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!