Increasing Despair, Depression and Suprises!

PERSONAL JOURNEY POST

The cheapie I had taken had a very faint line on it so I ran to the store and grabbed a First Result Early Response (FRER).

I had my first line! It had been 15 years since I saw a BFP and I was in shock! Really, I was in shock… Everything changed in an instant! Honestly… it was a trip! All the planning and researching and constant charting and thinking…. where does the mind go when all that ends?!

Just as a reminder, I had started taking these three supplements all within six weeks of this BFP. I don’t think anything could have had an affect besides the turmeric. I had started it first and it had the longest time to do something. It might have helped inflammation, and that’s if any of them did anything at all. As a side note, make sure you get PQQ with BioPQQ in it. Be sure to subscribe and keep your eyes out for my upcoming blog post all about PQQ!

Ahhhhhh… yes okay… I know what happens when your mind has nothing to occupy itself with anymore… It hit me like a MAC truck: I was pregnant at 40 years old and my chance of miscarriage was sky high.

My DH and I went on a walk that Sunday evening, after we found out, and I told him “you know, I had to push all of those worries and doubts and anxiety about things being wrong with the baby and things wrong with me, ALL of that way way to the back of my mind just to even be able to try. All of my mental energy went into trying… all the before BFP stuff. I didn’t even think about the afterwards because I just wouldn’t have even tried.” Dead serious. I explained how my mind was suddenly sort of vacant. Every single day for the previous 16 months, my mind had been full up with ttc. And I suddenly found it unsettingly empty. All the “WTF am I doings?” started swirling.

I better also mention, for those of you whom haven’t read PART ONE, about one week prior to this big fat positive (BFP), I had started taking sovereign silver for suspected bacteria. I mean, you could smirk and say, “Whatever, that didn’t do anything *eye roll*”, but the super interesting thing is that another lady I was speaking with at the time started taking sovereign silver after I got my BFP. I kid you not, guess who got a BFP that very next luteal phase after starting it?!! Yes, she did! We BOTH GOT BFPs! I do want to say that she had gotten pregnant somewhat recently before this time, like within the prior year, and I had not conceived what-so-ever in 15 cycles. I had never heard of anyone taking silver for ttc purposes, but I felt comfortable experimenting with it whereas I wouldn’t touch antibiotics.

I stopped taking the PQQ and the DHEA, also the resveratrol. I kept taking 2.5mg of melatonin and the Myo-Inositol. Melatonin is actually fine when you are pregnant. There is a loooooot of misguided information out there. You can absolutely safely take 3mg of melatonin every evening if you have to. I kept taking 2,000mg of Myo-Inositol because it can actually help prevent gestational diabetes and D-beetees is super common in my family. My brother, mother, grandmother, two uncles, many aunts… all diabetes. I live in the house my great-aunt used to live in. She died in this house with complications from diabetes. She had to get her foot amputated. I remember her being in pain, always moaning. Oh gosh… horrible. Anyhow, rest in peace great aunt D. Needless to say, I took the damn Myo!

I had to copy and paste this “comment” I wrote in a group of awesome ladies just a few days after getting my BFP: “I came out of the bathroom and bent over and OMG lightning crotch! Sharp electrical pulse right down my hoo ha!!!! I was like ‘woah!!!!!!! What the hell!’ Then I tried it again, bent over slightly and ‘yikes⚡️🍑’ It’s like a power station up in there!”

I instantly started feeling crampy, you know how the mind works, and worried about miscarrying from the moment I saw the lines. I went in to my OBs three days later to go over the lovenox injections. I had a pulmonary embolism after my third child who was born cesarean. I was very overweight, sedentary, had major surgery and was in a hypercoagulative state (pregnancy); therefore, clot town. It started as a DVT six days after surgery. It traveled to my lung (PE). To be safe, I had to take lovenox daily throughout pregnancy and postpartum period.

The doctor came into the room with a not-so-encouraged look on his face and said, “At seven weeks, we really should see a strong heart beat.” We scheduled a repeat ultrasound for five days later to check, or what seemed was to confirm miscarriage even though the Dr. didn’t say that, of course. He prescribed 200mg progesterone suppositories and said, “take it step by step”.

