Happiness

Well, our 12 week scan day was definitely the joyful day that we were hoping for! It was on a Tuesday and we were both working so met up in the afternoon to go to the hospital. The ultrasound waiting room was not the happiest place to be. It was really busy and hot and everyone had clearly already been waiting longer than they were happy about. We were kept waiting a long time too, nearly an hour. They weighed me, asked for my height and took my urine and blood samples. The nursing assistants were less than chipper! They ask you to attend with a semi-full bladder and when we finally went in for the scan I really needed to pee, but then when the doc started scanning me she said that because I have a retroverted uterus my full bladder wasn't helping the image anyway. My bladder just wasn't in the right place in relation to my uterus to help. So after looking around for a while and confirming the heartbeat (phew!), she asked me if I minded having an internal scan so that she could get a better image. Like I give a sh*t about internal scans anymore! She let me pee and then she did the internal scan which gave us a MUCH clearer image. It was so unreal to see our little one looking like a proper little person and moving around! An awesome moment. My OH was literally in shock afterwards with the reality setting in :) Here are a couple of the pics. The first one is the external scan - a little fuzzy but I like seeing the profile and the little hand :) And this is the internal scan. Although the detail amazing, I can't help thinking that it looks like it has the jaw and mouth of a puppy. I've seen it and now I can't unsee it! The doctor said that everything looked really great and she adjusted the due date slightly from 5th November to 3rd November. So we left happy with a date for our 20 week scan of 19th June. We both had to rush back to work which my OH was stressed and unhappy about. But we took a little bit of time to send a few messages to my family and close friends. People at work were thrilled for us and it was so lovely to be able to finally share it with everyone. I finally got to spend some time with my OH at about 9pm! We rattled off a Facebook message (this felt like the biggest milestone of all, I have imagined doing this so many times) and spent the rest of the evening watching the lovely comments coming back. I even had a phone call from an old friend who lives in Amsterdam to congratulate us! I can't help feeling a bit sad that I haven't heard from a few family members, in particular my sister. I let her know about the pregnancy by sending her a video of us telling Mum, and I've sent her pictures and messages following each scan. She has only replied with very happy but very brief messages. No phone call. No, how are you feeling? No, when is the baby due? No, I'm so happy for you after all you've been through. People can be strange sometimes. The last few days I have been feeling extremely full and have found it really difficult to eat. It was so uncomfortable. I also had a few more days of being extremely tired. But last night I slept like a log for the first time in a few weeks and today I've had a lot more energy and the fullness has gone. One thing that I have noticed with all these pregnancy symptoms is that they are all pretty fleeting, thankfully! My next appointment is with (yet another new) midwife at 16 weeks. Apparently I'll get to hear the heartbeat :)

Anxiety

So much for my bump showing itself... the following date I felt like a deflated balloon. I must have done a massive fart in the night! For the last couple of days I've been feeling a bit low. I've woken up early feeling really anxious but with nothing really playing on my mind. People have also commented that I seem a bit down. I really just feel over-tired and grumpy I think. Although of course I do have some concerns. Namely: money, whether I'm going to be able to keep up with the pace of having a baby/small child, how having a baby is going to change our relationships with friends, whether I'm going to appreciate everything that we've been waiting for as much as I should, whether the birth and the baby will be OK. It's all pretty emotionally exhausting and no doubt my hormones aren't helping. Hopefully this period of being a bit blue will be short-term. We have our 12 week scan on Tuesday. I want it to be the joyful day that it should be.

Bump!

My bump is starting to show itself! In the last week it has gone from being a small, firm area just above my pubic bone to now being the width between my hip bones and getting higher. Today is the first day that I've actually felt like I'm carrying something. A nice feeling :) We saw the midwife yesterday. A different one this time and she visited us at home. Lots of paperwork, past medical history, what not to eat, etc. It looks like I might get transferred to a different midwife team and so I'll meet yet another new midwife. Apparently my consultant might book me in for additional scans as it's an IVF cycle, which is great! Some friends of ours are selling their pram/pushchair as they have just had another baby and needed a double buggy. We've decided to buy it off them as it's a great buggy and a good price. We really didn't intend to buy anything this early on! Another friend was offering a bottle steriliser on Facebook so we've snapped that up. The nursery is going to be filling up with stuff soon it seems.

