A Miscarriage

I'm waiting right now for a doctor's visit, where, I am sure, he will tell me that I had a miscarriage at 5 weeks, 6 days.  I am, almost, looking forward to it.  Not because this is what I wanted.  Oh no, I wanted this baby so very much.  It was our first time trying, and I was so excited that we got pregnant the first month!  But now, now that all the blood tests have been coming back with low hCG levels, now that I've had the spotting, the bleeding, the ultrasound (no sign of pregnancy at all), I just want to know.  So that I, and my husband, can move on.  So we can try again.

I'll have a bit more on all that happened in the last five days soon.  On my research.  On what helped and what hurt.  But right now, I just want to hear the news, officially, that our little Schrodinger (because it felt like I was both pregnant and not pregnant for two weeks), is gone.

Spotting or Bleeding in Early Pregnancy

You know what's scary?  Bleeding.  It is also way scarier when you are (pretty sure that you are) pregnant.  The words MISCARRIAGE and ECTOPIC PREGNANCY float through your head as you go through the first four pages of google search result after typing in "bleeding during the first trimester."  Because as pregnant women we just don't have enough to worry about!

I'm still waiting for the nurse to call and officially confirm that my hCG levels are now normal, and I can happily move on with my pregnancy, but that has not stopped me from mostly freaking out about a little bit of spotting I've been getting.  

First, the good news:  according to everything I've read, there are a lot of reasons women bleed during the first trimester, most are benign, and although this will not stop any pregnant woman from worrying, chances are your worry is baseless.  Around 20-30% of women bleed during early pregnancy.  Bleeding can be caused by implantation, sex, hormonal changes that affect the uterus, or a benign cyst that bleeds as your total blood supply increases.  

Now for the bad news:  by definition, any bleeding that occurs before 20 weeks means a threatened abortion (a medical name for a possible miscarriage) though roughly 50% of women do go on to have healthy pregnancies. If you are bleeding (not just spotting, more on that later) during your first trimester and you do have a miscarriage, there is not much they can do at this point. However, bleeding can be a sign of an ectopic pregnancy (egg implants outside the uterus) or a molar pregnancy (egg does not develop into a baby), so definitely see your doctor if you are bleeding.

Should you be going to the emergency room?  Well (and I am not a doctor, so please take everything said here with a grain of salt) this is where the bleeding vs. spotting comes in.  If you are spotting (think pinkish or brownish discharge, not enough to soak a pad), stay home, try to relax, and let your doctor know that you have spotting.  If you are bleeding (bright red, soaks a pad in two hours or less, possibly passing blood clots), get yourself to an emergency room.  That kind of bleeding could be dangerous to you, and not just your baby.  The nurse at my hospital confirmed that "a pad soaked in two hours" is the amount of blood that my hospital thinks warrants an emergency room visit.  Also, this information is only valid in the first trimester.  Different rules apply in the second and third trimesters.  

So what do you do now?  Monitor the amount of bleeding you are getting (a panty liner is a good idea), as well as the color.  Call your doctor if anything feels wrong or if you are also getting cramping.  Trust yourself and your body.  If something feels wrong, don't ever be afraid to call your doctor (or midwife).  Unfortunately, the story will not end well, for some of us, we will miscarry because this baby to be was just not viable.  And we will grieve because no matter how early we lost a baby, we'll still know we lost that baby.  And that's OK too.  

I am pregnant?

This week I've done something I've never done before:  I've taken a pregnancy test and hoped it came out positive.  It turns out, however, that life is just not that simple.

This all started a year or so ago when my husband (J) and I had our big wedding.  We traveled to Chicago, said 'I do' in front of our friends and families, danced, had some cake and a generally good time, and came back to Fairbanks happily and officially married.  J's family was quite respectful of the fact that we are newlyweds starting out on our careers and living two thousand miles from our nearest relatives, and after hearty congratulations, let us live our life in peace.  My family, or to be more precise, my grandmothers, did not waste a week before they both summarily told me that they want to be great-grandmothers, and at 29, I better get a move on it.  

