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erinandcaitlin · 6 years ago

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My Pregnancy Through Week 20

With 9 weeks to go before my due date, I’m realizing I have written pretty much nothing about my pregnancy; I also have a fairly limited set of photos from this time other than the profile photos we have taken every 4 weeks. In 9 weeks we’ll be entering a period of sleeplessness and intensity that will probably be the start of a long period of time where the idea of sitting and writing something down will seem like a luxury. So I figured now is a good time to try and jot down some thoughts and memories about this time.

My second pregnancy has been very different than my first was (or would have been). I entered my first pregnancy with a sense of cautious optimism, with Erin and I not really talking in definites and saying things like hoping it would “stick.” We knew that the odds were 1 in 4 that something could go wrong and the embryo would stop developing; but we tried to also keep in mind the other half of those odds, the 3 in 4 of success. Unfortunately the cautiousness did not do anything to prevent how devastating it was to lose the pregnancy after only 8 weeks. On paper it was a short period of time, and it happened during the most likely time for it to happen. But after a year of trying, after finally seeing the positive test, it was hard not to immediately allow myself to really imagine our lives with a baby in 9 months, and think about a nursery, and get excited about watching the oval with the tiny heartbeat on the ultrasound screen grow. The intensity of the grief over losing something I had so briefly was unexpected.

I still think about that first pregnancy and what might have been, whether it was a girl or a boy. I don’t really want this to turn into an essay about processing my miscarriage right now, but it’s important context for how this pregnancy has felt for me so far.

It took another year, lots of doctor’s appointments, tests, and finally one round of half-dose fertility medication before we got another set of positive tests. I didn’t start crying like I did with the first positive pregnancy test a little over a year prior - I think I was holding things farther away from myself, thinking that maybe if I did that I wouldn’t jinx things, or if something did go wrong again I could do a better job of shielding myself from it. I don’t mean to make it sound like I wasn’t happy - I had counted down the days until I could take that test, and I woke up early (which is a big deal, as anyone who knows me would agree) so I could take it right away. I was incredibly happy when I saw the positive test, but I think there was also a thread of fear running underneath it.

While Erin was still asleep, I tried to think fast about how I could tell him in a way that would make for a cute story later. With the first pregnancy I was so excited I just went with the first thing I thought of, which was calling down to him while he was on his computer, “Hey Erin, can you clean the litter box? I won’t be able to for the next 9 months.” Which, in retrospect, was… not cute. I ended up grabbing a little jewelry box and putting in a pair of the booties Betsy had sent us during our last pregnancy - two little knitted socks with pom poms on top - and the two positive tests. I waited impatiently in the bathroom for Erin to wake up for his morning shower. After what seemed like approximately four hours and was probably more like 10 minutes, he finally shuffled into the bathroom and I shoved the box in his hands.

He was clearly not awake yet and mumbled, “What is this?”

“Open it!”

He looked at me with confusion before he slowly opened the box and squinted down at the contents. “Why are you giving me cotton balls?”

He kept staring down at the box in his hands for a few more seconds before he (finally) noticed the pregnancy tests and looked up at me, totally awake.

“Really?!”

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My first appointment for an ultrasound was at 8 weeks. For the 4 weeks leading up to it, I’m not really sure how to describe where our heads were at. The last time we went in for an 8 week appointment, there was a small oval that didn’t pulse like it did last time, and the silence of ultrasound tech. So we were both hesitant to dive back into being too excited. We were quiet on the drive to the new OBGYN’s office, and on the way in Erin asked me how I was feeling.

“I don’t know. I just have an intense feeling of dread.” Erin squeezed my hand and we went inside to wait for our appointment. When we were called back into the exam room, the nurse was excitedly asking us how far along we were, talking about the classes they offered at the hospital, how great our doctor was, but honestly I can barely remember any of it. I talked to Erin about it later and it turns out we were both thinking: “This only matters if there’s actually a heartbeat.”

Our doctor came in and was upbeat and friendly with us - and I think she immediately could tell how tense we were. “Let’s just get to the ultrasound, sound good?”

Erin and I held hands as she pulled up the ultrasound machine. When the picture came up clearly showing our baby with a beating heart, I instantly burst into tears. I had no idea that was going to happen - I had convinced myself so strongly that the results were going to be bad that the shock of seeing everything was fine just totally overwhelmed me.

