Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

Pregnancy after infertility and previous miscarriage sure is a nail biter.

I'm going crazy with doubt and fear. Each morning I wake up and decide if I am pregnant or not. This is how I determine that:
Poke at boobs. Sore? Things are ok. Not sore? Panic.
Did I get up to pee in the middle of the night? Yes? It might be ok. No? Clearly, I've miscarried and don't know it.

With my first pregnancy, I didn't have many symptoms and since I didn't miscarry until 12 weeks I really did have a healthy pregnancy (yes, heartbeat and all) for longer than I had an unhealthy pregnancy. I got sore boobs later in the pregnancy and only for about a week. Here's the thing: my boobs are never sore. I don't get sore boobs pre-period, actually nothing affects my boobs. Sometimes I wonder why I have them. At any rate, I really shouldn't put the future of any pregnancy in my boobs. They're a wild card at best. But I do. I put a lot of emphasis on how they feel during pregnancy. I poke at them so much I wonder if any sensitivity might be from me, well, poking at them. I also poke at them absent-mindedly...which means I've found myself doing it in public. Today I wished I had weighed my enlarged boobs because now I think they are smaller - I really need a reference point. But I didn't, so now I'll just wonder...are they smaller? I can't tell. Clearly I need a boob intervention.

The "getting up in the middle of the night to pee must mean things are progressing well" is another ludicrous thought that I just can't shake. It's ludicrous for a couple reasons. One, the urge to do this started the day I started the progesterone in oil shots. Hello, my embryos were an hour a way, they weren't even in my uterus. Obviously, this isn't a symptom I can put much faith into either way. But I do....

My tummy doesn't feel great and actually a little nauseous at times but I tend to attribute that to my ever increasing nerves. That also doesn't make any sense.

It's impossible to make any sense of any of it. It's funny, when fertiles find out they're pregnant, they're ecstatic. Some of them do cutesy things to tell their husband or significant other that they're expecting. It can range from a Bun in the Oven t-shirt and a big grin, or commonly a little onesie advertising their husband's favorite sports team...it's sometimes a big production. Infertiles think they will scream, cry and make a big deal out of it, but typically, we don't.

Typically, we react much differently. We kind of look at the test (or listen to the nurse tell us our betas are positive) and think "Hmmm. Well, ok. That's cool." But we're scared to get our hopes up. Throw a previous miscarriage in there and you've got a whole ball of "Oh, alright, thanks for letting us know." Back to your regularly scheduled programming. Then the family and friends you've told are excited and you keep saying, "Oh, it's early." They don't understand that to me, this pregnancy will be successful once my child starts kindergarten and not a second earlier.

I know I'm normal. Those that have experienced pregnancy loss and a new pregnancy within 6 months of the loss know what I'm talking about. We all know it's not rational, we all know it's really not healthy, but we also all know it's normal. It just may drive me crazy, though. Or crazier, I should say.