I researched until the cow’s came home, which is never so that is an accurate portrayal of the next five days. I discovered that a lot of doctors will diagnose a pregnancy as a miscarriage at 7 weeks with no heartbeat. A fetal pole that is equal to or greater than 7mm with no heartbeat is considered fetal demise. If it is less than 7mm with no heartbeat, you can consider it suspected demise. If I was stretching it, and I mean big time, I could maybe say my little one was 6.999999mm… Right? Even then, still suspected miscarriage with no heart beat. I also got a lot of “don’t give up on hope yet, you have a chance” and all of the kind things people say to make the blow less severe. Although people mean well, and sometimes there is that chance, the odds of there being a heartbeat in a fetal pole that was clearly visible had no heartbeat at 7+2 is very, very low.

I grew increasingly worried. I read research articles … women’s stories … medical studies… I started to realize that the chances of that little baby being alive was very, very small 🙁 I pictured his/her heart beating… I really tried to visualize it into existence every single day. I didn’t give up by any means, though, I also had to prepare myself and my poor husband, who thought everything was going to turn out fine, for the most probable outcome. We talked and decided I’d do the Cytotec (misoprostol) at home if that’s what needed to be done. I did not want a D&C. I knew that much. I definitely didn’t want to go through that. I did tell my sister and my mom what was going on and obviously that we were ttc. Surprise, I’m pregnant, but probably for only a few more days! It was strange timing.

When we returned to the doctor’s office, I was already in tears before she started the ultrasound… There needs to be a room for women who are experiencing miscarriages or threatened miscarriages. We should not have to wait in the same damn space as a bunch of pregnant women!! My god! What kind of idiot bastards would let that happen? WT-actual-F. It’s like this at most OBs I assume. Is yours the same?

There was no growth seen in the embryo. It looked the exact same, still no heartbeat. Crushed. My husband broke down… it was truly awful. Just devastating. It broke us. When the embryo or fetus dies and the body does not actively expel the pregnancy, this is called a missed miscarriage, or a silent miscarriage. The hardest part for me at that point was knowing I was carrying our dead embryo inside me. It did something to me that I’ll never forget.

I am going to copy and paste some of my comments during the miscarriage. It might be too graphic for some:

DAY ONE
“Thanks. I am feeling all the things that are normal to feel.
Anger. Grief. Mental exhaustion.
I just hope the pills do their job and my body lets go quickly.

I just took 800mcg (200mcgx4pills) by mouth.
He has me taking that same dose again 3 more times. Isn’t that excessive?
I did look and it seems like “one dose followed by a second if needed” but 4?

I only felt slight cramping a couple hours ago and I’m just laying here waiting, nothing really to report almost 3 hours later

I’m starting to feel a little cramping now… still nothing, no blood 6 hrs later 😔
I just can’t believe this is happening.
I just can’t… it’s like a damn dream.

Still no bleeding after over 7 hours. I called and nurse said it can be normal to not bleed after first dose. Every woman’s different.
I just feel so so damn sad.

I feel like I’m being a nuisance by talking about it so much. I keep thinking ‘should i be posting this or asking this?’ I keep thinking how my little embryo might end up in the toilet and it makes me sick thinking about flushing it.
I’m so sorry for saying this if it brings sadness or pain. But I don’t like having to put his or her tiny little body in the garbage rolled up on a pad 😔
I hate this and it hasn’t even damn started yet.

Thanks for being here. I’d be lost without you guys.
Thank you all for sharing. It’s so common to have gone through this.
I am scared because of my age…. it took 16 months for this egg to land and apparently it was a bad one.

Still nothing to report after 2 doses of 800mcg. I only bled a medium absorbency pad last night and few clots … waiting for nurse to call.

DAY TWO
I called the nurse again this morning and told her I was about to take my third dose of 800 MCG and I wasn’t really feeling much yet so she talked to the doctor and he had me insert them vaginally so I’m still lying here an hour and a half later and nothing. Nothing is happening. What the heck! I’m trying to lie down for three hours just so they are absorbed. They’re really small pills so I was like “crap, how the hell am I going to get these up there!” I decided to break them in half and stick them in the pre-seed applicator that I have. It was a little cumbersome, but it got them way up there so that’s good… but definitely still waiting for “it” to happening.

I’m going crazy in bed. I’m reaching a two hour mark and I’m still feeling absolutely nothing. I’ve vowed not to get angry at my uterus but come on for crying out loud! What the F!

Guys, seriously nothing is happening. I’m getting fed up. I can feel pressure like stuff wants to come out but my cervix will not open . All I’m getting is brown metal-smelling blood like an estrogen bleed. I feel depressed as well. It sucks so bad that I made it to bfp after 16 cycles and now I’ve got to start over. It’s enough to drive a person mad. I think I’m going to call. Again.

