Getting bigger, and bigger...

I  can’t believe it’s been so long since I last wrote.  I just don’t know where the time has gone, I intended to write regularly, then I intended to write at 20 weeks and now I’m 28 weeks and I’m only just getting round to it! Rest assured though that everything is fine!

14-20 Weeks

 

From about 14 to 20 weeks I was feeling pretty great, well certainly in comparison to how I had been feeling. You never know how nice it is just to feel hungry and enjoy food when you’ve spent about 8 weeks feeling desperately hungry but not fancying anything to eat! Apart from the occasional random vomiting incident I felt well and my energy and fitness began to return. I felt up to swimming again at about 14 weeks and it felt amazing just to be in the water stretching my muscles a bit.  

By this point in the pregnancy I was starting to feel a bit more confident that something wasn’t going to go wrong and I let myself start buying a few bits and pieces for the bub. We want to try and get most things second hand as the price of buying everything new is ridiculous and in my opinion a complete waste of money.  I quite enjoy looking for bargains on selling sites and I love the satisfaction of getting something for a fraction of what it would have cost new. I figure the more money I save of getting things for the baby the more likely I am to be able to have a whole years maternity leave and spend more time with the bub which she’s bound to appreciate more than she would a brand new cot!

I started to get a bump pretty early on in my pregnancy, probably from about 13-14 weeks more perceptive people would have been able to notice I was pregnant.   My theory is that because of the Ovarian Hyperstimulation stretching all my muscles and skin everything was a bit pre-stretched and so I showed earlier than I would have – much the same as they say people having their second babies show earlier.  I didn’t mind at all though, I’ve loved every minute of it, I just couldn’t stop, and still can’t, having a look at my bump each time I go past a mirror and marvelling at the thought of the little person growing in there.

As I went past 18 weeks I was counting down the days until the 20 week scan.  At the same time I was getting increasingly nervous as people started asking me “Have you felt it move yet,” which only served to make me more and more uneasy because I wasn't sure that I had.  I perhaps felt the odd movement in the 18-20 weeks period but it didn’t feel like people kept saying, things such as “Like butterflies” or “like bubbles,” it was more just like a little swirly feeling but nothing really distinctive that I could be sure it was the baby.

20 Week Scan

 

I’d always thought that I wouldn’t want to find out the sex of my baby before it was born. I liked the idea of having a surprise on the day of the birth and having that moment of “it’s a…”  Matt on the other hand was absolutely determined that he wanted to find out and managed to convince me, largely by pointing out that if I knew the sex I’d be able to make it a lot more things rather than having to make everything neutral!   As it happens I’m really glad we did find out because both Matt and I thought we were having a boy but it turned out we’re having a little girl!

 

The scan itself was amazing, it’s crazy how much they can see! All the chambers of the heart, the aorta, the bones of all the limbs, the kidneys, the spine.  It was a very long process for them to get all the measurements they needed too, first they sent me away to have a wee, then they sent me away to have a walk, then we changed scanners to the high definition one, then they sent us away for lunch before finally they had all the information they needed.  I really didn’t mind though, I could have looked at her all day and the advantage was that this meant we ended up with 2 different sonographers as the first one’s shift ended, so they both had a check of the sex of the baby and both said girl meaning it’s less likely they’ve made a mistake! 

And here she is…

I was (and am!) thrilled at the thought of having a little girl, I think largely because of all the crafty things I enjoy doing, I’m hoping that a girl is more likely to want to learn to knit and crochet and do those kind of things with me.  When I got home I stood in my little craft area upstairs and said to Matt, “This is where my sewing machine can go, and this is where her sewing machine can go.” Though of course I am very well aware that she’ll have a mind of her own and might not be interested in any of that but we’ll see!

 

From 20 Weeks Onwards…

 

From about 20 weeks I could really begin to start to feel her moving about. I can’t put a date on the first time I felt a proper kick, everything just seemed to progress gradually and get stronger day by day. She still has quieter days and some really active days where she seems to be wiggling about all over the place but it’s got gradually more distinct.  The last couple of weeks I’ve really started to be able to make out where she is, sometimes which was round she is and often feel little limbs moving around.  