“Everything looks great, guys,” she said. I can’t really convey how well she handled this - she wasn’t overly saccharine or dismissive or over-enthusiastic, just really confidently encouraging like, “I knew it! I knew it would be fine.”

Above: 8 week ultrasound photo

I won’t say that from that point on I didn’t have any anxiety anymore. Appointments were 4 weeks apart, and it felt like the cycle basically went:

Have appointment where everything is fine

Feel reassured and happy for 2-3 days

Increasingly worry over the ensuing 3 weeks

Repeat

I actually ended up buying a mini doppler, which I honestly think is what kept me sane in the beginning phase when I couldn’t feel the baby moving yet. I set some rules and expectations for myself - only once a week, I ran a timer to make sure I never did it for more than 10 minutes, and I reminded myself that if I couldn’t find a heartbeat, it didn’t mean something was wrong; an embryo is tiny, and I’m not a doctor. Luckily it was never really an issue - there was only once or twice when I couldn’t find it on the first go, and usually taking a break and having a snack was all it took for me to find it on the next try.

The other thing that weirdly helped during the first trimester was the fact that I was having all kinds of fun symptoms that I didn’t have the first time. I had just started a new job when the “morning” sickness started. As you may know or have heard, “morning” sickness is a misnomer. For me it was all day sickness. I was trying to orient myself into a new position at a new company, and was sitting on conference calls feeling like I needed to barf all day. I was hungry but didn’t want to eat anything. I chugged mint tea and ginger tea, and demolished containers of “Preggie Pops” trying to keep myself above water. Short drives around town would make me carsick.

The other fun symptom I had was that my skin went completely nuts. I have never in my life had acne that bad, and that includes middle school and high school. Again, it was in some ways a reassuring sign that my pregnancy was progressing well, but it wasn’t pretty. Add to that that suddenly every ingredient in every makeup item I used was “maybe not safe for pregnancy, I don’t know, but probably don’t use it just in case.”

Anyway, at this point we decided to tell our immediate family. Betsy and Steve happened to be visiting around this time, so when we went out to dinner to the fancy Black Cat Bistro, we told them then. There was going to be no explaining around all the special requests I was going to have to make for the meal! For my mom and dad, and Matt and Mallory, we used FaceTime. Everyone was super excited for us, as they’d all known how long we’d been trying for our second pregnancy and how much we’d been hoping for it.

Sometime around 9 or 10 weeks I had to go on a business trip to NYC, which meant a 6 hour cross-country flight. Hoo boy was that fun. I did okay for the first hour or two, but things abruptly went downhill for no discernible reason, and I spent the last 4 hours listening to Netflix shows with my eyes closed and putting all my mental energy towards not throwing up. While in New York I started running out of Preggie Pops and we wandered through drug stores until I found a bag of LemonHeads, which really did not work nearly as well and I now suspect actually made things worse. We went to some really nice restaurants while we were in town, and when my stomach was feeling agreeable I got to thoroughly enjoy them, but there were nights where I only got to eat a couple bites of really good food before my stomach arbitrarily said, “Nope, we’re done here. We’re hungry but literally everything looks disgusting. No more fish for you.” The flight back wasn’t as bad as the flight there had been, maybe just because I was so looking forward to being at home again.

Looming on the horizon was also our trip that we had been planning for almost a year to our friends’ destination wedding. I briefly considered canceling the trip, mainly out of fear that I’d somehow disrupt the pregnancy, but decided ultimately to go for it. The trip was for one week in France and one week in Iceland, and I mostly did okay on the flight. I had learned at this point that making sure my stomach wasn’t empty helped, so I brought literally an entire plastic shopping bag of snack food on the flight with me - enough food that we got pulled aside at security so they could look through it. There were a few other downsides to traveling at this point - I was in France and couldn’t eat most of the cheeses, or any of the charcuterie meats. (To be fair, I settled instead for stuffing my face with bread and pastries.) I couldn’t drink any wines, or the fancy coffees, and when we went to nice restaurants I had to get my meat well done. My bathing suits didn’t really fit anymore and a lot of my clothes in general were starting to get uncomfortably tight. I got tired really easily, and my appetite was still a bit finicky at this point. But in spite of all that, the trip was amazing, and I’m so glad we didn’t cancel it. I get to look back at the photos and think, “I carried my baby all around France and Iceland before he was even born.”

