snapshots: parenting after loss

 
I know I haven't written here in many months. In fact, I haven't visited at all in many months. During my pregnancy with Naama, returning to this place became too much, this special and sacred place where over the past few years I opened up my heart and received so much from you in return. For anyone following along, I hope you will forgive me for my absence. I still can't quite explain why I couldn't write or come here for so long, other than being quiet was what I needed most during the spring and summer.

Naama was born on June 26, 2013 at 37 weeks gestation. Her name means pleasant and calm. She came into the world with a full head of black hair weighing 2700 grams (just shy of 6 pounds) and measuring 20 inches long. She has made my wildest dreams come true.

I don't go over all the details in my head constantly anymore. The details of what happened to me, to us, is too painful to take in all at once. But not infrequently, I catch a glimpse of something and I am transported back to that cruel, rainy winter and everything that transpired then and in the years that preceded it and during the months that followed.

Sometimes I am walking down the windowed staircase of the medical school research building to my research lab and I catch sight of the old inpatient building that is now defunct. I look across at the windows (shutters now drawn) and balconies of the third floor -- the women's ward -- where Aminadav and Naava were born and died in the final months of the building's use, before all the inpatient wards were relocated to the new tower. 

And I am back.

I remember my view from the hospital room, a nice view, really, with the Judean hills off in the distance. The grayness and bleakness of that drab winter, which was particularly cold and rainy. Early mornings being sent down with an orderly in my wheelchair for ultrasounds -- during the first hospitalization, hopeful -- just a bleeding spot in the placenta -- and then more bleak, the ones where I asked the technician to turn off the big screen and only Y could bear to look at the small monitor: two hearts beating, two beautiful, healthy babies, except one immobilized by no fluid left and the death sentence that awaited my two precious bubs.

I remember lots of the little details, and perhaps they are the ones that hurt most: the moment of shock and horror of my water breaking all over the bedroom floor while on bed rest after being discharged from my first hospitalization following my partial abruption. Knocking frantically on my next door neighbor's door, the one with the balloon animal-covered van who ran children's birthday parties, whose popcorn cart infringed slightly on our storage space in the basement. "It can still be, it can still be!" she exclaimed, mostly to herself.

Leaving the hospital through the mall once it was all over, walking past the baby store with my deflated belly and empty arms with the realization that Y and I were leaving the hospital as two and that was it, having gone from a family of two to four and back to two again. It would never be all four of us again.

Y telling me on the way to the car: Just so you know, we're not going back to my car, it's a rental because my car is in the shop because I swerved off the road and totaled it three weeks ago in the rain on my way home and I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry. 

I remember going home for three weeks and then going back to the hospital and my massive hemorrhage and the new worries about my platelets. It seemed like I couldn't keep myself out of the hospital.

My mother came from Massachusetts to Israel to stay with us and I wanted her in the apartment but not in the same room. I sat on the computer by myself and discovered a Glow in the Woods and searched every variation of "abruption" "PPROM" and "twins"  on PubMed again and again, searching desperately, pleadingly, for a way to save my dead babies. If only I could figure out the magic formula retrospectively, maybe I could bring them back. Maybe I would get a do-over and they would live.

Then, finally, is the second half of my story: redemption. When Naama was born, right after her Apgars, the nurse placed her immediately on my chest. I remember looking down at her in shock, stunned -- was this really my baby with her mop of thick black hair? Mine? Alive? Even when I was in labor, the sublime reality of it all seemed thousands of miles away in time and space.

But the photograph Y took in that moment captures something else -- a tiny hand reaching up, up, tightly clasping the round "N" and "A" discs on my necklace. Reaching out into the big world and embracing her big brother and big sister.

Does she know? I often wonder.

Usually I am not prone to those type questions, but I like to believe that my beautiful, vibrant, living daughter is connected to her older brother and sister in ways we don't necessarily understand. I do know that she would not exist had they survived. This is the complicated reality of parenting after loss. I could never had all my children alive, for Naama's existence is a direct consequence of Aminadav and Naava's death. To pretend anything else would be dishonest, though the reality is impossible reconcile.

