Friday, March 24, 2006

March - part 3

The other day I was reading In Touch magazine (I am now almost addicted to those gossipy magazines) and it appears that Britney Spears is pregnant again!!! She just had a baby less than 6 months ago and she's pregnant again! How can that be? Out of all people, the one whose husband is a deadbeat redneck who doesn't even care about her managed to get pregnant twice in one year... Life is so unfair...

It seems that all the celebrities are currently pregnant and you see them and their bellies everywhere. Angelina barely has a bump and probably weighs less than I do (and I'm not even pregnant) but is due in 3 months. I started calculation when she got pregnant and it seems like it happened only a couple of months after her and Brad met. How can you not be jealous? Now I finally know how Jen feels...

And Katie Holmes - she practically got pregnant the first time her and Tom slept together and he is over 40! And even Gwyneth is pregnant with baby #2 and looking better than ever. I almost get some sick pleasure from looking at their pictures in the magazines. It's a weird combination of wishing I was them and hating them for being so perfect.

But then I got online and found all these articles about celebrities who had problems conceiving and it made me feel a little better. Courtney Cox took a while to have her baby, same as Brooke Shields, and rumor has it that J. Lo. has been trying to get preggers for a while and Aston and Demi have been trying as well. It's good to know that it's not just me although there are still the people like Britney who get pregnant even while her husband in partying in some Vegas club with a French model. I just don’t get it. I thought Kevin didn’t think she was sexy anymore after the birth of the baby... I have to stop obsessing about this!

It's hard not to feel like failure but it's Friday and next week we can start trying again so I need to stay optimistic.

March - part 2

Yesterday my friend had her twins! She was scheduled to have them next Thursday but she had gotten so big and she was having difficulty sleeping, moving and pretty much doing anything, so she asked the doctor to move the surgery a week earlier and he agreed. So she had a C-section yesterday and the babies were born - one boy and one girl, 7.3 and 6.3 lbs. I couldn't wait to see them so my husband and I went to the hospital last night and they had just brought the babies to her room and they were so cute. The boy has chubby little cheeks and the girl is slender and with lots of hair, they don’t really look alike that much. They are so tiny that when she handed me one of them and I almost panicked. She told me not to worry, that they won't break but their little heads were just so small... She was recovering pretty well from the surgery and said that everything went fine, wasn't scary at all. It was weird seeing her with the two babies when I saw her just a couple of days ago with a big tummy...what a miracle!

It made me feel even more how much I wanted to have a baby of my own!

March - part 1

My husband and I flew to Berlin a few days before my conference started and had a great time exploring the city. I had never been there before and even though it was rather cold this time of the year, the city itself is beautiful, especially the new modern part around Potsdamer Platz.

I knew my period was due around the same time we arrived in Berlin and I didn't think I was pregnant so I was basically waiting for it to start. In the meantime, being away from home and without the pressures of trying to conceive, we felt like we were on a honeymoon again :) Great times!

I felt some minor cramps a few times but no period yet, but I had no symptoms at all so I didn’t think anything of it. After my conference started, I was so busy from early morning till late at night that I honestly completely forgot about my period. At the end of the week I thought it was kind of weird that it still hadn't come but I didn't have an easy access to a pregnancy test and I was still so busy that I just figured if I'm by any chance pregnant, then whether I do a test now or later doesn't really matter.

However, after my period was 9 days late I thought it was kind of weird especially since it's almost never late. So I started thinking that maybe, just maybe I am pregnant but it's just too early to have any symptoms. I really didn't know what to think but at the back of mind I was slightly hopeful.

I flew back from Berlin on Wednesday and I was determined to take a pregnancy test as soon as I get home because by then I was 10 days late. I had a really long flight ahead of me and I'm really scared of flying so I took my regular anti-anxiety pill and I took a sleeping pill during the flight when we hit some major turbulence and I started freaking out.

As soon as we landed, I felt a strong cramp, which did not go away and by the time I got out of customs I was cramping a lot (I usually have major cramps during my period anyway) so I went straight to the bathroom and, guess what, I was bleeding. Full on, just like a period.

