Movie Previews

We finally made it out to see a movie on Saturday night, after a couple of weeks of trying and failing (usually, but not always due to my fatigue).

If I scream during a preview, I’m guessing that I shouldn’t go to see the movie advertised, so I’m not making any plans to see “Vacancy“.

I wouldn’t have gone anyway. I don’t watch horror movies. It’s bad enough that I scream in movies in which nobody else reacts that way.

Spring Updates

I forgot to wish you all a happy equinox. It is spring here, which means still cool enough to open the windows and let the allergens in. It’s been raining, which is good, except when the flash floods kill people. On a happier note, the wildflowers started blooming this week.
I am too tired for even the lazy linking posts I have in mind. I saw the obstetrician today and he said everything looks good, but we don’t have the results of the glucose tolerance test yet.

I forgot to mention that back when I was failing the glucose screening test, I tested anemic, so now I am taking a fancy prescription iron pill that seems to be living up to its promise to be easy to digest. So far, if I have any additional energy from the iron, it has been mitigated by fatigue from sleeping poorly.

Third medical appointment of the week tomorrow morning, but for my husband this time (Dr. Respectful, the neurologist).

29w6d

I was on a roll, and then a week just passed me by. I haven’t even written any drafts in that time.

Instead I have been sleeping a lot. Also, things keep making me cry, which makes me even more tired.

I failed my glucose screening test, and went in for a 3-hour glucose tolerance test today. I had to go in early, but I didn’t get to sleep early, so I was tired. (I keep thinking I am ready for bed at 9pm, but then that turns into a nap and I wake up and don’t get to sleep until after midnight. Also, any time I’m told I have to fast after midnight, I have the urge to stay up until then to get a snack in.) I misjudged traffic, so I was a little late, which meant I was tense They didn’t seem to care that I came in at 8:05 instead of between 7:30 and 8:00am, but I didn’t know that until after I arrived, plus I kept thinking that the later I arrived, the longer it would be before I got to eat.

All of which meant that a phlebotomist with a slightly abrupt manner left me with big fat tears coming out of my eyes–and that was before I found out that she had given me the wrong sized bottle of sweet stuff to drink. After some consultation, they assured me that it would be very easy to recalibrate the results. I must say I do not have complete confidence. Given the inability to read the instructions for my test and hand me the right bottle, how do I know the relevant person will get the instructions right about calibration?

Fortunately, I had three hours to calm down after that, and it only took me a half hour to do so. Of course, what I am really worried about is the eventual test results. After my initial panic at the screening test results last week, I managed to stop imagining the worst (testing positive for gestational diabetes, future type II diabetes diagnosis, death at an early age from a heart attack), but apparently I am still a little on edge.

By the way, I knew this test involved four blood draws, but nobody told me I would have to give four urine samples as well. Everytime I think I have gotten better at peeing into a cup, it turns out I have not.

I should add that I still feel like I have had an easy pregnancy overall. It’s just that due to family history I have a particular paranoia about anything related to the pancreas and due to my own history, crying makes me worry about depression.

Oh, yesterday’s tears resulted from trying to find a pediatrician; the one I called does not do any one-on-one consultations, but rather participates in the practice’s “meet the doctor” nights. The next one isn’t until May, and conflicts with a breastfeeding class that I have already paid for. Clearly, I am already a bad mother for not having called months ago. I probably shouldn’t wait until May to decide on a pediatrician anyway. Also, I’m not sure I want a doctor (or practice) who is that busy, even though I’ve had two recommendations for her and one for another doctor in the practice. That’s the problem with recommendations: the doctors everyone recommends are the busy ones.

