Love

Lots of negative stuff to write about: contradictory feelings on motherhood, thoughts that come up about donor egg issues, changes in my body, sadness that we will probably have to let our frozen embryos go, guilt that I can't give my son a sibling, barriers that exist to being a working mum (& shock at how many of those barriers are put there by other working mums), pressure to be the first to move baby into its own room or the first to wean (while still breastfeeding, of course), feelings around miscarriage and infertility that linger, etc, etc.

But look at this smile - this smile makes it all float away.

The Other Side

My son is two months old today (the photo is about a month out of date now). His birthday gave us a hat-trick of birthdays on the 6th of the first three months of the year. He is the 6th of January, I am the 6th of February and my dad - who is 75 years old today - is the 6th of March. These two months have been the longest of my life, I think.

I've heard the first few weeks with a newborn described as "ecstatic", "babymoon", "precious" and other similarly delightful terms. I can only describe our first few weeks as fairly hellish. Things are still fairly chaotic, but we're reaching a point where a certain amount of sanity has returned.

I'm not sure that I can give you my birth story at all clearly, as the whole thing is a bit of a blur, but I'll try.

We (me, my husband and my sister, who trained as a midwife) went in on Monday 3rd January at 5.30pm so that I could be induced. The hospital was so understaffed that I didn't get the pess.ary put in until 1.30am on Tuesday 4th (my due date). At that point, my husband and sister went home to get some sleep. I did NOT sleep - monitoring, nervousness and noise on the ward prevented it. The necessary 24 hours passed and nothing happened, so in the early hours of Wednesday 5th January they put some gel in and did more monitoring of the baby. Baby and I both came to hate the monitoring - tight belts round my belly, left for well over an hour at a time many times over the days I was in hospital. I know it was for our own good, but in the end it made things worse. I did not sleep on either the Monday/Tuesday night or the Tuesday/Wednesday night and, as it turned out, during the monitoring on the 2nd night, the huge movement I felt in my belly was the baby moving from the perfect "his spine down my left side" to the very much less than perfect back-t0-back position.

On the morning of Wednesday 5th, the midwife on the ward decided that I had dilated enough to be moved to the labour ward and have my waters broken. When I was examined by a doctor on arrival on the labour ward though, I was told this was not the case. Instead I had another, very painful sweep and was left to wait (sister and husband were back with me at this point). As I was high-risk and going to be having an epidural, I was on a more monitored part of the maternity unit. But again, they were understaffed, so instead of having a midwife with me all the time, I had to share one with the room next door, and got through 4 midwives in the 18 hours I was on the ward. Not great! Thankfully, I had my sister - had I not, I would have been terrified.

I had some contractions, tried gas and air, felt sick and dizzy and gave up in favour of some strong painkillers. As the painkillers took effect, the contractions stopped. In the middle of the afternoon, my nice consultant was passing and decided that she was going to break my waters. After that, the contractions came back, but not as effectively as they wanted. So they put a drip in and I asked for my early epidural. Four hours later, I got it! I did FOUR HOURS of strong back labour with no pain relief at all. My sister tells me I was amazing. Apparently, whenever a contraction came, I went very quiet, closed my eyes and breathed. I only swore once during the whole birth, when I was told (three hours after I'd asked for an epidural) that there was still no anaesthetist available. I have almost no memory of this part of the day at all.

Eventually, the anaesthetist arrived and put in the epidural. That part was OK, but it only worked down one side of my body and I continued to have terrible pain on the other side. The midwife and anaesthetist did some fancy manoevering over the next hour and managed to get it most of the way through the other side too. However, just when the pain stopped, the monitors started to show that the baby's heartrate wasn't great and I was threatened with a C-section. At this point, I didn't really care how they got the baby out, I just wanted him out and safe. Before they made a decision, they tried a scalp monitor and took a blood test from the babies scalp to see if he was in distress. The scalp monitor did not work well at all, and made it look like the baby's heartrate was dropping. I was terrified by this time. Thankfully, just as they were about to whisk me off to surgery, the results of the blood test came back showing that the baby was basically OK and we had more time. They put me back on the belly monitor and things settled a bit.

