18 months

[Photo removed]

Dear V.

Today you would have been 18 months old, most probably running around and being a big handful. How would you have interacted with your younger cousin? Would you have been naughty? Would you be saying your first words? What new things would you be discovering? Would I have appreciated you every day? What kind of mother would I have been to you?

One of your brothers has already come and gone. Your youngest brother is still here. I can't pretend that he wouldn't be here if you were here. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that he would still be on his way if you were still here. I hope he can stay with us for longer than you could.

Life changed so much for Daddy and me 18 months ago. Yesterday we discussed again just how much you looked like him. Your eyes, your lips, your nose - they were all instantly recognisable as Daddy's, even in the face of death. Maybe your hair was mine. I was born with a full head of hair too. Naniji told me that the hospital staff used to come and look at me as they had heard all about the baby with the full head of hair. Only your Naniji and Papi and Mami came to look at you.

I wish you were here V. I love you so much. It pains me that life goes on. I never thought it could. A piece of me died with you, I still feel that very strongly. My poor baby. I wish I had paid more attention. I'm so very sorry that I let you down. The rest of my life will be shaded by the lack of your presence. My beloved firstborn son.

Love Mummy

Good things in the day

I've had a frustrating day.

Friday's are my day off. After Moksha died I went back to work and after a few months changed my working hours so that I worked 4 days a week instead of 5 days a week. I'm lucky to work for a company that doesn't mind that sort of thing at all.

Key point: I also took a 20% pay cut along with my supposed 20% reduction in hours.

I felt that I really needed this day off a week to myself and actually I really do appreciate it.

Now in reality my workload wasn't cut in proportion and I have a tendency to work longer on the days I do work. But I have reflected on this holistically and still appreciate my day off per week.

I made a special effort to leave work yesterday at 6pm. I have really been feeling the tiredness kick in and need to prioritise my pregnancy into being a healthy one. All this meant is that there is a thing I have to do for Monday which I had planned on spending 2 hours on today. This is what I actually did today:

1) Wake up at 6:30am along with my husband. Not because of him, he was ultra quiet and even got up on his own before the alarm went off and switched it off. No, it was because of the elephant-woman in the flat upstairs who seemingly wakes up at 6am every single day and decides to perform a high impact step aerobic routine followed by an artistic and real look at what her bedroom would look like if she rearranged all the furniture.

2) Check some work emails (offline) and write some replies (offline). Realise that today is the day that not only my wireless router doesn't work but my broadband modem doesn't work either, even with the archaic cable set up.

3) Go to the post office to pick up my new wireless router and broadband modem - waiting there for me since Wednesday, but seeing as how I work during post office opening hours, couldn't actually pick it up until today.

4) Bring it home and move some furniture of my own to get to the phone line, get down on my hands and knees in the inevitable dust that is there, disconnect all the old equipment and follow the instructions to set up the new equipment. This is quite an annoying task at 7 months pregnant. Get very hot. Get annoyed. Clean up the dust.

5) Call a "help"line to find that the broadband connection hasn't been set up by the provider on their end yet despite information to the contrary. Speak to an extremely unhelpful person who says, "well, maybe it will be at 5pm tonight, maybe tomorrow but there's nothing on the record so I don't really know and I can't guarantee anything. No, I can't find out anything else. No, you can't speak to a supervisor."

6) Become very frustrated. Write some more emails (offline). Realise I am getting late for my growth control check-up (but know that the specialist is always running late).

7) Grab a yoghurt - yes, I have missed my doctor-prescribed mid-morning healthy snack again and dash out of the door with no lunch.

8) Park, walk to the specialist, eat my yoghurt, and wait there until about 1 hour after my actual scheduled appointment. Step into the waiting room full of pregnant people and choose to wait in reception alone instead. Watch as a young woman leaves in tears with a friend who has a (living, born) baby in tow and someone I presume is her husband. What bad news did she get, I wonder?

9) See the specialist. Beanie is becoming a big baby and estimated weight is now 1.2kg, up from 730g on 7th January. He is now in the >95th percentile. Worry about gestational diabetes again. Worry about big babies facing more in utero risks. His cord isn't around his neck at present.

10) Pretty hungry but stop v. briefly at the office to replicate my emails. (Normally I work at a client's offices and so hardly step foot in my own company office any more). I don't want to bump into anyone and have the "hey, you're pregnant!" conversation. Do bump into someone and manage to cut them short:

Her: "When are you due!"
Me: "I really don't want to talk about it."
Her: "OK, I understand, but you're feeling okay about it, right!"
Me: "No, it's really stressful."
Her: "I understand."
Me: "I haven't told many people, so please could you keep it to yourself?"
Her: "But it's pretty obvious."
Me: "I know but I hardly ever come here anymore so no-one really knows."
Her: "OK, I'll keep it to myself."