Communication Problems

When we got back from our trip, we encountered a number of communication difficulties, including:

• A message from the childbirth class instructor wondering where we had been the previous week. I had told her at the first class that we would be gone that week, and also sent an email before we left.
• A voice message from a guy in charge of a task that I had volunteered to help with before my trip, wondering if I had gotten any of his recent urgent emails. Last month, he had forgotten to send me the information about my task in time for me to do it before the trip, so I had told him I couldn’t do it and he had said he’d get another volunteer (the deadline was while I was gone, so there was time for somebody else in the group to get it done). He apparently forgot that I wasn’t going to do it and never reassigned it, hence the urgent emails and message. Result: He and I split my task and did it, albeit post-deadline.
• A letter from the Old Gym, informing me that the check I sent had not been in the letter they received. I was 90% sure that the check was in the envelope, because I had checked more than once to be sure. After all, I knew the impact of my irate letter to them would be reduced if I forgot to include the check that I mentioned in the letter. Still, this was one reason I cleaned off my desk, to make sure the check had not somehow gotten out of the envelope and lost itself in my mess. I finally called them and the women with whom I have been corresponding said she had left a message last week with my son apologizing because she had found out that whichever employee opened the letter removed the check before giving her the correspondence. Now, if you work in an office in which the mail you receive is already opened, wouldn’t you follow up to see if somebody had already taken a check out before writing a letter that insists the check did not arrive? Also, if my unborn son has a phone extension in the womb, it did not show up on ultrasound. Given all their other mistakes (which are unbelievable, but which I will elide for the sake of anonymity), I suspect they called the wrong phone number. My husband denies answering the phone and claiming to be my son, for the record.

• A couple of days after getting home, we were supposed to host the monthly meeting of a dance group’s board. It turns out that the meeting had been cancelled, but my husband never got the email about that–somebody called to let him know after he sent a last-minute reminder with directions to our house. (One other person was also out of the loop and showed up.) Well, we clean up on Sundays anyway, and we ate the food we’d prepared as an early dinner.

• One afternoon, while I was out, a woman called for me and asked my husband to have me call my doctor when I got home. He got her to specify which doctor (it was my ob-gyn’s office) and left me the message, but by the time I got home the office was closed. So I called the next morning and left a message on the nurses’ voicemail. And again in the afternoon, because it occurred to me that there might be a problem with the appointments scheduled for the next day, and if so, I’d want to know about it before fasting, getting up early, and driving up there in rush hour. Then, as it got closer to closing time, I called again and waited to talk to the operator instead of punching the numbers for my ob-gyn’s nurses’ line. She thought maybe the office’s schedulers had called me, and transferred me to them. They had a note that they had called me to reschedule me with the nurse practitioner, and transferred me to the nurses to clarify. Where I got voice mail again and left a third message. Then they called me back, and there had been some attempt to reschedule things because of a change in the doctor’s schedule, but that I should come in as planned anyway. By the end of all of this, I was nearly in tears, because this is the sort of thing that gets to me, plus of course I was imagining calling for a medical reason and never getting heard. Of course, the whole point of a “nurses’ triage line” is that they will call back the people with emergency medical issues first, and in the past they have called back much faster. Still, I kept thinking: “they started it” by calling me and asking me to call, so they shouldn’t have kept me hanging.

Note: I believe that last paragraph illustrates everything that is wrong with my story-telling abilities (strongly related to difficulties summarizing things succintly).

If This Keeps Up…

instead of “just relax” or “if you adopt, you’ll get pregnant,” people are going to start annoying their infertile friends and relatives by telling them “I heard that if you do ivf, it won’t work, but then you’ll get pregnant afterwards” or “you’ll have twins, and then get pregnant again naturally.”

Nothing Bad Has Happened Yet (tm getupgrrl). May all the pregnancies go well and end with healthy mothers and babes.

More Lazy Linking: Prenatal Testing

Michael Bérubé has a post up at Pandagon about prenatal testing, with a link to an article of his in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Instead of waiting until I can produce a thoughtful post on this topic, which may never happen (given my recent experience of many drafts unfinished), I’m just going to post the links and one quick observation.

Obviously, having done both preimplantation genetic diagnosis and amniocentesis, I believe that people should be permitted to do prenatal testing. I don’t see muchjustification for making it mandatory, however, as apparently some doctors in Canada have suggested.