My first thoughts were, oh well, I didn’t really think I was pregnant anyway so it's just my period. But the next day I noticed a couple of blood clots on my tampon and that got me a little worried. When I had my chemical pregnancy back in September, I had a lot of blood clots coming out of me and lots and lots of blood as well. So I freaked out that I might be having another chemical pregnancy. The blood was the usually period amount but the few blood clots and the fact that the bleeding came 10 days after my period was supposed to come got me worried. I was mad at myself for not doing a pregnancy test in Berlin because this way I would have known whether this was just a normal period or a chemical pregnancy. As it was, there was no way to know. Urgh!!!

So of course I was torturing myself going back in time to figure out whether I had any symptoms of late ovulation but could not remember anything. I had stopped testing with the Ovulation Kit because I just assumed my ovulation occurred while we were in Atlantic City but it's possible that it was just very delayed (although it has never been that late before). But if I did get pregnant, why didn't I have any symptoms at all? At least the first time, I had felt some symptoms before it turned out the embryo never implanted. This time it was nothing.

It was difficult for me but I decided not to torture myself thinking about this more and more because there was absolutely no way to find out. I kept checking the amount of bleeding and it appeared normal but the weird thing was that usually my period is completely over after 4-5 days max. This time the bleeding was over on the morning of day 5 but for 4 more days I had a brownish discharge - not a lot but just enough to get me thinking what if...

Anyways, I have made a decision that we will try again in April and if nothing happens I will make an appointment to see a doctor and see if maybe something is wrong. I will try to do everything right in April - I will start testing for ovulation early and not stop until I have a positive. We'll try to have as much sex as possible and I will make sure to take my vitamins and we’ll see what happens. Of course, every time I have great plans something happens and they don’t always work out but I've decided to give us one last chance before going to the doctor.

I’ll start testing for ovulation next Tuesday so keep your fingers crossed.

February

After trying all these things in January with no success I was really getting worried. My husband tried to play it cool and make things light, but trying for over 6 months with no success I was starting to think that maybe something is wrong. I mean, come on, we're both healthy, young, never smoked, never took drugs, drink very little, I’m taking all kinds of vitamins, and we're having sex at the right time and nothing is happening. How can this be?

We prepared ourselves for another month of trying and, even though now things were a little easier because with the Ovulation Calculator we knew when the best time for sex was, there was no room left for spontaneity. I felt like everything was planned- we knew the time, we knew the positions, we knew the drill. It just wasn't lighthearted anymore. But, we wanted a baby and we loved each other, so we were ready to try again.

I did a quick calculation to figure out when my ovulation will be and it was supposed to be during the weekend so I decided to have some fun and go to Atlantic City for that weekend and try to make things more exciting and just about conceiving. I started testing a couple of days before the weekend and the results were negative. And then we went to Atlantic City and I forgot my test kit (yeah, I know, it's stupid) but I figured my period is always 28-30 days apart so even without the kit I was pretty convinced I must be ovulation that weekend.

Unfortunately, not all best laid plans always work, and it turned out that my husband got a sinus infection a few days before we went to Atlantic City (he has a lot of problems with allergies and his sinuses) and they put him on a strong medication, which he had to take before going to bed. And, as luck would have it, the medication acts like a tranquilizer, so my husband would fall asleep right away and even during the day he did not have much energy and was feeling tired, so having sex was almost impossible unless we really wanted to force it, which I did not want to do. I was very upset and a little mad at him even though I knew it wasn't his fault but I just blamed it on him, and we got into a huge argument, so the fun times at Atlantic City did not work out.

We got home upset and sad and when I did an ovulation test on Tuesday and it came back negative I was convinced that I had ovulated over the weekend and by Tuesday it was over. With the pressure gone, we had sex several times just for fun but I did not even bother lifting my legs because I knew I wasn't ovulation.

That weekend was the baby shower for my friend with the twins. She was really happy and glowing and all the other women at the shower were either pregnant or recently gave birth so all the talk was about babies and pregnancy and even though I was really happy for her, I just could not help but being sad inside.

On top of that, one of our acquaintances who was at the shower, a hip Brazilian party girl who was dating one of our guy friends who everyone thought was a party animal, announced that her and her boyfriend had broken up right before the holidays but they had had one last "farewell sex" and she just found out that she was pregnant and she had decided to keep the baby. Needless to say, this was more that depressing - here was this girl who partied all the time, drank a lot, never really thought about having kids, who has one-off sex with the guy she's breaking up with and, voila, now she's pregnant. How can I not get pregnant when everyone else around me is, even people who are 10 years older than me? Why is this happening to me?

