Pushing the Reset Button

Last Friday, we arrived at Johnson’s office around 3 p.m.  After making sure I was sufficiently loopy, antibiotic-ed, and dilated, we had our 2^nd d&c .  I had hoped that on our way in things would have started happening on their own, but they didn’t.  I felt guilty; I felt nervous; I felt angry that we had to go this route and just pray that there will be no scarring or other issues as a result.  Fingers are tightly crossed.  

I know I’ve said it before, many times, but Johnson really is a wonderful doctor.  She is human and caring.  She jokes with us and talks matter-of-factly about the baby we will have soon.  “This is actually great. You won’t have to be pregnant in summer.  You can be pregnant in the winter, have the baby around July or August and have next fall for maternity leave.  This is going to work out great.”  She is optimistic for us, when we often don’t feel so optimistic. 

Not surprisingly, this recovery has been so much easier.  Maybe it is because only the sacs developed and so everything was toned down, hormonally.  Maybe because we had known for over three weeks that this wasn’t going to work out, so all the sadness, the grief, had already played itself out.  I also don’t feel such an all-encompassing drive about when we will try again.  The teeth-clenching feeling that “I MUST GET PREGNANT, NOW.”  That isn’t there this time, at least in the sad, desperate way it was before.  I think if I have learned anything, if this has prepared me at all for anything, it is having limitless amounts of patience.  Something I severely lacked before.  And no matter what happens, patience is a good thing to cultivate.  It will serve me in my work with high school students, even more so with my high school teaching colleagues (excluding those of you who are probably reading this; seriously, you are my sanity at work), and in the hopeful future I envision of being a mother.

I think what is still hard this time around is seeing the enormous amount of pregnant women and new mothers that Portland seems to breed like skinny hipsters with mustaches and birds on things.  It is amazing to me how many of them I see in my day-to-day life.  What I also notice is they all seem to be a bit older.  Or maybe being a new mom just makes you look really old? Sometimes I want to ask not, “How old is your baby?” but “How old were you when you had that baby?” I want continued reassurance that it is possible, even though I know of at least two women who are slightly older than I am who just had and will have a baby soon.  My head knows, my heart is just slow to believe.

So in many ways it seems we are back where we started around this time last year, but obviously so different from who we were then.  Physically, I am continuing to do acupuncture, yoga, a basketful of supplements every morning, a mason jar full of slow-steeped raspberry tea every day, and Chinese herbs.  I am hopeful that we won’t be waiting as long as we did before for things to return to normal.  But at the very least, I know that it can take a very long time.  Patience.

And on a mental level, we’re doing some work, too. I know I said I wasn’t woo-woo in a previous post, but I guess that there are parts of me that feel intention and invitation are going to have to be part of this process for us.  In the fall, we had painted the eventual baby room.  After the miscarriage in November, we literally shut the door and kept it shut.  We have since opened it.  I went on a Nikki McClure binge, one of my favorite artists.  She does fantastic papercuts around the theme of motherhood, among other things.  We have framed a number of them and put them around the house.  Part of it is about inviting this experience into our life and part of it is about feeling happy and hopeful when I see images of a pregnant woman amidst sunflowers, a mother holding a child in a garden, instead of feeling sad and hopeless.  Maybe it will transfer into the real world, maybe not.  But they are sweet prints to look at.    

We leave for a nearly three-week West Coast Tour this Friday and we are looking forward to getting the hell outta Dodge, seeing family and seeing friends.  My brothers and my best friend have not so new babies now that I have yet to and need to squeeze.  This will be our last hurrah before we come back and start a three-month ‘cleanse’ so to speak.  It takes about 90 days for an egg to develop.  During that time, so much of what you do can impact whether that egg is healthy and viable or not.  We will do what we can on our own to get the world’s healthiest egg (for sperm, it’s like 24 hours, but Brett is being a good partner by suffering for three months with me) before we try again.  I will start Mayan abdominal massage when we get back, and the practitioner also suggests giving it three months - man, the more I write about what I’m doing the more woo-woo I feel.  It works like acupuncture in the sense that it helps blood flow to the ovaries and uterus and makes sure everything is in the right place. 

So three months.   November.   That puts us smack-dab where we started.  Hopefully, this time, we’ll be ready.

Where do we go from here...

