HPTs

Chances of home pregnancy test accuracy

Thinking Outside of the Box

So last night I was having serious premenstrual cramping and then I remembered - that's how I felt the first time! Since I didn't even remember that, how could it be psychosomatic? I was positive there was a lil bun in the oven.

Today though, no cramping, not too exhausted, nothing really to speak of. A bit nauseous, but now it definitely could be me making things up so I'm not putting stock into anything.

I need a positive test result.

I was SO excited yesterday, that it almost made me nervous, so I took a step back to consider, "Am I happy for me? Or for Kira and Scott? Am I really looking at this baby as mine, or as theirs?" And I was pleased to realize that I don't want my own baby right now -- I want to do it on my timeline that has a few years between now and motherhood. I was genuinely happy to be able to give Kira and Scott what I know is the most important gift they will ever get.

In other news, I told my friend Shannon today about this surrogacy endeavor and her response was perfect: "Talk about thinking outside of the box." I nearly choked on my hazelnut latte, I was laughing so hard. Then for the rest of the afternoon, I regretted that latte as my body seemed determined to reject it.

I'm preemptively grateful that I have a boyfriend who will love me even when I burp.

Math

Omigod omigod omigod. . .I was using the fertility app by what to expect when you're expecting to calculate ovulation, and it told me I'd ovulate the 21st. EVERY WEBSITE I AM CHECKING says I ovulated the 18th based on the first day of my last period.

I THINK I AM RIGHT. And we inseminated. . .you guessed it. . .the 18th!

False Hopes?

I am positive I am pregnant. I know, with all of my scientific research that you usually cannot tell you are pregnant until about a week after conception (implantation), but here was the timeline last time. . .conception Oct 2, positive test Oct 13, felt sick for about a week already on the 13th, so symptoms since about the 5th-7th. . . I feel the exact same way now. I went to the gym and did a 500 meter row, then 4 rounds of 50 squats and 15 clean and jerks (45#). And I felt like I could barely make it through. The same way I felt in October. I have felt exhausted since Wednesday.

I told Kira I'd bet my house I'm pregnant. While it might be psychosomatic, me expecting to be pregnant, hoping to be pregnant, goddamn am I tired. Can't wait until we have a positive test to confirm that things are good, but also that I'm not crazy. Or dying.

(Ir)rational Fears

This morning's test was negative. Not a surprise at all, since it's too early even if I am pregnant.

So, here's what's been running through my head a lot since this whole shebang started. What if I get pregnant, and it's not Scott's, it's Matthew's? I mean, Matthew and I are very careful about protection, but I've already proven that protection doesn't always work. And everyone has stories about timing not being exact, and getting pregnant nowhere near ovulation. I have this horrible scene playing in my head where I am pregnant, and Kira and Scott are so excited, and are decorating the nursery, and we get an amnio, and it's Matthew's. I even took a pregnancy test Tuesday just to make sure by some miracle (or disaster) of science, I wasn't already pregnant. I feel like no matter when I get a positive, until we get amnio results, I won't feel totally secure. Which is awesome, since amnios aren't exactly the safest thing anyway, not to mention that you don't get them until about 18 weeks into the pregnancy (halfway through?!).

Of course, B&N made me 27 times more afraid, because when I went onto the site the other day, it featured the book Inconceivable -- about a couple who uses IVF, and is accidentally inseminated with another couple's embryo. How horrible! (Also, is B&N tracking my google history?) I almost feel like even if somehow I ended up pregnant with Matthew's child, I'd want to hand the baby over to Kira because I know how utterly destroyed she would be. Can you will this stuff to work out exactly the way you want? Why is pregnancy the most complicated medical situation possible? With so many possibilities that it's never safe, you can never stop worrying, and you have zero control of it ever. . .I guess those are the very things, though, that make it such a miracle.

Sick or Pregnant?

So I've started playing a game I like to call "Sick or Pregnant?" We did inseminations Friday and Saturday, and I probably ovulated Sunday or Monday, so the chances of us/them/me being pregnant are slim, but the past few days I've been super tired and starving. And craving chocolate. Like a 3-day long chocolate craving. Yesterday I took a 4 hour nap, woke up for maybe 4 hours, and went back to bed. So every time I want chocolate, or am starving beyond the usual, or need a nap, or feel too tired to horseback ride, I wonder. . .

I know it's too early for symptoms -- it usually takes a week after implantation to feel anything. But still, my mind is wandering.