As the time for my period approached, I felt absolutely no symptoms of pregnancy. I was scheduled to go on a business trip abroad during the time my period was due so I figured being busy will take my mind off it and by the time I come back it will be time to try again. Last, minute, I managed to get a ticket for my husband to come with me using my frequent flyer miles so we were both looking forward to some time away to just have fun and relax and forget about the baby problems.

January

As soon as we got back from vacation my pregnant friend called me and told me they had their baby a few days earlier. We went to see them and I held the baby and he was so tiny and so sweet that I almost cried. I was so desperate to have one of my own...

My friend was very tired and scared and she said she had not slept since the baby was born because she kept waking up to check up on him and then to feed him and change him and she was so stressed and sleep deprived that she was jealous of us taking a vacation and having fun. Only if she knew how jealous of her I was (in a good way of course)!

I went to see my friend and little baby Alex every few days and in the course of our conversations my friend told me that she and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for 2 years. But when I asked her whether she was checking her ovulation, etc she said no, they had just been having unprotected sex hoping to get pregnant and she was almost losing hope when she got pregnant with Alex.

So somehow that gave me some hope and I was determined to do everything I could to increase my chances. I finally got an Ovulation Calculator after spending hours researching how they work and how reliable they are. I got the CVS kind but it got really good reviews on epinions.com in it looked fairly easy to use. I also read online that taking Vitamin B-6 is good for conception and for keeping the baby so I started taking that as well. I had stopped using the natural progesterone because I wasn’t really convinced it works, but who knows, maybe I'll start using it again soon.

I started using the Ovulation strips on day 12 of my cycle and for the first few days the test line was so thin that I thought I'm not doing it right. However, on day 15 both of the lines were the same color and I scrambled to get the manual and see exactly what it means. According to the instructions, it meant that I will ovulate within the next 24 hours and the egg only lived for 12-24 hours so the best time to conceive was in the next 2 days.

I told my husband we got busy for the next couple of days, although again it was not romantic at all and by that point, it was almost like we had to do it and that's why we were doing it. I'm not saying it wasn’t good sex but it just felt weird that we were having sex to get pregnant and it was difficult to enjoy it as much as before with all the pressure. And of course you have to be careful not to spill any of the sperm, lift your legs when you're done and all this other romantic stuff. My husband never really admitted that he was stressed as well but he had a couple of "performance" problems where I had to put some extra effort to get things going so I could tell that it was different for him as well.

Unfortunately, after all the efforts and the planning, my period came right on time on day 29.

December

One of my really got friends (not the one with the twins) was pregnant and due in early January so I decided to throw her a baby shower. Something to do and besides, I desperately wanted to feel part of the pregnancy process. She was already very pregnant and heavy and got tired easily and she was complaining that she could hardly wait for the baby to be born and all the time I just kept thinking I wish I was her. I constantly discussed every single detail of her pregnancy with her so between her and my other pregnant friend I already felt like I know more about pregnancy and babies than anyone else. Sort of like "always the bridesmaid, never the bride" but in regards to babies.

I kept reading pregnancy books all the time to the point where my husband became worried that I'm taking this too seriously. All the fun pregnancy books you can think of: "From Here to Maternity", "The Thin Blue Line", "Babyville" - I read them all. Before I finished one I was already on Amazon searching for another similar one until I pretty much read them all. I mean, I usually read a lot anyway, but this was too much even for me.

And, of course, all the celebrities was getting pregnant one of the other, so I saw pictures of Angelina Jolie, Katie Holmes, Gwen Stefani, Brooke Shields, all sporting a nice bump and cool pregnancy clothes. Urgh!

I was feeling down so we made a last minute decision to visit my parents for the holidays. They live in another country and I only see them a few times a year, so I thought it would be great to spend the holidays with them.

We were scheduled to fly out on the day before Christmas arriving at my parents the morning of Christmas day. So we left work early, loaded our suitcases in the car and left for the airport 4 hours before the flight - usually plenty of time. Well, not on this day. Everybody was driving somewhere or buying last minute gifts so the Capitol Beltway was jammed. After an hour we had hardly moved one exit. We tried to get off the Beltway and use some back roads but even they were packed so we ended up getting to the airport a little more than an hour before the flight. And, of course, the check-in lines were a mile long. United Airlines didn't really care about checking us in quickly so by the time we got to the front of the line our flight had already left. I was crying, my husband was yelling at the check-in person who told us there was no other flight they could put us on that night, it was just a nightmare. We spent 3 hours at the airport trying to work something out and finally they told us they can only put us on a flight the next day, which meant we would spent Christmas day in the air and would get to my parents the day after Christmas. By that point we were both really tired and didn't even care.