Now I'm a planner and it seemed to be utter foolishness to go into baby making without some serious prep.  After months of talking about timing (didn't want the baby to be born while J was away), and our mental readiness, we came up with a start date:  June 2016. I bought a couple of pregnancy books, read them, and put a plan into action.  I started taking 400 IU's of folic acid, eating more fruits and vegetables, slowly lowering the amount of caffeine I drank, exercising more to get to my 'ideal' conception BMI.  Eventually, I started taking a full pre-natal pill and charting my period/ovulation.  By the time May rolled around, everything was in place, and I schedule my appointment to get my IUD out.  

For June, we planned our honeymoon: an amazing, five-day backpacking trip to Gates of the Arctic.  A time to relax, be alone, and to maybe make our first child (as luck would have it the ovulation dates lined up!)  The trip was everything I could have asked for in a honeymoon.  The sun did not set. The weather was (mostly) perfect.  And we fell asleep under the orange light filtering through our tent to the sound of a brook and birds singing every night.  

And then came the wait.  The dreaded TWW I had read about, but never before experienced.  Even though I read many wise ladies stories on what a bad idea it was to test early, I only made it 11 days before going to our local military hospital for a blood test.  It came out negative.  We were both disappointed by consoled ourselves thinking that maybe we were too early, or we could just try again next month.  Four days later (the actual day of my missed period) I took a test at home.  It was a VERY weak positive.  So weak in fact that both my husband and I wondered if we had convinced ourselves to see something that wasn't there.  So back to a hospital, and the news:  a weak positive, to be confirmed by a blood test later that day.

So now I'm scheduled for another blood test tomorrow, so see how my hCG levels have changed.  And at this point, it's been SIX weeks since the beginning of my last period.  Waiting two weeks was hard enough, but waiting almost four?  It's torture.  

So now we wait.  

I did want to say one more thing, to any ladies out there who are experiencing infertility, for those of you who have waited for a positive again and again: you are amazing.  I have the utmost respect for you and your ability to keep trying, to wait again, and I hope your miracle comes.  I know my few weeks wait must seem like nothing compared to what you've gone through.  I highly respect that.  Just know that I am a novice at this getting pregnant thing, and this post is more for those like me.  Women who try for the first time.  Women who thought a positive pregnancy test is a positive pregnancy test.  Women who are trying for the first time and did not realize how fluid and complex this whole thing was.  

Tomorrow, only 24 hours away.  

Study finds women on the pill chose bad mates

My post earlier sparked a conversation with some of the people at the co-op about how hormones affect us humans, especially women on birth control.  One of the guys pointed me to this study which proved that women on the pill choose men with similar genes, while women with no hormonal influence choose men with different genes, which improves the chances of the offspring to have more fit immune systems.

As a side result, women who get married on the pill are more likely to divorce when they get off birth control, cuz their men smell bad.

Rats go "Whee"

Motto: no day is wasted when you learn something new.

Example: Male rats raise their hands after ejaculation in a gesture clearly reminiscent of male humans on a roller coaster.

I learned this fact at a UT lecture on the effects of environmental contaminants on fertility, obesity, and intelligence, where the lecturer, Andrea Gore, showed us an experiment on how different female rats choose to mate depending on their exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDC's).

It seems the kind of information that people other than lab rats would have no business in knowing, but it was actually fascinating. It seems to me quite telling that female rats can tell if a male rat's great grandmother was exposed to EDC's, and will choose not to mate with that rat. Not only is this terrifying in terms of what these chemicals (which btw were banned in the 1970's but all of us have in our systems due to contaminated food webs) are doing to us, but also what they will do to our children and our children's children. (Check out her book here)

There is a correlation between the use of EDC and the raise in cancer, autism, and several other diseases in adults. This means that like in plants, what happens to the kid can then manifest dozens of years later in the adult.

Also right now, the chance of your child having one of the spectrum Autism disorders is 1 in 90.