meanwhile, you're busy populating the earth with new life so that humanity doesn't fade away into the ether.  But you have to stand in a hot, crowded subway train while doing this.

3. The bad news: your stomach is enormous.  The good news: your ass now looks small by comparison.

4. The urgency to urinate is inversely proportional to the amount of pee that actually leaves your body.  I feel like a 70-year-old man with an enlarged prostate.

5. So far, the best, and only, perk of being pregnant is not having to suck my stomach in at the beach.

Last weekend, I was chomping on fried chicken legs and throwing them over my shoulder, sucking down lemonades, and gobbling chocolate chip cookies, all while sporting a tiny black bikini, legs akimbo, stomach hanging down over my beach chair.  All without the slightest worry that I might have to inhibit my intake of oxygen in order to appear smaller than I really am.

It was absolute freedom in a bikini, for the first time in decades.

Guilt, Party of One, Your Table is Ready

So I scheduled the amnio.  What else would I do, really.  Statistics don't work for me.  That I might be the one in however many thousands who might hold the (defective) bean is something my psyche could not stomach.  And the anxiety, crying jags, shakes, and erratic behavior set it.

I made the appointment and told no one besides my mothers-in-law, my husband, and my best friend.  I didn't want to hear one more bit of advice, read one Internet anecdote about an amnio gone bad, or have one more person telling me that they "had a friend who..." I needed radio silence.  And I was smart enough to know that the people I told respected my decision, or even outright supported it.  I was tipping the scale in my favor with absolute impunity.

I think it was a stroke of luck that my husband couldn't accompany me to the doctor's office that day.  Not that he's not supportive, but he's not as, say, indulgent, of my fears as my friends or my mothers-in-law.  I needed someone who could coddle me, not by feeding my fears, but by acknowledging them.  Someone who would allow me to own and hold these fears, and then just BE THERE. I think we all know what I'm talking about here:  I needed a woman by my side.

I got two.  Boy, did I hit the jackpot in the wedding lottery.  I hear mother-in-law horror stories all the time, but I have none of those.  If there was a divorce, I know who would be on MY side in the courtroom.  Seriously, I couldn't have dreamed up a better Amnio Dream Team.

One mother-in-law, who I'll call Mother Hen, sat in the waiting room and tried to remain calm by pacing the waiting room while the other one MIL did bedside duty.  Nurse Reddi, I'll call her. You want Nurse Reddi, or someone just like her, at your bedside.  Nurse Reddi was the one who held my hand and watched the doctor like a hawk.  Nurse Reddi was the one who whispered to me, conspiratorially, "I like him, he knows what he's doing.  I feel really good about this" when the doctor briefly left the room before the procedure.  Nurse Reddi also had the presence of mind to ask questions and remember the answers, like, when the tests would come back, if we could order a rush on them, and even asked about checking on some random birth defect even I hadn't heard of.  Nurse Reddi does online research prior to taking her place next to the bed.  I recommend you find your own Nurse Reddi and hang on for dear life.

I'm not a queasy, or easily grossed out sort of person.  I love looking at the needle when I'm having blood drawn.  If there was a full-time Surgery Channel option on my cable subscription, I would definitely add it.  In HD.  I can talk about knee surgery or a bout of diarrhea at the dinner table as I shovel steak into my mouth.

But I was unable to stomach the thought of watching the amnio needle enter my belly for this test.  All I could do was apologize silently to the fetus for what I was about to do.  A sharp object was about to invade his warm, wet, haven, and I had signed the papers to do so.  I am so sorry, I said.  But momma needs to sleep through the next five months without the assistance of opiates.

I'm not going to lie.  It hurts.  Not a lot, but it's a pain that I've never experienced before, I guess because it's not every day that your womb cramps up from being punctured with a 22-gauge needle.  In case you are wondering, that is incredible thin.  I had assumed it was going to be about two or three times as thick as a strand of spaghetti.  In actuality, it resembles the sort of needles used to draw your blood, maybe even thinner.  Also, I had mistakenly thought that the needle went into the belly button.  Again, not so.  The doctor uses the magic ultrasound wand to look for the best pockets of amniotic fluid, and then constantly looks at the screen to help him guide the needle to the fluid.  As soon as the needle goes in, the uterus reacts by cramping up -- there's the pain.  I pictured a jellyfish contracting in the water when I felt this.  The remainder of the time was spent pain-free, but it was the longest 60-seconds or so of my life.  That's when the doctor is piping out a couple of test tubes' worth of amniotic fluid.  (It takes so long because the needle is so thin.)

