Ultrasound: May the Odds Be Ever in Our Favor

Today's appointment had lots of news - some great, some good, and some not-so-good.

What's great: there's a little baby growing inside me! It has arms and legs and a still-big-but-less-freakishly-large head. It looks like he or she was sleeping at first but woke up briefly during the scan to kick and punch the amniotic fluid a little bit. However, he or she still has a weird alien face that only a mother could love. (Errr....) The ultrasound tech paused on an angle that showed its facial features pretty clearly and, wow, I really hope those aren't family traits we're seeing! Perhaps someday I'll post an actual ultrasound picture, but in the meantime, you can use this as a guide:

Hello, my baby!

What's merely good: there's still a sub-chorionic hemorrhage inside my uterus. It is not on the side with the placenta, which we knew from last week, and it has not grown in size. It's actually slightly smaller than the last time it was measured, and most hemorrhages take between several days and several weeks to resolve, so this is more or less expected. There's no indication of new bleeding, and the gestational sac remains uncompromised. All good things. Except:

What's not-so-good: The doctor was going over all the positive findings listed above, and Harry and I were feeling pretty confident about things, and then she said - and I quote - "bleeding is an irritant, so we're not out of the woods yet." And that deflating sound you hear is the optimism just draining right out of the room. 

She's right, of course. My obsessive searching about miscarriage rates by week in the first trimester had me obsessed with percentages and it was very gratifying to watch them drop as we passed each milestone: seeing the sac, hearing the heartbeat, etc. And then when this happened, our possibility of having a miscarriage shot right back up again, though it's probably well below the first 50% statistic I saw that scared the living daylights out of me. The analytical side of me wants to do more research on this and see  what my percent risk is now that the hemorrhage is a bit smaller, I haven't had any new bleeding for a week, etc. But even if the medical literature suggests that it's 15% rather than 10%, is that going to really make a difference? Nope. Not one bit. It's not going to change the way we're managing it, and it's not going to change whether this particular baby in this particular pregnancy makes it to term. And it's also important to remember that we still have a much better chance of the baby surviving this crisis than losing it to a miscarriage. A 15% miscarriage risk is also an 85% "risk" of a healthy pregnancy. That's a way better chance than Katniss had going into the Hunger Games, y'all! So, yes, the odds really are in our favor. May it ever be so!

File Under "Weird Things that Actually Happened"

All continues to be quiet on the western (southern?) front. No new bleeding, no cramps to speak of, no sudden cessation of pregnancy symptoms. So, in the hopes that everything is going to stay stable, I want to tell you about a very weird and surreal experience we had during our middle-of-the-night hospital adventure this week.

The ultrasound was actually performed on another floor of the hospital, so I had to be brought up from the emergency room on a stretcher. We saw the baby moving as described in my earlier post, we still didn't know about the sub-chorionic hemorrhage, and we were feeling incredibly relieved and giddy when the ultrasound ended. The sonographer wheeled me out from the curtained exam space and parked me about 20 feet away in a little holding area. It was entirely deserted and the lights were low. Harry and I were quietly talking and joking about random stuff unrelated to the pregnancy by this point. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a transport person show up and I thought "oh good, we can go back downstairs now" but then I quickly realized that he was just bringing up another patient. Her stretcher was brought into the holding area only a few feet from mine, and we had the following conversation:

Lady: Hello.
Me: Hi.
Lady: Are you pregnant?
Harry: [taken aback] Uh, we can't really talk about that right now.
Lady: Oh, I'm sorry.
Me: Actually... I am pregnant, but unfortunately I'm bleeding.
Lady: Oh, I'm terribly sorry to hear that. I'll say a Hail Mary for you.
Me and Harry: [somewhat awkwardly] Oh, thank you very much.
Me: [trying to be polite] I hope you're feeling alright, too.
Lady: I'm having some kidney pain. I had it once when I was 24 and now I'm 55 but I knew exactly what it was as soon as I felt it.
Me: I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope everything's okay.
Lady: Yes, me too. Okay, I'm going to say the Hail Mary now.
[Harry and I exchange glances - we had both kind of thought that she would be praying at a slightly later date and time. But what do we know, neither one of us has ever said a Hail Mary in our entire lives.]
Lady: [crosses herself, closes her eyes, and whispers] Hail Mary, full of grace...
[Harry and I are silent and kind of don't know where to look as she's praying]
Lady: [finishes prayer and turns to me] You are going to be a wonderful mother.
Me: Oh, um... [speechless]
Lady: You are. And your baby is going to be fine. [sonographer comes over to move her stretcher away] I don't really know what this means, but you have a tiny tear in your - in your placenta? That's what caused the bleeding. [almost out of earshot] It's going to heal and everything is going to be fine.
Me: [fighting back tears] Thank you... good luck!
Lady: [behind the ultrasound curtain now] You too!

