Reliving the past

Do you ever have those days where you just can't stop obsessing about what happened in the past?

Letely I keep thinking about the day we were flying back from visiting my parents after Christmas 2007. I was 18 or 19 weeks pregnant with Ellie at the time. We were running late and YaYa had to go to the bathroom. I was carrying a bunch of carry on bags and YaYa trying to hurry down the ocncourse to the bathrooms. I suddenly felt a sharp stabbing pain in my lower abdomen. It wasn't so terrible that I couldn't stand it - but it wasn't pleasant either. I couldn't stand or sit or lay comfortably for several days. And then no more than a week later came our terrible ultrasound when we found out Ellie didn't have any amniotic fluid.

Now when I think back on it I wonder if I did something that caused part of the placenta to seperate and started the avalanche of IUGR, oligohydramnio, and PE. I can't seem to get it out of my mind that maybe trying to do more than I should have done is what caused everything to go wrong with Ellie's pregnancy. Everyone told me to slow down - but I never listened. I was goingt o be super pregnant woman.

I never mentioned it to the Dr's at the time because the connection just never really dawned on me at the tiem. But it hit me recently for some reason and now I can't shake the thought. I'm going backwards I guess... back to the blame and the guilt of the early days after Ellie's death.

It feels like crap. I've been in a major funk all week. For no real reason either. I should be celebrating. Everything seems to be going so well this time. But somehow that just makes me feel worse about what happened to Ellie. Why does one baby get to live and the other doesn't?

Why do people have to be so rude???

Before I go off on my rant I just want to tell everyone thank you for all the support from my last post.

On to the rant...I just got off the phone after trying to change my ultrasound & OB appointments... it did NOT go well. Normally everyone at the MFM office where I go - is so nice and so helpful... until now.

When I called in this morning I told the woman that I needed to change my appointment. The first thing she asked was why I needed to change the appointment. Really - this is none of her business, but it was because I had decided that I didn't want to have to go to the ultrasound alone and we couldn't drive 1hr to the clinic wait for the 1 1/2hr delay, have the ultrasound, wait to see the Dr and make the 1 hr drive back home in time to pick YaYa up from daycare. So I told her that I couldn't make it back in time to pick up my daughter. Her response - you should have thought of that before you made your appointments. I very nicely bit my tongue and didn't comment because I did make the appointment knowing full well that the time wasn't good - but at the tiem I thought I would be OK going by myself. I changed my mind - but that shouldn't make a bit of difference.

Anyway - to make a long story short... this woman managed to argue with me on every single thing I asked fer. I ended up with three appointments on three different days because she was unwilling to try and work out a better schedule for me because I was being difficult.

I guess needing my husband to accompany me to a very stressful ultrasound makes me a difficult patient...

I'm just glad it's FRIDAY!!! Even though I do need to get ready of a house full of people. (My parents are coming to visit tomorrow.) I'm still glad to see this week end.

Speaking of visitors and just becaus it feels liek that random kind of day - I found the best place in the world yesterday. It's called "Company's Coming". They make up all kinds of food and freeze it then you take it home and bake it. Voila - a wonderful meal! I think I bought one of everything they have. It's what we will be eating all weekend. I used to love cooking - but not so much lately. I'm hoping this will mean YaYa and T can get some "home" cooked food more often than not too.

I had an MFM appointment yesterday - Dr. J wasn't available so I saw one of the nurse/midwives in the group. I wasn't sure I was going to be happy - but I ended up loving her!!!

She was so nice and completely helpful. We talked for a ling time about what happened last time and how I was getting close to those dates with this pregnancy. She told me I could come in as often as I wanted to and could request an ultrasound if it would make me feel better - no matter what! I guess the light bulb just came on for me at that point. Why torture myself through the next 5 weeks. So we just went ahead and scheduled a whole bunch of appointments.