All through this time I’d been measuring myself to see at what point I reached the same size round that I was when I swelled up with all the fluid at the beginning of the pregnancy.  It took me to 24 weeks to reach the same size that I was at just 4 weeks pregnant, which is 94cm.   It was a completely different experience though of course, this time it's comfortable (thought beginning to get a little less comfortable!) and natural and a nice neat bump rather than at 4 weeks which was painful, scary and which made me swollen all around my back as well.  At 28 weeks I’ve now surpassed this by quite a way and I’m nearly 100cm round!

 

28 Weeks, Looking Forward

 

So today I’ve reached 28 weeks and it feels like a massive milestone.  I can’t quite believe that there’s only 12 weeks to go (or up to 14 if I go overdue) until I finally get to meet her, my daughter!  It feels so strange to think of it, the idea that after all the waiting, all the heart ache, I might finally have everything I ever wanted. I feel so amazingly blessed and so thankful.  It’s still nerve racking, I spend a lot of time analysing her movements and worrying that she’s not moving enough and I think I will until I have her safely here in my arms, then of course the worrying won’t end and I’ll have a whole new world of things to worry about but I can’t wait to be able to see her and cuddle her in my arms.

     

Looking forward it’s crazy to think that I’ve got to grow for another 12 weeks!  I feel pretty enormous already and can’t really imagine how massive I’ll be by the time she’s due.  The last few days have been pretty uncomfortable, I think perhaps she’s had a bit of a growth spurt as the discomfort is starting to ease off a bit now as I adjust to my new size.  Just 4 more weeks at work, 8 weeks of nesting and then life changes forever….

Pregnancy - The Early Days

The thing about finally getting pregnant after infertility is you’re simultaneously in a state of disbelief, excitement and terror.   You’ve spent years waiting to get to this point and consequently can’t possibly let yourself believe that what until now you’ve believed might be impossible has actually happened. 

After the embryo transfer in IVF there’s the infamous 2 week wait – for me it was actually about 12 days – where you have to wait to take a pregnancy test to see if the embryo has taken.  This is naturally torturous, wondering if all the injections, tests and pain will have been worth it.  I was incredibly blessed that I only had to do this once and the outcome was good, I can’t imagine how it must feel to have that wait and then get a negative result, my heart really goes out to those ladies.  For me this period of time was in a way overshadowed by being so horribly ill, in pain and ending up in hospital.  I felt also that being ill put more pressure on the wait because I felt so terrible I wasn’t sure I could ever bare to have another round of IVF.  I feel differently now, in hindsight I would go through that again without a second thought in order to get pregnant, but at the time it was hard to keep that perspective.

For Matt and I the 2 week wait was cut short by a day, I warned Matt that along with my other bloods they’d being checking my HCG (pregnancy hormone ) level and that they might just come and drop the results on us and I was right.  The night before we were due to test the Dr and the ward Sister came in, I think their exact words were “It looks like you are pregnant.” I can’t remember what I said, I don’t think I said a lot, I don’t think I really took it in.  I just remember when they left climbing out of bed and sitting of Matt’s lap (which wasn’t very easy in my fluid filled, bloated state) and hugging him and not saying anything, I remember Matt shedding a few tears. After the hideous, scary week that we’d had it was suddenly all worth it, somehow it didn’t matter how awful I felt anymore.  Feeling a bit better that evening we ventured down to the canteen, all I fancied as a celebration however was a bottle of apple juice and a new puzzle book, not how I would have imagined celebrating the news!

 

We still had to do the ‘official’ urine test from the clinic the next day and for both of us it didn’t seem entirely real until we’d done that.  Matt came into the hospital early at about 6.45am before work. I remember doing the test and then going to sit on the bed, putting the 3 minute timer on my phone and waiting before going back to get it from the bathroom.  It wasn’t quite the moment I’ve imagined so often over the past 3 ½ years because obviously we’d been pre-warned but still, there it was, that 2^nd little pink line that I had wondered if I would ever see.