During all the investigating, they found that I was 9cm dilated and, once they'd established that the baby was OK, they gave me one hour to push before taking me into surgery for a C-section. The hour did almost nothing - they'd discovered that the baby was back-to-back with me by this time - but it did get things far enough on that they started talking about forceps rather than a C-section. How I wish I'd taken the C-section now!

The nice doctor who was looking after me by this time brought me a consent sheet to sign, whereupon I read her name - she was the parent of a child in the same year that I had been teaching at school, in the classroom next to mine. On the one hand, I shall probably not be able to look her in the eye again, on the other, I think she took extra care of the baby, who emerged without a mark upon him - quite unusual for a forceps delivery. They had to turn him manually first, then pull him out with the forceps. By this time, we'd had to leave my sister behind and it was my husband and me and a lot of medics - midwife, doctor, my consultant (who happened to be passing again), anaesthetist, paediatrician and several other folk who I never identified.

My epidural was topped up and then they began. I am honestly not sure how my son's head remained attached to his body. I felt no pain, but I felt the force of the pulling and it was quite something! I have since read of people seeing their midwife or ob/gyn putting a foot up on the end of the trolley to brace themselves to pull a baby out using forceps. It doesn't surprise me! And although the baby was left unscathed, I am going to be feeling the effects for some time. I had an episi.otomy, which came unstitched and got infected and I have prol.apses front and back and possibly in the middle too - waiting to see a consultant about that next week. Childbirth is the gift that keeps on giving here!

The baby was placed briefly on my chest, looking grey and bloody and not crying, and was then whisked away to be looked at by the paediatrician. I heard him start to cry as he was taken to the next room and my husband tells me that by the time the he saw him, the paediatrician said "perfect - nothing for me to do here". His APGAR score was 9, which is one off perfect actually, but it was good enough for me. I was stitched up and the bleeding (which was quite a lot) was stopped and then I was given the baby back in recovery and I fed him. My sister was brought back at this point and we were all taken up to the postnatal ward. My son was born at 4.07am on 6th January - Thursday's child, just like I had been 41 years and 11 months before him.

The postnatal ward was not a great experience - once again, understaffing was largely to blame. My medications were late, sometimes missed and I had to chase them up myself, and when I said I was having difficulty breast.feeding, I was given formula and a syringe!!! There were also good bits - a midwife who really did care, who took time to help me express my own milk and who was very thorough in briefing me before I was released, and a girl who was in the bed opposite me who was having a similarly tough time who I became friendly with and have continued to keep in touch with. We both agree that the first three weeks of motherhood were horrendous and we both thought "what on earth have I done?" once or twice most days during that time.

Getting home wasn't much better. I was out 2 days after giving birth after 5 nights of almost no sleep at all and was slightly mad and incredibly anxious and spent the next few days not eating and almost unable to sleep altogether. One of the visiting midwives, arriving after a particularly bad night, sent round a psychiatrist and acute psychiatric nurse, worried that I might have pue.rpural psyc.hosis - anyone who knows me well enough could have told her that my behaviour was fairly typical for me after two weeks of no more that 3 hours sleep a night and none during the day! Thankfully the psychiatrist and the nurse pronounced me to be utterly normal :-). That alongside yo-yoing blood pressure, the infected episiotomy, stitches coming out, wierd heart rhythms, a return stay in hospital with retained products and, worst of all, my poor baby coughing up blood (which turned out to be from feeding from me!) led to a horrendous first few weeks. And just as things began to settle, as my swelling went down, the prolapses became obvious, meaning that walking and standing are now uncomfortable. I am awaiting an echocardiogram and a 24 hour heart monitor, after some ectopic heartbeats and a really scary turn when it felt like my heart stopped for a couple of beats, I couldn't breathe and things started to cloud over before normality returned (ECG, bloods and chest x-ray afterwards came back clear but medics thought they could hear a heart murmur). And just yesterday, we discovered that the wee one has an ingu.inal her.nia and will need surgery at some point. My anxiety about my own health, always an issue for me, is even stronger now that I am spending time on my own with my baby - what if I pass out while carrying him, or die one morning leaving him on his own till my husband gets home at night and finds . . . what?!

