Well, we are halfway done with week 10 of your growth and all seems to be going well. Jamie is feeling much better by the day and she is now off her nausea meds. She takes her last estrogen pill on Friday, and she ends her progesterone one week after that. I’ll be thrilled (and so will she and her husband) when she is done taking additional hormones. The “usual” pregnancy hormones are enough!
Jamie is beginning to feel the twinges of her lower abdomen beginning to stretch and grow. That means you are growing, our baby! She has been craving chicken breast subs from Subway because they are so mild yet protein rich and good. Saltine crackers were a staple of hers for awhile!
Her relatives all moved out yesterday, so she now has the one on one time with her own immediate family again. Her house is getting cleaned tomorrow, and then she is decorating for Christmas.
Life is really good at our home. Our tree is up and the house is all decorated. The Christmas cards went out today. I used the photo of all of us at Disney World because that was the day of your first ultrasound. What a wonderful, special day that was for us!
I told my friend Mary Claire about you on Monday and it was so wonderful! She had a baby yesterday, Maria. We would have had the same due date if my IVF cycle worked this past spring. I was at her home looking at the nursery and all of her new belly photos prior to us going out to brunch. On the way out the door she asked if I was going to tell her what we were doing at this point to complete our family. (I hadn’t said a word to her about anything baby related for the last 8 months.) I said to her “I think I will tell you.” She said “Really?” I handed her this journal, this beautiful leather journal with gold pages that I am writing in now, and asked her to begin reading it aloud from the beginning. She was crying by page one, sobbing by page 7. When she read “The gift of her womb” she was crying so hard she could hardly talk. She looked at me and said, “You are really going to do this?” I said “Look at the date.” and smiled while pausing, then said, “We already have, it worked, she is in her 10th week.” Then the floodgates completely opened. It was the BEST news to finally share with a good friend that had been in the dark, yet still by my side, for so long. She couldn’t be happier for us.
We talked through everything at brunch and, among other things, discussed how I need to get tough skin because so many people might say the wrong thing somehow, unintentionally, and it will sting.
About an hour after we parted ways we were on the phone again. She said “I recognize that this very well might be one of those “wrong things to say” but I’m SO f-ing jealous of you right now!” I just laughed. After all, she was in her last week of pregnancy. I remember all too well how hard that last week was with Grace. I am just SO glad that I have experienced pregnancy so that I know, first hand, all of the good AND the bad. I did not have an easy pregnancy with Grace, and that is putting it mildly. In fact, by this point I had already been on bed rest for a whole week. Crazy!
With Grace I was on complete bed rest from weeks 9-15. I began my pregnancy with ovarian hyperstimulation and looked 6 months pregnant by 2 weeks. My uterus filled up with fluid from the follicles that released the 9 eggs I had created during the intrauterine insemination in which I conceived her. There was only a 1% chance of this happening, and I was the lucky one. As my uterus grew by the minute with all of this fluid, the remainder of my body was severely dehydrated and craving fluid. A recipe for disaster!
When the hyperstimulation finally went away in week 8, thanks to protein being pumped into me intraveniously, I was much relieved because the fluid had been getting to my lungs and it was becoming hard for me to breathe. My body went back to “normal” briefly, but in the following week—week 9—I began bleeding, went in for an emergency ultrasound, and found out that I had a subcoreonic hemorrhage. This is when you have bleeding in the uterus that has stopped but it has formed a blood clot between the placenta and the uterine wall. This was the cause for my early bed rest and for my then 50% miscarriage rate. What a scary time.
All this being said, you can see why I laughed when Mary Claire said she was jealous. I can absolutely see why someone 9 months pregnant would be jealous! (Side note: Mary Claire just called me to tell me about her delivery and, unfortunately, she too had a C-section. Darn it. Luckily, all went well. Grace and I will go and see her and little Maria at the hospital tomorrow. How special that will be, knowing we will be next this time!!!)
I can’t believe that I failed to mention in here that my little angel, Grace, fell this past week and got stitches in her face. She had been sick with a really bad cold. She couldn’t nap because her cough was so bad, and she threw up from ingesting all of the mucus. Anyway, I told her that she could snuggle with me on the couch while I worked on Christmas cards. She got bored and asked if she could do a little dance for me. (We had just been to the ballet “Twas' the Night before Christmas” that week, and she was all about practicing her own ballet.) She got up and did one simple little turn right in front of me, tripped over her foot and crashed into the living room table. She had a HUGE open wound from one end of her right eyebrow to the other. It was so hard not to panic, but I had to stay calm for her. I laid her on her back on the kitchen floor and told her she had to hold the already saturated paper towel on her head while I called the doctor. We were told to go to the ER just as soon as I could drive her without blood flowing into her eyes.
We waited for 3 hours before they bound her in Velcro blankets and stitched her up for 45 minutes. It was SO awful! She screamed out for me the whole time, alternating between “Cuddle me, Mommy!” and “I have to go home!” Heartbreaking since the doctors wouldn’t let me anywhere near her head to console her. Her little feet were shaking and her teeth were clattering. It was the hardest 45 minutes. Afterwards, we went to Steak and Shake (her favorite restaurant) with Grandma and got her a cheeseburger and a milkshake. All was well.
She is slowly healing—still very much bruised though, and her cold is finally on the mend too. Besides all of that, she also dropped her nap due to everything—making for one very long past week…
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