Worse than the 2 Week Wait

 

That moment you’ve imagined so long is amazing but it’s really just the beginning of another agonising wait which in many ways is even worse that the original 2 week wait. You have to wait another week to take a further test to confirm the result.  Then you have to wait until you’re 7 weeks for the clinic to do an early scan to make sure that the pregnancy is viable.   It’s horrible waiting for that scan because part of you wants to jump for joy but there’s this horrible part of you that knows that there’s a chance that you’ll go for the scan and they’ll tell you the devastating news that they are unable to find a heartbeat and the pregnancy is going to fail.  I was a little bit luckier than many people in a way as I was having regular bloods to monitor my OHSS and they also checked my HCG meaning I could see that this was going up nicely as it should in early pregnancy.  In other ways however the after effects of the OHSS made the wait more difficult as it gave me a lot of pain in my lower left abdomen which meant got myself a bit worked up that the pregnancy might be ectopic.

First Scan Day 

When you go in for the scan they naturally talk you through “I might not be able to find it straight away, give me a few minutes to have a look…” etc.  I could see the screen however and quite quickly I could make out the little heartbeat, I can remember half crying half squealing, “I can see it’s little heartbeat!”  It’s a difficult moment to describe. After so long of wondering if it was possible, wondering if my body was even capable of getting pregnant to see that little miracle right there is beyond words. It looked much like a little jellybean or a monkey nut, we’d already been referring to the baby as jellybean so that’s just stuck.  I could have just sat there all day and looked at that little beating heart. 

7 week scan, 10.3mm long

 

 

More Waiting, Less Eating 

 

Of course as soon as you’ve had one scan been reassured the fear creeps back in and you then become fixated on the next scan.  I had a midwife appointment at around 9 weeks, this was the initially ‘booking in’ appointment which is a pretty dull series of form filling but yet it will felt ridiculously exciting.  It felt almost wrong to be going for a midwife appointment as if I was going through somebody else’s life, I couldn’t possibly be allowed to go for a midwife appointment, I felt like I must be just being ridiculous as if the midwife was going to turn round and say to me,  ‘I’m sorry you really shouldn’t be here.’  Once this appointment is done you’re then sent a date for your ’12 week’ scan, mine actually turned out to be booked for  13 weeks which is perfectly normal but still disappointing as I was just desperate to see my little jelly bean again.

This period of the pregnancy was pretty hard work. I wasn’t actually vomiting but felt nauseas almost all day, every day for a few weeks. I felt desperately hungry but at the same time I really struggled to find anything at all I fancied eating. I survived mostly on potato waffles, fish fingers, dry granola and oranges.  I felt so rough and tired and was having at least a couple of naps a day.  It was difficult to separate the early pregnancy symptoms from the after effects of the Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome,  for example the exhaustion I was feeling was probably a combination of the two.  The nausea also made it difficult to get over the OHSS as I’d lost weight and a lot of fitness while I was ill but struggled to eat anything to get my strength back.   

I found this whole period very strange.  I’d waiting to be pregnant for so long I felt guilty complaining that I felt so unwell. I kept saying to my husband “I am happy, but I just feel so rough.”  I felt like I wasn’t allowed to complain because I was so incredibly blessed that the IVF had worked but at the same time I just felt like the ill feeling would never end!  In time things gradually started to improved, the nausea wasn’t so constant, it was more just in the mornings and then eased off throughout the day, I gradually got my appetite back and could eat more things. The only things I’ve really stayed off are cooked tomatoes (yuck) and even things that contain them like pizza, chocolate and tea.  It’s a very weird to be off tea and chocolate because these are 2 of my favourite things!  I hope my taste for them comes back quickly after the baby is born because I’m not sure how I’ll survive being a new mum without tea and chocolate!

Scare

 

I remained on progesterone pessaries until 12 weeks.  Around 10 weeks when giving this I started bleeding, initially it was probably around a tablespoon of bright red blood. I just remember saying out loud “Please God no,” running down the stairs and shouting at Matt in tears “I’m bleeding.” I knew that bleeding is quite common during pregnancy, I know more ladies who’ve had bleeding that those who haven’t but all this goes out of the window when it’s happening to you.  I felt like everything I’d hoped for, dreamed of and waited for for so long was about to disappear. I felt in a complete panic, in that moment a whole future of horrible fears rushes into your head. What would happening if I was miscarrying, how would I cope with having to go through the whole IVF process again after how ill I’d been the first time, how was I going to tell my parents who were so excited about being grandparents, I was just in a complete and utter panic, hyperventilating and crying.  Matt was absolutely amazing! He must have been terrified but he stayed calm, sat me down, calmed me down and looked after me.  There’s been a number of ladies from my church who’ve been praying for me for a long time and throughout all the IVF as well as my bible study group and my first thought was just to get them to pray so Matt contacted them for me. 