But one thing did really bother me a little bit...as we were going through some of the events from last time she was looking through some notes in my records on the computer and for some reason it had Ellie's birth listed as a stillbirth. She was alive and with us for 2 hours. I really hate that one short sentance buried in my medical records completely negates her short life. She was here. She was with us. I saw her move and struggle to breathe. We all knew she was going to die - but that still doesn't mean that she didn't live.

It's amazing how different this pregnancy is. At 18weeks I am bigger now than I ever was with Ellie. And this baby is active. I have been consistently feeling movement for almost 2 weeks already. With Ellie I almost never felt her move until after the final amnioinfusion right before I had to be induced.

In a lot of ways this makes me hopeful that things will be much, much better this time around. But there is so much sadness mixed in too. All of the things that should have happened but didn't. The next 5 weeks are going to be really difficult. It was at the 20w growth scan that we learned there was a problem with the pregnancy. I have my 20w growth scan with this little guy in two weeks. At 17w we were told that Ellie was perfect - by 20w they weren't sure she would survive overnight. Ellie was perfect. My body was not. It was slowly killing my daughter. Maybe it won't happen this time, who knows. But wether I had any control over it or not I will always live with the knowledge that my body is the reason my daughter is not with us today. I don't think this had made me a stronger person or even a better person - just a different person.

I saw this on Carly's blog.

It made me cry. I cried because for me it is true - I probably would give up five years of my life to be thin (even now after so many years...)

EDs are so destructive. They rob vibrant young women of so much happiness.

I am recovered - mostly. But there are still the nasty haunting thoughts that linger in my mind and probably always will. Like this morning when I stepped on the scale and a bigger number than I have ever seen before in my life popped up. I've been feeling bad about it all day. And then I happened to see this video and I reminded myself that I am good and I am beautiful no matter what the number is.

I'm sure some of you will judge me because I'm pregnant. Weight should be the last thing in the world I'm worried about after everything I did to get pregnant. But that's just not how real life works. This is who I am - I'm f***ed up and that all there is to it. I want this baby to be born healthy and I want to take care of myself so that I can make it happen. Sometimes I just have to work a little harder to make sure I can ignore the awful voices in my mind.

Ahhhh...

We had a wonderful week at the beach! I can't even begin to put into words how nice it was to just get away from everything for a while. We woke up every morning and took a walk on the beach. YaYa got a TON of shells. then we swam in the pool for a while, had some lunch and went back to the beach until dinner time. No stress, no worries - just fun...

This is one of my favorite pictures from our trip. T just took it one morning while we were on our walk. It is our whole family... T, me, YaYa, Big Boy and Ellie...it just melted my heart when he showed it to me.

Then there's the classic beach foot shot... but this one has our ramshakle sand castle as a backdrop...

Happy 4th to everyone!

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday this weekend!!

We are off to the beach tomorrow and I don't think the place where we are staying has internet - so I won't be here for awhile!

I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

What a relief!

The ultrasound and amnio went really well yesterday. The baby is doing great and growing like crazy - actually measuring a little ahead at 17w. The fluid levels were just fine and all the right parts were accounted for. That is a HUGE weight off of my mind. Dr. B did the amnio. She remembered us from last time with Ellie. She was the one who did the last amnioinfusion right before PE hit. Actually I went right from seeing her to L&D with Ellie. She was happy to see us and took a lot of time to go over all of the ultrasound results to make sure we felt comfortable with what they saw. She aslo said that after seeing such good results from the ultrasound she would cut our chances of any problems showing up from the amnio in 1/2.

I'm going back in two weeks to have things checked out again - just to be safe. I saw a new Dr. that I hadn't seen before - but he completely understood that after what happened last time I would feel safer being seen more often during the next couple of months. There was some emrgency so I didn't get to see Dr. J - but it was OK.

And we found out yesterday that it really is a little boy!!! I was still kind of holding out hope for a little girl... but a boy is pretty good too! Now we have to start thinking of some boy names... i was already with a list of girl names.