When Naama was three days old, I read her her first book, Goodnight Moon:

Goodnight room, goodnight moon, goodnight cow jumping over the moon.
Goodnight light and the red balloon. Goodnight bears, goodnight chairs,
goodnight kittens, and goodnight mittens. Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks. Goodnight little house and goodnight mouse. Goodnight comb
and goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush and goodnight to the old lady whispering "hush."  

Goodnight stars, goodnight air, good night noises everywhere --
 

This part came out in a choked whisper. Hadn't I recited those same lines for Aminadav and Naava in my head when they left us? Many parts of this parenting gig have left me in tears of both gratitude and the knowledge of what was lost, especially in those first few days, when the details of another labor, another birth story, came flooding back. It all felt very familiar. And I suppose that in some parallel universe, I had done all of this before. It was all for the first time just as none of it was for the first time.

One of the most helpless things about losing children at birth is the inability to parent them. It is a biological cruelty that when you are left empty-handed, you are still flooded with the same maternal hormones that catapult the rest of us into the nurturing and caretaking of mommy land. And so all of these rituals of newborn care, the tedium of the feeding and rocking and diaper changing, took on new meaning for me, all of the things I couldn't do for my sweet twins. In her memoir "An Exact Figment of a Replica of My Imagination" Elizabeth McCracken writes about her son Gus, born after the stillbirth of her first son Pudding, and captures the notion of the parallel universe far more eloquently than I ever could:

Sometimes I look at Gus, and it all feels very familiar. Not him. He was a skinny just-born, with cheekbones and an incensed cry: he looked like an old man who’d been outfitted with hands and feet a size too big and he wanted to know to which knucklehead he should address his complaint. Now he is fat and looks like a retired advertising executive. He is gorgeous and inscrutable. I tell you, I’ve never seen his like. But taking care of him, changing him, nursing him, I felt as though I’d done it before, as though it were true: time did split in half, and in some back alley of the universe I took care of Pudding, when he was a tiny baby, and this reminds me of that. There’s a strange museum/ gift shop/ antique store/ tourist trap in Schuylerville, New York, the next town over. In front is a reconstruction of colonial Fort George done in wood cutouts — a soldier in stocks, Revolutionary soldiers in profile, all cut with a jigsaw and painted in bright colors. In front is a sign that says: An exact replica of a figment of my imagination, and that is what this life feels like some days. It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life, and someone is missing. It’s a happy life —

I think she has it just right: "it's a happy life, but someone is missing. It's a happy life, and someone is missing. It's a happy life --"

dusting off the cobwebs

Its been a while. Quite a while. Since I last posted, we passed a lot of significant milestones. All of these milestones were pretty hard, and they actually made me feel less like writing. Instead, they made me want to crawl into my own little cocoon and burrow there for a while.

The Big Dates

The first big date was 19w2d, which was my PPROM milestone with the twins. It happened to coincide with the weekend before my SIL's wedding, so it was also a hectic family time. I spent a lot of time crying in the shower and crying in bed that weekend. Hitting my PPROM milestone was harder than I anticipated and made me sadder than I thought it would.

I was also incredibly fearful. I knew there were no ominous warning signs that my water was about to break, but it still felt like maybe there was something karmic or evil about that particular gestational age that would rob me of this little one, too.

My FIL made a toast at dinner in which he listed month by month all of the babies born in our extended family over the past year and he omitted Aminadav and Naava. Given my already fragile emotional state, this really made me feel like crap even though I know he meant no harm by it. I didn't think it was worth it to call him out on it, especially not on my SIL's wedding weekend when the attention should deservedly be focused on her, but it did really upset me and the timing was just very poor.

Y's grandmother noticed the omission and also commented that she always remembers them. We shared a little cry and that made me feel much better.

Later in the week, I reached the gestational age where I lost Aminadav and Naava. Getting to that point was surprisingly less emotionally charged and sad for me than my PPROM milestone. I felt a small weight lift from my shoulders as the day ended.

And just a few days after that was the Hebrew anniversary (yahrzeit) of Aminadav and Naava's death. I knew that being essentially on the same calendar with this pregnancy as I was with their pregnancy, all of these significant dates would come one after the other.