Ugh… she said the doctor went home today already. We hung up and she called the surgery unit to see what the schedule looks like for this weekend. She called back and said it doesn’t look likely that we will have a D&C before next week. She said to take 4th dose and she will call me at 9am and we’ll go from there.

DAY THREE
Thanks. I’m just lurking here… all day… in bed again trying to relax like nurse said. I am so god damn sad. I feel like I had almost reached the top of a mountain I have been crawling up for a year and a half. And as the summit came clearly into view, something just screams “Nope, fuck off! You lose!” and flings me backwards to the very, very bottom. Again, at the very base of this God forsaken mountain that was so damn hard to climb the first time. And at the moment I don’t care if it will only take 12 months…. or 6 months… or even 3 months to climb it again because I am damn exhausted from the first time. How can I even look up there where I just was. I was just there days ago. Now I’m here. I just don’t want to have to do it again. My whole life has been put on hold. And even if it takes only six months to get pregnant (I could just burst out laughing at that statement), and even if we get past finding the heartbeat… anything could happen at any time. Anything! I’m just so tired of all of this. If it hadn’t taken so fucking long the first time maybe I would feel less like a big old pile of shit. But today, I’m in a dark place. And I don’t know how the hell women can do this for years. I just want the despair to stop. If I had money, I’d do IVF in one second flat, but I don’t and I never will have that option. Sorry… I just feel like time has stopped and I’ve wasted a year and a half of my life all-consumed by trying to create the baby I just lost. No… wait… my damn body is still hanging onto it so I haven’t even lost it yet. It’s still here 😖

I was prescribed four more rounds of misoprosotol (800mcg). I’m at the gym trying to shake things loose now. I’m scheduling a D&C for Tuesday. I’m starting to bleed lightly red blood now instead of just brown so I guess that’s “good” so maybe it’ll happen after eight damn doses of miso! Is this not insane?

Well, Molina assholes won’t pay for me to get it filled again today. So even though I’m finally starting to bleed red I can’t even start the crap until tomorrow. I could’ve easily freaked out when they told me that but there’s nothing the pharmacy can do of course. It’s like ‘Hello people, do you want me to try to get a miscarriage going and then just stop when it starts getting momentum!?’ Only positive thing so far today is that I’m definitely having some cramps now after going to the gym. That lying down crap is for the birds and it’s doing nothing for me.

I’m breathing through contractions right now …. passing things now.

OKAY. I had what felt like a 30 minute contraction. Then had about 10 minutes of contractions like when labor starts... passed a half dollar sized clot and am bleeding bright red.Passe . Strange brown fluffy dry tissue as well. Coffee ground type stuff.

Now having sharp pains in cervix and achiness but no more contractions. Ill still do the misoprosotol again 2 doses tomorrow vaginally. ETA- ended up passing another large clot about an hour later
D&C is set for Tuesday 2pm. They will do an ultrasound Monday to check for tissue but I’m thinking at this point I’m gonna have the D&C anyways. I’ve read too many stories of retained tissue causing hcg to stay elevated. The one thing making me feel better is knowing I might ovulate in a few weeks. I just can’t stand the thought of any retained tissue getting in the way of that. Women still have retained tissue even after D&C!! I guess we could check HCG levels a couple times if the ultrasound is in fact clear. And perhaps postpone the D&C. But I just don’t think I trust ultrasounds that much. Even a piece of tissue a few millimeters big can cause hCG to stay elevated. And I ain’t having it!!

Man… I made a wish that we’d all get our BFPs by Christmas… I should have been more specific: I hope we all get super sticky gumballs before Christmas! Hell, Id be satisfied with by Spring. Four of us had losses in the last month ❤️❤️❤️❤️

Again, thanks to all of you, my friends. I was so lonely before I made this thread. For over a year, I had absolutely no one to talk to about this all-consuming journey… I was given hope by all of you.

DAY SIX
Well… there is still F-ing tissue … for crying out loud. Bring on the D&C tomorrow 😡 and the best (worst) news of all of it is I’ve developed another fibroid and what if this one could be coming through into the uterine cavity. OB said it shouldn’t affect implantation, but I’m just like WTflyingF… since this summer a new blasted fibroid? I said “can you scrape that sucker off!?” He said no, and that he doesn’t “scrape” he just uses gentle suction.

Bring on the damn pasta!!!!!”