I vetoed the hot tub this weekend, after reading that hot tubs pull your blood to your skin away from your organs which can prevent getting pregnant, but I worked out today. Seems kind of silly to switch to CrossFit Mom already when maybe maybe maybe implantation has taken place, but probably not.

Going to start testing tomorrow. Early, I know, but I'm crazy.

Bodies Without Borders

Two out of three of the inseminations are done. So, like the bar exam, I feel like it's now out of my hands. What has happened/is happening/will happen is already in the works. Not that I ever really had control, right? It's not like I could do anything to ensure this cycle resulting in a pregnancy. But that's really what's crazy and frustrating and so beautiful about pregnancy. We live in this culture where science trumps nature every time -- we live in a day of medications to change your brain's chemical makeup, and plastic surgery can give you a different nose than the one your grandmother passed on to you, etc etc. We have this belief that if we don't like how nature is, we can "fix" it. Even with pregnancy, we have IVF, where you can ensure you have a fertilized egg, and while I don't know that much about IVF, there's still an issue there right? They implant several embryos I think, in the hopes that 1 survives. And there's nothing anyone can do to choose how many survive, which one(s), and whether those embryos will survive an entire pregnancy, whether that baby will survive the first year (or three). As much as we want to feel all-powerful, in the end we are still the subjects of whimsy, or God, or fate, or whatever it is you want to believe has the deciding say in these matters.

How I feel emotionally, though, is not quite as clear-headed. Ever since my D&C in November, I've felt different about my body. I can't say whether it's more disconnected, or more protective. Perhaps both? I remember that doctor looking like Amy Smart, young and blond and intelligent, and being talkative and friendly. Factually, I know she was. I remember the nurse holding my hand when I cried. But in my head, in these flashbacks I have, the doctor's face gets contorted, floats towards me like it's the subject of some awful Dali painting that never made it into general distribution. She has become a monster in my memory. And even with the IV of anti-anxiety meds and pain meds, I remember feeling everything. I remember intense, sharp pains, cramping, toe-curling, nail-digging hurt.

Intellectually, I know now, and knew then, that this wasn't the doctor's fault, or her doing, but emotionally I still felt as though this procedure was the ultimate form of violation. Going into my body through that most personal, protected of paths, to take away what I loved even more than myself (how was that possible so early?) made this doctor a barbarian in my mind. The recovery from the D&C was more about recovery from my body's violation, from using my body against itself, than about physical healing.

Until things went wrong. Some pregnancy tissue had been left in my womb, and I ended up in the hospital. Five. Times. I knew something was wrong at the end of November, when I was driving back to Colorado from Thanksgiving with my family in Philadelphia. I stayed in a Best Western in Illinois (where a chicken roosted in a tree outside the front door), and in the morning I did an easyish workout in my hotel room. 21-18-15-12-9-6-3 push-ups, sit-ups, squats. (For those who don't CrossFit, that's 21 of each movement, then 18, then 15, etc). Doing the sit-ups, I felt sharp pains where I imagine my ovaries are. Even after I stopped working out, the pain continued as I walked to my car, shooting across my torso, up my body, radiating everywhere. In the car, sitting made the cramps worse, but pushing my seat back and laying down hardly alleviated the stinging.

When I went into the ER, after watching a thermometer obsessively track my temperature from 94 to 101 to 94 to 100 to 95, etc for a few hours, the doctors did a transvaginal ultrasound. I knew this what this would show me -- my uterus, empty. And knowing that terrified me. I didn't want to see what I knew my body had become. So I found myself, again, lying on a table in dark room, crying, as a doctor indifferently inserted tools inside me. I can't remember when I stopped crying this time, but I know I cried through the ultrasound, back into my hospital room, and through the consultation with another, warmer, doctor after she had reviewed my ultrasound pictures. I remember sobbing even harder when she told me I would have to have yet another D&C. I mumbled to her, "As though it wasn't bad enough the first time." When I said this, she was on her way out of the room, and she stopped, maybe seeing me as more than a patient for the first time, and put her hand on my knee. "I'm speaking from experience," she said, "you never completely get over this."

And right then, in that way that you can feel for people you don't know but who understand you, I loved her. Not for fixing my body, but for being honest with me, for what felt like the whole time in this entire ordeal. She was the first person who told me that how awful I felt was legitimate, that my month of angry, bitter moods and self-loathing and simultaneous self-pity was warranted, the first person who verified that when I snapped at people, "I can't get over this," or "No, it isn't getting any better," I wasn't just being stubborn. I was right. And I was normal.