This could easily turn into a whole other post about our trip, so I’m going to skip ahead so this doesn’t end up being 50 pages instead of 15!

Right after we got back from our trip, we had our 12 week appointment where we got to see the baby being active for the first time. This was when we decided on the nickname, “Rupert (or Roberta) Roll-Around.” I had originally used that name in reference to Erin’s tendency to roll himself up in the blankets in the night; now it seemed perfect for baby that couldn’t seem to keep still.

Above: 12 week ultrasound

It was also around the time when I could opt to do blood testing for genetic/health screenings, and find out the gender of the baby. We both agreed we wanted to know, and I went in for the blood draw on a weekday morning. I underestimated how much blood they were going to need to take, and definitely did not eat enough beforehand - for the first time ever (and I have had a lot of blood draws in my life, and have donated blood multiple times) I briefly passed out after the draw. Some exacerbating factors were that I’m pretty sure I got a new phlebotomist (which was a word I didn’t realize I knew until I said it to Erin - a health tech who does blood draws) - I had been many times and never seen her there - and her needle insertion was quite painful compared to others I’ve had, not to mention she kept wiggling it around in my arm. The final straw was when she remove the needle and dropped the cotton ball, so I got an eyeful of a bunch of blood before the room started receding and I muttered, “Uh, I’m getting kind of dizzy” before I went out for a moment or two. I woke up quickly and got to experience the fun process of having my chair leaned back, suddenly feeling like it was a million degrees and sweating, having ice packs arranged around my neck and arms, and being handed a series of apple juice boxes to chug. The apple juice more than anything else helped make the room stabilize and come back into focus. Once I felt stable enough I went and sat in the waiting room with more juice and a bunch of crackers until I was okay enough to go back to work.

Long story short, a week later we got the results back - no abnormalities on the genetic screenings, woo! The nurse offered to tell me the gender over the phone, as well as the option for her to leave a card at the front desk with the gender so Erin and I could find out together. We opted for the card and went in first thing the next morning. We made it as far as the parking lot before we stopped to open the envelope.

Erin asked if we should guess first.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you think it’ll be?”

“Hmm… I think… we are having a girl. A Roberta Roll-Around.”

“I think it’s a Rupert. Ready?”

We stood behind the car and opened the card together. A boy! A tiny Erin! We honestly would have been equally excited either way; more than anything the best feeling was having one more thing that made everything about the baby feel so much more real.

We waited to tell our extended family about the pregnancy until 16 weeks, a number I had somewhat arbitrarily picked. Another piece of context to add here is that following my first miscarriage, I had joined a few online communities for women who were trying to conceive after a miscarriage. It was incredibly helpful to have commiseration from people who were also struggling with a mix of hopefulness, sadness, and fear; but it also exposed me to a lot of stories of women with repeat miscarriages, mostly losing them before 16 weeks. The number stuck in my head, so that’s where 16 weeks came from.

The 16 week ultrasound was especially awesome - the baby was putting on a real show, moving his arms and legs around and flipping over. The doctor was extremely positive about how he was developing - his brain, spine, and organs all looked perfect. We got a bit of it on video, which I am still trying to get uploaded here... watch this space!

Above: Me at 12 weeks and 16 weeks

Above: 16 week ultrasound photo

The next big milestone was the 20 week anatomy scan. Another opportunity to be excited and nervous at the same time. We were excited at the opportunity to see our baby moving on the screen for an hour or more - leading up to this we had had ultrasounds at most of our appointments, but they were usually quite quick - think less than 5 minutes. Watching the embryo grow from a jelly bean at 8 weeks to a tiny baby-shaped jelly bean at 12 weeks and then a wow-that’s-a-real-baby and woah-he-flipped-over baby at 16 weeks had been amazing, but it always felt like we got 2 seconds to absorb it before the machine was turned off and we had another 4 week wait ahead of us. So the idea of a luxurious hour spent watching the baby was extremely exciting. But obviously the anatomy scan is also a potential time to find out whether there might be something wrong.