So, I ended up having a D&C. I was so nervous about it. They had the usual trouble of getting in my I.V. Why, Lord, do my veins shrink and hide when I am in a stressful situation (I.V. Therapy usually has to do it. After the last time, they told me to just request it from now on whenever I go to the hospital. I forgot.) I was put under by a sweet man. I was crying as they were getting things ready and I said “I just don’t want to die” and he said, “you won’t, don’t worry”. I went to sleep crying and I woke up crying like no time had gone by… it was a strange experience… like I was suddenly paused and then unpaused. Apparently, I told that guy that he was a hero 🙂

In December, I called the second of two choices I have for an reproductive endocrinologist (RE) in my city. I set up a consultation in-office appt to talk about doing medicated cycles. As the holidays came and went, I found myself wondering if I could afford to do IVF if I went out of the country, hmmm…. I started emailing REs overseas, mostly in Turkey because my husband is from there. I had a phone consultation with Dr. Yelian from Life IVF in Irvine, CA (he got a dear friend of mine knocked up – Algar girl, you’re awesome – have that next one, you’re not too old!). I also made a telephone appointment with Dr. Kiltz at CNY Fertility in Albany, NY. The soonest I could get a phone consult with him was March 31st I believe!

Dr Yelian said the following:

• He respects my choice not to PGS test and if I don’t he will transfer 2 embryos.
• In his experience, 25-35% of a 40 year old woman’s embryos will result in “normal” (so if I get four, odds are 1 will test “normal”)
• He recommends testing because there is still 65-75% chance of abnormal and he sees a lot of these abnormals as Down Syndrome
• He has treated women “as old” as 47
• In a 40 year old, he would trigger at 20mm. A few years older and he would trigger no bigger than 18mm because experience “has taught him that this leads to better success”

My grandmother passed away about four weeks after the D&C. We were quite close. I grew up four blocks from my grandparents. I was my grandma’s caregiver part time. We would puzzle and eat sugar free Chocolates. We would take our “rest” together and complain about how bad it sucks to go to the bathroom and how cold we were.

In the end, the RE was not convinced by any means that I had adenomyosis so that was awesome. He could see no signs of it. I also got a protocol that I was happy with! I ended up doing 5mg of letrozole for cycle days 3 – 7 (5 days) and then a dose of 150IU of FSH on CD 8 and another 150IU on CD9. I got my DH started on 1000mg of Vitamin C, 1000mg Omega 3 and 1000mg Vitamin E, the “3 1000s”. It is very important to have your SO taking supplements that have been shown to lower sperm fragmentation rate. There is nothing they can do for low frag rate in the REs office, ladies, but those vitamins + an extra 50mg of Zinc have shown to improve frag rate in sperm.

I went back in on Monday, CD13, to have my follicles checked. This particular office has people come in on CD12, but that was on a Sunday so I had to go on Monday, CD13. I told the nurse that my ovulation never holds off that long. She didn’t seem concerned in the least. I ended up getting a positive OPK on Sunday CD12 as I knew I would. I’m just glad it wasn’t CD11! I had super bad ovulation pains that woke me up all through the early morning on Monday, CD13. Again, ladies, we can ovulate within 6 hours of a +OPK, and sometimes we have already ovulated by the time our OPK turns positive. Do The Deed BEFORE positive OPK!

What a strange experience it was, and I’ve heard it is like this in other RE clinics. All his patients that need a transvaginal scan that day come in and wait together at 7:30am…. ? I was like… wait, what? Yeah… so I’m sitting in the lobby with everyone else and I have no idea who goes first because we were all there at 7:30am! After they call your name they lead you to a little changing room with two doors. One door is the one you go in. The other door, straight across, leads to the exam room. Put it this way, if both doors were open, anyone walking down the hall would see straight into the exam room and straight up follicle alley! While I waited in the small “changing room”, someone else was getting examined. I could hear everything they were saying. When she was finished, they led her into another small changing room, but opposite side of the exam room from the little room I was waiting in. So little room, door, exam room, door, little room, door. Like cattle being herded

“I want another baby/child so bad it’s consumed me. I don’t even know how therapy could help that drive. It’s deeply seeded. I think of hardly anything else. My now is: baby. My future is: baby. Sleeping next to, playing/cooing with, feeding, traveling with, teaching, holidays with…. baby. I know it’s not healthy and I willing make a solid effort to start shifting my thoughts. Ive lost myself. And today I’m just damn sad.”

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