Tag: pregnancy

Miracle Baby’s birth story

~ femmephysicist

Ten short weeks ago, we welcomed our miracle donor egg IVF baby. I’m told that the first few weeks with a newborn are always a blur. In our case, this was compounded by Miracle Baby’s (MB) traumatic hospitalization at two days old and subsequent Hirschsprung’s disease diagnosis. All of this means that the actual story of her arrival has more-or-less been ignored.

So before all of the details fade into the haze of my sleep-deprived brain, here is the story of her long-awaited birth.

An easy start

I was 41 weeks and 4 days pregnant when I went into labor. Being 11 days overdue, I had already tried pretty much every old wive’s tale you could think of to get things going. So when I started noticing a pattern to my cramps around 4pm — a few hours after I’d had a second membrane sweep — I was definitely more than ready.

The contractions ramped up quite quickly from ~15 minutes apart to ~3 minutes apart. Nevertheless, those first few hours were actually almost pleasant. I was sitting on my birthing ball, leaning on the windowsill near the open window and watching rain fall softly through the twilight and onto the canal below. I would moan through the contractions and my husband would apply counter pressure to my back. When the midwife arrived at 10pm to check me, she reported that I had progressed to 3cm dilated, and that she would be back in 3 hours. We were like ‘We’ve totally got this!’

Spoiler: We did not.

Almost as soon as the midwife left, it became clear that it would not be as straightforward as we assumed. I was having intense pain in my lower back, which our doula told me was ‘back labor’. Worse than that, in what should have been the rest period between contractions, I was having…more contractions. This fun little phenomenon is known as ‘double contractions’, or ‘coupling’, and as I was counting on using the breaks between contractions to get me through the pain, it was a total mindf@&$.

The almost continuous contractions meant that it took 30 minutes just to get me down one flight of stairs (scooting one stair at a time on my butt), where I had a romantic vision of laboring in the shower in a recently purchased bikini top (Americans are prudish, recall). After instead crawling into the shower buck naked and spending several hours crying in agony on a footstool, it then took another 10 minutes to transition me the 10 steps to the bedroom. When the midwife finally returned after 3 years* and reported that I was still only 3cm dilated, I threw my idea of a water birth out the window and immediately requested an epidural.

The hospital portion

The midwife got us a room in the nearby hospital, and our caravan of cars set off through the rain (or so I’m told — I wasn’t very observant at that point). After arriving, it took ages before I was prepped and ready for the epidural. They say real labor isn’t like the movies, but I was definitely that crazed woman clutching the rails of the hospital bed with white knuckles and yelling ‘How long until the doctor gets here?!’

The epidural was a huge help. HUGE. Really cannot stress that enough. Everyone’s always warning you, ‘An epidural can slow down labor!’, and I just have to say that a slower labor is exactly what I needed at that point. When it finally kicked in, I could breath again. Make jokes with my husband. I even ate a sandwich. Sure, they had to give me a little boost of hormones to try to get the contractions going again, but once they did, I didn’t notice the back labor or the double contractions. And those last 12 hours were infinitely easier than the first 12.

In summary — Epidural: 5/5 stars. Would definitely recommend.

Pushing

The nurses weren’t happy with how MB’s heart rate was dropping (and staying) low during contractions, or how she’d pooped in the amniotic fluid**, so they drew some blood from her head to do a stress test before they would let me push. Thankfully it came back ok, so at 2:30pm on my 12th day overdue, my husband put on my ‘Birth: Energetic’ playlist*** and away we went.

Pushing was predictably intense, with a lot of yelling from both me and my husband. My yelling was from the sheer exertion of bearing down with everything I had, and his yelling included encouraging phrases like: ‘IF I DON’T SEE POOP, I’M GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTED!!’**** At one point between pushing contractions, I even wailed ‘WHY DIDN’T WE JUST ADOPT?!’ (which — like any good insider joke — is something only infertile people are allowed to say about themselves).