It was, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre experiences of my entire life. Let's review the tape for a moment: we weren't talking about the pregnancy when she came into the room, I'm not really showing, and it wasn't a dedicated ob-gyn ultrasound area, so there was no immediate reason for her to think that I was pregnant. We didn't ask her to pray for us or read our fortunes or anything - it's not like that time I went to the renaissance faire.

On the other hand... it's not like her diagnosis was entirely correct, what with this whole not-tiny not-tear in my placenta. If she had said "large sub-chorionic hemorrhage that did not actually compromise the placenta but you won't know that until Thursday" then I would have gotten even more chills. And if you're a layperson, and you hear about bleeding during pregnancy, wouldn't one of your first guesses be to say that maybe there was a problem with the placenta? And it was late, and dark, and we were feeling very relieved but still had a ton of adrenaline running through our veins, so we were about as primed for a chat with the divine as we were ever going to get.

That said... it was still one of the most spiritual moments of my life. (That includes the time I converted to Judaism, which in the moment was more "this water is a little chilly and I wish I could have kept my contact lenses in" than "I am emerging from this mikvah a new woman!") I don't often take this stuff as seriously as I probably should - Harry and I are more irreverent than anything else when it comes to organized religion, even our own. But I don't know where to fit this experience in with that worldview. She could have been a crazy person, or a kind person who was telling us what she thought we wanted to hear. Or, she could have actually been speaking with G-d. We'll never know. But I hope she was, because I hope she was right, and because that would be great news.

Houston, We are at Stable One

The appointment today went as well as can be expected. The baby is alive and literally kicking with legs (and arms) that are noticeably longer than they were on Monday. My doctor also spent a ton of time with the ultrasound looking at the placenta from every possible angle trying to determine whether the bleed had separated it from the wall of the uterus and found... that it was still attached, which is really good. He did see the bleed, which looks like it's clotting and shows no evidence of any new blood, and it had not compromised the gestational sac. So it's possible that Tuesday night was totally uneventful for our embryo and it was not sitting there the whole time thinking "What the hell* is happening to my little house?!? The walls are closing in!" like I was imagining.

So, hemorrhage = stable. Baby = alive. Me = immensely relieved but still very cautious. I feel like mission control in Apollo 13 when the astronauts are still alive after the initial explosion but the big challenge is now trying to wait out the rest of the mission until they're safely home. FYI, I'm still feeling nauseous and have giant boobs** and am completely exhausted, so all that fun pregnancy stuff is going strong. I'm almost grateful to be feeling sick. (Almost.) Assuming everything continues to be quiet over the next few days, we might be able to start breathing easier.*** Fingers, toes, arms, legs - everything is crossed.


*Of course my kid swears.
**More on this later. I love them lots and lots.
***I still have to tell you about this really bizarre experience we had at the hospital with a person who was maybe crazy but maybe speaking with the divine? Yeah, stay tuned for that.

Panic in the ER: Sub-Chorionic Hemorrhage

Okay, guys. This isn't good, but I'll tell you at the beginning of the story that it looks like things are stable at the moment. It's precarious, but I am still technically pregnant. I have another doctor's appointment today and am hoping and praying to get a good report.

On Tuesday night, I was going to take a shower before I went to bed and decided it would be a good idea to pee right beforehand (you know, like you do). I was horrified to look down and see a large volume of bright red blood. I have had no cramping and no spotting this entire pregnancy, including the hours leading up to this event. Harry and I immediately got in the car and headed for the emergency room and I called my Ob-Gyn on the way.

Once we arrived, I got into a room and a gown pretty quickly. A nurse put in an IV and took several blood samples and a urine sample. One of the doctors examined me internally and said that the cervix was closed (thank G-d). However, we wouldn't really know anything until I was able to get an ultrasound.