On top of all this: we had to get the flat cleaned and decluttered ready to put on the market and we're now up for sale and showing people round the last four days out of six; my husband's hours at work have been cut just as my maternity pay comes to an end; we are now well in to the development of the property we bought with my parents and have a huge mortgage and cannot pull out without leaving my parents homeless. We are looking down the list of life's most stressful experiences and wondering which one is coming next.

But alongside all that anxiety and stress and sleeplessness (did I mention that the baby is colicky and doesn't sleep for more than 3 hours at a time?!) there are starting to be some amazing moments. When my baby smiles at me as I pick him up first thing in the morning, when he does something new like trying to get his thumb in his mouth today, when I see my husband with his longed-for son, when my father tells me that he thinks his grandson is incredibly clever and will be walking and talking in no time - then it's all worth it - every moment of pain and stress since the birth, all the worry and discomfort during the pregnancy and even all the sadness of the losses and the childlessness of the last eight years. I love my child so much! The fact that he is not genetically mine makes no difference to me at all. I will never know what it is like to have a genetically-related child, but I can't imagine for a moment that I could love such a child any more than I love my son - it's just not possible! And the wonderful thing is that it makes no difference at all to the rest of my family either: my mum and dad are clearly as besotted with him as they are with the other two grandchildren and my sister keeps threatening to steal him and has already begged me to make sure that she is the one we "leave him to" in our wills (if anything happens to her and her husband, my husband and I are to be guardians to their kids and she wants to do the same for us).

I want to leave this post with a message for those of you who are still trying to have a baby. If you are considering donor eggs or donor embryos and are worried about bonding with any resulting baby, I hope this gives you hope (and I have three friends who have also done donor eggs who are also delighted they took that decision). And for anyone who has reached the point where they have decided to live childless (or have accepted that that is what is inevitable): before this pregnancy, I had reached the point in my journey where I had accepted that childlessness was the most likely possibility and I had pretty much made peace with that - to the extent that there is a little bit of me mourning that life I had planned, with all the travel and freedom and possibilities of doing valuable things for people who really needed help. I love my son and I am very happy to be a mum now, but I can still see that place I had come to before this and it was still a good one. I hope I always remember the pain that our fight to have a child brought, but I hope that I also remember that I had realised that our lives were still important and valuable if we had never had a child. That is still very clear in my mind - I am not one of those women who has had a child and now believes that any other path in life is irrelevant. Had I had a child easily, I think I might have been, but that time of struggling and exploring alternatives has taught me a lot.

At Last

He's here. Our beautiful baby boy was born at 4.07am on Thursday 6th January 2011, weighing 7lbs and 14.5oz. He is, without doubt, the best thing to happen to us, ever. I will post his birth story - rather long and rollercoaster-ish - once we're home and settled. It's only been 24 hours, but all the waiting and hoping was worth it!

Terrified!

I had a sweep on Friday! And now I've had a show and an upset tummy. No contractions yet and my waters are still in place, but things do seem to be moving. If I haven't got started on my own beforehand, I go in to be induced tomorrow evening at 5.30pm.

I am terrified! I am terrified of labour, of what my blood pressure will do (it's been up quite a bit this last week, even with increased medication), of having to have an emergency c-section and mostly of me and my baby not being OK at the end of all this. We have waited so long for this to happen but we have been on the wrong side of the statistics too many times for me to have faith that everything will turn out fine. If you're the praying type, say one for us please!

