No not yet, maybe not ever

So in the last 48 hours I've been asked if I am thinking about using donor eggs and whether I am considering adoption. Clearly I've hit some kind of threshold where people are starting to think that I am pursuing a lost cause and that maybe I should give up.

This raises lots of issues for me.

First, adoption and donor eggs are generally expensive and difficult, neither are a sure bet and both have a whole lot of complex emotional issues attached to them that come with parenting/giving birth to a child with a genetic makeup different from his or her parent(s). Moreover, even if we did decide to pursue this as a couple we are not necessarily a good candidates for adoptive parents given our relatively advanced ages and the fact I am being medicated for depression. And it could be that donor eggs wouldn't work any better than my own eggs, if the cause for the miscarriages is some kind of underlying condition that stops the pregnancies from progressing.

Second, there is still a good chance that I will have a pregnancy that ends in a live birth of a healthy child. There are interventions that I haven't tried yet (basically because they are unproven and the doctors wouldn't give them to me until I had four losses or because they are really expensive). Plus most women with recurrent miscarriage eventually have a successful pregnancy if they keep trying. Its really about how many times you can bring yourself to go through it.

While my feelings on this stuff can fluctuate like mercury, right now I feel certain that we will be successful if we keep trying.

Rollercoaster blah blah

So today the blood test showed my hcg is dropping, which means the pregnancy is almost certainly non-viable. I kind of feel like some higher power is cruelly toying with me.

So shall we just go back and replay Friday's post.

And for those of you who feel like something really carthartic there is also this song.

OMG, this stuff can mess with your head

So it seems, despite all indications to the contrary, that this pregnancy may be viable. My hcg levels have risen from 20 to 55, which is a 49 hour doubling time, with the average doubling time for normal pregnancy being 48 hours. Still bleeding though.

Sorry, again, for traumatising everyone with my post the other day. After everything that has happened. and with everything looking so bad it was self-protective for me to assume the worst.

It will still be weeks before the danger zone for miscarriage is past and things could go kaput at any time. From here on out I will have three-daily hcg tests and a scan at around 6 weeks - it will be a waiting game to see what happens. Wish me luck.

Anthems

I really didn't mean to traumatise anyone with yesterday's post. Today I am feeling ok, although a little introspective and fragile. I am not sure really how to process all of this or what it means. It could mean:

a)I am really unlucky and have had a string of mcs from sporadic one-off events
b)I have some kind of undiagnosed underlying condition that is likely to reocur
c)Some strange mixture of a and b

I don't really know what to believe. Statistics still say I am likely to have a child one day. Although they also say that my chances have dropped a somewhat with no.4. Statistics have stopped holding much power with me now. Its now turning into a matter of faith.

Anyway, I thought I'd share with you my two anthems for this part of my journey.

Maybe tomorrow

and

Something good

I can't even say how I feel right now

Its come to the point that when we get a positive pregnancy test instead of being excited we cry. This morning L and I hugged and I cried when I thought about how difficult the last pregnancy was. But I don't think I need to worry about this pregnancy playing out in the same way as that one, I think this one's going to be over pretty quickly.

This time around I got caught out in that classic way, when I started bleeding on Saturday I thought it was my period. It was a pretty convincing imitation - but it dragged on longer than my period does and after tapering off the bleeding started intensifying again. So this morning I took a home test and it was positive and then I went and got a blood test and the hcg level is only 20 (it really should be around 100). And then I read up (again) about bleeding during early pregnancy and found a lot of people saying that the kind of bleeding I was having was indicating a miscarriage.

So I've found out about the pregnancy and the miscarriage on the same day. And my head is kind of spinning. What are the odds of four miscarriages in a row any way? The next medical professional who tells me that I have an excellent chance of my next pregnancy being successful is gonna get slapped in the face!

And I'm more and more becoming 'that' woman - the horribly unlucky one, the one that other people pity, the one that people can't deal with because all they can thing is "god, I hope that never happens to me", the one that miscarries over and over again and no one can tell her why. I am becoming the 'barren woman'.