It was 3 AM before I was brought up to see an ultrasound tech. I've never been so glad to see Mr. Wandy in my entire life. The sonographer did a thorough exam internally as well as over my belly and although I couldn't see the monitor too easily, Harry stood right behind her and said immediately that he saw our embryo moving around just like it had on Monday. Additionally, this was about 40 hours after Monday's ultrasound and the embryo had grown by 3mm in that time. Huge sighs of relief and giddy laughter all around. My bleeding had also been tapering off and by the time I got the ultrasound, it was basically done. What the tech did not tell us at the time, however, is that she also saw a large sub-chorionic hemorrhage that was continuing to threaten our baby's survival. We had to wait until we were back in the ER for one of the nurses to hand us a printout of the radiologist's official report to learn that.

Interestingly, it was right after I got done with the ultrasound that I realized I badly needed to pee... despite having gone 3 times in 3 hours, and barely having anything to drink. No sooner did I get back from the bathroom than another nurse came back and said that my urine culture was positive for a UTI. I've had two UTIs before and this felt mildly familiar, though I was surprised that the symptoms really didn't start until I was already in the ER (in fairness, I guess if I were home I probably would have slept through most of them and woken up in the morning with a raging and angry bladder, which has happened before). Shortly afterwards, I got a dose of antibiotics and the head doctor came in to talk with us. Sub-chorionic hemorrhages happen fairly often, she said, and the odds are actually pretty good that they will resolve. The fact that the baby survived the initial hemorrhage is a good sign, and they think the uterus might have been aggravated by the irritated and infected bladder right near it, which we are now taking care of with antibiotics. That said, identifying a cause isn't that important, it's more important now to see what will happen over the next few days. If the hemorrhage gets bigger or I see additional bright red blood or feel cramping, it's probably game over. If the hemorrhage stays steady or starts shrinking, that's a good sign. All of this puts me at higher risk for problems later in the pregnancy (later! in the pregnancy!) but at least right now things are stable. I might continue to pass some old and brown blood from the existing hemorrhage, which happened this morning, and although women often report that as the worst part of this experience because it makes you panic every time, it's actually nothing to worry about.

I did have to have a shot of RhoGAM since I have Rh- blood and Harry has Rh+, and even when you have a threatened miscarriage there can be some mixing that would put me at risk for Rh problems in a later pregnancy. I also stopped the Lovenox temporarily while we track the hemorrhage's progress over these next few crucial days. And I'm back on the twice-daily Crinone (earlier this week they were talking about weaning me off of it) because what the hell, the placenta is having problems and a little extra progesterone is not going to hurt. Other than that, I'm taking it easy and keeping activity to a minimum. They said that I'm not actually on bed rest, but I should stay as quiet as possible for a little while.

And how am I doing? Um, not too well. But I'm okay I guess. I started looking up statistics for having a full-on miscarriage with a hemorrhage like this and had to stop when I found one site estimating 20% and one site estimating 50%. I'm overanalyzing every little twinge in my belly to see if it's the start of strong cramps (and there are a lot of twinges thanks to the UTI and the antibiotic horse pills, which are making my GI tract a wee bit unhappy). I am also considering investing in a home ultrasound machine (they can't be that expensive, right? I mean, what's $100,000 compared to peace of mind?) so I can check on the baby once an hour or so and keep reassuring myself that he or she is still alive. I would say I'm freaking out, but even I can't keep up this amount of panic for days on end. I'm just crossing my fingers, trying to keep my belly still, and hoping against hope for a good outcome. I'll keep you posted.

Good Morning! I Have Tiny Arms!

We had another ultrasound this morning and everything looks wonderful. The embryo, who I am told will graduate to "fetus" on Thursday when we hit 10 weeks, is 28mm long and was waving around tiny, hilarious T. Rex arms. I do have a picture, but because it's so grainy (and frankly it looks like every other 9 week ultrasound that you might care to google) I have attached this helpful graphic highlighting our unborn child's dominant physical characteristics:

We did hear a heartbeat but stupidly forgot to ask exactly what it was... oh well. My RE said that everything looked perfect for this stage of development. We are so, so grateful for this news. From here on out, I won't be seeing him but will go to my regular Ob-Gyn for obstetric care as well as visiting the high-risk Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist occasionally to follow up on this whole DVT issue.