After an hour of pushing, they threatened me with an episiotomy and vacuum pump. That was apparently all I needed to hear, because soon after, I started to make real progress. Twenty minutes and three second-degree tears later, our Miracle Baby entered this world. And I’ll tell you what: she is absolutely perfect.

xx

* This is not a typo. Special relativity teaches us that time is relative, and those 3 hours felt like eons.

** MB’s apparent ability to poop was one thing that complicated her Hirschsprung’s disease diagnosis, which essentially means she can’t poop (enough) on her own.

*** In contrast to the ‘Birth: Mellow’ playlist that we’d had playing during the rest of the labor, my ‘Energetic’ playlist featured a lot of early 2000’s screaming punk (much to the amusement of the Dutch nurses).

**** We’d given permission for a young male intern to observe, and between all of the yelling and the blood/tearing that occurred, I think the poor dear was traumatized.

Follow me on Instagram: @thebunlessoven

The contents of my uterus

~ femmephysicist ~ Leave a comment

You know those people who talk about the baby like it’s a person before it’s even born? As in, ‘Bradley just loves when I eat ice cream’. Or, ‘Bradley’s nursery will be complete as soon as I hand-stencil the Desiderata on the wall’?

Well I’ve always found this behavior sort of odd, which is part of the reason I didn’t want to tell anybody the name before the birth.

That’s right — we have a name. Some people are surprised we have one ‘already’, but they really shouldn’t be. We’ve had YEARS to figure this out, guys. And actually, we had the name before we even started trying, and well before all this infertility nonsense started. My husband and I both distinctly recall discussing the name as a given already 10(!) years ago*, which means we’ve had it for at least that long.

The only thing we weren’t sure of was whether the gender would fit, because for some reason, we only had a female name. But at our 20-week scan we found out that it will…because, as luck would have it, it’s a girl.

To tell or not tell?

Everyone keeps asking if we were hoping for a girl or boy, and honestly — after years of infertility, failed IVF attempts, and ultimately egg donation — we’re still just over-the-moon that we’re pregnant at all. Our main excitement over learning it was a girl was realizing that we could finally use the name we’ve talked about for so long.**

My husband was so excited he wanted to immediately tell everyone the name, whereas I wasn’t even sure about revealing the gender at first. I admit the initial excitement almost swayed me. But in addition to finding it weird when people refer to an unborn child by a name, I’m also suddenly feeling a little…private?…about it all.

Saying that may seem at odds with the fact that I’m doing so on a public blog — raise your hand if you’ve heard me talk about my uterine lining! — but it’s actually pretty logical. I still believe strongly in raising awareness about infertility and egg donation, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a naturally private person. Infertility steals so much from you — my husband and I couldn’t conceive without getting literally dozens of people involved — and now that we are finally pregnant, I’d like to keep something back for just the two of us.

It’s an…it

In the meantime, my husband and I continue to refer to the baby not by name, or even by gendered pronoun, but as an ‘it’ — including in private. Maybe this will change as the pregnancy progresses further, but for now we’d like to ask our friends and family to do the same.

In addition to my newfound (& somewhat surprising) desire to keep the contents of my uterus private, I think part of it, for me, is that it seems somehow presumptuous/overly familiar to refer so intimately to a person we’ve never met. Another part of it may have to do with the fact that it’s a girl, and I’d like to delay society’s expectations (why is everything so PINK?!) for as long as possible. But I’m also no dummy, and it’s likely that a major part of it has to do with the trauma we went through to get here, and a natural tendency to shield oneself in the event of a loss.

So until this baby makes its grand debut, we will continue to refer to it as an ‘it’, and we hope you won’t mind following along.

xx

*We know this conversation took place exactly 10 years ago because we were trying to adopt a deaf corgi with the same name after we’d already decided we liked it for a kid. When that adoption fell through (and we wound up with our current neurotic fluff-ball instead), the silver lining was knowing we wouldn’t have to choose between finding a new kid’s name, or naming a kid after our dog.

