Reservations

I'm so tired. So, so tired. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I get up every day at 5:30am. I usually enjoy having extra time in the morning - it's much less stressful than having to rush to get ready - but it means I have to go to bed early. If by chance I stay up past 10 like I did last night, the morning is a horror. I'm hoping I can get off work early enough to take a nap this afternoon.

Mr. Ibis's friend is coming into town today and staying until Thursday. He's Mr. I's oldest friend and was a groomsman at our wedding. We're having our Little come over tonight to have pizza with us and then tomorrow Mr. I is taking the day off work to hang out with his friend. I have one small concern about this visit and that is that the friend has to sleep on our pull-out bed in the living room, and I have to pee once every night, without fail, meaning I have to walk through the living room on my way to the bathroom every single night around 2am. I'm going to warn him up front - there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm feeling a little disconnected from the pregnancy right now. Once I got over the initial depression of being put on progesterone, I moved into a kind of distant, numb zone. It's not like I can forget that I'm pregnant, since all my symptoms are still here, but I'm not consciously thinking about it that much. Just, in the back of my mind, biding my time until a week from tomorrow, when I can hear the heartbeat and know that at least we have passed the point where I miscarried last time.

It sucks that it's hard for Mr. Ibis and me to find any comfort in the statistics about our safety. I mentioned to him almost in a rote way that supposedly when you see a heartbeat on an ultrasound your miscarriage rate drops to around 5% and he made an expression like, what a crock. I said, "I know." It's hard to take any comfort in the fact that I've had no spotting, since I had no spotting in my first pregnancy until I started to miscarry. It's hard to hear that brown blood is usually harmless, when that's how my miscarriage started. It's hard to hear that some cramping is normal, when I had none in my first pregnancy until two days before I miscarried. None of these markers that other people get to rely on for peace of mind are available to us. I saw someone on the board announced their pregnancy on Facebook at 9 weeks and I physically winced - I did the same with my first pregnancy and had to redact it three days later. I know that people with later losses feel this even more keenly than me - at least I still feel that the second trimester holds some promise of safety for us.

It is difficult to believe in the statistics when you are one of the 5% or 1% or .5%. I have also heard that the common knowledge about heartbeat is actually a falsehood, because it comes from a time when no one heard the heartbeat until the doctor tried the Doppler at 12 weeks - so in reality the truth is your miscarriage rate doesn't drop to 5% until second trimester, just like traditional wisdom has always held. This makes more sense to me, but maybe that's just my personal experience filtering information the way I want to see it - I know some people have argued with certainty on behalf of the "heartbeat statistic."

So, I don't know, I guess I'm holding myself at some emotional reserve right now. In the beginning I was extremely excited to just be able to get pregnant again, but I think I'm holding back from believing that I'm going to be able to keep this baby. It makes sense that I'm feeling this way now, because right now is when I started to feel super confident about the first pregnancy. I had heard the heartbeat and starting telling the world... I had banished miscarriage from my mind as a possibility anymore. The sense of shock and denial was probably the hardest part of the emotional experience of losing that baby... the sadness felt right, but the initial feeling that it couldn't possibly be happening was intensely painful. I think that is what I am trying to protect myself from this time.

Sorry for the morbid post today. I knew this week was going to be a little difficult.