Because this was my last meeting with my RE for what we hope is quite a while, it was also my big chance to talk about my experience with egg retrieval. The conversation went pretty well, all things considered (definitely better than when I brought up my concerns with him initially, and way better than the time I told my Ob-Gyn that I wouldn't take the birth control pill because "this is America, dammit!" Note to self: if you are using the phrase "this is America" to bolster your argument, you have already lost.) Anyway. I said that while we were so thankful for such a positive outcome, the hardest part of this pregnancy has been trying to reconcile my joy at becoming a parent with my horrible memories of how our child was conceived. I was a bit surprised that he immediately agreed with me that more pain relief should be offered, and he even gave some examples of other gyn procedures totally unrelated to IVF that are only performed under anesthesia even though they're considered less invasive than egg retrieval. But... it's not within his power to change their policy, and without going into too much detail, he summarized some of the reasons why the senior doctors in the clinic set it up this way. I reiterated that I didn't feel at all as though he personally had given me substandard care - in fact I think he has done a great job and I intend to go back to him in the future if and when we try for a sibling with our three frozen embryos - but I offered to write a letter to the head of their practice describing my experience in case this issue ever comes up in the future. He said that might be a good idea, and now I'm trying to decide how much of a squeaky wheel I want to be. On the one hand, everybody got what they wanted out of this cycle, clearly the majority of their patients find the service they provide to be acceptable since they're not exactly going out of business, and I'm not often inclined to rock the boat. On the other hand, I do think their policy to go with minimal anesthesia for egg retrievals puts women through unnecessary pain and suffering during what is already an incredibly difficult process. So, I'll be thinking about this one.

For today, I want to focus on our good news. In fact, this is my new policy overall - I found this (unattributed?) quote online and I pinned it up by my desk so I'm looking at it every day. Good things are happening, and I hope and pray that they continue.

Food: So Tasty! So Horrible!

Still the enemy? We'll have to find out.

Q: Hey Charlotte, have you been eating anything weird lately?

A: Yes! How did you know?

Q: Just a wild guess, based on every stereotypical media depiction of pregnancy ever. Care to give some examples? Maybe as a list?

A: No problem. In recent weeks I have developed a sudden culinary fascination with these items, among others:
- Avocadoes
- Lipton Onion Dip
- San Pellegrino Limonata Soda
- Tahini
- Sour Patch Kids (just the sour coating)
- Feta Cheese
- Thai Coconut-Lime Soup
- Strawberries

Q: Once you get your hands on these foods, what happens?

A: I eat them with gusto for about 20 minutes and then they make me feel horribly sick, so I have to abandon them for a period of days or even weeks.

Q: How does your husband feel about this?

A: He has been extraordinarily patient about finding himself the recipient of three ripe avocadoes for dinner and a wife who has suddenly decided she can't be in the same room as an avocado. Luckily, he likes guacamole.

Q: Have you ever craved pickles and/or ice cream?

A: Ice cream, no. Sweet things are staggeringly uninteresting to me right now, which is entirely out of character. But as far as pickles go, even though I don't much like them in my normal life, the other day I decided that I really, really wanted cornichons. You know, the little baby French pickles that they serve with pâté and fondue.

Q: Do you think that "I didn't have a craving for pickles, just cornichons" is the most bourgeois thing you've ever said?

A: Probably. But the time I complained about not being able to find orange blossom water in the grocery store was also pretty memorable.

Q: What's the craziest thing you've done to satisfy a craving?

A: That would probably be the time that I drove 40 miles (one-way) to a particular grocery store so that I could buy a bag of their cheese popcorn. It's not brand-name or anything, it's just cheese popcorn that they make in the store. I planned my entire weekend around this trip since I knew it was all I would have the energy to do, and oh, it was so glorious to eat that popcorn.

Q: How'd you feel once you finished half the bag?

A: I don't want to talk about it.

Q: What about things that you used to love and now hate?

A: That would be most foods, actually. My only real food aversion when I'm not pregnant is cilantro - like a certain subset of the population, it just tastes really bad to me. I've always prided myself on not being a picky eater, so that's really the only thing I truly refuse to eat. But now, easily 80-85% of items sold in our grocery store look terrible.

