500 and 500 more.

As if we needed reminding that Hope’s a bitch.

I’m leaving a trail of half finished thoughts, terrible grammar, typos and spelling mistakes around the internet both kids start complaining as soon as I go near the laptop (me using the ‘phone has a similar effect). 

It isn’t all just pregnancy crap-ness, we’re having major connection problems (die motherfucker plusnet) and am relying on seriously unreliable dial-up. But that’s not really it, I have all this stuff in my head (and in drafted posts) but I just can’t speak. Where to start, I am (depending on whether I managed to publish this or not) 26 weeks pregnant. I still listen to the baby’s heart beat with the doppler before every heparin injection - ideally you need to stop the injections 24 hours before delivery. If the baby has died I don’t want to have to wait to be induced. We still haven’t told C - its amazing how unobservant a 5yo can be (or how deeply they trust us not to lie to them). My major fear isn’t PROM or cervical incompetence or even prematurity, its stillbirth. It looms over me, such a dark cloud. An hour doesn’t go past that I do worry that he has died. I moderate a little pregnancy group for women who’ve become pregnant at my clinic. The clinic has traditionally been a last resort, a place for the desperate - most of the women in the group are older, have long infertility histories, many have had at least a few losses - it is generally a safe place for the bruised & battered. Recently though, the clinic has become much more popular, we’re getting lots of first time successes (ha who am I to complain, I was nearly one of those), women without losses, generally younger & dealing with MFI. It is hard I think for all of us, I find myself biting down irritation at the discussions of what pram to buy at 8 weeks. I’m perplexed that there are people who spend £10,000 on a cycle & not know the significance of E2 levels, or the importance of HCG, people who aren’t alarmed not to see a heart beat at 7 weeks (’the doctor said it was just a bit early’). They can’t begin to understand what has brought us to the point of prefixing every statement with ‘if’ … ‘if all goes well’, ‘if the baby is born’, ‘if he doesn’t die’, why when we hear something awful we don’t think ‘thank god it wasn’t me’ we wonder which of us will be next. We’re out of the first trimester so where’s the happiness? I don’t know what to do with it really. I’m still involved (as much as you can be when pregnant with an apparently healthy baby) with my loss group; it is an awkward fit, I’m not on the other side and although I’m closer than many of them at the moment we’re all painfully aware of how quickly it can change. I can’t leave. S accuses me of self flagellation, immersing myself in the sadness as some kind of punishment. Every single one of those stories could be me - I don’t look for reasons why it can’t happen to me, I’m not even thankful that it isn’t me - I just can’t leave them. Blah … god its hot … nothing coherent here.