The weekend after the D & C, we went to the coast with a group of friends and their kids.  I felt like I was in a daze, the fog had never cleared for me.  And truly, I felt empty.  It was like I had been on an adrenaline high since October and now I was crashing hard.  The future seemed bleak.

It wasn't easy for us as a couple either.  I was insistent on our next steps.  Sounding like Obama talking about his jobs bill - WE MUST GET PREGNANT...RIGHT AWAY.  Brett was less than enthusiastic.  We found ourselves at an impasse - I felt certain of the future I wanted, while he felt this was an opportunity to be circumspect about it and went back to a place of ambivalence.  In my head, it made sense, but in my heart, it sucked.  I knew that our experiences with the pregnancy were drastically different.  I had felt the hormonal and physical changes and they were interwoven with my emotions - tightly woven.  For him, the baby was merely an idea, a possibility that was yet to be a reality.  They say women become mother's the moment they are pregnant, men become father's when they hold the baby for the first time.

The first month was rough.  We got through Thanksgiving with a barrage of family and friends.  I had previously imagined this would have been the moment we told everyone that we were having a baby.  And now, we weren't only not telling folks we were having a baby, we weren't telling them we lost one either.  We were as quiet about that fact, too.  I'm not sure the reason, except to say that at that time, I couldn't talk about it without crying.  In fact, that is often true even some four months after the fact.

December 2nd rolled around, a month since the miscarriage.  I'd marked on my calendar that we would start trying again this month, as soon as my period returned.  But it didn't.  I called my doctor frantically, "Why hasn't it started? How long should it take?"  She advised me to wait 6 weeks before calling back.  I did and it didn't come back.  I called again, "It really could take up to 8 weeks. Give it some more time and call back."

I started to see an acupuncturist in the hopes that I could feel like I was doing something besides waiting around.  I kept taking pregnancy tests, thinking that maybe we would be the lucky ones who get pregnant right away after a miscarriage; but no such luck.  Jo, my acupuncturist, is a god-send.  She started me on herbal supplements - false unicorn root (hopefully it is as magical as it sounds) and vitex.  Two herbs known to help regulate your cycle and prepare your body for pregnancy.  But still no period.

After 10 weeks, we went in for blood work.  No thyroid problems, no hormone issues - all signs pointed towards a healthy body.  But still, no period.  She put me on 10 days of progesterone - lovingly called "The Progesterone Challenge." I failed - no period.  I went in for an ultrasound and a saline histogram.  There was the slight possibility that I had scarring in my uterine lining that was preventing regular cycles or any cycle at all.  Unfortunately, she couldn't maneuver the catheter the way she needed and so couldn't do the procedure.  She did notice, however, on ultrasound that my lining was about 1mm - very, very, very thin. 

So, she put me on a month of birth control pills to see if the estrogen would help boost my lining and bring on a period.  I failed this challenge, too.  Nothing.  We had another failed saline histogram, but she did notice that my lining had increased thickening - up to 5 mm, but still, very thin.

It is now, quite possible, that the problem is a scarred uterine lining that is preventing my cycle from returning and ultimately prevent us from getting pregnant as it currently is.  I continue to take supplements, downing raspberry tea like you can't imagine, boosting my herbal supplements, and hoping that it isn't scarring and that my cycle will regulate itself here soon enough.  I am losing hope of that solution each day.

Due to the failed histograms and the lack of cycles, Dr. Johnson has scheduled me for a hysteroscopy.  Not to be confused with a hysterectomy!  I will have to go under anesthesia while she uses a camera to visually look inside my uterus for scarring or other issues that may be at work.  During the procedure she will be able to remove any scarring and hopefully get us back on the train to babytown.

We had originally scheduled for March 23rd, the day before spring break and two days before we head off to Sayulita, Mexico, but we have decided to reschedule.  Although we want to get things going soon, we don't want to potentially ruin our vacation to do it.  So we will wait, something we are getting pretty good at.

Nah...it can't be, can it?

The universe doesn't mess around.  August passed us by with a flurry of home projects and repairs and baby talk took a back seat.  We were busy.   I am a high school English teacher and although the summer affords me the time to rest and relax, this summer was about putting our lives back together. 