Q: Since every day has apparently turned into topsy-turvy day, have you thought about trying cilantro to see if you still hate it?

A: Huh. Interesting query. I may have to give that a try, just for funsies. I mean, it can't be worse than anything else, right?

Infertility & Adoption Podcast

We interrupt our usually scheduled complaining for a public service announcement.

My job affords me plenty of time to listen to the radio on my headphones. It's great, actually. I love multi-tasking and being able to learn about something that's actually, you know, interesting when I'm facing an entire afternoon of what is really glorified data entry. (Click... type. Click... type. And repeat.) I started, as so many of us do, with the usual web-radio suspects: Pandora, Spotify, NPR, PRI. But when the news cycle kept repeating itself, the Glee covers of Journey and Madonna were getting old, and I realized that there really was a finite supply of episodes of This American Life, I started to branch out into more specialized topics. When I was first diagnosed with infertility, I decided to see if there was an infertility-centered radio program that I could discreetly listen to at work. I am proud to recommend to you:

Creating a Family Radio Show

I started listening to this a few days after returning to work post-surgery in the fall. I was ripping through episodes at a rate of 4-5 per day, learning about infertility and adoption even when I wasn't obsessively searching through PubMed or the blogosphere. My husband pointed out that this might not be the absolute healthiest use of my time (I was thinking about infertility 24/7, including in my dreams), and for a while I gave it up, but during my IVF cycle I started listening again. Not every episode is helpful or applicable to my situation and interests, but many are: endometriosis, what to do with frozen embryos, how many blastocysts to transfer. And others provide a fascinating look at things I had never thought about: a panel of birth moms talking about how they chose their child's adoptive families, fertility tourism, breastfeeding through adoption or surrogacy. Mel from Stirrup Queens has even been interviewed about the importance of IF blogging! Because I listened to this podcast series, I felt really secure in our decisions about eSET and freezing our embryos. And there have been more than a few shows where I've been moved to tears, particularly while listening to the various therapists who come on and describe coping strategies for women going through infertility treatment. Be aware that the audio quality is pretty low, and there are occasionally little glitches that you might not hear in a more professional production, but that's all part of the charm.

So anyway. I could totally write another post on how this whole nausea thing is getting old, and fast, but that can wait for a little longer. Are there any other radio shows about infertility/IVF/related topics that I should be listening to while I'm sitting at my desk and breathing deeply?

Everything I Know About Morning Sickness I Learned on my Bathroom Floor

Everyone, I'd like you to meet Mat.

Mat hangs out on my bathroom floor with me. He is soft and blue and we picked him up at Target a few weeks ago to replace our really old IKEA bathmats. I adore Mat, he's been a great pal as I've been feeling so sick.

My other constant companion while I'm huddled on the bathroom floor (or the couch, or the bed, or - just once, it was a low point - the floor under my desk at work) is my iPhone. Never before have I been so grateful for a piece of technology. I can read gossip websites and play endless games of Solitaire and distract myself from the feeling of "ZOMG I want to throw up right now!" My iPhone is my link to the vast repository of human knowledge about the symptoms of early pregnancy. If you were to look back at my search history, every so often it would go from normal things like "jezebel - demian bichir - hela cells" to a string of "morning sickness causes - morning sickness cures - morning sickness home remedies by continent - ginger safe in early pregnancy." Here are the top five things my iPhone has taught me about morning sickness so far:

1. You don't have to throw up for it to be morning sickness. 
Somehow I had lingered under the misapprehension that morning sickness was defined by vomiting spectacularly like you see in the movies. To date, I have only actually puked once. There have been a couple of dry heaves here and there, but here's the thing: my stomach is actually happiest when there's something in it. It's counterintuitive, and it means that most of the time I'm forcing myself to eat when it's the absolute last thing I want to do, but it's a pretty typical presentation of morning sickness.  When I feel sick right after eating, which is often, I fight it: if I throw up now then I'll undo all of that good work choking down food! The statistics on this are fairly reassuring, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence as well that fellow bloggers have suffered from nausea that goes on and on without ever actually upchucking. (However: now that I have written this down, ten bucks says I'll start really barfing within the hour.)