The Right Words

I went swimming with my mum this morning - a nice little Tuesday routine we've got into since I've been on maternity leave. On the way in, a woman said "hi" to me. At first, I didn't recognise her and looked behind me to see who she was really talking to, but there was noone there. So I turned back and she said "yes - I mean you".

It turned out that she was the mother of one of the children in the class of 6-year-olds I left in October. I hadn't taught them for long and I was meeting her out of context - and my brain has left work behind pretty thoroughly. I did remember her daughter, thankfully, and we chatted a bit about the class - they like their new teacher, but they like me more and she hopes they'll get me back when I return to work in the new school year (thank you!).

Talk turned to the pregnancy and the fact I'd stopped work so early. She had also stopped early when she was pregnant with her daughter - she was an older mother who had done IVF! "Me too", I said. She then went on to talk about her sister who had lost pregnancies and done IVF. "Me too", I said. We talked about how hard it is to keep trying when you've had so many disappointments and how easy it is to resent fertiles who appear to churn out kids with no effort or appreciation. She says she still feels that way sometimes, even though she has her little girl (no siblings - she decided to quit while she was ahead, a sentiment I understand very well).

I hadn't said anything about how I was feeling about imminent birth, but as we were about to go our separate ways she said, "Don't be scared. When I was getting close to birth, I was terrified the baby would die". I couldn't say anything at this point.

"But they want to live," she said. It's no guarantee - there are none of those in this business - but I needed to hear that.

A Different Sad

For the last seven years, on the night of 4th December, I have gone to bed and lain for a bit thinking, "I should be clearing up from a 1st / 2nd / 3rd etc birthday party and where there is a room full of boxes there should be a baby's / toddler's / child's room". Most years I have cried bitterly, some years I have tried to shove the thoughts and feelings out of the way.

December 4th was the only due date we ever had for any of our 6 lost pregnancies. It was the first. After that, I put serious effort into not finding our or working out any others. This last Saturday (or thereabouts, since so few babies arrive on their due date), our first child would have been seven years old. I did think about it this year, but it felt different. For a start, that room that was full of boxes is now transformed into our bedroom but mainly, in about a month, we will (please God) be sharing that room with our baby.

The new life does not cancel out the ones we lost - it will never be OK that we went through that - but it does take away a lot of the pain. Since our losses were so early, I do not mourn an individual child in the way those who have lost babies later in pregnancy do, I mourn the loss of potential and the loss of a life we could have led as a family - and a whole load of other more hidden things that IF/loss does a number on (intimacy, confidence, friends, financial stability etc, etc). Finally, that potential and that life look like they might actually become real.

I have poked and prodded myself to see if my inability to have a genetically related child pains me much, and it really doesn't. In fact, as time goes by I a) feel so much that this child is mine in every important sense and b) think that not passing on some of my seriously dodgy genes is probably a very good thing - I mean, genetic clotting conditions, high blood pressure and all the other possibly inherited health issues are not something any child's going to thank me for.

So this year, on the night of 4th December, I still thought of that first baby and felt sad, but it was a different sad - a gentle, regretful sad, not a raw, stinging one. Next year, I will still remember, still feel sad, but I hope (I pray) that next year will be even more different in an even better way.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Roccie has nudged me into putting in a post - thank you!

