D
dizz
Guest
Lurked for a while - figured it was time to post! Apologies in advance for my somewhat dark sense of humour at times - but to be honest, I've been to hell and back and there've been points where if I hadn't have been able to laugh - I'd have crumbled completely.
OK - so the background to this tale of anxiety, pant paranoia and obsession...
Years and years and years of infertility. At least partially made worse by my weight (all bound up with depression, none-existent self-esteem, and, well the fact that chocolate tastes nice), and when I finally found an understanding GP (or so I thought) he promised me that if I could prove I'd lost a substantial and sustained amount of weight - he'd try to push through a fertility referral (not for IVF or anything - just for some answers) before I made the NHS BMI targets.
I lost three stone - got pregnant, and proceeded to miscarry very very rapidly. To say I didn't cope well with this is an understatement! I begged the GP to follow through on his promise - at which point he played the "well you've got pregnant so no" card on me. So we kept trying (by this point we were up to a good 4 years or so of trying - which doesn't half put a dampner on your lovelife by then - we'd long since hit the level of me mentally composing the shopping list while mid-"act"... sure any long-term TTCers will know what I'm getting at there).
Back to it - this time it was WAR! Armed with a thermometer, a copy of TCOYF and an attitude (I knew I'd hit rock bottom when I caught myself delivering a motivational pep talk to the contents of my husband's underpants) we went back to action. I got pregnant again within 3 months- logic dictated that bad luck couldn't hit AGAIN so soon after. Textbook temperature chart (I was really proud of my chart - I'd woken up at 6am dilligently and everything), nice triphasic pattern - ok so you wouldn't want to hang it on your wall or anything - but it had pretty lines in all the right places and was multi coloured and everything. Little bit of spotting - so off to the GP I trotted having Googled myself to oblivion and come to the brown blood = probably OK conclusion - got a referral to the EPU for an early scan. Thought we were going there to see our baby - and then that wonderful, so innocent-sounding phrase that I think you only truly know the terror of if you've been there.... "you ARE sure of your dates aren't you?" I thought blood running cold was just literary licence - it's not.
Scan machine showed one empty gestational sac - it's an image seered forever on my brain. Husband responded to this by almost keeling over, causing much concern among the nursing staff because of the sheer size of him (and the things he could break if he keeled over), so there's me, legs akimbo, pants around ankles with my world crumbling - and half of me wanting to clip him around the ear for being a big melodramatic wimp! (I can laugh now - back then - no way I could) While others left clutching an envelope with a picture - we got shown to the side room, given a leaflet and a rescan appointment and left clutching the pieces of our broken world. In the end it was even MORE cruel and drawn out - the rescan revealled the sack had grown... still no baby, and there was a second sack hiding away in a corner (I've got a retroverted uterus making early scans fun)... so sent back away for another fortnight - before hope was officially declared lost and I was booked in for the D+C.
A year of hell followed. I begged the GP for help with the crippling depression and agoraphobia - he would only consent to this if I agreed to have a coil fitted... I'm in my 30s - the biological clock's ticking - no way was I throwing in the towel and giving up, even temporarily! At one point I had to be physically stopped from attempting an overdose - life was utter hell. I didn't appear to be ovulating, didn't appear to have anything in the way of fertility left - but I'm a stubborn mare and wasn't giving up on things. Watched relatives get pregnant with ease and get their happy endings - felt increasingly like the freak of the family and shut myself away more and more.
So then I totally randomly decide, "ok this is the month we nail this" - and, well, we did. I got pregnant again (took a year mind you). The one blessing we had this time around was that we'd been seen by the miscarriage specialist after the last one and told to call them when we ever found out we were pregnant again... so we got scanned at 5 weeks (could only see the sac), 6 weeks (could just about see what she was probably confident but not 100% was the heartbeat), 7 weeks (heartbeat - still all looked like a badly tuned telly to me), 8 weeks (still going ok - could see it abdominally by now), and then 10+4 weeks where it was recognisable as a baby with a heartbeat... finally I got to leave the EPU with a photo and not a leaflet. She discharged me from miscarriage monitoring as being well past the point of previous losses and said she was confident things should go smoothly from now on.
So this is where I need the sense knocking part...
Why, if I know things were ok a week and a half ago (I'm now 12+4 by dates, scans have shown me only a couple of days out and consistently growing measurements) am I absolutely frantic and climbing the walls about the big "end of trimester 1 12 week scan" tomorrow? Rationally I've had weeks of clear heartbeats (although I know only too well tragedy can hit), I've had no bleeding for weeks (had some around week 5 that I was told I did not have permission to worry about) so whatever is in there is obviously still in there, I've got no rational reason to think the world's going to shatter again tomorrow - yet I'm going nuts working myself into a tizz about it - feels like some hormonal snowball I can't get hold of. I know I've got minimal symptoms - but I've had those throughout - I just cannot rationalise this fear of going to the "big pregnant ladies" place and that it's all going to fall apart again.
I even "know" mentally it's different this time - the last two times, however much I daydreamed - I never saw myself going into labour or holding the babies - this time I can. It was a funny instinct - but 100% right, even down to just knowing I was pregnant each and every time... even that doesn't work to calm the nerves down.
It's kind of a mix of absolute terror (I think my fear of mentally going back to that dark place the last losses took me to is more than my fear of actual miscarriage to be honest - to the extent I've pushed for a referral to mental health monitoring in case I end up with PND or anything) and a mix of frustration of the night before Christmas when we can actually big a farewell to that horrid first trimester and start planning things - and I'm driving myself nuts with it.
So please, slap some sense into me - and sorry for the long ramble! Also apologies for the quite dark humour in it all at times - like I say, it's quite often the only thing that got us through it all.
