The guilty party

Is my appendix. I am going in to have it out soon. Leaving F in his dad's capable hands. Thanks to eveyone for all the lovely messages. LoveBetty xx

36w

He is here! 6lb 5oz. Gorgeous. Mystery ailment afflicting me so both of us are chock full of antibiotics and stuck here till Friday at least. Photo when I get home as phone/ blogger interface eluding me! Thanks for all the lovely good wishes.

35 plus 6

I had been hoping to do a Sock it to me post. But here I sit in a hospital bed. Been here since 8 on Sunday. First day they were convinced it was labour as was I. Now they think it is something else possibly irritable uterus ( bloody furious more like), kidney infection, random other thing as yet unspecified. Unfortunately for most of the last 24 hours I have been barely able to move and dosed up on a zillion painkillers although here at least morphine is an option and the one enabling me to blog. Each time he kicks me the pain intensifies but at least out makes kick counts easier. Hopefully we will have a plan tomorrow. He is looking about 6 1/2 lbs on today's scan so early out may be an option. We'll see.

My own x-poll post for posterity.

This was my post for the Great Cross-pollination day which was posted over at Katie's blog. Real post forthcoming soon-ish. Possibly after 30w check up later today. Yup 30 weeks - shocking eh.

I was reading a post by Kym the other day where she talked about “passport children” and how for those of us who were either infertile or have had recurrent losses the living children we have are our passport into the fertile world. That’s the world where people plan their children so they have birthdays at the beginning of the school year. Where a decision to try for a baby means a baby is created max 3 months down the line and at that point it is safe to go tell everyone and buy nursery gear. Where it is a given that the number of children you have and their spacing is a deliberate choice. Where detailed knowledge of transvaginal scan procedures and how to inject yourself anywhere from the torso to the thigh is not necessary. Where - I could go on for pages in this vein - but you get the picture.

Anyhow the post said a lot of the things that I felt as well but then I got to thinking isn’t it about time I stopped feeling like this? I have two lovely children (spaced a fertile world style 3 years apart to the week thanks to those failsafe great planning techniques of a few ivf cycles and a miscarriage) a third hopefully safely en route. To all intents and purposes I have leave to remain/a green card (depending which side of the Atlantic you are) in the fertile world. Look come on I am now that annoying woman who conceived naturally at 42 and seems to be having a successful pregnancy - quickly reaching for the copious quantities of wooden coffee tables, lamps etc in close proximity - lets keep quiet about the further miscarriages in between.

Maybe I should just suck it up and move along. Its hard though because it still bloody rankles when its easy for other people. On balance though I think the anger is marginally better than the overwhelming sadness the whole business used to engender. I wonder how much time, energy and life I have wasted on this? Too much? Almost certainly. Would it have been easier just to be public about the whole thing and not suffer in silence? Would it have made any difference to the kids if the world knew about their start in a petri dish? Should I just have got over the fact that I thought they and me and the husband would be pitied for our failings to be a real part of the fertile world? Maybe. Maybe not. Do I really need to add regret to anger and sadness over the way we had to travel to get to where we are? I think not. I think now I need to grab that stamp in the passport or that green card - which isn’t even bloody green you know - and enter that other world as if we all belonged there all along. And in a spirit of multi-culturalism try and do a bit to make it so that for those coming along behind the whole passport issue just isn’t such a big deal anymore because we can all finally get to belong however we get to build our families.

Enough of the maudlin introspection though - serves me right for x-polling whilst watching a Joan Baez documentary. And thank you for letting me take over this space for a day.

CROSS POLLINATION DAY: A beating heart

Its cross pollination day people so here is today's mystery post. See if you can work out who it is or go to the great list of pollinators over at Geohde's place.:

When I scheduled our ultrasound two weeks ago, I honestly had very little hope that we would actually arrive at this date and still be pregnant. I put the day on my calendar in pencil, so I could erase it, if need be.

Every day since the second line came up, I have expected red on the toilet paper whenever I wipe. Whenever I feel a cramp or twinge, I take a trip to the restroom and do a "spot check." I am always amazed when the tissue comes back clean. Despite my increasing symptoms and all-day nausea, I can't wrap my mind around the fact that I seem to be staying pregnant.

I have been pregnant nine times. And eight of those times has resulted in a loss. Granted, the one time that did work out, resulted in my wonderful little boy. However, I still have very little confidence in my body when it comes to pregnancy. I still don't equate a positive pee stick with a baby. My mind does not work that way. When my husband and I discuss this pregnancy, we pepper our conversations with "if" not "when" and actually, we talk very little about the baby itself. My husband asks how I am feeling, or if I have had any spotting, but he does not really talk about the baby. Neither do I. I talk about my pregnancy in terms of symptoms and logistics. I try to steer clear of emotions or hopes. I did this with Will, too. It wasn't until much later, probably after the anatomy scan, that I was really able to start placing any true emotion into the baby part. I felt like a fraud of a mother, and I feel that way now, too.

Against the odds, here we are. I am 7 weeks, 2 days pregnant and at 3:45 this afternoon, we will know if this little baby has a heartbeat or not. Though I know that this is the first of many, many hurdles, I do know that, statistically speaking, our chances for a loss would go down dramatically if we were to see a beating heart. My own heart flutters with hope.

Pollination

As I have signed up to the witty Geohde's cross-pollination on Wednesday I think it is about time I pollinated the damn blog. The usual shit gets in the way of posting: laziness, dog tiredness, work etc etc etc. I also owe the wonderous and recently(ish) transmogrified Y-Yo Mama an award/ meme thing which may have to wait until later this week.

