Little Boy what now?

Not long before Charlie was born, I issued a manifesto, a list of promises I have mostly managed thus far to keep.  No Lunchables?  Check.  Ridiculous getups?  Check.  No full frontal nudity on display?  Check, although I do have a single photo of him sashaying around the back yard, naked but for his Crocs, a pair of giant rubber oven mitts, and a seraphic whole-face smile.  (I have named the picture blackmail.jpg, and I have backups in two separate places.  Bring on the teenage years.  I am fully prepared to fight dirty.)

I've spent a lot of time marveling at how different this pregnancy has been, from its earliest days onward.  This time, instead of thinking to a baby I haven't yet met, I hold Charlie close and make him more silent promises, a lot more complicated and even more heartfelt.  Knowing him now, I'm much less articulate, and sometimes I count on my body — the way I persist in roughhousing with him, unwieldy midsection notwithstanding; the fact that I still carry him now and then, just because I feel like it — to tell him what's hard to say.  I think he is listening.  He hears me.  "Mama, I always want you to hold me," he tells me, as I hoist him with some effort.  I will is what my grunt says.

...

Charlie is perfectly delighted.  We told him several weeks ago that this summer he'd have a baby brother.  He gets it, as much as a three-year-old can.  "He's growing in your belly," he says, repeating what we've told him.  "He'll come out when he's big enough."  And not a moment sooner, I think, smiling and nodding my encouragement.  And then, inevitably, "Where will he come out?"

Why, the hospital, of course!  Now!  Who wants something delicious?  A little something I like to call...a Lunchable?

...

He's taking this all quite seriously.  He is full of plans.  This time around, he's the one making promises.

"I will sing our baby brother some lullabyes to help him get to sleep," he says, and proceeds to demonstrate.  [Deep breath, bellowing.]  "JOHHHHHHN JACOB JINGLEHEIMER SCHMIDT!  His name is myyy name toooooooo!"

"I would like to go to the toy store," he casually mentions as we pass.  When I tell him that we're not buying any toys for him today, he looks genuinely aggrieved.  "But for our baby."

In the middle of the evening routine, he declares, "My baby brother can share my bathtub."  Rinsing him, I mention that we have a bathtub that's just the right size for a baby.  "But I will wash his mighty hams."  Three and a half years in, apparently I am in no hurry to teach him they're called thighs.

"I will name the baby...Isaac."

"I will name the baby...Little Boy Blue."

"I will name the baby...Natalie."  Because I guess I'm old school when it comes to gender identification, I gently opine that Natalie is usually a girl's name, and he gives me a steely look, then speaks as if I were the three-year-old and he a Prussian schoolmaster unimpressed with my unruliness.  "The baby...will be named...Natalie."

"My baby brother can share my big-boy bed."  I suggest that a baby might need to be more securely contained.  "I'll teach him how to sleep in it without falling out."  I explain that babies don't understand such things, not right away.  "Mama, he'll want to be near me."  And of course I tell him he's right.  Of course baby Natalie will.

Open mouth, insert speculum...I mean foot

When you get right down to it I do feel a little bit sorry for my doctors.  They've been nice people, all of them, well intentioned and caring, but let any one of them utter a single phrase that is less than exquisitely calibrated and I go all lucha libre on their competent white-coated asses.

But only in my head.  In person, I am almost faultlessly courteous.  (I only add "almost" because I know I've allowed myself the odd impolite guffaw here and there.  It's usually been immediately after I've been asked if I'm aware of the risk of high-order multiples, or prodded for a decision about how to handle any leftover embryos.  I excuse myself this lapse in manners only because I think those doctors have been in on the joke, having seen my ovaries in action.  Uh, in inaction.)

Lovely people, all.  If they have occasionally made a gaffe, it has usually been a mild one, kindly meant and easily forgiven.  (Usually.  I make an exception for the doctor I'd asked for birth control pills, who actually leaned in close and whispered, swear to God, "Just in case, or is there someone whispering in your ear?")  Some of them have even been people I think I'd have liked to be friends with, like the long-ago gynecologist who looked at my piercings, regretfully told me I'd have to remove them for my laparoscopy, and then reminisced wistfully about her college days, when she'd had a mohawk and a lip ring.