After this ER visit, I had 4 more trips to the hospital before I physically recovered. But each time, my body felt less and less like my own. I felt like doctors had betrayed me, like my body had betrayed me, like all I wanted was to be able to heal, and my body was forcing me to feel physical pain so that I could not forget the emotional. And as my body felt more like something that belonged to doctors, to test and prod and draw blood from and discuss and "fix," I became more and more protective of the little bit of control I possibly had over it. I didn't want anyone touching me anymore, not hugs, not romantically, not supportively, not protectively. My body felt assaulted and invaded, and I wanted to close it off to everyone. I stopped going to follow-ups with my doctor, I stopped getting the prescribed blood tests. I needed my body to heal on its own, to maintain some kind of autonomy.

So what I'm getting at is this: This insemination thing has thrown me for a loop. And I know Kira reads this, but for the sake of emotional honesty, I'm going to talk about this anyway. While I so badly want to give Kira and Scott a child, especially knowing how it feels to have lost one, and knowing the pain Kira has suffered, this separation from my body for the sake of insemination is emotionally confusing. Again, I feel like my body is no longer my own. Intellectually, I know that this is for something good instead of what I have grown used to, but emotionally the feelings are similar, are overlapping and confusing, and I find myself having to remind myself of the why. When I get anxious about this, especially about the insemination part, I find myself needing to take a step back to look at the bigger picture, to reconsider what this is for. To realize that this isn't me losing, or someone looking at me as a series of blood tests and ultrasound images, but to realize that this is me creating something new and beautiful (a baby, a mother, a family). Even while this seems obvious, it is still emotionally confusing to go through.

Matthew asked if I wanted to back out of the agreement, if I wanted to take more time to think about it. He said he would support me whatever I decided. I know that that's not what I want, but I do want to get a positive test, to get past this awkward point. To finally make something good come from my body. To have doctors examining me not to diagnose, but to appreciate.

Statistics

Fertility & Sterility [April 2001, 75:4, pp. 656-660] reported a study that compared IUI and ICI in fertile single women. Interestingly they conclude that two are better than one. A single ICI had 5 percent success; double was 9 percent. A single IUI had 14 percent success; double 15 percent.

S**t Just Got Real

Matthew said he realized how serious things were yesterday when he was checking out of a bookstore with a copy of "What To Expect When Your Wife's Expanding," and the cashier congratulated him, and started telling him how amazing fatherhood is.

Things became very real for me today when I was considering buying a very cute spring/summer outfit online, and then I thought, "Wait, this won't fit me by then. What's the point?"

I'll admit, I'm getting nervous about this. Not about having the baby. About this weekend. What if I don't get pregnant? I'll feel so let down, I'll worry about letting Kira & Scott down. I always want to give people everything I can, and I know I can do this (eventually), but I can't control whether it will happen this weekend, or next month, or the month after, etc. I'd feel so much more confident with IUI, even though that only has a 15-20% success rate. . .

I'm getting so antsy. . .This is almost as bad as the bar exam.

Conversations with Matthew

Texts from Matthew today:

"I had a 'shit just got real' moment at lunch. I went to a bookstore during lunch and was looking at baby books :) And looking at everything was just like wow you are really having a baby and what a big thing it is. And I'm gonna be there every step of the way with you, but it's definitely gonna take a big toll on your body, and so getting you through it safe and sound is my biggest concern. . .Well I've got to start getting prepared so I can know how to be good to you :-)"

I deem further commentary on Matthew's amazingness uneccessary.

Conception Minus 3 (Fingers Crossed)

We are trying three times this cycle -- Friday night, Saturday morning, and Monday night. Oh, and why are we doing ICI instead of IUI you might ask? For one, I don't have fertility problems (as evidenced by my getting pregnant accidentally while on birth control) so there is no reason ICI shouldn't take. Second, the fertility doc Kira sees doesn't "do" surrogates. Seriously. These people will set you up with egg donors, with sperm donors (from a bank), ICI, IUI and IVF. But not with a surrogate. Is this some weird religious or moral thing that I am missing? If you're going to make baby-making scientific, why not get fun with it, right? So of course, the angry lawyer that I am (I mean, I am CONFIDENT IUI would take the first time), I called the doctor's office to demand an explanation. The receptionist told me the doctor didn't have a private voicemail (I refuse to believe that), and connected me to the business manager, who basically told me that it would take too long and be too expensive to get the legal documents necessary to do surrogate insemination. I asked, well what if the IP (Intended Parents) have their own attorney doing the legal work? (i.e., me, the one getting knocked up). The business manager said that wasn't enough for them, they needed to protect themselves from liability.

