Counting down

It occurred to me that my whole life is going to be about counting down from now on.  Well, that is if everything goes correctly.  Can’t wait until I can stop qualifying everything – “if I’m still pregnant then”, “if everything works out”, etc.  Getting real sick of having to be “cautiously optimistic” all the time.  Can’t this just happen?  Can’t I stop worrying about losing the baby and having to start all over again?  But I know the answer to this question.  It’s NO.

Have felt well enough the past two days that I haven’t had to shove rice cakes down my throat before I get out of bed just to function, and have been able to eat regular meals, which helps.  However I recognize this could go away at any time – at any moment I could get a surge of hormones and find myself as sick as I was this time last week.  Part of me is clinging to the hope that the worst is over, but I know that at only six weeks that’s extremely unlikely.  All of this is very unpredictable and I have to just roll with the punches.  However it has made me more confident that I just might be able to survive my two upcoming east coast trips.

Been obsessively googling miscarriage stats by week, always with the question “am I out of the woods yet?”  The answer is “getting there, but no”.  I have survived that early danger spot – the 4-5 week loss, which is when most occur (and probably more than we know, since most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at this point).  So that’s good.  And I’m just two days shy of seven weeks, which is also good.  Have all the symptoms still – lingering nausea and the boobs are out of control.  So no “sudden loss of symptoms” going on even though I’m not as sick as I was.  But as always the stats are very unreliable – one website says the odds of miscarriage after a heartbeat is heard is only 3%, which I found very comforting; but then why are miscarriage stats for women my age still in the 33% - 40% range?  All any of this means is it’s still early and I just have to sit tight.  Still weeks to go before I can relax.  Sigh.

At least I have my first appointment next Tuesday, which hopefully will reveal all, one way or the other.  If they tell me there’s only an empty sac going on in there or no heartbeat, I honestly don’t know what I’d do.  After all this…after all this suffering.  I think I might lose my mind if it turns out that once again this one “isn’t viable”.  But you know what?  I can’t think about that.  I have to just assume everything is fine unless there’s a reason to think otherwise, and so far everything that’s going on around here indicates that I’m having a perfectly normal, progressing pregnancy.  

One thing I would strongly advise against is googling images involving the word “miscarriage”.  I was looking for charts or graphs and instead found pictures of dead fetuses in people’s hands.  It’s going to take me a while to recover from that.

In the meantime I am going to enjoy our wonderful mild summer weather, read good books, revel in having all this free time, and generally indulge myself.  And just keep taking it one day at a time.