**Ironically, the name we chose over a decade ago on the US is quite popular here in Holland. I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed, but least it will be easy for people here to pronounce…

Follow me on Instagram: @thebunlessoven

Pregnancy after infertility

~ femmephysicist ~ 1 Comment

Apologies for the radio silence, and rest assured that it’s not because anything has gone wrong. It’s partly because I’ve been really freaking busy with work and visitors, and also partly because I’m still figuring out how to talk about pregnancy in an infertility blog.

First, there are the questions about my blog name/Instagram handle. Then there’s the matter of adjusting to a new reality after such a long road. And finally, there’s the fact that I still don’t look or feel particularly pregnant. Let’s tackle them each in turn.

The formerly bunless oven?

“You’re not bunless anymore! You’ll have to change your name!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this over the last couple months. The thing is, this donor egg IVF pregnancy — while a scientific miracle — doesn’t change the fact that I’m infertile. I don’t mean that in a mopey please-feel-sorry-for-me way, but as a matter of fact. Obviously I feel immensely lucky that modern science ultimately still made pregnancy possible for us. Nevertheless, that doesn’t just erase everything it took to get here.

There’s also the issue of ever having another kid, assuming this one makes it out alright. We’re extremely fortunate to have three more frozen embryos from Marie’s eggs, which is a luxury many people don’t have. Still, if we ever wanted to try for a 2nd — a decision most couples make over a casual dinner, or not at all (#bonusbaby) — that means more hormone therapy, long drives to Belgium, and potentially even finding a new egg donor in yet another foreign country to start the whole process from the beginning.

So in summary:

  • Super grateful to have gotten where we are today.
  • Still definitely keeping the name.

Fitting in with the ‘fertiles’

Transitioning from the infertility community to the pregnancy community has been strange, to put it mildly. Many people assume that the transition happens instantaneously the moment you get the news, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Going through what we did was a massive emotional and physical burden — I didn’t just magically wake up pregnant one morning like all the other women in my pregnancy yoga class. I feel like a warrior among lottery winners, and coming to terms with the full extent of this new reality will take some time.

One of the ways this manifests is in the way I feel comfortable talking (or not) about the pregnancy. I’m not the type to gush about baby stuff or write carefree ‘Lovin’ pregnant life!!’ posts anyway, but this has made me probably even less so. Part of this is because I’m super-conscious of all the couples still struggling — I’ll be the first to admit that pregnancy-related posts were a big trigger for me during our multiple IVF attempts. But it’s also because it’s hard to endure so many years of failure without experiencing a little bit of post-traumatic stress. When you finally get something that you’ve fought for for so long, it’s natural to treat it more seriously than those who ended up there by chance.

Nothing to see here

The final reason I haven’t posted much is that even now at 17 weeks, I still don’t feel (or look) particularly pregnant, and not much has been going on. We had two more ultrasounds at 10 and 12 weeks when I tapered off the estrogen and progesterone, but everything looked perfectly normal. We also had another small bleeding scare at around 12 weeks, but thankfully nothing more since. The genetic testing came back with no evidence for Down’s, Edwards, or Patau syndromes. In addition, my blood work all came back looking excellent, and my blood pressure has always been extremely low. Aside from the whole prematurely-failing-ovaries thing, I’m really the absolute picture of health. Honestly, the most exciting thing to happen during the last couple months was learning that my blood type is not O+, despite having believed that my whole life. (My real blood type is apparently A+, which seems perfectly fitting if you know me at all.)

Since everything seems to be going well, we finally announced our pregnancy to our wider network a few weeks ago. So in case you haven’t already seen it, here’s our long-awaited pregnancy announcement featuring all of the used needles from our IVF attempts:

“Today we want to introduce a project that we’ve been working on for over half a decade*. After a very difficult journey, including 6 attempted IVF embryo transfers, 5 medicated (and >55 unmedicated) two-week waits, 4 separate egg retrieval surgeries, including 3 for Allie in 2 different (foreign) countries, and ultimately the generosity of 1 amazing friend who donated her eggs, we are happy to report that we are finally expecting our miracle baby. *This is longer than it took me to get my PhD in Physics. I think I should get to put this in my tenure report.”

Follow me on Instagram: @thebunlessoven