Believe me, I recognize my great good luck in this and appreciate it, especially having heard some real lulus from some real bozos.  A friend inside the computer pointed out Radar's "Gynecologists Say the Darnedest Things," a list of some of the creepiest things their readers have heard from a professional head tucked between their thighs.  And indeed some of them are weird.  But in my opinion they're nowhere near as cringeworthy as what a doctor, male, said to a friend of mine just before injecting the dye during her HSG: "Let's see if your insides are as pretty as your outside."

The comments at Jezebel about the Radar story are every bit as unsettling and, in places, hilarious: "My doctor once shouted, 'Wow, you are LUCKY! You're really tilted but in a good way. He must not have to work very hard at all!'"  "I mentioned my mother was a dentist. The gyno looks up from between my legs with a disgusted look on her face and says: 'You know, I could never do that. Looking into people's filthy mouths all day long...Ugh!'"  "Mine always tells me to say hi to my dad. Yeah. Awkward."  "The weirdest thing I've had happen after I had an exam was for the doctor to pat me afterwards, right on my mons pubis.  Like he was patting a puppy. A cute vagina puppy."

Woof.

Now I happen to think that given the, ah, emotionally charged nature of fertility treatment, plenty of you must have heard funnier, creepier, or both.  Feel like sharing?  If it makes you feel more relaxed, imagine me complimenting the sweet ballerina pink of your cervix as you type.

I LOVE JUSTINE ELIAS for the link.

SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWW

The trouble with having had so many legitimate reasons to freak out is that it gets kind of hard to tell the difference.

Two weeks ago I had a scan at my MFM's office.  Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring a week ahead of dates, in the 90th percentile for size.

Friday I had a scan at my OB's office.  Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring exactly correctly for dates, in the 60th percentile for size.

I am trying to figure out how to type an onomatopoetic representation of that sound a phonograph needle makes when it's suddenly being dragged across a feel-good pop hit from the '60s.  You know, like they sometimes do in movie trailers when they want to signify a sudden upsetting paradigm shift, like maybe that hot girl the camera was following down the street isn't really a hot girl at all, but Steve Buscemi in drag.  Oh, it starts out innocuously enough...

Sugar
Awwww, honey honey
You are my cannndy, girrrrl
And you got me SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWWhat the fucking FUCK?

...and, okay, I don't mind having my preconceived notions about the intrinsic nature of human beauty challenged, but once that record is scratched and the soundtrack changes to, I don't know, "Dude Looks Like a Lady" or something, the bottom line is that you're still looking at Mr. Pink in falsies and a Spandex minidress.  And the best you can say about the whole thing is that it could be worse.  It could be Benicio del Toro.

The OB who did the scan seemed unconcerned.  "I wouldn't worry" is what he said.  "You're not the one with a file that reads like Finnegan's fucking Wake" is what I answered.  No, that's a lie; finding myself incapable of speech, I actually just scissored my thighs apart, trapped his neck in an unforgiving viselike grip, and choked him until he turned the loveliest shade of periwinkle, to match his panicked, watering eyes.

No, that's a lie, too.  It was an inverted facelock camel clutch.

The thing is, he is almost certainly right.  Leaving aside normal variations in growth, the fact that the scan was done on different equipment by a different operator could easily lead to discrepancies that may sound significant to the patient — 30 percentile points! — but that are, in reality, mere clinical bagatelles.

Right?

At this point, my sense of when it is appropriate to worry is seriously skewed.  Sometimes a headache is just a headache.  Other times, it's a sign that your brain is about to ooze out of your ears if that baby doesn't come out now.  (My head feels fine, thanks for asking.)  Although Charlie was born at a great weight for his gestational age, the fact that my placenta showed marked signs of age — never normal in a preterm birth — and had an infarct showed that if he hadn't been born when he was, it's virtually certain that he would have begun to suffer from growth restriction.  And that's the best case scenario.  So even the faintest suggestion of slowed growth scares the busty Buscemi out of me. 

Given all this, I have decided to permit myself a small ration of low-grade anxiety.  The OB wants me to schedule a repeat scan for four weeks, pointing out that because of those normal variations, an earlier scan won't tell us much.  I feel sure he would forgive me my skittishness if he remembered that it was he who neglected to request a protein dip at my 28-week appointment with Charlie, and he who gave me cheerful leave to travel.  I don't blame him at all for failing to predict what happened, HELLP being what it is, but the association still makes me twitchy.  Therefore I am keeping the appointment I'd already scheduled for two weeks from now with my MFM, who did the original scan — you remember, the one we were enjoying before the perfectly unobjectionable "Sugar, Sugar" went all SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWell, no wonder Tony Soprano shot him with a 12-gauge.

