Ah, three-day weekends! I love them. I hope everyone had as lovely a weekend as we did, whether you were celebrating a holiday or just enjoying a couple of days off. I strongly recommend the indulgence of a t-bone cooked on the grill and an ice-cold Sapporo shared with someone special.
We decided to name our new kitten Lucy. Whether it’s for Lucy Ricardo or Lucy, Daughter of the Devil…well, the world will never know!She’s fearless, she goes non-stop for hours, and after a rough start…eats like cookie monster in a nabisco factory. When she’s hungry and her bowl is empty, she tracks me down and tries to climb my leg, meowing as if her heart were breaking. She likes to be held if we’re standing up, not so much if we’re sitting down. She’d really love to be friends with the kitty in the mirror, but it keeps running away. Our older cat, Widget, isn’t so sure about Lucy and sort of wishes she’d just go away, or at the very least, stop playing with her toy mice.
I had my consultation with Dr. T last week. It went well. We met with the genetic counselor and, after going over our family history, felt pretty confident that neither Shannon nor I brought any high risk of DNA wonkiness to the table. She explained CVS and amniotic testing (I know they get a lot of young women in their high risk practice who haven’t researched these things to the nth degree, I really do, but I wish there were some way for them to tailor their speeches to the audience a bit) and how, because of my age at the time the eggs were collected, either of those was an option. I explained that unless a non-invasive test indicated cause for concern, I’d be passing on having a needle stuck into my uterus, thanks. Just satisfying curiosity isn’t enough to justify the risk of miscarriage to me, at this point. When Dr. T joined us, he fully understood my feelings and promised to support my decision either way when the time came.
I like Dr. T. He’s probably about our age and very personable. Throughout my stay on his service in the hospital, he did a great job of explaining what was going on, why they were doing what they were, and answering any of our questions, even the truly strange ones*, without talking down to us or over our heads. The first thing he stressed when we met with him last week was that if anything good could be said to have come out of what happened it’s that he feels fairly confident that an infection most likely caused, not just the premature labor, but the original rupture. The most likely scenario is that my cervix shortened enough to expose the membranes to the normal bacteria of the vaginal canal, which then crossed the membrane. If that was the case, and it would seem to be the best candidate (we’ll never know for sure. There was DEFINITELY an infection when Lennox was born.) then we know to start watching my cervix very early on and to keep a close eye on it. Dr. T only uses cerclages in extreme cases and he didn’t rule me out as a candidate for one, given my history. With my history, I’ll get to skip the OB-GYN and go straight to him as soon as Dr. N releases me from her care. He’ll start measuring my cervix at 16 weeks and will start FFN (fetal fibronectin tests) at about 20 weeks. Beyond that, the single embryo transfer is strongly encouraged. He did say that this doesn’t mean I couldn’t necessarily have a normal pregnancy with twins, but given the additional strain of a multiple pregnancy and the added difficulty in monitoring, since we had control of the situation it was a wiser decision to go with the singleton. He had no recommendations pre-conception beyond what I’m already doing…prenatal vitamins, metformin, exercising. Post-conception, I think the majority of his work will be of the hand-holding variety as every twinge sends me to his office…at least, I hope that will be the case. He reiterated that nothing we did or didn’t do caused this and that gives him confidence in saying that we have very good chances for a normal, healthy pregnancy and delivery.
So, there we are. I’ll keep popping the handful of pills every morning and either dragging my butt to the gym or wearing myself out on the WiiFit (that thing is surprisingly effective! My thighs were shaky for hours after doing lunges). I’m about due for my annual physical where they’ll tell me my bad cholesterol is still too high and my good cholesterol is still too low and I’ll try to figure out how to fit MORE salmon and flax seed oil into my diet (I did the Lipit*r and niacin…what a nightmare!). Hopefully, the anemia I had when I left the hospital is improved after all of those awful iron pills. I’m considering asking for another 3hr GTT, just to see. I’ve been on the met for a long time now, I have been exercising and I’m curious to see if things are better. I know I don’t have the blood sugar level issues I did. Dr. N will do another infectious screen (last year, we learned I wasn’t immune to Rubella anymore and I had to spend two months getting that taken care of.) Then, Shannon and I have decided to celebrate nine years of marriage with a week in Vegas. One big grown-up blowout. After that, maybe, I think, I might be ready to tackle trying the frozen transfer. In a perfect world that thought wouldn’t make my stomach tie in knots, but I think at some point I’m going to just have to take a deep breath, squeeze my eyes closed tight and jump.
*After my c-section, I had a problem of hearing my pulse in my left ear. Sometimes it was so loud, it was like having a white noise machine playing right in my ear. We kept mentioning to any nurse or doctor who would listen, but all of them just sort of shrugged and ignored it. He actually listened as I tried to explain it and suggested that it was just a post-op blood pressure fluctuation and that it would most likely go away on it’s own in a few days. Aside from making sure that my pulse was the ONLY thing I was hearing that no one else could, he took the complaint seriously and at least tried to come up with an explanation.