2. It does vary from day to day.
Wednesday might be horrible. I might wake up on Wednesday morning and spend all my energy on just putting one foot in front of the other and think to myself that if this is the way the rest of the pregnancy is going to be, then I should consider checking myself into a psych hospital for the duration so at least there's a paid professional to listen to my crazed ranting. And then I wake up on Thursday morning and... I'm okay. I eat a bowl of cereal and walk the dog like it ain't no thang. I start to convince myself that my symptoms are disappearing from a missed miscarriage and everything is doooooooomed, when I feel... what is that? Is that a twinge of nausea? It sure is. Huh. But it stays at a manageable level the entire rest of the day, and I wonder if it's leaving for good. That is, until I wake up on Friday and before I even get my eyes open my brain is receiving an urgent signal that reads "NAUSEA! ALERT! NAUSEA! ALERT!" That's when the wonderful ladies of Yahoo!Answers reassure me that morning sickness totally varies and I am not alone in this experience.

3. You read one list of suggested remedies, you've read them all. 
Nobody has anything new to say. Cut lemons, ginger root, eating every 2 hours, blah blah blah. Occasionally someone will say something like "meat has been associated with nausea in pregnancy" and I'll think, "that's it! I will stop eating meat! I will never eat meat again!" Then I eat a meal of plain pasta and veggies, and I feel just as sick as I did before, and I start searching for things like "vegetables associated early pregnancy nausea." Bottom line, I'm not sure there's any way of predicting what will help or hurt from one day to the next - heck, it changes from one hour to the next. Sometimes a mug of lemon-ginger tea makes me feel much better, sometimes I have to psych myself up to take a sip. There's no rhyme or reason to it. You might as well stick to this site, it's as good as any other.

4. OHSS is different from morning sickness.
Despite my RE never giving me a firm diagnosis, I do think I ended up with a mild case of OHSS as the hCG in my system started to rise. I had a few risk factors - 22 follicles at retrieval, I was pretty young (28), I had a fairly slim build, and as my beta hCG values rose, my entire abdominal cavity swelled up in the most bizarre fashion. I wasn't even 4 weeks pregnant when I started feeling some serious GI awfulness, including but not limited to nausea and vomiting. It came on fast and was pretty debilitating, but after about a week, I looked down one morning and realized that I could actually see my waist a little bit. As the OHSS subsided, I had about 3-4 days where I ate like a normal-ish person (and convinced myself yet again that I had had a missed miscarriage, but that's a separate story). We even went out to a French restaurant where I consumed escargot and blue cheese and cassoulet, and it was delicious! (Note that it took some significant effort to even type that sentence now. Blech.) Then, at 5w6d, one day shy of the Internet's wise estimation that most women will begin to feel morning sickness around 6 weeks, I began to feel a bit of nausea. Real nausea. Not accompanied by diarrhea, headache, gas cramps, back pain, nothing like that. Just nausea. That was the morning sickness saying hello.

5. No, I don't know how I'm getting through it.
Prior to getting knocked up, I would hear about all the unsavory aspects of pregnancy - weeks of unrelenting nausea, a huge distended uterus constantly pressing on your bladder, and of course the horror of labor and delivery - and I would assume that there must be some sort of magical pregnant-woman force field that descends to make all these things seem bearable. There is not. It is awful. I am getting through this for only one reason: I don't have any other choice. And, it is true that you don't know what you're capable of doing until you have to try. In my old pre-pregnancy life, I would have called in sick to work every day this week; now, I am writing polite emails and participating in meetings when all I really want to do is curl up on the floor and rock back and forth and groan. If you find yourself in the same spot, I recommend bringing some sort of device or book or magazine or something as a distraction. Or, you know, you could start a blog and then complain there!

Congratulations, Snooki!

So, have any of you been to the Us Weekly website lately? I mean, I know it's been an unusually big week in celebrity births and pregnancy announcements, but good luck if you happen to be an infertile gossip-magazine reader.

In addition to this amazing cover, the top five headlines on all of Us Weekly yesterday were:
1. Snooki: Yes, I'm Pregnant and Engaged!
2. Whoa! Pregnant Jessica Simpson Poses Nude, Says She's Having Girl
3. Vanessa Minnillo Is Pregnant -- See Her Bump!
4. Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and More Nude, Pregnant Celebs!
5. Who Looks Better Nude and Pregnant: Jessica Simpson or Demi Moore?