I GUESS I can understand. . .I mean, theoretically, I could steal the child and Scott could sue the doctor for putting his sperm into this crazy broad, but wouldn't a simple waiver solve that problem? This is not an issue I've researched the legality of, really I've been looking more for the scientific and emotional information.

So I had Kira call the office back -- they had just heard my voice, after all -- and ask whether they would do IUI with a private sperm donor, not from a bank. (We were thinking I'd just bring in Scott's baby batter and say the baby was for me). Again, no. Same reason.

So back to square one. ICI.

From our extensive scientific research (i.e. googling other women's experiences, trying to figure out the best way to go about this whole process), Kira and I learned -- over Valentine's Day chocolate-covered strawberries -- that you should try to inseminate the day before ovulation, the day of ovulation, and the next two-three days. According to my handy-dandy fertility calendar, I will ovulate on Monday. The problem here is that we are using fresh sperm - that should optimally be used within 12 hours of production. Scott is out of town until Thursday night or Friday morning this week, and leaves again Monday morning - Thurs/Fri again. And I am leaving Saturday morning until Monday night.

BUT. Sperm can live in a happy fertile welcoming uterus for about 5 days, so if we are successful Friday or Saturday, or even Monday, our chances look pretty good.

Scott will be traveling for work. Where will I be? With my fantastic, amazing boyfriend, Matthew. Matthew and I have been together since February 2, 2011, and I know this sounds ridiculous to say already, but he is it for me. I have never been so taken by someone in my life, and before you say, "Oh it's just the honeymoon period, it'll wear off," let me tell you about Matthew: I told him on our third date, February 4th, that I was considering becoming a surrogate for Kira & Scott. I told him about my own loss the previous Fall. And what did Matthew say? Did he back off, never call me again, tell me he wasn't ready for this kind of craziness? No. Not even a little.

Matthew said he thought this was a wonderful thing for me to do for someone else, one of the most generous things I could do, and he believed I should do it because it really sounded like I felt good about it. He said, "I'll take care of you. I'll bring you peanut butter and pickles or whatever you're craving." I warned him that when I had been pregnant before, I had been a bitch. The thing is, I knew I was being a bitch, and I hated it about myself, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just tried really hard not to snap at people, to keep my angry remarks in my own head. "Well just try to take it easy on me, ok?" he asked gently.

Last Friday, when I took Kira to have another test, Matthew texted me throughout, asking how Kira was doing, what the results were, how things looked for all of us.

So yeah, now what? You're going to tell me it's one thing for him to sound so supportive now, another thing for him to follow through, right? But you know what? I don't doubt him for a minute.

Also, he's willing to go out with me in public while I'm wear the shirt shown above.

Admit it. You're jealous.

Day: Conception Minus 4 (Maybe)

I never would have guessed that this is where I'd be. . .I turned 26 less than a month ago, and in 4 days, I will begin trying to get pregnant for my friends Kira and Scott. In 4 days, we will begin doing ICI, best known as the turkey baster method, except we are going to get a little bit more intense with it. Essentially, we will use Instead softcups to lock the "baby batter" (as my best friend Jeremy calls it) in place for a few hours, thus attempting to increase our chance of conception (since ICI can be low - anywhere from 5-30% success rates -- per cycle -- have been reported). We will try on Friday, Saturday and again Monday night (the day I am most likely to ovulate).

But let me back up a little bit and explain how it is that I got here.

On October 14th, 2010, I found out that I was pregnant. I had felt a little bit 'off' for a few days -- feeling nauseous all the time, which was exacerbated when I worked out, and feeling constantly exhausted. Far too exhausted to be social. I spent more afternoons laying on my couch watching TV in the first two weeks of that month than I probably had throughout the rest of the year. My body felt like I was depressed, but my mood didn't match. I'm not sure what, exactly, provoked me to buy a pregnancy test. I may have been a few days late, although at this point I don't quite remember, but I do remember buying the test, and seeing the faint pink plus sign appear. The horizontal line was thick, certain, and that line alone would mean the test was negative. But towards the third minute, a very faint vertical line started to show. If I had not had all the physical symptoms, I would have just thought that I "overcooked" the test, waited too long, and the results weren't accurate. I didn't know at this point that any vertical line, no matter how faint, shows that there is SOME HCG level present, which means that you are pregnant, even if it is just very early in the pregnancy.