Making space

I'm almost over this cold now, thank goodness. I actually threw up following a wave of nausea this week. It came over me so fast. I immediately felt fine again afterwards and wolfed down a bag of mini-cheddars! Weird. I don't seem to be having the same level of extreme tiredness as before, but maybe that's because I'm taking the week off work and the weather has been bad so I've been generally taking it very easy anyway. I've noticed some headaches though and some waves of anxiety which brings on heart palpitations which I have always suffered with now and again. I've also noticed some breathlessness which has been extra hard to deal with with a cold! I can definitely feel, but not yet see, a firm swelling above my pubic bone. My other half is obsessed with it! He wants to have a feel at least twice a day :) I got fitted for a maternity bra this week. I was literally busting out of my usual bras and they were getting really uncomfortable. The new bras are only a cup size larger. They are very plain, non-wired, unsexy things but they are much more confortable! We've been doing some window shopping for baby stuff this week. Cotbeds, car seats and pushchairs. It's all a little overwhelming and I'm determined not to be drawn in by the sales talk. It's going to be very easy to spend a lot of money without even going over the top about it and I really want to focus on what this baby truly needs. We've also been clearing out our smallest bedroom which will be the nursery. We've been using it for storage so we've found new homes for everything. When we bought our house nearly 5 years ago, we were regularly in junk shops and reclamation yards. I found an old rocking chair and bought it with a picture in my head of me feeding our future baby. In all these years of trying to conceive, the chair has been sat in a corner looking very sad. I always said that I wouldn't fix it up until there was a baby on the way and so it gave me great pleasure yesterday to start sanding it. My other half took a picture of me doing it for a future baby book :)

Feeling rough...

When we met with the midwife she said that if I hadn't experienced any morning sickness at that stage that I probably wouldn't in the future. Well, despite that I have had some waves of nausea most days since then. I'm keeping Cheddars close at hand and as soon as I feel a bit sick I munch on 3-4 of those which seems to help. Thankfully I've had no vomiting. My mum said it was the same for her during her pregnancies. I don't know if I've mentioned how tired I've been. Not constantly but again it comes in waves. My friend described it well. She said it's like when you have some kind of virus and all of your energy is completely zapped. You hear about people being tired in their pregnancy but I didn't realise quite how extreme it would be. On top of the tiredness and nausea, I've now come down with a cold. I'm usually quite happy to dose myself up with cold medicine but that's not an option. So I'm resorting to chicken soup, steam, vitamin C and the occasional dose of paracetamol. It's not really doing the job.... I've just read that your immune system is lowered in pregnancy to stop you rejecting the embryo so you are prone to colds. I really hope this is the only one for me, it sucks! I'm quite amazed how this pregnancy is taking over my body and my ability to function as normal. I'm looking forward to getting to the end of this first trimester, seeing how much our baby has grown at the next scan and hopefully getting some energy back! We were due to have a visit from the midwife yesterday but she was ill so it was cancelled. I'm now going to be seeing a different midwife next week instead. It's a bit of a shame not to be seeing the same one again. My hub keeps telling people about the pregnancy! He finds all the questions about future plans that come up too difficult to manoeuvre so he blabs... I've taken that as permission to tell one of my friends who was there for me via email earlier in our treatment. I sent the email yesterday but haven't heard back from her yet. It's a little worrying as I know that she's had a lot of problems herself and that my news will probably be bitter sweet for her. We're also planning to Skype with an old friend later today as we want to let her know before we put the news out on Facebook and she can be hard to pin down! Some friends of ours had their second baby this week. Their first baby was prem and this little one was also 4 weeks early. He's doing very well, just being tube fed. The birth was very sudden and unexpected and I think the story freaked out my other half a little bit! He's likely to be working when I'm due and his job is over an hours drive away, so I think that's a worry for him. I think it's unlikely that we'll have a similar situation to our friends. If my mums pregnancies are anything to go by then we'll be having trouble enticing this one out!