And then, that's it.  I was allowed to go home and rest for before resuming a somewhat normal life -- no heavy lifting, sex (that this would even be a remote consideration by a husband after an invasive procedure, is, in my opinion, a precursor to filing for divorce), or air travel, that sort of thing.  Oh, you also have to check for signs of leakage or blood.  I thought that the leak would come from my stomach, the place where the needle went in -- again, I imagined a sea creature, this time a whale, spouting out amniotic fluid from it's blowhole.  But no, the leak comes out the vagina.  These are the lessons learned by warm glow of an ultrasound screen.

So I was released on my own recognizance.  But I still had Mother Hen and Nurse Reddi, the ultimate Recovery Tag Team.  They all but took me out in a fireman's carry.  On the way to the car, there was much debate among the two of them as to whether or not I should proceed along a short incline or walk down small set of stairs.  I took the stairs while they evaluated.

The rest of my day was spent on my couch.  Mother Hen delivered my favorite foods and Nurse Reddi filled my water glass and they both spent a full six hours talking with me about every subject under the blue sky -- except amniocentesis.  If there is a medal for "Care in the Service of the Neurotic" these two earned it twice over.

After my Florence Nightingales left me in the ahem, care of, my betrothed, my night was once again, sleepless.  This time it was because of my trips to the toilet to check for leakage or blood (there was none), and because I would not leave the confines of the couch.  The remote became my talisman, the television, my companion, late into the night, while I monitored the cramping that the doctor had warned me about, and which he emphatically reminded me was perfectly normal.  Two Tylenol later, I finally nodded off under the watchful glow of Iron Chef.

The next two days would be a reprise of the first.  Bathroom, couch, kitchen, couch.  Though I was told one days' rest was sufficient,  I convinced myself that three days' rest would more fully insure me against the worst.  Three days passed, then three more, then three weeks, then five, and the memory of that morning fades more and more as the fetus slowly morphs from "it" to "him."

Order Up: Ham and Pea Salad with a side of Anxiety

I think it might have been just as well that none of you had to live through the first four months of this pregnancy.  Not unless you like to read an endless trail of whining, complaining, groaning, and “why-me-ing” online.  The other reason I was unable to bring myself to write on this blog during the first trimester of my pregnancy was because I was alternately nauseous and certifiably insane.

The nausea.  Ahh, those, lazy, crazy, heady days of stomach-churning nausea.  Not being able to throw up, and yet not being able to stomach the sight, smell, or taste of anything meant for human consumption.  I stopped cooking altogether.  My husband began to lose weight.  You hear about the partners of pregnant women gaining sympathy pounds.   Well, my husband lost inches off his waistline.  He should thank me.

I also happened to go on a vacation to Texas during my first trimester.  There was a plethora of items which nearly incited projectile vomiting.  Texas BBQ?  Normally, I would have been a huge fan, gorging on tender, juicy meats. ribs, you name it.  The smell instead translated into the most primitive of roasting decaying flesh, often accompanied by acrid, vinegary sauces, and sides that made me dry-heave behind my napkin while sitting at diners: imagine ham and pea salad laden with globs of mayonnaise and celery salt and you have an idea of what sort of culinary torture I was enduring.  

Or, it could have been the continuous site of signs for the George W. Bush Turnpike.

I felt so guilty for not wanting to eat anything, and fearful that I was depriving the zygote nutrition, that when I got back home, I compensated by force-feeding myself cheeseburgers.  I must have had five, six, burgers a week.  As far as my pregnancy logic went, cheeseburgers had all of the components essential to healthy fetal growth and development.   Think about the components of a cheeseburger and tell me you don’t agree. The truth is, even cheeseburgers made me want to hurl, but I swallowed them because I was sacrificing myself for my unborn child.  It better appreciate this someday, I thought.  Like when it thanked me for winning an Olympic gold medal, or practiced the piano without complaint.  

Truth is, the only “food” I could stomach was lemonade.  Anything liquid, cold, and lemon-flavored.  I didn’t care what it was, as long as it was made up of those three components.  It’s a wonder I haven’t developed an ulcer.

When I wasn’t on a rampage to find lemonade, I was trying to keep from having a nervous breakdown.  I could not keep it together.  The crying jags were taking a toll on my relationship.

“You have GOT to get it together” my husband would tell me.