In the end the scan went really well, and we got to watch the baby frustrate the ultrasound tech by wiggling and moving around constantly. I couldn’t feel him moving quite yet, so in spite of the fact that it was making the ultrasound tech’s job a bit more difficult, seeing him roll and kick was awesome. The doctor came in afterwards to let us know that everything looked good, the only thing they had noticed was that the vermis, a connective piece between the two halves of the cerebellum, did not seem to go as far down as they’d expect. The cerebellum itself was exactly the right size, which was good news. She said we should go for a fetal MRI, and then depending on those results come back for a follow-up scan.

This was definitely not the result we were hoping for, but we immediately went about doing some reading to learn as much as we could. Everything we found was all around reassuring - the fact that the cerebellum was the right size ruled out the most severe options, and the fact that it was only partially vs. entirely missing made it even less concerning. It seemed the worst potential effects based on these combined factors was that early on in baby/toddlerhood, he may have slightly worse fine motor skill control - but studies showed that by age 6 kids with this abnormality were entirely caught up with their peers. This particular issue also has an extremely high false positive rate - over 30% - and it was generally recognized to be a fairly new thing to catch, mostly due to how rapidly the tech was improving. In other words, doctors may have been over-diagnosing or over-concerned just because they could see it in a way they couldn’t 5 years ago. All these factors combined reassured us so we were able to control the extent of our worrying/distress. To jump right to the end, the MRI techs said everything looked totally normal to them (and they also mentioned that the baby did not seem to want to sit still long enough for them to get more than a couple of photos), the doctor had us come in for another scan anyway, and came out of that still not entirely sure the extent of things. We declined doing another MRI, especially because the last one had been fine; and it also wasn’t going to make any difference in our plans, since there’s nothing to be “done” about it, so we wanted to just move on from it. It honestly hasn’t even crossed my mind since then, at least until I wrote it down just now :)

Phew! So that makes 20 weeks (plus a brief 8 week fast-forward to the second scan), which is a good halfway mark. I’ll stop this entry here and start up the next one this week - from 20 weeks to where I am now, at 32 weeks.

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erinandcaitlin · 8 years ago

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Sand Dunes

Alright. Caitlin made me pinky promise that I would write about Sand Dunes. And everyone knows that a pinky promise is the unbreakable bond, so now I have to follow through.

Great Sand Dunes National Park is in southern Colorado, about 4 hours from Boulder. I consider myself fairly well versed in national parks, but I had never heard of the sand dunes before we moved here. It seems to not be as well-known. But, since our vacation was about exploring our local area, we had to go check it out!

The Sand Dunes are a very strange and sort of alien sight. They sit on the western slope of the San Juans where the mountains make a large U-shaped bowl. Everything to the west is a wide open, flat desert plain. The area has constant eastward winds, which have picked up all of this sand that has formed over thousands of years and blown it into a giant pile at the base of the mountains. And we are talking about A LOT of sand. The dune field is 30 miles square, and the highest dunes are over 700 feet tall. The sense of scale is hard to grasp until you start walking out onto the dunes, but it is big…

So, our plan was to arrive at the park, hike out onto the dunes and camp for the night. The only problem is that camping out on the dunes requires a backcountry pass - handed out first come, first serve each morning. We arrived at 5pm. The park ranger at the visitor center basically laughed at me when I asked if they had any left. He looked like he was about 15 years old, so it hurt my feelings. But, since we were there, we figured we might as well go out and take a walk on the sand in the evening. This is when our brilliant and diabolical plan started to form…

The park doesn’t close. You are allowed to go hiking at night. The parking lot says no overnight parking, but obviously people who have backcountry passes do park overnight. It was time to find a park ranger and ask a few inconspicuous questions:

“Soooo, we can go hiking at night, right?”

“What exactly does overnight parking mean?”

“Do you tow or boot the cars, or what?”

“Is there a cutoff time? I just don’t want to get in trouble you know.”

This conversation ended in the park ranger explaining vaguely that if your car is there at night and there in the morning, they have “ways of communicating that up the hill.” Yeah ok. It was not entirely clear if he was actually trying to seem threatening and authoritative, or just begging me to shut up and stop being so obvious. But either way, I heard what I needed to hear. I walked back to the car, and Cailtin and I had a short discussion. Inspired by wild landscape - the spirit of cowboys, outlaws, and rugged individualism that it evoked - we decided it was time to go rogue. It was time…to camp without a permit. This one’s for you, Butch Cassidy.