In February of 2009, Brett and I were living together.  I was teaching.  Brett runs his own marketing business and worked from home or various cafes.  He is lucky that he can do his work anywhere there is an internet connection. We both had traveled, loved traveling.  He had lived abroad before and I always wanted to.  So, I sought out and accepted a job teaching at an international school in Shenzhen, China - just outside of Hong Kong on the mainland.  The prospect of going overseas 'unattached' to one another made both of us a bit nervous.  Although talk of marriage hadn't come up, I knew that I could see myself with him for the long haul. 

We were married under the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon with a few friends present and had a big reception in June.  The next month, we were in China.  Those two years are an entire blog unto themselves.  Filled with travel, culture shock, amazing new people and tremendous growth.  When my contract was up, we contemplated moving elsewhere abroad and I initially took a job in Nairobi, Kenya.  But after much debate (are you starting to see a pattern here?) we decided to move back to Portland, at least for a little while.  I came back to a new position in the same school district; Brett continued to work with his clients and we waited for all of our stuff to arrive from China.  We repainted the house, cleaned up the yard, and I got ready for the school year to begin.  

Living overseas, living in China, certainly gives you perspective.  It even impacted my views on family and children.  In a country where it is illegal to have more than one child (if you're not in the upper echelons of the party, that is) children are the center of everything.  Extended families tend to be close to one another, if not living together, and the family revolves around that baby.  And they are everywhere.  It is amazing how valuable family and children were in China, often at the expense of not caring for others who aren't in your immediate family.  It isn't a warm culture, to say the least.  But it seems that they care tremendously about their families.

September came and went and it slowly started to feel as if our lives were getting back to normal.  We had serious moments of reverse culture shock and periods of adjustments - we are still going through them.  So when October came and my period did not, it didn't seem strange.  Neither did the extreme exhaustion I felt.  That was a start of the school year norm - a result of having to wake up to an alarm and be somewhere all day.  It wasn't until I sent a text to my friend Errin, mother of 6 with one on the way, that I began to wonder.  "If I were you I'd be peeing on a stick already," she texted.   Reluctantly, I went to the store after work and bought a pregnancy test.  I came home, went upstairs and did my thing.  Within seconds, two faint pink lines were present.  "Seriously? No way..."  I went downstairs to find Brett.  I brought him upstairs and showed the test to him.  He was seriously confused, "What? What does that mean?"  Neither of us seemed convinced.

Errin!  She'd know, mother of 6 with one on the way.  I scrambled to take a picture of the test and sent it to her.  "You're so pregnant," was her reply.  I chugged a glass of water and we ran back upstairs; luckily the box had 3 tests in it.  I took it again.  I needed a second opinion.  Same thing.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  I honestly have never quite felt that emotion before.  And so it seemed the universe had made her move.

A Toss of the Coin

It was in early July, after having returned from two years living in Shenzhen, China, that the conversation about having kids began.  I am 36 years old and my husband, Brett, is 39.  It hadn't been a conversation in our house before, but then again, we have only been married a few years and the bulk of that time had been overseas. 

It started with the interviews or intelligence collection.  Perhaps it was easier to have the conversation when it was somewhat mediated between a third-party.  At parties, a wedding, a bbq, happy hour - the questions would begin.  For our friends without kids, "Why have you decided not to have kids?" and for those that did, "What's it like, seriously? What's so great?" 

Once we talked to folks, it became easier to understand what motivates people to have kids - a biological urge, a need to be a mom or a dad, a desire to have a family - it's seemingly so personal, yet so universal and in many ways, so instinctual.  And everyone who does seems to want you to share in the experience.  When you have that inkling of doubt, you have to suspend your disbelief and accept that there must be something quite satisfying and rewarding - all our parents did it and look at us!

It was also easy to understand why those of our friends who didn't have kids, made their decisions, too.  They truly enjoyed one another - which is not to say that the couples who had kids didn't enjoy one another - it's just that they really didn't see the need to add anything to their mix.  And I get that.  I love my husband, but even getting a dog has thrown him slightly into 2nd place around here.


So we asked and we listened.  We observed and we noted.  Sometimes, after many cocktails, we even recorded folks on my iPhone.  And most importantly, we looked to see if both parties agreed on the answers to those questions because that's where we were.  For us, we were both on the fence about children.  When talking to friends and family, I guess in many ways, we were looking to be sold on the idea.  Come on, sell it to us!  But by late July, we were still ambivalent.  That didn't stop us, however, from having my IUD removed.  Our plan, since we couldn't decide, was to let the universe decide for us...