But wait! There's more! On the same page, you can also see these headlines:
Bethenny Frankel: Doing Lunch with Bryn
Bruce Willis, Pregnant Wife Step Out After Demi Moore Leaves Rehab
Kourtney Kardashian Squeezes Her Baby Bump Into Tight Red Jeans
FIRST PIC: Jennifer Garner Goes for Drive After Giving Birth

The craziest thing about all of this is, of course, that if I only had a camera to take some "nude and pregnant" photos of myself I would totally blow both Demi Moore and Jessica Simpson right out of the water. I mean, do they have the kind of Lovenox bruises I have? I didn't think so. And Snooks, I'm so so happy for you, but you might want to invest in a new bra now that your cup size has gone up. It'll be way more comfortable, I swear!

But seriously folks... I remember having a conversation with friends a long time ago about celebrity babies and how interesting it would be to see which celebrities would be due at the same time as us when, at some point in the far-away future, we got pregnant. I'm thinking that it's still a bit early for me to declare that Snooki and Vanessa Minnillo Lachey are my celebrity pregnancy BFFs, since they're probably past the first trimester and I am decidedly not. Celebrities who are currently puking their guts out and waiting until mid-April to announce that they're "over the moon" at their exciting news, I am looking at you! (And if I'm perfectly honest, I have my fingers crossed that one such announcement will come from Kate Middleton. Nobody deserves to struggle with infertility, but man, if there's one person for whom it would be a painful public experience, it's the Duchess of Cambridge. Also I can't wait to see her maternity style!)

A Brief List of Things that Recently Made Me Cry

1. A commercial for Pradaxa
2. News stories about the recent tornado damage (this actually makes some sense, it's terrible)
3. The Dixie Chicks' "Wide Open Spaces"
4. The USA Gymnastics American Cup television coverage
5. Finding out that a friend is 10 weeks pregnant

I know the last one should actually have made me happy - if everything goes according to plan, our babies will be born within a few weeks of each other, which is really cool. And yes, it would have hurt even more if we didn't have our own bun in the oven. But... argh. It's really tough to hear that she just felt weird one day and took a pregnancy test and, what do you know, it was positive. As opposed to "injected herself with drugs and cried herself to sleep for months and has horrible painful memories of her child's conception." And, of course, they felt comfortable sharing the news before the end of the first trimester - it must be nice to be so confident.

So, self-pity, party of one? Hopefully, in time, this will become a happy coincidence and we'll be able to look back at all of this and laugh. (Ha. Ha. Ha. Look, I'm already doing it.) And for the record, they have absolutely no idea that we are also expecting - a testament to our acting skills if I've ever heard one. I'm thinking of announcing our news around when the baby crowns, what do you think? If wizard capes become fashionable, I just might have a shot.

Heartbeat

The blastocyst that was transferred to my uterus a month ago is now 10mm long. He or she has a heartbeat of 152 beats per minute that was strong enough to be heard by the Doppler ultrasound. I was given a grainy picture depicting an alien floating in a black bubble that looks, I am told, exactly as it should at this stage. It's pretty crazy.

I know that other people have described bursting into tears or otherwise feeling overcome when they heard their baby's heartbeat for the first time, but for me, the big moment was when the first image came on the screen and it looked like the other eleventy billion 7-week ultrasounds I googled in preparation for this visit. I gasped and put my hands over my mouth and my RE said "are you okay?" and I sort of squeaked back "yes" and he continued his measurements. He was totally unfazed and only took about 90 seconds to look around and say "yup, as expected, everything looks normal." The longest part of the appointment was after the scan when I complained about morning sickness and everything he suggested, I had already tried - finally the nurse broke in to say that she has two children, remembers how awful the first trimester was, and to just hang in there. They did say that I can have a prescription for Zofran if it gets really bad, and I'll keep that in mind... I don't want to resort to any kind of drug, even a really safe one, if there's any way to avoid it. Until then, blech.

I won't have another scan for (knock on wood) about 3 weeks. So much suspense! At least it's Friday so I have the next two days to lie on the couch and stare at the ultrasound picture. Wow, a heartbeat, wow wow wow!