Cheesecake and Chums

Yesterday I went to Blogger's Night Out with some other local IF bloggers. Sunny from Sunny In Seattle, Jen from Despite the Best Laid Plans, plus an anonymous blogger friend. Katie from Taking the Statistical Bullet couldn't make it, for obvious reasons, if you read her posts lately. But we managed to have fun anyway!

Our Anonymous friend is now 17 weeks pregnant through IVF (I switched clinics for this round based on her recommendations when we all last met up in January.) I'm soooo super excited for her. Which is nice. It's so nice to be happy for once that someone is pregnant. It makes me feel less like a heartless, jealous, shrew. I'm happy that I'm happy. If my BFN had turned out to REALLY be a BFN, I can't promise I'd be any happier for her than I was for my sisters, but I was still a good enough sister, while still sad and anguished for myself, to still be happy for them. The bitches.

We talked about nursing, and not bothering to read the pregnancy books (I read Belly Laughs, Pregnancy Sucks, and The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy. I looked up stuff in What to Expect, and read the assigned bits from Pregnancy Childbirth and the Newborn for my prenatal class, but despite my sister nagging me and thrusting 15,634,876 pregnancy books on me, I never read a non-humorous pregnancy book cover-to-cover during pregnancy. Oh. Well. I practically read all of Your Pregnancy Week By Week, since it was just a few pages every week, and it was kind of fun to see what the little zygote looked like as it turned into a fetus.) We talked about going back to work or not, and when did we decide. And she told us her baby names, but I'm sworn to secrecy!
We also had cheesecake! Sadly, I've had a really bad cold this past week, and pretty much no appetite. I've been eating roughly one meal a day, with some snacks (ie: daughter's leftovers/half-eaten cheese sticks.) I had TOTALLY forgotten about our night out, and ate a "large" breakfast at Shari's while waiting for my husband to get done with his visit to the Urgent Care Clinic. (He hadn't been able to hear out of one ear for two days from his version of this cold. Boo-frickin-hoo.) I had a pancake, 2 eggs (over medium. Yes, I know. Avoid "undercooked eggs." Sue me.) and 2 slices of toast. Then I managed to cram in a turtle sundae (turtle brownie with ice cream!) Hours later, at dinner with the ladies, I couldn't even manage my small hummus appetizer. And I was pushing it to eat half my slice of cheesecake. (I had them cut it in half and bring it on two plates so that the other ladies could try it without risk of catching The Plague from me.)

Tomorrow (well, technically today) I go in for my first ultrasound, to find out how many of my Maybies took. (and whether they *shudder* split. Apparently the act of IVF itself slightly increases the chances of monozygotic twinning (identical twins,) from the hormonal and ovarian stimulation. Then ICSI increases the rates again by some fraction of a percent. And Assisted Hatching doubles the microscopic chances. So, there's some (slim) chance I have more than 2 in there. On the plus side, then I could be done, done, DONE, and not want have to ever think about maybe doing IVF again!) So, based on my posting track-record, I'll probably get around to posting about it in a week or so! Cheers!

Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

Well. After such a depressing post, you'd expect a little radio silence, yeah? The day after was my blood test at the clinic. I'd spent the day before yelling at myself and stomping on any spark of hope that the pee sticks were wrong. I spent the day I decided to stop peeing on sticks saying goodbye to my Maybies and yelling internally and stomping on any spark of hope. Then I went the next morning for my bloodwork, and again said goodbye to my Maybies as I waited for the walk light as I crossed from the parking lot to the clinic building. Slapping myself internally and putting the smackdown on any little niggle of hope. Every time I felt my breasts tingling it was like a cruel slap in the face. Which was all the time.
After the blood test, they said it would be hours before they got the results, and then would get around to calling me, basically, when they got around to it. "Then they do their rounds, so whenever they get to it..." Thanks. It's not like this is important to me, or anything. So I met my husband and daughter at her kiddie gym class, and we went out for brunch after. Some point before our food arrived (maybe even before we'd ordered. I can't really remember...) I get a call from the clinic. You know in those moves, where they do some camera zoomy trick where suddenly everything in the world is focused on one tiny little thing? That's how I felt.
It was my nurse, which was weird, since I thought she only worked weekdays. And she sounded cheerful. Could this mean...? "Congratulations!" Whaaaaaaaat? Seriously? "You're pregnant! Your number was at 147, and we're looking for anything over a 50." Oh. My. God. I was crying so hard, and I thanked her and hung up and couldn't even function. I knew that my husband was sitting there, and I knew what he must be thinking, but I couldn't even form a thought coherent enough to consider how to let him know the good news.
Until my daughter's voice asked, "Mommy. Are you sad?" I look over and her mouth is downturned in her little sad moue, and her lip is starting to quiver and her eyes are filling with tears. So I say "Oh, no, baby. I am so HAPPY! I am so happy there was just no room for my crying, so it had to all come out." My husband isn't an idiot, so he understood, and was also pleasantly shocked. My daughter was not convinced. So everything else took a back seat to calming her down. I couldn't really blame her, especially after she found me crying periodically the day before. Now whenever I laugh really hard she asks me why I'm crying. Poor thing.

It's weird. I'm totally thrilled and happy, but I'm also still all withdrawn. I don't want to talk about it. I don't mind people knowing. I just don't want the focus to be on me right now. I don't want to talk about it. I made him call his mom (I mean, she's his mom, after all.) If I could have gotten away with having him tell my sister, I totally would have. Luckily my sister was at my mom's house so my mom heard her side of the conversation, so that saved me having to make another call. And his mom told his sister, who had no cell service until she got back from her camping trip on Monday. I didn't call my stepmother-in-law until many days later. Mostly because I only thought about it while driving or too late at night, and I didn't want to text her.