In an unusual turn of events, once we committed and started packing our bags, I started to get kind of nervous. The park ranger’s words - “We have ways…” - started to feel sinister. I had been so obvious! He definitely took a note of me. Would we come back to a $100,000 fine? Banned from national parks for life? Would they call my mom and make her come pick us up, heads hung low in shame? The stakes felt high. I glanced around furtively while I tried to hide the fact that I was shoving a tent and 3 liters of water into my pack. Were they watching from the bushes? We needed to move the car - the rangers had seen me walk back to this spot. Luckily a blue honda civic is the most common car in America, so that wasn’t too much of a giveaway. I broke out in a cold sweat, and started to shake a little.

Ok, so maybe some hyperbole. But I actually did make us move the car and seriously considered taking off the back license plate. I didn’t want to get caught! Luckily Caitlin was cool, calm and collected. She was Butch Cassidy AND the Sundance Kid. And under her guidance / bad influence, we were able to pack up food, water, camping gear, and get out of the parking lot and onto the dunes. And thank goodness she did, because it was worth it!

We started hiking in the early evening, as the sun was going down. The sand is loose, fine, and dry. Think about the perfect beach sand. It feels really nice, but makes hiking HARD. It’s even worse trying to hike uphill. And with 700 feet of elevation gain over dunes (up, down, up down), there is a lot of uphill. Luckily, I have read Dune about 50 times, so I was had plenty of desert wisdom to lean on: drink plenty of water, walk on the windward side of the dunes where the sand is packed firmer, avoid the soft basins, walk in an arhythmic pattern to avoid attracting sandworms. And believe it or not, this all turned out to be pretty good advice! It made the hiking easier, and we never got attacked by sandworms.

Unlike lots of national parks, there are no trails or markers in the sand dunes. It wouldn’t really be possible since the landscape is always shifting. So our only goal was to hike over the ridge - the first high line of dunes. This would give us a good view out over the dune field and make is harder to spot from the outside. That ended up being about 2 miles in. We found a small private basin right as the sun went down and twilight fell. It was on the leeward side of some tall dunes that gave us good protection from the wind (the wind is blowing constantly with fine sand and dust). Our basin was full of small grasses and flowers. We set up the tent made ourselves some dinner, then laid out on the sand and watched the sky.

At the sand dunes, there are no towns or significant housing for miles and miles around. So there is no light pollution, and there is an amazing view of the night sky. It was also a new moon, so it was especially dark. As night set in, we laid out on our backs and watched the milky way come out. It was an amazing feeling - everything was quiet and still, and it felt like there was nobody else for miles. We saw more stars than we have ever seen before, and were treated to a few really spectacular shooting stars. Around 11, we called it a night and climbed into the tent for wonderful night’s sleep.

Until…2am. The wind is howling into our basin from the south and hitting the broadside of our tent. We can’t sleep, and with big gusts it’s almost rolling us over. Caitlin and I discuss what we want to do, when suddenly everything clicks into place in my mind. This is no ordinary wind. It is the divine retribution of the park rangers, sent to punish the unworthy. The un-permitted. His words come echoing back: “We have ways…” We can’t stay here! They know!

Oook. It wasn’t that dire. But it was fairly uncomfortable, and we couldn’t get any sleep. After about 20 minutes, Caitlin and I decided that we should pack up the site and hike back out. Another fun experience - hiking through the dunes on a dark night with just starlight and headlamps to guide us. Luckily, we did a decent job of keeping our bearings and tracking landmarks on the way in, and hiking downhill was much easier. We made it back to the car around 3:30, where we ate a second dinner, then tucked into the front seats. And obviously, I moved the car one more time, just to throw them off the scent.

I woke up at 8 am to the sound of a car. It was a ranger’s truck driving past us. Caitlin and I were in sleeping bags in the front seat, very obviously overnight parkers. The ranger - different from the guys we spoke to last night - passed within feet of Caitlin’s window. She never even looked over at the car.

We got lucky. This time…

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