We got home around midnight and woke up on Christmas morning when we had amazing sex and I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if I got pregnant on Christmas, it would be so amazing. I always believe that everything happened so a reason and I kept thinking maybe that's why we missed our flight; so that I would get pregnant (it was exactly around my ovulation time.)

We spent a week at my parents' and had a really good time, except for the fact that there was no chance for us to have sex because we did not have much privacy and we traveled around to see some relatives and it just wasn't possible to have sex. But I figured at least we had sex on Christmas, the timing was right, so if it was meant to be, then it will happen (I was trying to be Zen)

Well, it did not happen and I got my period shortly after we came back from vacation.

November

Trying for a baby was turning out to be more tiring than we thought. After the initial excitement of being able to have lots of unprotected sex, it was now becoming somewhat of a routine. We were both busy at work and it was the time of the year when I don’t feel like going out because it's so depressing and cold, so it was difficult to feel sexy.

For the past two months I was trying to predict my ovulation days by counting checking my discharge, etc and we would try to have as much sex as possible during those 3-4 days, but I could tell that for both of us it wasn't as exciting as in the beginning.

It wasn't making love anymore, it was just sex and there was the added pressure of trying to conceive. I read somewhere that you should lift your legs up after sex to facilitate conception so I started doing that for about 20-30 minutes - very romantic...

I also obsessively read info online about preventing chemical pregnancy and a lot of people recommended taking natural progesterone considering one of the main causes of chemical pregnancy is lack of natural progesterone produced by the body. Some people swore by the natural progesterone saying that it definitely helped them keep their babies and it did not have any side effects as it was produced naturally.

I got a whole bottle of it (it looks and feels like lotion) from a health food store and started using it in October and November but unfortunately I got my period right on time both months. What a disappointment - I felt like a failure! On top of that my friend who got pregnant through in-vitro fertilization already had a big belly and she recently found out she was carrying twins.

I was very happy for her and obsessively discussed pregnancy issues with pretty much reliving every moment of her pregnancy with her. I also started reading books about pregnancy and maternity. Not the scientific kind, but the fun fiction kind, but still, I just wanted to be pregnant so badly! By the way, if you even want to read a fun pregnancy book, I highly recommend "Diary of a mad mother-to-Be" - very funny and true as well.

I also became very aware of any little change in my body, checking my breasts, my discharge and my temperature obsessively hoping to feel something that would indicate I was pregnant. Every little twinge in my breasts or every time I had to pee more than once in a couple of hours, and here I was speculating that it could be a sign.

I counted the days after my ovulation and when it got close to the implantation stage, I would start checking myself for every possible symptom to maybe tell me I was pregnant. I also constantly searched online for new and undiscovered symptoms of early pregnancy - indigestion, excessive saliva, headaches, cramps, you name it, I've checked myself for it. Unfortunately - nothing for two months.

September

After the chemical pregnancy I was really depressed and scared for a while but I could not wait to start trying again. Even though the doctor told me to wait one full cycle before starting, I read many postings online where people started trying right away and got pregnant with no problems, so I decided I to start trying right away. I didn't know when I'd ovulate because according to the doctor it could take up to 6 weeks for my body to get back to normal, so as soon as my cramps subsided we got back to having sex regularly and pretty much every other day. I figured this way we're covered regardless of when I ovulate. About 3 weeks after my chemical pregnancy, I went on a short business trip to Florida and on the way back all of a sudden I felt super tired and slept through the whole flight without taking a sleeping pill. Then, for the next few days I felt really tired, I would fall asleep around 10 every night (I usually don't go to bed before midnight), so I was secretly praying that this was the first sign of pregnancy. I couple of days later I felt the tingling in my breasts, which grew stronger every day, so I was almost convinced that I was pregnant. I even started talking to my belly (crazy, I know...) I decided to wait until 5 weeks after my miscarriage to do a pregnancy test and became acutely aware of every little thing my body was feeling trying to interpret it as a symptom of pregnancy. Well, I was wrong! Exactly 5 weeks after "the incident" I got my period. Turns out the tender breasts were just PMS and the tiredness was probably work-related. I didn't really know what to think anymore.