That Said,

I always said that the only way you can successfully keep journal writing going, is if you forgive yourself from the obligation to "catch up" the journal when you fall behind. Otherwise, once you have a break in your writing, you never want to sit down to write again.

That said, I feel compelled to do a little emotional catch up: I need to go back to when I had just miscarried Curly Five, while Bruno was in Japan. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever been so low in my whole life. Even when we lost the boys, I was cushioned by huge amounts of shock and I was with Bruno, to whom I clung as if we were the twins. I think the loss of the boys came on me in waves: my mind protected me from experiencing the whole loss at once.

With this loss, I was without my buddy, it took me a while to call out to my family for help and I had no cushion. Instead I had the weight of everything that had already happened, everything we had already lost crushing into this fresh wound. I wandered around the house, literally wailing like a bad Greek tragedienne. A dear friend called and left a message, "I hope you are doing OK". I called back and ranted into the phone, "Of course I'm not OK, I am not remotely OK, I am nothing even approaching OK. I am a highway for little baby souls to die in and everything is pain and everything is blood, blood, blood...." She told me I sounded almost Joyce-ian. She got me to pause for air, and in that pause I heard what she had just said, and it made me laugh. Thank G-d for dear smart old friends.

Bruno came home, and we mourned together, and then time marched relentlessly on with holidays and parties and the New Year forcing itself into being. We squeezed in a few doctors appointments, one with our Ob/Gyn, and one with a perinatologist who specializes in cervical issues.

The perinatologist was maybe the most confident man I've ever met, for the good and the bad. I suppose you want someone like this on your team, but his confidence also led him to make a statement that set me back quite a ways, emotionally. He is completely convinced that if he performs a cerclage (a stitch in the cervix, done at 12 weeks of pregnancy), we will have a 90% chance of encountering no cervical problems again. Fabulous. He went on to say that because we were in small town Oregon when we had trouble, there was no one there with as much experience as him, no one with enough confidence to push back Pedro's bag of waters and perform an emergency cerclage. But now we had happily found our way into his fold, and he wouldn't let us out of his sight, and we would be fine.

OK. Gulp. Let me get this straight, Dr. Ego: if we had been in San Francisco and under your care, my sons wouldn't have died? And since when is Portland "small town Oregon". I immediately flashed back to early conversations from Oregon where my parents and brother and sister-in-law were angling to get us medivac'd to Stanford. I believe someone even suggested renting an RV and paying a nurse and driving me down to the Bay Area. And we told them all to leave us alone, that we were fine and receiving excellent care. And we were just going to quietly wait it out past all the trouble. And everything was fine, for three weeks, until it wasn't anymore.

Now, since that conversation, my Ob/Gyn told me that he knew of three emergency cerclages Dr. Ego had done in the last three months, and not one of them worked. But the damage was done to my psyche, and waves of fresh guilt lapped at my mind all through the holidays and well into the New Year.

Meanwhile, for these first two weeks of the 2009, I'd been harboring a secret fantasy that I was pregnant again. I knew it was nearly impossible, and that it must be some sort of mind game I was playing to get myself through. I started to bleed last week, and I picked up some medicine my Ob/Gyn wanted me to take after the return of my period. And all the while, I couldn't shake my fantasy. The first day I was due to take the medicine, I put it off all day, thinking: I'm pregnant. I finally confessed my little delusion to Bruno, who told me to take a store bought pregnancy test, just in case.

It came up pregnant.

I called the emergency hotline, was told NOT to take the meds, and to show up for a blood test to confirm the pregnancy. The test the next morning confirmed it, with Hcg levels of 70. Come in tomorrow for another test, they asked. Elevator going up: Hcg level of 98.8. Come in for another at the end of the week. Hcg level 234. They told me they think it is a little low.

OK, now you are just being mean.

The levels are more than doubling every 72 hours. What the hell good does it do to freak me out? There is no difference in treatment, no matter what the numbers. Nothing to do but think good thoughts, and see what is in store for us at the 6 week ultrasound. Which is next week.

Wish us luck.