Major, major denial on my part.

11) Drive back home and pick up my husband's dry-cleaning despite being starving. Curse a driver going at about 30 mph on the frigging motorway. Curse a woman who pulls out of a parking lot without looking. Get steadily more and more pissed off mainly due to hunger. It's time for my doctor-prescribed mid-afternoon healthy snack but I haven't even managed lunch. On my day off.

12) Get home and think about how I am just not going to get 2 hours work done today due to utter lack of motivation and resentment for this supposedly being my day off. So I will have to do it at the weekend. Finally eat something and try the wireless connection set-up again. Another phone call and this time it works!

But you know the key good things about today which is what I should focus on (not in any particular order):

- I had breakfast with my husband as I got up early enough. (He was on a business trip most of the week and got back yesterday)
- Beanie is alive and kicking and was doing well at 1:15pm this afternoon
- I got free parking at the car park near the specialist clinic as the ticket machine wasn't working
- My wireless internet connection works now
- My mum reminded me that since I am going to be induced early, it's not necessarily a bad thing if Beanie is on the big side.

How was your day?

Distraction by Niobe

See here for what to do

Increasing stress

I have been offline for a while as I've been busy at work but also because the wireless part of my wireless connection at home stopped working. So I'm typing this crouched by my broadband box, tethered by an archaic cable of all things.

This pregnancy is definitely becoming more and more stressful. I am doing my kick-counts (at the moment once a day but I would hope to go to twice a day whenever I stop working). This helps as I can objectively see no slowdown - Beanie generally takes no more than 30 minutes to make 10 movements.

Although I'm not doing formal kick counts in the morning, I do note in my head the morning movements. Some time over the last few days Beanie decided he wasn't going to systematically move anymore when I woke up and turned over in bed. This has sent me to the Doppler before 7am several times over the last few days. I have to wait at least 20 minutes after taking my thyroxine supplement in the morning before eating anything. Of course this morning as soon as I had eaten my breakfast he kicked up a storm but this was after a panic-stricken heartbeat search.

But god, this is all making for increased stress. I'm seeing my OB this afternoon and I'm going to ask her which hospital I should go to in a mad panic at the moment. The clinic where I would deliver if we make it to the end is not one that can deal with premature babies, so until 36 weeks I would have to go to the main state hospital which is the best equipped but further away or one other hospital which is closer but smaller.

And of course, I am only on a journey which is taking me closer and closer to where everything went wrong with V. I really feel the pressure of being the only person who could (and didn't with V until it was too late) detect slowed down movement. It is ultimately my responsibility and I failed V. I waddled to the goddam cinema in a heatwave the night before he died whilst he was probably already in trouble.

I am in no way psychologically preparing myself for bringing a live baby home but that's okay with me.

I'm also a little overworked at the moment and will have to tell my boss on Monday that I need to cut back - cutting back in this case means I will have to start leaving work at 6pm instead of 8pm or I'm pretty sure that my OB will reduce my working hours on medical orders sooner rather than later. I am beginning to feel the fatigue. I had to organise and run an all day workshop on Monday which saw me putting in a 12 -13 hour day at work and going into the office on Saturday to print swathes of documents for the participants. That's what I need to cut back on.

I also haven't been reading much recently, so off to check some fellow bloggers updates.

No more Sachertorte for me

I failed my 1 hour glucose test - only by a smidgen apparently.

Three hour test scheduled for Friday morning.

Updated on Friday evening: I passed the three hour test. All the results (fasting, 1 hour, 2 hour and 3 hour) were normal. We'll do the one hour test again at 30 weeks just to be sure.

OB still told me to cut down on sweet things and to avoid eating too many carbs....

Minutes of my birthday

Many thanks for the birthday wishes for yesterday.

Overall I had a pretty good day.

It started badly at midnight as I missed Dad terribly. It's my first birthday without him and there's no card with his neat handwriting in it and no book ordered from my Amazon wishlist. And he died at 68 - so I am officially past half his age. I don't know why that mattered but it served to make me feel older.

So after a rather tired night, with the usual odd nightmares (I had those with V. too) I went to work in the morning and had my annual feedback session with my manager. He told me that he was going to request the top rating for me (subject to agreement from a team of other managers on the account I work on).

This session ran over a little and as a consequence I had to gob down my glucose rather quickly. Luckily I wasn't sick. Then I picked up DH (who had also taken the afternoon off for my appointment and my birthday) and we went to the OB's office.

Heartbeat was heard and Beanie was seen moving around. Once again I could see him waving on the screen but couldn't feel it. We saw his very clear little boy parts again. My cervix is "very long with absolutely no pressure". We discussed low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) shots for the 3rd trimester. My OB had already spoken to the haematologist to get her opinion.