Their yahrzeit falls on the Jewish holiday of Purim, a particularly joyous holiday, ironically. Y and I decided not to celebrate. Instead, I lit their yahrzeit (memorial) candle and we went out snowshoeing in a nature reserve.  I wanted to do something solitary in nature, so this felt right to me. In the evening, we went out to dinner. I spent a lot of time crying on their yahrzeit and the crying was very therapeutic for me and actually made me feel better, as I find sitting in the depth of my pain on occasion often does.

Then about 10 days after that was the one year anniversary of their birth/death on the English calendar. That date was actually much easier and lighter for me than their yahrzeit. I focused on my appreciation for the blessing of their brief existence instead of on all of the hurt, pain, and what-ifs and should-haves.

The Babe and Me

Thank goodness this pregnancy continues relatively uneventfully. My only major complaint is that I have frequent contractions and cramping/pressure, which coupled with my anxiety makes me really nutty. I go in weekly for a tv u/s to measure cervical length and take a quick look at the babe. My cervix continues to hold stable, usually measuring between 3-3.7cm. This is obviously a big relief.

At 21 weeks, I had my anatomy scan. Everything looked good and we were told for the 4th time that baby is a girl :) The only notable finding was an echogenic focus on the heart, but we are told that with improving ultrasound technology, this finding is becoming increasingly common and is very unlikely to have any significance in light of our first trimester screening and quad screen results.

Baby girl was super active during the anatomy scan, which was pretty cool to see. I have an anterior placenta again this time around, so movement was a little muted at first, but during the past few weeks I have been feeling consistent movement including some really good jabs and kicks that are visible from the outside, which is pretty cool. I started progesterone on the same day as the anatomy scan.

I had a detailed placenta scan at 22 weeks, which showed my placenta looks great. This is also a big relief since it seems placental issues are what began the series of disasters that ultimately resulted in the loss of the twins.

I've made one trip to L&D, which was actually a positive experience, but hopefully we won't have reason to repeat it for many more weeks. I was having menstrual-like cramping and lower back pain for a few days that wasn't going away and I was scared of PTL. My MFM happened to be on call that night and she was very reassuring. We were in and out within an hour with the knowledge that even if I was contracting, my cervix was stable.

I met with the hematologist again a couple of weeks ago. The current plan is that I can get an epidural as long as I take clotting drugs prophylactically beforehand (the concern with an epidural with a bleeding disorder is a subdural hematoma). I will see her again in May.

I am really fearful and anxious these days. I am so scared my body will screw up. I know these next few weeks until 28 weeks are really critical. I relive my water breaking all of the time - it was such a strong sensory experience. 

I know that right now I am very "lucky." Lucky in that I had a relatively easy journey (relative to my previous history, anyway) conceiving this pregnancy after losing the twins and lucky in that so far, I have had a pretty good go of it this time around. (It feels a little ominous and foreboding to write that.) I have experienced enough to realize that this journey has everything to do with dumb luck and little to do with deserving.

I exist in this really weird place where I am constantly trying to mentally prepare myself for losing this dream little girl while in the same moment I can look at cute baby clothes and read carseat safety reviews. Stuck between preparing for the future I have dreamed about for so long and preparing for the death that I pray won't happen. 

                                                   23 weeks

these two lands

I hold a kernel of hope deep in my heart that this pregnancy is going to end in a baby that we get to take home. It seems a bit bold and gutsy to confess to that, but it's true. I am not confident in my ability to carry to term, but I think the odds of me getting to something like 28 weeks are much better with a singleton and I think that each new week that passes by with no bleeding bodes well.

Still, it is hard not to be consumed by my fear. This is a different pregnancy, a new pregnancy, and yet it all feels so familiar. I have done this before, walked many miles in these shoes exactly a year before, and we all know how that turned out. Sometimes I even slip up, forget it's not Aminadav and Naava in my belly, and sometimes friends and family slip up, too, asking a question about 'the babies.' If only we really got a do-over, but Aminadav and Naava are still buried in the ground in Israel and in my belly I carry a brand new little one in Canada - the little sister or brother we haven't met yet.

I suppose it makes perfect sense that this winter feels like an extension of last winter and that my pregnancy with this baby feels like an extension of my pregnancy with the twins. After all, this winter and last winter, those babies and this baby are part of the same story and the same journey.

The memories of the terrifying moments are so visceral, so engrained in who I am, it is hard to not constantly relive the sheer terror of my water breaking (exploding really) way too soon and all of the sensory details of the experience.