Moving forward

I had a very stressful few days dealing with the issue with my friend but thankfully we got together and resolved all of that and I feel much better! I had slept really badly for a few nights and felt constantly anxious and so I just had to do another test to make sure that I hadn't scared the little one away from this stressful world ;) The fertility clinic have told me that I can stop my remaining meds from 8 weeks (which is now). I've been taking Progynova and doing the Gestone shots ever since the embryo transfer and so it's odd to be shaking off that security blanket. The nurse said that I could wind it down gradually if I want to and so I'm tailing it off over this week. We met with the midwife for the first time today :) It felt like a real milestone and I really feel like we are now moving away from the uncertainties of IVF and early pregnancy and into pregnancy proper! The midwife was very lovely and I'm glad to hear that I will see the same midwife for most of my visits. She just asked us a few questions about general health and booked me in for my 12 week scan. I might need some more blood tests, although she's going to check if I've already had them all as part of the IVF preparations. They will test my urine at the 12 week scan too. She talked us through the inital screening for Down's syndrome and my hub and I discussed it. We've decided that we don't want to have the screening as it wouldn't make any difference to us in terms of continuing with the pregnancy and we don't want any unnecessary worry and uncertainty that might result from it. If problems are discovered when the baby is born then we will deal with them then. We can't prepare ourselves for every possible eventuality. The midwife left me with lots of paperwork to fill in about our own and family medical history, and lots of leaflets to read. It's nice to find that I'm now finding myself re-reading the same information in different places and so I feel pretty well informed for this stage of the pregnancy :)

Bitter sweet

We went for the 8 week scan on Thursday. We were both so nervous while we were waiting to go in although I was quietly confident that everything was going to be OK. My other half was a mess though. They kept us waiting for 30 minutes and he was getting more and more uptight. Thankfully once we got in there, the scanner (internal) was in place very quickly and almost instantly our little peanut popped up on the screen and the nurse pointed out the heartbeat straight away. Such a great moment! Hubby was pretty emotional, struggling to hold it together. He asked me afterwards why I hadn't got as emotional and I think it was just that I had felt relatively calm beforehand about it being a positive outcome so I just felt great happiness :) The nurse gave us 4 different scan images to take home. Here are two of them: What I initially thought was the head is actually the yolk sac which will become the placenta. The embryo itself is the little blob at the bottom of the second image. We could actually see a little arm bud on one of the pictures :) The nurse explained that the dates get slightly messed up with it being IVF and so she has calculated that I was actually 7 weeks and 3 days on the day of the scan. So I'm not quite as far along as I thought. Which means a slightly longer wait until the next scan now - darn it! I was so happy and relived to see that there was an embryo and that it was alive that I didn't even think to ask any questions about whether everything looked OK or not! Presumably they would have told us but I'm kicking my self for not checking with her. I immediately got online looking at other 7 week scans to compare and then started getting concerned that my yolk sac seems really big... And then I started googling that and found all kinds of stuff that I really didn't want to be reading! Must avoid internet articles and forums!!! The bitter in the sweet is that I fell out with a very good friend on Friday. There has been an ongoing issue with her sister and I decided to confront the elephant in the room which has led to my friend feeling veryhurt. She won't explain why and says that she can't talk to me at the moment. It's all very upsetting and has left me feeling very anxious and nervous. I hate unresolved conflict and want to sit down and talk to her as soon as possible, but it's out of my hands at the moment. You imagine yourself getting pregnant and that everything will be right with the world, but of course life carries on as before, with it's ups and downs.