I have a mild clotting disorder called Factor V Leiden - mild as I only have the hetereogenous version of it. This means I only have one gene with the disorder - homogenous FVL is a much more serious clotting disorder. It was only discovered that I had it in the battery of tests I had after V. died and after that both my brother and my mother discovered they had it too. My mother never lost any pregnancies and my grandmother had six children. My mother says my grandmother didn't lose any pregnancies either but I reckon she might have lost early pregnancies and not even known about it herself. But there's no evidence of that.

New statistics show no strong evidence that mid-late term obstetric problems are caused by heterogenous Factor V Leiden. It may cause early miscarriages. My D-dimers are checked regularly and I'm taking baby aspirin every day. LMWH has to be self-injected everyday, but is prophylactic not therapeutic. In short it wouldn't do any harm to me or Beanie to take them, but there's no real evidence that I need them either.

So we've decided that I'll keep taking the aspirin and keep having my D-dimer levels monitored and keep seeing the foetal medicine expert for blood flow scans in the placenta and the cord and only if a problem begins to show will I start doing the LMWH shots (when you start them, they have an immediate effect, unlike the thyroxine supplements I take which take several days to build up). It's not like I'm clamouring to start injecting myself everyday, although if I was told I had to for Beanie's sake, I wouldn't hesitate.

Then DH and I went out for a late lunch together and he bought me a new mobile phone for my birthday. He had also got my favourite handbag repaired. After walking around, my back was playing up again, so we came home and watched the last episodes of Season 3 Des.per.ate Hou.sew.ives on DVD and ate some of the little Sachertorte birthday cake he got for me - possibly my favourite cake ever.

So although I am now 35 years old (and sadly not 5 as my 3 year-old niece claimed over the phone) and don't like that at all, the day was pretty good.

Two weeks at home

I am back home now and have taken my last flight for this pregnancy. I also succumbed into purchasing a Doppler (not available here but got one in the UK) and started my kick-count charts yesterday. I am going to try and use the Doppler for panic mode only and don't use it systematically every day.

It's my 35th birthday on 3rd January. (I share my birthday with Natan's). I'm working a half day and at 12pm have to take my glucose for the gestational diabetes test at my appointment at 1pm. It did cross my mind that an appointment on my birthday might not be the best idea in case of bad news but I'm feeling okay about it now.

I first got pregnant when I was 32 and utterly innocent about obstetric tragedies. I didn't dream that at 35 I would still be waiting to bring my live baby home.

I spent Christmas with my brother, SIL, niece and nephew (who is 1 year old). It was tough, also because I had a tendency to view them as germ-ridden hives of potential foetus-killing infections. I washed my hands a lot and didn't pick either of them up. I got stressed about the cloths used to wipe their mouths lying around on the kitchen surfaces, about my niece's elephant security blanket being put on the radiator with the clean tea-towels, about bottles not being washed up promptly, pacifiers being left on the table and my nephew putting all the living room coasters in his mouth. (Note: I'm fully aware that this is what small kids do - didn't stop me being stressed about contracting parvovirus or chicken pox whilst pregnant).

In fact I spent as little time as possible with my nephew. He is now pulling himself up to standing and this brought home clearly how V, at 5 months older, would have been running around everywhere causing havoc by now. He also screamed a lot at night, most likely due to jet-lag and separation anxiety (he would scream for ages, his parents were trying to get him to go cold turkey since he apparently sleeps fine at home, but if they went in to see him he would stop screaming immediately). Earplugs helped me.....

My niece, 3 years old, is very well-behaved and quite smart. Her parents seem to have done a pretty good job with her so far (she is sent to the naughty step à la Supe.rnan.ny quite quickly if she misbehaves at home).

All this notwithstanding, I was fairly glad to leave the house after two weeks, except for leaving my mum. She dropped us off at the airport and I had a flash, for which I was totally unprepared, of the equivalent last year, which turned out to be the last time I ever saw my Dad alive.

Whilst my mum is happy to have grandchildren and company, my brother can sometimes be a bit of a selfish git (a big exception was the way he came over from the US, pretty much for a weekend, so that he could participate in V's goodbye ceremony and how he called me very often after that). He does have a slight tendency to let everyone else do things for him whilst he only does stuff for himself. He is an actively involved father though. My SIL's time is fully taken up with looking after the two kids. So my mum is cleaning up regularly after everyone and cooking meals. She got quite cross with me if I lifted anything so I didn't help much with the vacuuming...

I hope she will come to visit us in February since I can't go and visit her for a while (I hope).

DH has been wonderfully supportive for months now and we are pretty loved up in general. One thing to be very grateful for.

I wish all those reading this a 2008 free from tragedy, sadness and despair.