The pregnancy is now at just shy of 24 weeks - we are 6 scans down the line and all seems fine. There has been a slight rival scan maestro spat as to whether or not the babe had a slight pericardial effusion - to which the rival answers were respectively "no" and "yes but meaningless in the grand scheme" so to be honest perhaps we would have been better off with not being told at all. I'm not usually one for keeping stuff from the patient but given the upshot was "who cares" I sure wasted a lot of my time lying on my back craning round at blurry pictures of internal organs. And in other whinges - why do all appts take over 2 hours for anything at all? In other pregnancy related news I have shifted the nausea only for it to be replaced by reflux and constipation - joy of joys. Oh and I am hobbling about as I seem to also have some sort of sciatica. This is no doubt why the chorus from the ob community is get this done in your twenties ye foolish wenches. Huh, if bloody only. Explain to me why I have been contraception free since my late twenties and not till I was 42 could I manage this on my own then.

I have also sorted out cover for my maternity leave. I have had a jobshare for years and rather than muck it up we came up with a wheeze which hopefully will keep the place ticking over in my absence as I do twice as many hours as my colleague but also can be sold as development opportunity to one of our reports. I now have some confidence that my systems wont fall apart from 6 -7 months of neglect. We are a successful jobshare but, how shall I put this, we have complimentary skills and certain things just don't get done on her watch. She will however willingly do loads of difficult staff stuff for which I am eternally grateful. Even though occasionally I curse the fact that I occasionally get in and think what the *&%^ has she been bloody doing this week, I am happy to proselytise far and wide on the benefits of a jobshare in pretty much any job but in particular in professional ones where people get narky about part timers.

In exceedingly old news I got to see the HFF, and her bags of London swag, at the Cringe reading. Always good to see that bloggers do look human in the flesh. Not that I doubted HFF's existence but she could have been a boy biker from Bolton for all I knew (she isn't for any doubters amongst you).

Anyhoo. Do check back on the 9th for the cross-pollination extravaganza. Now back to failing to buy Yule gifts. Oh I wish I was one of those super witty gift givers who buys the oh so perfect items through the year and come December has nothing to do except source recherche wrapping. I blame living in foreign climes for years of my youth and also having non-religious/non-christian parents for my failures to buy into the British Christmas shopping experience.

Also why on earth are marron glacees so expensive - if anyone can confirm that making them yourself is a) viable and b) as tasty as the offerings from fancy French deli type place I will be eternally grateful.

There has been a lot happening

I am a shit poster. People I read mange posts every day, every other day, every week, every month. I barely manage every quarter. Oh well. I was rubbish at keeping up my juvenile diaries too which is probably a relief given they tended to be pretty uninteresting. I went for endless lists of books I had read rather than tortured analysis of who liked who best. Thats why I love the idea of Cringe - the book of hideously embarrassing juvenilia in which the great HFF has a piece (clearly her current writing is nothing like that stuff).

As an aside I also have a super bad habit of saving up posts of a lot of my favourite bloggers so I can think of something worthy to say and then never having enough time to comment. How do all those daily posters manage to find time in the day to comment absolutely bloody everywhere as well as having real lives?

So what are my excuses?

Indolence. A character trait I think I am stuck with. I am fine with tons of deadlines but if there isn't a court order hanging over my head and it can be put off it will be. This is why I am a litigator rather than any other sort of lawyer.

The need to keep up with the increasing no of people I read who post all the time. This comes under the husbandly rubric of "you need to get a bloody life in the real world". Thing is he doesn't deal with the people I do at the school gate. That is a whole post in itself but you wouldn't have thought it was quite so difficult to get past good morning. And work people aren't much use the rest of the week. (Work takes up time too and is unfortunately totally unbloggable for as they say "legal reasons".)

7 weeks of school holidays - thankfully over. London is a fabulous place with kids but boy can you spend a fortune in money and patience going to the Science Museum, the Zoo etc etc.

A number of weeks taken up for the husband by my seriously ill alcoholic FIL. That would be the high functioning alcoholic who managed to disguise from his sons that he had left himself with a bare 10% of his liver. FIL has never ever been my favourite person. In fact less said about him the better as it is not my story to tell suffice it to say throughout the husband's life he has been not nice.

Another pregnancy - currently at 14 weeks. This time though I decided I couldn't face the serial hell of inconclusive/ ok but not great scans ending in disappointment so I waited until 12w to have my first scan. All went well and all looks fine. Even the trisomy risk is pretty good for my age (between 1 in 850 or 1 in 1100 depending on the fancy research scan place vs NHS even though they should both be running the same system). Actually fancy scan place have been doing research trying to predict pre-e at the 12w scan from blood flow patterns and blood tests and on that I'm looking pretty good at the moment although no guarantees given I have had it before and the lupus pre-disposes. The booking in with the midwife took about 8 hours as each gory detail of the previous 5 pregnancies was recorded for posterity by me on paper and then repeated for her to put on the computer (although to be fair whilst child 1 was on the lots of reasons for intervention side pg wise child 2 was trouble free) . The high risk boxes were all ticked and off I shot to the consultants. Always a joy when they first thing the high risk consultant says is "oh I remember you". Never sure that that is a good thing. Didn't stop me having to give consultant no 2 (never knowingly under-consultanted my appts - 3 is the norm no 3 wasn't there as as per usual I was booked into the wrong clinic) and the snotty medical student the whole history a-bloody-gain.

Despite all things looking good so far I am still indulging in head in sand behaviour about this whole thing and have told precisely no family at all yet. Can't imagine I will be able to get away with that for much longer.

Anyway as with my diaries I have sent my self a "could do better" report card and a mental note that must try harder.