I was really nervous during the first trimester about an early miscarriage and then I had a brief respite from anxiety, but now I feel my fear slowly creeping back up as I approach the gestation where I began having complications with Aminadav and Naava. 

Every morning I wonder is this the day I will go to work, end up in the hospital, and not come home? Is today the day I'll start bleeding or the day my water will break? Is today the beginning of the end, or just the beginning of the beginning, like it should be? 

I exist straddling a weird in-between of hope, excitement, and fear. Just like last time, I want to read reviews of fancy stroller models and daydream about baby-wearing and making my own baby food, but in my sleep, I give birth in tens of bizarre and disturbing ways to a baby that is not yet viable. Sometimes in these nightmares the baby is somewhere on the floor but so small I wonder if I will find him at all. 

There are limitless demons that can haunt you once one truly awful thing happens - one of those sort of things that isn't supposed to happen. It opens so many new possibilities and avenues of horror. All of the sudden every freak complication seems equally possible because you are one of those people.

The belief that there are those people and then there's you is what keeps your imagination from plunging too deeply into the menagerie of horrors that could befall you. But once you become one of those people that wall comes down and you skate on thin ice because every manner of disaster could happen to you. Suddenly, the improbable odds and freak statistics feel very personal.

So I carry this kernel of hope deep in my heart; this belief that this time will be different but I have another foot grounded in a land of fear and disaster. Praying that in the right time I will land, two feet on the ground, with a screaming, cooing bundle in the 'normal' world - the land of the lucky.

**In mundane medical news, I had a MFM appointment on Thursday. Cervix is funneling a tiny bit at the top, but with fundal pressure, the cervix doesn't go below 2.8-2.9cm and my baseline measurement at 13 weeks was 3.0cm, so there is very little if any change there. The NT results combined with the first trimester screen gives us a 1:29000 odds of trisomy 21 and the appropriate PAPP-A levels combined with u/s suggest that my placenta is functioning well at this point. I think we will do the quad screen at my appointment this week.

I had a hematologist appointment on Friday. They asked me to enroll in a study following pregnancy and medical outcomes of women with bleeding disorders. There is so much known about the role of thrombophilias (clotting) disorders in pregnancy but much less known about the implications of bleeding disorders in pregnancy. The suggestion that my bleeding disorder may have played a role in my abysmal obstetric history is actually pretty unsettling to me.

14.5 weeks - long overdue update!

I am so far behind, I am not really sure where to begin. I often wish I had been much better at documenting my pregnancy with Aminadav and Naava since in the end, my pregnancy was the only time I had with them. I have mused about how I did a good job recording all the mundane details of our fertility treatments and yet I did such a crappy job of documenting the next stage. And here I am again, doing the exact same thing. Actually, I have been even worse about documenting this pregnancy than my pregnancy with the twins.

I suppose it gets back to the age-old question that has boggled many an infertility blogger - how do you blog about the next stage? Who is your audience? And based on your answers to those questions, how comfortable do you feel writing about pregnancy and maybe even parenting? 

I still feel pretty uncomfortable writing about pregnancy. I realize this is pretty stupid given that despite several pregnancies, including one that came very close to living take-home children, I know firsthand that pregnancy doesn't necessarily translate into a baby or babies in your arms and that pregnancy isn't always the holy grail to The Other Side. It is just another stage in the journey to The Other Side. Yet regardless of these experiences, it seems like I will never make the easy transition from infertility/baby loss blogging to pregnant after infertility/loss blogging. 

But I do still feel a tugging to document this pregnancy for myself, for this babe, and for anyone else out there who is experiencing something similar or will in the future. I am so incredibly grateful for this pregnancy. I still can't believe that it is my current reality. At the same time this pregnancy is also of course really complicated for me emotionally. I am very fearful that it could all be taken away from me at any moment and with each day further I get, I feel the stakes increasing. 

I also still desperately miss and long for Aminadav and Naava. I feel like I knew them. I still don't understand why they aren't here with me and I know if they were here, this baby wouldn't exist in the first place. That's complicated. I feel like I knew them. But not this little one. Not yet anyway. I ask all the time: Who are you? Who are you in there? 