But I was too worried.  Too worried that something was horribly wrong with the fetus.  Understand that I wasn’t just worried that it would die.  I was just as worried that it wouldn’t.  If something was wrong with it, I wanted something else to make the decision for me.  I have always been grateful that if the other two pregnancies I had “resolved” themselves --- if indeed they were not viable and that was the reason – though I will never know the reason why.  That’s part of the cruelty of miscarriages, you have no idea if it was something you did,or didn’t, do, or if there was just something horribly wrong with the chromosomes that made up those bundles of cells.  As the pregnancy advanced, I worried about all of the things that it could possibly have, but survive in the womb.  I was worried I was being tricked into being happy about being pregnant.

My fears ranged from spina bifida to Down’s Syndrome to open-heart to it missing part of its brain to – this is a good one, wait for it: I was really afraid that maybe it would be a hermaphrodite.  I was trying to figure out what I would do if it was born with two kinds of genitals.  Would I raise it as an asexual person, naming it ‘Pat” or “Chris” until it decided what it wanted to be?  Or maybe I would  just have the doctor snip something off, in the hopes that it would become whatever I had arbitrarily determined.

If it sounds like I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about this last issue, it’s because I did, I really did.  Imagine my surprise when a friend recently revealed to me her own fears for her baby when she was pregnant, only to mention that SHE had been wondering what to do if the baby was double-sexed too!  I was ecstatic to share my morbid fascination/fear with someone, which I had indulged in privately.  We had a nice, long conversation about all of the possibilities and choices regarding this issue.  Oddly enough, it was sort of freeing, and oddly fun, to finally be able to talk about it.

But I still had to decide what to do: risk the pregnancy with an amnio, just to assuage my worst fears? Or trust that things were going to turn out all right, given that the non-invasive scans and blood tests so far, had determined that the statistics pointed in my favor?

A Freebie

During one of our regular walks, my husband announced that now that this every-other-ovulation-day Clomid sex was done with, if I got pregnant now, we would just have to chalk it up it to the mortgage-blowing acupuncture and the hippie energy work.  

We did it exactly ONCE during my next ovulation that month. Talk about putting the hippie practices to the test.   

But, maybe there’s something in them needles. Because I got pregnant.  Really. I’m currently in my 22nd week. 

I didn’t know if I should even mention it to my blog “family” when it first happened.  I had conflicting feelings about turning my Clomid Diary into a pregnancy blog.  After all, I hate most pregnancy blogs that I come across out there; the miracle of life and all that happy feel-good crap. Not me, so much at this point.

But my husband kept asking me when I was going to tell my blog. 

“Have you announced it on your blog yet?” he would ask every morning.  

“No, I haven’t.” I felt like a fraud: I had shared so much about my miscarriages, and Clomid-taking. But here I was, being so cautious about sharing my pregnancy secret with the world - I had turned into one of those pregnancy-hiders.  After all, this was good news.  But I just couldn’t bring myself to write the words.

I refused to tell most friends, or if I did, it was with so much sworn secrecy, qualifiers, and doom-and-gloom scenarios, that when I did get around to saying the words”..and I’m pregnant”  that the face of the person I told was a strange mash-up of reactions: hopefulness, joy, maybe a little pity.  It was a little, sad, really.  I could not be happy for myself or allow anyone else to be happy for me.  Not this time.  Not again.  I was going to protect myself, dammit.

A week or two, then six, went by, and I was nearing my first visit to the doctor.  I had the usual: weight check, lab orders for a full blood work up, uterus pressing, the whole shibang. But, no heart beat check, not yet, it was too early. Damn. I was frustrated.

But the clincher, the real cherry on top, was placed by my undoubtedly well-meaning, if not slightly, absent-minded, and obviously very busy OB.

“So remind me,” she said, as she slammed shut my two-inch thick chart, ”is this a Clomid pregnancy?”

You would think she would have some clue if I was currently taking the Clomid.  Like, if I was floating face down in the San Francisco Bay.

‘Um, NO...” I replied. 

“Oh, great!  We have a freebie!” She said. “See you in four weeks.”

Freebie indeed.  I’ll give her a freebie.

Called to the Carpet

So, one of my top-five readers (I have five readers, total, by the way) called me to the carpet the other day with the briefest of emails.  It read, "What happens when a blog goes stale?"  OUCH!

Thanks, Gentle Reader, V.  Touche!

After three unsuccessful rounds of Clomid, I decided to go the alternative therapy route and do as my fellow Romans, er, San Franciscans do, and just do the hippy dippy thang and get acupuncture and energy work.  I mean, since the Clomid made me want to jump off a bridge, maybe needles and ancient rattles could do what modern science could not.