MY PRAGNET BELLEY

First things first: Thank you so much for your concern.  I'm embarrassed and sorry to have made you uneasy.  Everything's absolutely fine.  I am well; this past Wednesday I hit the 26 week mark and there have been, thus far, no bold and daring escape attempts.  I've been mostly offline, visiting my mother, attending my brother's wedding, and trying to figure out what to say here next.  And then inspiration struck.  I know! I thought, sitting bolt upright in bed this morning.  I'll write a long impenetrable blog post about why I haven't been blogging!

It's hard to know what to write these days.  I don't write much about Charlie.  In fact, I'm finding it hard even to write about why I don't write about Charlie.  The responsible claim to make is that I respect his privacy and am trying to be careful about sharing his life with the world at large.  But that's not it, not really.  It's almost entirely out of stupefaction: I don't know how.  I don't have words.  I can tell you he's funny, for example.  I can even tell you exactly what he said, in tones of great good humor, as he bit the back legs off his cow-shaped cookie: "Now it can hop."  But I can't tell you how that bubble of laughter felt as it rose in my chest, or how hard it was to suppress, or the relief of letting it out, letting our son — our son! amazing even three years later — see that I find him utterly captivating.  See the problem?  Watching a three-year-old dance at a wedding is a relatively common experience, not worthy of hyperbole to anyone but his family.  But for his awestruck mother, whom words otherwise seldom fail, "captivating" doesn't cover it.

I don't write much about infertility these days.  One commenter suggested that since I am currently pregnant, with a reasonable expectation — holy disabled cow, 26 weeks — of a live birth, it would behoove me to, oh, how did she put it?  Step off.  In general, I resent being told to do so, even going so far as to bristle when I hear that polite disembodied voice at the end of a moving sidewalk.  ("No, lady, you watch your step.  Uppity robot bitch.")  But in this instance the commenter has a point.  What do I have to say about infertility these days that has any relevance whatsoever?  One and two-thirds children later, I can no longer speak of the loneliness and isolation infertile people feel on a daily chronic basis with any kind of immediacy.  (That is not, by the way, a complaint.)  Approaching the third trimester, I spend no time at all worrying about what we'll do if the pregnancy fails.  (Plenty could happen, we all know that, but contemplating any of it is a far cry from the frantic plan-B-ing we do when we see that seven-week spotting.)  And although pregnancy after infertility is an experience well worth chronicling, a pregnancy-after-a-child-after-infertility is different in every way.  I now have bloodthirsty cow-biting proof that not everything turns to shit, and that knowledge informs everything about the way I feel this time around.  Specifically, it makes this all much easier.  And easy and infertility don't mix.

So for a blog that confines itself to infertility, pregnancy, and parenting, what's left?  Only MY PRAGNET BELLEY.  (Someone found this site by Googling that term, can you believe it?  I must have words with the proofreading staff here.)  And while I have plenty to say on the subject, I am feeling kind of shy about saying it.  I got e-mail from a reader who was offended by an ad that ran on my site for a while, one featuring a picture of a bald wide-eyed infant, suggesting that maybe I had forgotten what it used to feel like to be confronted with such things.  My first reaction was, Well, huh.  Yes, I guess I have, in the way that we forget exactly what it feels like to drop a bowling ball on our foot.  We remember that it did hurt, but we can't re-experience the pain simply by trying to recall it.  And, Jesus, I don't want to.  I am thankful every day for that merciful amnesia. 

But then my second thought was sincere puzzlement: What am I doing here, then?  When pregnancy, a pregnancy in which I am fairly confident, is all I have to talk about, am I alienating people I care about every time I post?  I mean, more so than usual...?  Are infertile people coming here, reading my petty carping about veiny legs and pregnancy magazines, and feeling slugged in the gut by someone who used to get it?

This uncertainty has made me feel somewhat muted.  I want to talk about things like baby names, delivery plans, and, I don't know, onesies and Boppies and Soothies and other interesting products I refuse to name aloud, because, hey, sound like an ass much?  Normal mother-to-be things, things I couldn't consider last time because I was too preoccupied with fear.  I want to talk about where I am now, and about how happy I am to be here.  And I stop short, because, again, sound like an ass much?