And while I have not been busy imagining up a personality for this little one, I think of this baby as a he. I am nearly convinced of it. I will honestly be so happy with either a girl or a boy, but I will be a little surprised if this baby is a girl :) 

On the practical front, I had my first MFM appointment at 13 weeks. I stopped progesterone supps at 11 weeks and I am now tapering off Prednisone while continuing baby aspirin. We did the NT scan and the first tri screening blood work, but I won't have the results until my next appointment. I was just really satisfied to see that baby was still alive! I am so far very impressed with the MFM - he seems very compassionate and knowledgeable. 

At this stage, I will be going to the MFM every other week and they will check cervical length by u/s. I will also continue to be followed by the RPL specialist. At 20 weeks (assuming I get that far), we plan to start progesterone to prevent PTL. Since it is not so clear-cut whether there may have been an element of incompetent cervix in my PPROM and since the 2 D&Cs for retained placenta could have caused cervical damage, cervical change is something they will be closely monitoring. The other thing they will be monitoring closely is my placenta since I had a partial abruption with the twins preceding PPROM. The good news is no bleeding so far in this pregnancy. My next appointment is this Thursday at 15 weeks.

To wrap things up on a light note, here is a recent bump pic. I still treasure my bump pics from my pregnancy with the twins, so I know even if things don't turn out well this time, I'd still like the little momentos. Lastly, in silly news, the most exciting thing that happened this past week was that I got a Snoogle. I can't believe I was deprived of a pregnancy body pillow when I was pregnant with the twins and spent so much time in the hospital and on bed rest - I guess what I didn't know I was missing then couldn't hurt me.

on gravesites, due dates, and the after

Last week was Aminadav and Naava's due date (by 40 week standards, though I knew with twins I was never going to make it that far even under the best of circumstances). I found myself becoming increasingly miserable as the due date approached. It meant another degree of finality was closing in surrounding their death -- almost as if the possibility of their existence slightly existed in some alternate universe until that date came around and slammed shut any possibility. As if they existed in some suspended in-between until now, certainly not here, but the possibility not entirely gone, either. The difference between gone and really gone. I know it's wacky and illogical, but it is the best way that I can describe it.

I felt like we were supposed to do something special to commemorate the day but I wasn't sure what, and so I was left grasping for something that felt very elusive while feeling like I was failing extraordinarily to honor them properly. Should I buy a bundle of sunflowers -- too cheery? Light a candle -- tacky or a little macabre? Nothing was really speaking to me.

The day before I was positively wallowing in dread watching the calendar inch closer and closer to what never was and never will be. In order to cross between the research lab and the main hospital building to go to the coffee shop, I go through the traffic circle entrance of the hospital out back, where parents load their newborns into the car to take home.

That afternoon as I walked into the hospital, there was a family parked in the traffic circle with their two kids and newborn daughter. The father was videotaping the mom carrying her to the car narrating, "And here is her first time in the car! Here she is coming home!" Watching the happy new parents load their newborn into the car struck a raw chord. I couldn't hold back my tears thinking of my poor babies who never got to come home with us. I wasn't jealous, just so sad for Aminadav and Naava and sad for us, especially knowing that the babies coming home healthy now are their compatriots.

One thing that has grated on my conscious constantly is being physically so far away from Aminadav and Naava, with them buried in Israel and us here, and also not having a special place to go to that acknowledges them. One thing I have not written about at all here -- perhaps because until now it was too painful -- is the reality of what happens to babies lost during late pregnancy or shortly after birth in Israel.

While the notion of a proper burial applies, there is a long-held belief that parents of young babies should not participate in the burial and should not know where the baby is buried. Different chevrot kadisha (ritual burial committees) enforce this policy with varying degrees of strictness and leniency, but in the hospital they don't really present the different options to you -- you just sort of get stuck with whatever chevra kadisha serves that particular hospital.

At first, when we signed their bodies away to the chevra kadisha, I was pretty naive and I was just happy that my babies would get a proper burial and not be considered medical waste or some similarly horrible fate. I wasn't thinking about it so clearly at the time, but I didn't realize I might never find out where they are buried.

In the months after we lost Aminadav and Naava I began to wonder more and more where they were buried and began to develop a desire to find out and visit the place. In the process, I learned more & more about what this might entail. Not shockingly, I am not alone, and you can find many similarly-minded posts on the Israeli pregnancy loss forums, of women months and sometimes years later, trying to figure out where their babies are buried.