OK - so the background to this tale of anxiety, pant paranoia and obsession...
Years and years and years of infertility. At least partially made worse by my weight (all bound up with depression, none-existent self-esteem, and, well the fact that chocolate tastes nice), and when I finally found an understanding GP (or so I thought) he promised me that if I could prove I'd lost a substantial and sustained amount of weight - he'd try to push through a fertility referral (not for IVF or anything - just for some answers) before I made the NHS BMI targets.
I lost three stone - got pregnant, and proceeded to miscarry very very rapidly. To say I didn't cope well with this is an understatement! I begged the GP to follow through on his promise - at which point he played the "well you've got pregnant so no" card on me. So we kept trying (by this point we were up to a good 4 years or so of trying - which doesn't half put a dampner on your lovelife by then - we'd long since hit the level of me mentally composing the shopping list while mid-"act"... sure any long-term TTCers will know what I'm getting at there).
Back to it - this time it was WAR! Armed with a thermometer, a copy of TCOYF and an attitude (I knew I'd hit rock bottom when I caught myself delivering a motivational pep talk to the contents of my husband's underpants) we went back to action. I got pregnant again within 3 months- logic dictated that bad luck couldn't hit AGAIN so soon after. Textbook temperature chart (I was really proud of my chart - I'd woken up at 6am dilligently and everything), nice triphasic pattern - ok so you wouldn't want to hang it on your wall or anything - but it had pretty lines in all the right places and was multi coloured and everything. Little bit of spotting - so off to the GP I trotted having Googled myself to oblivion and come to the brown blood = probably OK conclusion - got a referral to the EPU for an early scan. Thought we were going there to see our baby - and then that wonderful, so innocent-sounding phrase that I think you only truly know the terror of if you've been there.... "you ARE sure of your dates aren't you?" I thought blood running cold was just literary licence - it's not.
Scan machine showed one empty gestational sac - it's an image seered forever on my brain. Husband responded to this by almost keeling over, causing much concern among the nursing staff because of the sheer size of him (and the things he could break if he keeled over), so there's me, legs akimbo, pants around ankles with my world crumbling - and half of me wanting to clip him around the ear for being a big melodramatic wimp! (I can laugh now - back then - no way I could) While others left clutching an envelope with a picture - we got shown to the side room, given a leaflet and a rescan appointment and left clutching the pieces of our broken world. In the end it was even MORE cruel and drawn out - the rescan revealled the sack had grown... still no baby, and there was a second sack hiding away in a corner (I've got a retroverted uterus making early scans fun)... so sent back away for another fortnight - before hope was officially declared lost and I was booked in for the D+C.
A year of hell followed. I begged the GP for help with the crippling depression and agoraphobia - he would only consent to this if I agreed to have a coil fitted... I'm in my 30s - the biological clock's ticking - no way was I throwing in the towel and giving up, even temporarily! At one point I had to be physically stopped from attempting an overdose - life was utter hell. I didn't appear to be ovulating, didn't appear to have anything in the way of fertility left - but I'm a stubborn mare and wasn't giving up on things. Watched relatives get pregnant with ease and get their happy endings - felt increasingly like the freak of the family and shut myself away more and more.
So then I totally randomly decide, "ok this is the month we nail this" - and, well, we did. I got pregnant again (took a year mind you). The one blessing we had this time around was that we'd been seen by the miscarriage specialist after the last one and told to call them when we ever found out we were pregnant again... so we got scanned at 5 weeks (could only see the sac), 6 weeks (could just about see what she was probably confident but not 100% was the heartbeat), 7 weeks (heartbeat - still all looked like a badly tuned telly to me), 8 weeks (still going ok - could see it abdominally by now), and then 10+4 weeks where it was recognisable as a baby with a heartbeat... finally I got to leave the EPU with a photo and not a leaflet. She discharged me from miscarriage monitoring as being well past the point of previous losses and said she was confident things should go smoothly from now on.
So this is where I need the sense knocking part...
Why, if I know things were ok a week and a half ago (I'm now 12+4 by dates, scans have shown me only a couple of days out and consistently growing measurements) am I absolutely frantic and climbing the walls about the big "end of trimester 1 12 week scan" tomorrow? Rationally I've had weeks of clear heartbeats (although I know only too well tragedy can hit), I've had no bleeding for weeks (had some around week 5 that I was told I did not have permission to worry about) so whatever is in there is obviously still in there, I've got no rational reason to think the world's going to shatter again tomorrow - yet I'm going nuts working myself into a tizz about it - feels like some hormonal snowball I can't get hold of. I know I've got minimal symptoms - but I've had those throughout - I just cannot rationalise this fear of going to the "big pregnant ladies" place and that it's all going to fall apart again.
I even "know" mentally it's different this time - the last two times, however much I daydreamed - I never saw myself going into labour or holding the babies - this time I can. It was a funny instinct - but 100% right, even down to just knowing I was pregnant each and every time... even that doesn't work to calm the nerves down.
It's kind of a mix of absolute terror (I think my fear of mentally going back to that dark place the last losses took me to is more than my fear of actual miscarriage to be honest - to the extent I've pushed for a referral to mental health monitoring in case I end up with PND or anything) and a mix of frustration of the night before Christmas when we can actually big a farewell to that horrid first trimester and start planning things - and I'm driving myself nuts with it.
So please, slap some sense into me - and sorry for the long ramble! Also apologies for the quite dark humour in it all at times - like I say, it's quite often the only thing that got us through it all.
. Good luck for the scan and think positive, it worked for me and i've a gorgeous little 15 week girl now 