I promptly went about making expensive, out-of-pocket appointments with a really nice acupuncturist.  She's from France.  Having an accent gives a person about 75% more credibility, don't you think?  Which reminds me, I need to hire someone with a British accent to record my outgoing message. 

She went to town with the tiny needles, placing them on my meridians, and informing me that I should come back at least two more times before I ovulated.  Which I did.   Just after I took out a second line of credit on the house. 

Then I took up a close relative, B., on her offer to supplement my extertions with Energy Work.  In a nutshell, Bodywork, or Energy Work, involves checking your preconceptions at the door and jumping into what some might consider the "New Age" deep end of the pool.  B. and I spoke a little about my stress and fears surrounding pregnancy, the trauma of my miscarriages, and my expectations for the future.  Then I laid down on her cushion-y massage table, she wrapped me in a knitted blanket, and asked me to close my eyes. 

Soon, the smell of burning sage wafted gently into the room, and B. asked me to just sit with my intentions, to consider all the possibilities that the moment had to offer and to let them go.  Thus began our Guided Visualization. 

Let me interject here to mention that I'm not the meditating type.  I'm prone to opening my eyes during the relaxation portion of yoga classes, and I'm not the least bit susceptible to hypnotism (I tried getting hynotized once, to no avail-- that's another story for another day).  But something about having another body in the room, talking, and guiding me through the silence -- in other words, not silent at all -- made it possible for me to really truly relax and give it up. 

She lead me through this little trip by suggesting visuals for me to imagine in my mind's eye -- think a walk along the ocean, or by the side of a stream -- and then guided me to think about my pregnancy intention, if that's what came up.  I went on a really soothing, gentle journey in my mind -- and B. allowed me to speak and react whenever I felt the urge (sometimes, during yoga meditation, don't you just feel like letting out a scream? No?  Ok, it's just me then.).  All options were open, and OK.  Not having any rules made me feel assured that I couldn't mess this up. 

45 minutes went by like THAT.  Seriously, I was on that table for 3/4 of an hour, and it felt like a moment.  We talked about what I "saw"; it felt like when you describe a dream to friend and she tries to help you figure out what it's about.  Only this time, the person I was telling the dream to really gave a shit. 

I don't remember the drive home, except I think I clocked a maximum of 25 MPH.

Don't RSVP to my Pity Party, You're Not Invited Anyway

I've seen my acupuncturist twice in this past week, and will see her again tomorrow.  I have to take my hat off to the acupuncture; I feel a renewed sense of calm that I haven't had, maybe, ever.  You can chalk it up to a placebo effect, or you can say that my meridians have been controlled or that my chi is balanced.  Whatever, I'll take it.

And so, when I spoke with one of my close friends the other day and she asked me how I was doing, and I said I hadn't felt so great in months.   I alluded to the "dark" places that Clomid had taken me, and how I now felt renewed and alive once again.

"What do you mean, she asked, were you depressed?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I meant," I replied.

"What about?"


HUH??

I paused for a beat.  The answer to that question might, to most readers, be obvious, and the question itself might have seemed daft.  Why indeed, would a woman who has had two miscarriages and tried unsuccessfully for several cycles to get pregnant, be the least bit sad or depressed?

I explained that I had become overwhelmingly melancholy when I took Clomid for those three cycles.  The feeling had no name, it had no circumstantial basis -- that would have been too easy to express.  I was not sad that I didn't have a baby, I wasn't pining away over my unused crib in my basement, I was blind with a feeling of despair that is simply hard to fathom unless you've ever felt suicidal or like you were trying to claw your way out of a wooden box buried deep in the ground.

"Well, why didn't you say anything?  Why didn't you write about it on the blog?" She asked.

I've got to hand it her, she had a point.  Here I was laying bare all of my woes, but I kept one of the worst aspects of the process to myself.

Maybe I felt that the blog had turned into a sort of funny pages about trying to get pregnant. Perhaps my own pride got in the way; it's hard to admit when your sadness is so undefined.  I also didn't want to throw a pity party.  The only person invited to that is my husband, who is legally bound to tell me hundreds of times, without complaint, that I'm not a loser and that I'm cute and skinny and small.  He is also bound by law to ignore my frequent trips to the freezer for ice cream immediately following a fat debate.  HE is invited to the pity party.

But once again, (no small thanks to friends) I'm called to my mission: to be open and honest and forthcoming about my process.  In the hope that it might assist other women to feel less self-conscious if they've gone through a similar experience, to teach to those who haven't, and, selfishly and most of all, to make it easier for me to put one foot in front of the other.  And I'm walking taller.

Next week: "energy work."  Whatever that means.