I learned that oftentimes it is difficult to just get in touch with the correct chevra kadisha and if you do, getting any information at all can be extremely difficult if the person you are in contact with thinks he is protecting you by refusing to give any information. If you are lucky enough to find someone willing to help locate the body, the records are sometimes kept shoddily, and especially if time has elapsed, it is sometimes impossible to find a record of the body. I also found out that the babies are generally buried together in mass graves that are either unmarked or poorly marked.

I know this reality may sound shocking and horrible to many, but this is the situation we are dealt in Israel. Of course now I would like to spread awareness among women in similar circumstances -- that at least there is a choice in which chevra kadisha comes for the body and that some are much more willing to involve the parents in the burial itself and the details surrounding it, but this was not information at hand for us when it was relevant.

I had a very strong desire to find out where Aminadav and Naava were buried before we left for Toronto, but I had an oversimplified fantasy of how we would find out before I started fact-finding and reading the forums. I have a wonderful book on pregnancy loss in Hebrew - כחלֹום יעוף - Like a Fleeting Dream, which to my knowledge is the only Hebrew language book on pregnancy loss written for religious couples. The book has a listing of phone numbers for the chevrot kadisha serving various Israeli hospitals. I thought we would just call the listed number, they would look up our babies in their records, and we would have our answer.

Of course it wasn't simple at all. After a long and convoluted goose chase, Y did succeed in tracking down the cell phone number of the man who took their bodies. However, he only finally succeeded getting his cell phone number the night before we left Israel, which made visiting them impossible. Also, I was really adamant that we try to track down the information before leaving because I figured that as more time passed, the chances of getting the information would just become increasingly slim.

Sure enough, the man remembered our babies as "the twins from Purim" (Purim is the Jewish holiday on which our babies died -- ironically, it is a particularly joyous holiday.) However, he would not agree to tell us where the babies are buried, at least not outright.  Instead, he spoke in riddles, I assume because he had a moral opposition to telling us, but at the same time had some empathy for our situation. We understood from what he told us what city and what cemetery the twins are buried in but not the location of the plot.

For then, that was all the information we had, and it gave me some peace at least knowing the location of the cemetery, but not enough. I thought if I could just go there, maybe I could find a kind person who works there who could tell us where they bury the small babies and since we know they were buried fairly recently, maybe we could deduce which plot.

But we were leaving Israel and it wasn't going to happen this way, at least not maybe until we got back. My babies are in some unmarked mass grave with the chance of ever identifying the spot dwindling with each passing month, I am moving 6000 miles away for the year, and I can't even visit their spot, I thought. Here I go failing them again. And again. First it was my body, now it is practically almost willful.

So on the eve of their due date, here I was more than 6000 miles away, with a vague general idea of where they are, and no way to properly visit or honor them. Thankfully, there is another part of the story:

Two acquaintances back in Jerusalem also lost babies this past year and subsequently became good friends (yes, it is both sad and ridiculous that we only became good friends after losing our babies, because they are two wonderful women). One of them delivered her baby stillborn during her 22nd week of pregnancy at the same hospital in the same room where I delivered Aminadav and Naava about 3 weeks later. Recently, she also got the urge to track down her baby.

She had a similarly difficult time tracking down the information (though it seemed very likely that her baby was in the same cemetery, perhaps even the same plot as the twins since it was at the same hospital only a few weeks apart). Indeed, she eventually traced her baby to the same cemetery. She and my other babylost friend, N, went on a pilgrimage together to the cemetery in an attempt to find the grave. It happened to be on Aminadav and Naava's due date.

Just like in my fantasy,  the staffer, a kind older man (Sephardi and very gentle as decribed by my friends) pointed them in the right direction and led them to three plots with small babies. Based on deductive reasoning, they figured out which of the three plots they think has E's baby, and they think Aminadav and Naava are in the same plot, too. They recited some tehillim (psalms) and placed stones on the grave for E's baby and for Aminadav and Naava, a Jewish tradition that signifies someone has visited the grave. The elderly Sephardi cemetery staffer and my friends recited the names of all of our lost babies and prayed for them together.

