Kickin' ass and taking names

Managed to rally a bit after writing yesterday’s post.  I dragged my ass to the crappy ghetto grocery store on my corner and bought apple sauce, cottage cheese, and other infantilizing food just to get me by.  Felt a lot better throughout the day, and today I’ve been kind of sick but at least able to function – I’ve started doing a percentage game with myself.  Today I’m at about 70% of normal function.  Wednesday I was at about 20%.  So for the moment things are looking up.

All of this means nothing, though, since this whole sickness thing comes and goes with absolutely zero rhyme or reason.  I had thought I would develop a “system” for “handling” how sick I feel, but have come to realize this is kind of impossible.  Nothing really helps; just some days and times I feel better than others, and that’s it.  I will take up the suggestion of Dramamine, however.  I have some Bonine here and will use it when I start to feel really horrible again, and see if it helps. 

So what I have been able to do is maximize the times I feel somewhat decent to cram in any work/phone calls/errands I need to do, knowing that I may suddenly become incapacitated for days on end.  Today I did a ton of work, made a ton of phone calls, and got my butt to Kaiser and to the pharmacy to pick up my progesterone which runs out in two days.  Kaiser was funny – try having to explain like 50 times that the “day of my last period” was really a miscarriage, and that I had an IUI and can’t we just use that to date the pregnancy?  At least they didn’t make me watch the super creepy “here are all the things that can go horribly wrong – especially at your age – and let us know if you want to abort your chromosomally abnormal baby” video again.  I have my first real appointment on the 16^th, which would place me just short of eight weeks.  Let’s hope I don’t have to cancel that one!

When I started to feel a little bit better yesterday, I was lying down watching my Mad Men DVDs and came across the episode in Season 3 where Betty’s father dies and she gives birth to the new baby.  I’m usually creeped out by labor scenes anyway, and contemplated skipping the episode entirely, but made myself watch it.  There’s this sequence where she hallucinates that she sees her father mopping up in the hospital, and this sad little song plays.  Something about the song made me burst into tears and I spent several minutes sobbing like my best friend just died.  It was just so sad.  Music always gets me more than anything else – especially violins or other “sweet” sounding instruments.  Not that I wouldn’t normally be touched by a scene like this, and god knows I cry at TV and movies all the time, but this was the first time I really felt those hormones.  I couldn’t even articulate what I was feeling, except that the song was so sad, and I couldn’t bear it. 

Then I started to think about how I had wished anything to not be sick anymore, and started feeling horribly guilty, and then paranoid I was going to lose the baby *again*.  No matter how many times I logically remind myself that wishing doesn’t make something so, and our thoughts have zero power to make something happen or not happen, that fear is still in there.  I guess thirty years of belonging to a crazy religion that believes you can heal cancer with the power of your mind is a hard thing to unravel, especially at a time like this when emotions are running so high and everything is at stake.  And the hormones.  And not sleeping or eating properly, and a little return of my old anxiety that makes my throat close up so tight I can barely talk much of the day.  So, it’s a lot, all at once.  Still, I recognize that none of this has any effect on the baby.  It either is or it ain’t.  End of story.

Read a couple of blogs of women who had early losses and then went on to have babies and realized how normal I am – it appears for many women, especially ones who have lost, early (or entire) pregnancy is just fraught with fear and anxiety.  I’m glad I’m not the only one not reveling in my good luck at being able to be pregnant – which I should be, since all of this is pretty much a miracle.  But I’m too afraid and too sick to “enjoy” the pregnancy.  If I hear a heartbeat, if I see a little tadpole swimming around, if I stop wanting to gag every second, maybe I can enjoy this.  But not yet.

Talked to the old clinic today, and the lady asked how I was doing, and when I said sick as a dog, she said this was great; it means I’m producing a lot of hcg.  And of course I recognize this is all good.  And of course whenever I feel better I start to panic that I’m “losing the symptoms”.  But they’ve come and gone so much now that I realize this is kind of how it is.  I need to just maximize the times when I feel so-so, and rest when I don’t.  And thank god I have the luxury of doing that!  I can’t even imagine trying to wait tables, or work in a store, or clean houses, or go to an office, feeling like this.  I really don’t know how women do it, I don’t.  And hats off to them, for reals.