But then I consider the proposition that that's all any of us can do, talk about where we are now.  And then I start hating myself for being so ridiculously self-indulgent as to imagine anyone expects otherwise.  And then I sit here and ask myself incredulously, Did I really spent almost all day writing a post about why I haven't been writing, instead of something funny or interesting or informative?

Why, yes!  Yes, I did.  But I won't do it again, nor will I drop out again so inconsiderately.  I will write, instead, about baby names (undetermined), delivery plans (hazy), and maybe even Charlie (delectable).  And also MY PRAGNET BELLEY (bruised but unbreached, hallelujah).

Very-gross veins

I am not especially vain.  Oh, sure, I like a little lipstick, a pedicure, a V-neck T-shirt that draws attention resolutely away from the ridiculous — my inherited tendency to under-chin pudge — and directs it to the sublime — a rack held unshakably aloft by a masterwork of modern engineering, the Wacoal 85185.  But that is as far as my interest in clothing stretches, and at the moment my hair looks like this was the year the swallows said, "Fuck Capistrano," and my legs, they go unshaven for seasons at a time.

So the physical repercussions of pregnancy have never been a major concern.  First of all, I haven't had many; I delivered Charlie early enough that I was spared many of the customary indignities.  ("Wow," said the saleswoman as I bought a nursing bra five days postpartum, "you look great." You think I'm slim? I did not say.  You should see my kid.)  Second, what marks I bear I think of as badges of courage.  In the case of my C-section scar, a thin red badge with an unfortunate dogleg at the end, unfaded after three and a half years.  In the case of the stretch marks on my breasts, silvery, crepey-looking badges.  You should see the fancy sash I wear for ceremonial occasions.  The rosette representing enduring nipple-related ambivalence is truly spectacular.

In other words, I haven't been bothered by the changes pregnancy has wrought.  That is, I wasn't bothered until Wednesday's visit with the hematologist.

Because I knew from previous experience that she'd want to examine my legs, satisfying herself that there were no deep vein thromboses I'd, oops, forgotten to mention, I shaved, lotioned, and chose my widest-legged maternity jeans.  (Since I own but a single pair, I did not linger long in the closet.)  I presented myself at the appointed time, hitched up my pant legs, and showed her my pallid shins in all their purple-mottled glory.

"This bruising," she said, "is to be expected."  An effect of the Lovenox, of course.  "And this..." she prodded the fronts of my legs with a curious finger.  "Any tenderness?"  No.  "Any redness in the surrounding tissue?"  Not that I'd noticed.  (I was too embarrassed to tell her that I hadn't really looked at my legs in months.  I wash, I jacket myself in a thick layer of Lubriderm, and I forget about them for weeks at a time, except insofar as I frequently use them to connect my torso to the floor.)

"Well, these are just varicose veins," she said, "not a big surprise since you are older."  I manfully swallowed the shriek that bubbled up, resituated my dentures more comfortably against my palate, shoved my walker to the side, and bent over, lumbago notwithstanding, to look at what she was indicating: a broad network of raised, wormy-looking blood vessels that appeared to be so near the skin that I could imagine I saw individual platelets whizzing through.  Varicose veins are apparently a common occurrence in pregnancy, with up to 40% of women manifesting them to some degree.  Although  they can be "uncomfortable and sometimes painful," they are not in themselves harmful or alarming; they "tend to improve" after pregnancy, though if they do not, there are, the Internet tells me, ways of dealing with them.  (I don't know about you, but to me, surgical vein stripping sounds simply delightful.  Even more captivating than the three little words, maternity support hose.)

But that is not a concern at the moment.  My own personal varicose veins are not painful, merely ugly.  Although the rest of my pregnant body somewhat resembles this:

...Hey, I said somewhat...

...my legs are a little closer to this:

Which makes me think that it might be time to buy another pair of jeans.  And perhaps a couple of caftans.  Because with legs that look like mine, the maternity Daisy Dukes I've been eyeing are clearly out of the question.  Unless you think they'd look nice with compression stockings...?

P.S. Because this has all been such a lark, perhaps I will title my next post, GAAAAH SKIN TAGS GAAAAH

P.P.S. Speaking of dentures, last night I dreamed I was having sex with none other than the first President of the United States, George Washington.  GAAAAH HIPPOPOTAMUS MOUTH GAAAAH

As a matter of fact I did kiss my mother with this mouth.