So far I have learned patience, I have learned endurance, I have learned a kind of surrender. But, apparently I still have more to learn in this miscarriage milarky.

I've turned into a women's magazine

You know how those women's magazines always announce pregnancies of celebrities by publishing a photo where a female celebrity has a tiny suggestion of a pot belly or perhaps an item of clothing that is slightly baggy or wrinkled around the midriff and they photoshop in a large arrow and add a caption that says BABY BUMP? Then at least 70% of the time it turns out that the celebrity was just slouching in a minorly unflattering way and is not actually with child.

I am now chanelling the women's magazines. If ever I meet a woman of child bearing age (or even one that is arguably borderline) who appears to have a belly of some kind I am transfixed by it and start wondering - is there a baby in there? It's getting so bad that I am having to bite my tounge to stop myself from asking some of them if they're pregnant.

Endurance

So I got depressed after the surgery I had in March. I felt teary every day. Ordinary levels of stress made me feel overwhelmed and unable to cope. It got to the point where I felt like I was walking around with a large and heavy stone on each shoulder. I used to feel like this a lot on and off (basically throughout most of my teens and 20s) until I started taking antidepressants. SSRIs changed my life so much for the better. Once I found the right ones and they kicked in it was like I had been sitting in a room while dusk had fallen and hadn't noticed how dark it had gotten until someone turned on the light. Some people say that antidepressants flatten out their feelings but it wasn't like that for me. My feelings were already flatlining and because of the drugs I suddenly felt a much broader spectrum of emotion than I had for years. Previously my main emotions had been anxiety and despair.

Since I started on the SSRIs back in 2003 I have only been depressed twice. (Thats not to say that I haven't been unhappy, but unhappy is different from depressed and I would say a normal and healthy part of anyone's emotional life.) The first time was in late 2006/early 2007 when I stopped taking the drugs in preparation for trying to conceive. I took about 6 weeks to taper off the drugs and it was all looking good but then shit happened - in an 8 week period I had a big dramatic fight with some close family members on Christmas day, a had a painful run-in with a work colleague that shattered a lot illusions I'd had about my job, my job was seemingly disestablished and I was told by email, L's stepmother died. My mood crashed. I couldn't even cope with simple things like ringing the electricity company to query a bill. I wanted so badly to have a drug free pregnancy but when my GP suggested I go back on the medication, at least temporarily, I was relieved. I decided that the risk to my mental health of being off the meds (which was high) outweighed the risk to a future child of being on them (which was low).

The second time I got depressed was last month. In some ways this time was scarier because this time it happened while I was on the meds. I don't know why the surgery was the trigger for depression when there have been so many other more stressful life events happening over the last year. Maybe it was just culmulative.

As luck would have it this bout of depression got pinged pretty early on and it pretty much gone now. The great saviour this time was traditional chinese medicine. I know lots of people don't hold much stock in TCM , L being one of them. And while TCM has been proven effective for a limited number of medical conditions depression is not one of them. On the day that I felt weighed down by heavy stones I happened to have one of my regular acupuncture appointments. When I told my acupuncturist about the depression she treated me for it through both needles and herbs and I felt better straight away and pretty much a lot better within about 3 days. Now you can say thats a placebo effect but I have to say that its the best damned placebo effect I've ever come across.

Still, here I am now not depressed but I would have to say that I'm not so happy either. I remember being happy and excited about my life and the future and the last times I can remember feeling this way is right before I got married in 2007 and then again in mid 2008 when I got pregnant for the second time before I miscarried. I know that life goes in phases and I have to say that 2003 to 2007 were pretty happy times for me. Lots of stuff went right, I found a job I loved, I got promoted, I got together with L, I bought a property, I got a car and learned to drive. All long held goals that suddenly all came together. Now I am in a phase where it feels like my long term goals are being thwarted and where there has been a lot of loss and sadness. I guess when I take the long term view I see that I will at some point move from this phase and into a happier one but in the meantime I am learning endurance.