My previous posts on pgd and prenatal testing: here, here, and here.

28w2d

I had my one-hour glucose tolerance test today, along with an ultrasound to check growth and an appointment with my doctor. I was most worried about the glucose test, because of my risk factors for gestational diabetes, but I don’t have results for that.

Everything else is good. The sonographer said the Chocolate Chip is head down, and on track for weight at 2 lbs, 9oz. Also, my “friend the fibroid” is still there, though harder to see. Apparently, my slow weight gain (I am still not back up to my Day 3 weight) is not a problem for the Ch.Ch., since the doctor also said the uterus measures just right. My belly is definitely getting bigger and more pregant-looking. As far as I can tell, I must be losing weight in my feet to compensate, because my shoes are loose. I would have said my face before, but it is filling back out again these days. I haven’t outgrown any of my clothes yet.

The doctor said it still looks fine for me to go to my conference in Neighboring Country at 34 weeks, so I’d better write that paper soon. He gave me the recommendations about how many contractions are too many and how much movement is too little, which I promptly forgot. Those guidelines are also in the handouts I got from his office at the beginning of the pregnancy (and all over the internet, I suppose), so as long as he said the same thing as the handout, I’m ok. I hope that if I do get worrisome contractions, I can be as calm and collected as Emmie was about timing everything and getting it checked out.

I’ve been extra lethargic the last couple of days. Today, I would just attribute to insufficient sleep and fasting before the early morning glucose test, but I don’t know what was up yesterday. They also took blood for a cbc, so if I’m anemic, I’ll know soon. I’ve had severe anemia in the past, but it was always iron-deficiency anemia from the blood loss of heavy periods. Normally, I’m borderline ok, meaning the doctors say I’m normal, but the blood bank doesn’t let me donate (this hasn’t stopped them from calling to ask me to donate four times since I’ve been pregnant–they love that Rh-negative blood). The last time the ob-gyn checked, at the beginning of pregnancy, I was fine, and I was a lot more fatigued then.

In other news, I continue to be a bad consumer of medical services by failing to ask most of the questions I write down before my appointments. I blame myself, not the doctor. He never acts rushed, even when I know he is rushed. I’m quite comfortable with the nurse practitioner, whom I’ve seen for some of my annual exams and a lot of the ivf tests that I did locally. Still, the last time I saw her, a few weeks ago, we talked a long time, but I still didn’t ask all the questions I had.

I Almost Forgot

Happy International Women’s Day.

In Old Colony, I always used to go out to lunch with my friend and mentor.

My women friends who taught in China got a half day off, along with their women students.

I haven’t done much to celebrate it since I got back to the United States, and I am too tired to write an insightful post now.

If you have money to spare, give a thought to the Global Fund for Women.

Link: Babyblogorama

I saw that I was getting a bunch of hits recently from a place called babyblogorama.net, so I went to look. If you would like to see a list of blogs organized by the writers’ due dates, check it out. In addition to “Expecting,” they have categories for “Trying,” “Parenting,” and “Connecting.”

Also, if you’re doing ivf and want to see bloggers who are cycling at the same time, don’t forget cyclesista.

Welcome Home. Get to Work.

We finally went on our long-delayed trip to my home state, which is also Mr. Luo’s grad school state. Because I am at least as paranoid as Johnny, and because our cats would be even less effective than Jo(e)’s at scaring off intruders (one would hide in the closet, and the other only scratches people she knows and loves), I didn’t mention our imminent departure on the blog.

Since I didn’t take my laptop, all vacation-related blog posts were in my head, and right now I can’t even spit out random bullets of nostalgia from visiting my childhood hometown, but I’ll try to post something about it soon.

I have just under three months to complete my sabbatical project before my Estimated Date of Delivery. Time to clean off my desk and reattach the arm to my superergonomic graduate school physical therapist-recommended desk chair.