First my mother was here for a week.  To those of you who have expressed worry that I swear in front of my child like I swear on this blog, I will assure you that I don't even do so in front of my mother.  In fact, I can't even think a swear word in front of her.  In fact, I can't even think one while she's in the same state.  It happens as soon as she crosses the border, and it's weird: Somewhere between impulse and speech, each "fucking hell" effortlessly morphs into "laaaand o' Goshen."  Every last "goddamn it" turns into "well, I swanny."  Before you know it I'm do-declaring and heavens-to-Betsying and tarrrrnationing with the best of 'em.  Which is all well and good when you're hunched over the butter churn in your line-dried pinafore, but it does lead to a certain undesirable incoherence of style, if "style" is the right word for what I do in my posts.

And then!  Once she'd left, I sat down to write, a glorious stream of liberated profanity flowing from my fingertips.  But not ten minutes in, my computer suddenly shut off.  The long version of the story involves rending of clothing, gnashing of teeth, and frantic shaking of the backup drive to see if I could hear my data rattling around in there.  (It sounded a lot like a handful of nickels in a coffee can.)  Also weeping, anxious dry heaving, and hesitant prodding with a stick I found in the yard.  And then slinking away for a few days, then returning for a surprise attack, the last resort: plugging the machine's power cable into a different outlet.  And success.

So that is why I haven't been around.  I've been tongue-tied, out of an insurmountable inhibition about posting when in the bosom of my family, and computerless, out of an inability to apply a complex solution like "try another plug, jackass" to the simplest of problems.

Although a riveting passage about why I haven't been writing is indeed a tough act to follow — nothing people enjoy more than reading interminable blog posts about why there haven't been blog posts — I will try.  I am rounding the bend of 24 weeks, sailing into what promises to be the most unnerving part of this pregnancy so far.

The term you hear is "cusp of viability," that time between when a baby born early might possibly survive and when he would reasonably be expected to.  Some 23-weekers survive; most don't.  At 25 weeks, depending on whose numbers you believe, about half will, give or take.  And so on; the outcomes get better as a baby's gestation lengthens.  Last time around, I told myself that if I could just make it to 30 weeks, we would be in the clear.  I almost did, and we eventually were, but little of it was easy and none of it was certain.  Nevertheless, by 28 weeks the survival rate is around 90%.

This is a scary time for me.  I didn't worry much before now, because if something did go wrong — any of the unspecified somethings a pregnant woman doesn't dare to conjure — there was little to be done, and I'm relatively good at accepting the inevitable.  But if something went wrong now, everything would be done, and anything could happen, and that is downright terrifying.

That neurosis admitted, I can say that I don't spend every minute expecting things to go wrong, at least not quite yet.  If pre-eclampsia or HELLP is in my future, well, that's where it is — not today, and probably not soon, since if it recurs in subsequent pregnancies it tends to happen later in gestation.  (Egad, I must be feeling good if "tends to" reassures me.)  Gestational diabetes, although annoying,  would only complicate an early delivery, and not cause it.  And although my placenta is currently a mere 2.5 centimeters from my cervix, that's nothing like the complete previa I had last time, "virtually certain," according to my MFM, to migrate before delivery.

So not every minute do I expect things to go wrong; just one out of every, oh, fifteen minutes or so.  I still fear the fluke, the opposite of "tends to," because that's what's always gotten me before.  The stomach ache I had Friday night scared me, leading me to stand in front of the mirror and draw imaginary lines on my torso to determine if it was, in fact, upper right quadrant pain.  (It was, squarely within the invisible dotted lines, but better the following morning, with no repeats since.)  When I wake up with swollen hands and feet, I swear off added sodium for two days just to make sure that's the culprit, a staggering sacrifice for someone who copiously salts everything, often before tasting.  (You...you don't salt your toothpaste?  Oh, my stars.)  And I think about ways we could still be blindsided by complications we don't expect, and don't even know to fear.

But the scary part is background.  We're aware of certain possibilities, and are working to reduce their likelihood, to the extent that we can.  So far, all signs have been good, although I do dread Friday's obstetrician-mandated eye exam, because I hate that better-one better-two bullshit...I mean horsefeathers.  And the baby, whom I think of as Snowball II when I'm feeling optimistic and the Widowmaker when I'm not, is moving, and growing, and staying, for the moment, precisely where he belongs.

And for the moment, I feel, too, that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.  Which is, by cracky, a jo-fired sight better than working that butter churn like a round-shouldered motherfucking champ.