The title refers to a nice little article I read on my iPh.one as I tried to relax over an eggn.og lat.te and toasted frui.tbread (guess where I had elevenses today?!). As if losing multiple pregnancies is not upsetting and scary enough, this article in the BBC news online today suggests that those of us who have had more than 3 miscarriages are at a 500% increased risk of having a heart attack in middle-age or after. Although they pussy-foot around a bit about causation, I'll eat my hat if clotting is not the link here. It seems on the evidence of this pregnancy that my main problem was bad eggs and that having a donor fixed that problem. BUT who's to say that, if I had done a donor cycle without aspi.rin (125mg) and Cle.xane (40mg), I wouldn't have lost this pregnancy too - possibly at a later stage, since my clotting condition (Fact.or V Lei.den) tends to be a 2nd/3rd trimester issue. I know at least three people who have been diagnosed with Hug.hes Syn.drome (Anti-phos.pholipid An.tibodies) through testing for recurrent miscarriage and more who have, like me, an additional unidentified clotting issue which was identified through a TEG (throm.bo-elast.ogram). I'm now off my aspirin so that it doesn't affect the baby or bleeding during labour, but I intend to get back on a low dose ASAP afterwards - it helps to control my migraines and I can only hope it might help to protect me from future heart problems.

I am still here and still pregnant - 35 weeks now. I am still anxious too, but things seem to be going well. In a way, I wish I didn't know the stories of several bloggers who lost their babies at term, during labour, or my own friend's story of how she lost her two week old baby girl to Group B Strep. These were avoidable losses and reminders that, however far I get past the time of my own losses, I could still lose my precious baby for some totally unrelated reason. In another way, I feel thankful to these girls, who have used their blogs to educate and inform so that hopefully others might push hospitals to check things they might otherwise have ignored. I spoke to the senior registrar who was taking the high-risk clinic last Friday about my anxieties and pessimism and she was lovely. She said that of course nobody had a crystal ball and nobody could promise me that nothing would go wrong, but these things were rare (though she and I both acknowledged that they still happened more often that they should). She also didn't belittle my fears, saying that with my history it wasn't at all surprising that I was anxious. She is referring me to the hospital's consultant midwife to talk about my fears about giving birth.

My various health issues are conspiring to make labour and birth even more scary and complicated. I saw the anaesthetist on Friday and she is very keen for me to have an early epidural, as they have the convenient side-effect of reducing blood pressure - convenient for me at least, since high BP is one of my issues. My BP is also labile - it goes up even further when I am stressed or in pain, which are givens while in natural labour, so it would help with that too (protecting my blood vessels from BP surges). BUT - I can't have an epidural if I've had my Cle.xane in the previous 12 hours because of the risk of bleeding - nor could I have a spinal if I needed a C-section. So, if I go into labour within the 12 hours after my Cle.xane dose (7.30 in the morning), it's a natural labour or a C-section with a general anaesthetic for me. AND, because of my sleep apnoea - if I have a general, I would then be at risk of stopping breathing during recovery and I'd have to spend time in the ordinary high dependency unit, not the maternity one, because the maternity one isn't set up to deal with apnoea patients, and I'd be separated from my wee boy. I also would not be allowed any heavy-duty op.iate pain-killers because they affect the breathing centres in the brain.

To me, then, the obvious thing seemed to be to schedule a C-section or an induction. That way, I would know when not to take my Cle.xane and everything would be more straightforward (barring disasters or early labour). But no - they explained that a C-section is not ideal (major operation, increased risk of clotting for me, restricted movement after birth etc) and nor is early induction (if my body and baby weren't ready to go, it could lead to slow, unproductive labour, a distressed baby and an emergency C-section). They really would like me to go into labour naturally, as they feel that is my best chance of a good labour and birth. The consultant assured me that most women manage to get the Cle.xane timing right and that most first labours have a long, slow first stage so, even if I had taken the blood thinners, there would be time for them to work through my system before I needed an epidural. Well, I don't know if labour runs in families but my mother was in labour for 12 hours in total with me and when my sister gave birth to my niece, she went from twinges to birth in an hour and a half!! I can only hope that they have other ways of controlling my blood pressure, should I follow my mum and sister!

I really must get round to writing the second half of my "Why Donor Eggs?" post. All I can say just now is that I cannot imagine being any more bonded to a baby than I am to this one. I love him completely already and feel so protective of him, regardless of genetics.