So, over the course of their due date, not only was the site of their grave discovered, but Aminadav and Naava got their first visit, not from me directly but from my messengers. Their names were recited, stones were placed, and my sweet babies were remembered by Y and me in Canada, and by two very special friends in Israel, N and E, who I am very blessed to have in my life. E reported that after the visit, she felt "this powerful urge to nap -- not in a tired way, but in a peaceful, relaxed way that I haven't felt in a long time."

I cried all morning, but not the sorrowful tears I cried the night before -- instead, these were more tears of relief. Relief that I felt right was finally done by my babies. Like E, I found some new peace, too. Thank G-d my friends decided to visit the cemetery on their due date. Thank G-d they found the grave. Thank G-d for these small blessings -- they amount to a big deal in my life.

speechless

Please body, please G-d, please universe, please random chance: let this be good.

Welcome home!

Today was our embryo transfer. We were told to arrive at 10:30am and the transfer didn't happen until 2pm, so that was pretty annoying! The day would definitely have been more pleasant if we arrived later, had lunch first, brought some entertainment with us, and if I didn't start chugging water until right before the transfer! In the end, the transfer went super smoothly, though, and that's what is most important!

Of our 8 embryos, 1 was blatantly abnormal (the outer shell was missing entirely) so it will be discarded, and the other 7 were continuing to grow and do their thing. We transferred 2 embryos, an 8-cell grade AB and a 10-cell grade B. The remaining 5 which will be frozen were grade B with respect to degree of fragmentation (it is possible that 1 of them was actually grade C or BC). We weren't sure if we were going to transfer 1 or 2, but my gut was to go with 2 and Y felt it was ultimately up to me, so that's what we ended up doing.

It was really one of the most amazing experiences of my life to see those 2 embryos on the screen and watch them get sucked up by the glass straw and then to watch by ultrasound the little flicker as they went inside my uterus...pretty incredible. I really hope and pray to be blessed enough to meet one or both of those little guys again this coming winter. Y made a video on my iPhone of the embryos on the screen, but I don't think that the quality is so good.

The real kicker is this: my former boss performed the transfer! Before grad school, I worked in a stem cell research lab for a couple of years as a research technician. The head of the lab was a MD/PhD whose training was as a RE. Anyhow, he does 1 day a week in IVF and today was his day! He was really friendly and professional about it and he offered to get someone else if I was uncomfortable. We were already in the OR, though, and by acknowledging the situation, it actually made me feel okay with him doing it. In truth, I really only run into him once a year or so, and I trust him very much, so I figured I'd just go with it. Obviously, if he was someone I was still working with currently, it would be totally different. Still, crazy, right?

They brought me on a gurney to the ob/gyn ward afterwards to lie totally still for an hour, which seemed like total overkill to me. Once that hour was over, I was just so ridiculously happy to get up and PEE. Finally, we got out of there a little before 3:30. I am still feeling pretty crummy but I am beginning to walk like a normal person now, thank goodness, so I think I am on the mend. Now I am just thinking happy thoughts for my 2 embryos and hoping and praying for the best.

I am excited to have gotten this far - when my E2 wasn't rising and with the stress of not responding as well as they had hoped transfer seemed so far-off and built upon so many what-ifs. Now I just feel relieved and filled with gratitude to have just made it to this point. Seeing those 2 beautiful embryos inspired me and now I am doing my best to put my faith in them and in my body (though true to my usual form, I am still planning ahead for The Worst Case Scenario).

Second beta results are in!

Today I had my second beta drawn at 18dpIUI. It was 279. A normal doubling time is every 48 hours and since 4 days ago it was 42, on target would have been 168. I think that we're actually doing pretty well so far! I am starting to let myself imagine what being pregnant and having a baby might actually be like. I guess you could say I am feeling more cautiously optimistic now, but still terrified. Again, each passing day feels like a new milestone. I am so filled with gratitude every morning.

Next week we have an appointment with our RE, Prof. L. I am also hoping we will soon get our first peek of Baby G by u/s in the next couple of weeks. When I had my last u/s 4 days ago, the technician told me that once my beta level reaches 1000, we should be able to see something. So cool. Since we had a lot of follicles, I am also extremely anxious to see whether there is more than one baby in there (that would be Babies G!).