It was 7 o’clock in the evening which made things difficult.  I knew that if I went to the hospital they wouldn’t do anything overnight unless the bleeding was heavy enough to cause major concerns. I did ring the NHS 111 number and a nurse rang me back but they just confirmed this advice (NB: Of course it’s different for everybody and if you’re having bleeding I would always recommend seeking medical advice).  All I could think was “how am I going to get through the night,” I couldn’t possibly imagine getting any sleep at all.  Matt managed to calm me down and fortunately the bleeding didn’t last too long. I managed to get some sleep overnight but woke every few hours to have that horrible moment of having to see whether there had been any more bleeding.

After a whole night without any more bleeding I was feeling a bit more hopeful but was desperate for a scan to reassure me.  I managed to get a Doctors appointment for 9am but unfortunately they couldn’t fit me in at the hospital for a scan until 9am on the Sunday morning 2 days later.  I wasn’t annoyed about this level of wait, it seemed reasonable in a sense given that the bleed had been relatively short lived and wasn’t ongoing.  I probably would have managed to wait that long if it hadn’t been that I was going to see most of my extended family that weekend many of whom knew about the IVF and who I’d been intending to tell about the pregnancy. The thought of being there for the whole weekend with them not knowing and worrying was horrible so I decided to pay for a private scan at the clinic where I had the IVF.  I was feeling much more optimistic about things now but was still terrified and I remember sitting on the floor in my bedroom having a good cry that morning before pulling myself together for the scan.

When we got there for the scan there was still another horrible wait to be called in for the appointment then while she went through the paperwork it felt like forever. Eventually though we got to the scan and almost as soon as she got it up on the screen she said in a very jolly voice “well it’s doing gymnastics in there”!  The sense of relief to see that little baby wiggling around was immense, the scan wasn’t cheap but I can honestly say it was the best £80 I’ve ever spent!  It was amazing to see how much it had developed in 3 weeks since the last scan.  She couldn’t find any reason for the bleeding or any evidence of it meaning it was likely to be just a superficial bit of irritation to the cervix, perhaps for the pessaries.  It was an immense relief, I could have stayed and watched it wiggling around all day.  It was kind of laying on its back so you could see its arms either side.    

After paying for the private scan and feeling reassured I phoned up to cancel the NHS one as I didn’t want to take up a space that somebody else could use but the nurse said “don’t worry, keep this as well,” which was probably sensible as it meant they’d be a record of it on my medical records.  So in the end we got to see the baby twice in 3 days which was amazing.

2 scans around 10 weeks

 

Starting to Feel Human Again

 

As time went on and I approached the scan at 13 weeks I started to feel a lot better and was eating more normally. I also started to notice my body changing and around 10 weeks and had to give up on wearing my normal jeans undone and change to maternity jeans. The relief of putting them on and being comfortable was amazing! I did seem to show quite early from around 10 weeks, my theory is that because my muscles had all been stretched when I was ill and swollen with the OHSS I showed earlier than I would have otherwise. I didn’t mind though, I love my little bump and I struggle to walk past a full length mirror without stopping to have a look at it and I’m always showing it to Matt and going “Look!!!” It’s just so exciting to finally be here.

13 Week Scan

 

Lots of people told me that when they went for their scan the clinic was running late and that they were so bursting for the loo by the time the scan came it was a bit of a close call.  Consequently I was a held back a bit on the drinking immediately before the scan. This then meant my bladder wasn’t full enough and I had to go away, drink more and come back after 20 minutes, I didn’t mind really though, it meant I got to see the baby twice (they could see it the first time they just couldn’t do the measurements).  Everything was looking good on the scan and you could see it having a wiggle around and moving its arms and legs. I keep saying this but it was just so amazing after all that time to finally be there, having a scan and seeing our little baby. I don’t think I need any final words, this says it all…