I called the father first with the news, crying so hysterically I'm surprised he could understand me at all. I realized that I was so nervous about becoming a mother that I told the father I had to get off the phone so I could call my mom. In my head, I felt like I was in the same position as those mothers on 16 & Pregnant, even though I was a 25 year old lawyer who owned her own house, was starting her career, had savings. Even though I was an adult on paper, I never felt less like one in my life. My mom, however, reassured me that I would be okay, that I would have my family's support, that having a baby would not get in the way of my dreams. She told me that she and her own mother had loved being pregnant and becoming mothers more than any other experience in their lives.

Long story short, over the next few weeks, I picked names (Henry for a boy, Ava Lillian or Aspen Lillian for a girl), painted my office a soothing blue perfect for a nursery, and read What To Expect When You're Expecting and the Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. I had several ultrasounds and HCG tests, and I modified my workouts (from regular CrossFit to CrossFit Mom). I even ordered a CrossFit Mom hoodie a size larger than normal to wear while working out with my baby bump. The hoodie displayed the gym's logo of a pregnant woman holding an olympic barbell overhead. It was exactly what I wanted to look like when I was further along. Even though the baby was unplanned, and the situation was not what I had seen in my future, I was elated about the baby, and even though it was still early in the pregnancy, I raved to everyone about my excitement and my plans.

On November 12, 2010, at 7 weeks pregnant, after much testing and uncertainty on the part of my midwife and nurses, I lost the baby. I had a painful D&C on a Friday morning, and largely spent the following weekend curled into fetal position, sobbing. The next month, I felt the emotional part of depression that I had seemed to be missing in October. I was glad to have a job just to have something to think about that wasn't my loss and my misery. (The back of the book, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, has a line that always comes to mind when I think of this period -- something to the effect of, "Doesn't anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job?")

Towards the end of November, I decided that I would have a baby on my own using a sperm donor. I sorted through profiles on donor websites, finally settling for the "perfect" donor -- a music therapy major in college with a 3.8 GPA, bilingual, guitar- and piano-playing personal trainer, 6 feet tall with curly brown hair and brown eyes (he was said to look like Mark Ruffalo). When I showed my father the donor's profile, my father asked, "Can't you just meet him and do this the old-fashioned way?"

But the longer I considered sperm donation, and raising a child alone, the more I realized the situation wasn't quite right. At least, not right now. I went to therapy to deal with having lost my baby, and came to realize that using a sperm donor would be my way of taking control of a situation over which I had no control at all. I knew I needed to find a healthy way to move forward from my loss, but I just wasn't sure how.

And this loss felt spectacularly isolated. Any time someone I knew had died, there was at least one other person with whom I shared the loss. But this time, the loss was exclusively mine. Even the baby's father did not share the loss with me -- he was completely out of the picture at this point. I did not know how to recover from a suffering that felt uniquely my own.

Until, that is, I met Kira in December. Kira had been close friends with my roommate for years, and one day we went to lunch at Panera, and over salads she told me about how hard she and her husband Scott had been trying to conceive. For some unknown reason, Kira doesn't ovulate, so she had been put on Clomid to induce ovulation each month. Over the past year, though, Kira and Scott only succeeded in getting pregnant once, although Kira miscarried shortly after she found out she was pregnant. Kira was the first person who I knew understood how I felt. She knew the sorrow of inadequate HCG levels. She knew how each period after losing a baby felt like a whole new loss of its own.

So after Kira went through two more cycles with no conception, and did some more diagnostic tests with no results, I offered to surrogate for her and Scott. I think we both felt -- or at least I did -- that we had met each other at this time in our lives for a reason.

Everyone I've told so far has been shocked at first to find out my plans, and most people ask whether I'm worried that this will be hard for me, especially after my recent loss. I know that I would wonder the same thing if I were on the outside in this situation, but somehow this feels like the most perfect possible conclusion of a traumatic experience. Before ever getting pregnant, I would never have considered surrogacy. In law school (I'm a family lawyer, ironically enough) there were signs asking for egg donors in the girls' bathrooms, and I knew I could never donate eggs. I wouldn't feel comfortable with my biological child being raised by other people, being taken care of who knows how, not knowing where or who my child is. . .But now, knowing Kira and Scott, I feel completely comfortable with the idea. They are the most loving, caring, giving couple I know, and I know they will give my child -- our child -- an amazing life. . .

So here's hoping that the insemination takes this cycle. L'chaim.