Haisla's Adventures in Endoland

Thanks all for your lovely and supportive comments after my last post. When things go south, it's great to know that there are people out there who will cheer you along.

I haven't been updating much lately, mainly because there hasn't been an awful a lot to update on.

My numbers are still creeping up ever so slowly (or were up until Wednesday) with an astonishingly snail-paced doubling time of approximately 137.5 hours. The last number was 257 or 275, I could't quite catch what the nurse was saying, since she also pronounced our pregnancy 'unviable' in the same breath. That kind of robbed my attention. I sort of knew that that was the case but it was another matter to hear it from the mouth of a healthcare professional.

It was surprisingly hard to go for the blood test at our clinic on Wednesday. Sitting in that waiting room full of hopeful women and their partners whilst I pretty much sat there knowing that my pregnancy is doomed.

Unfortunately my favourite nurse (whom I normally adore - she is so funny) didn't help the matter by being overtly cheery whilst drawing the blood. I don't know if she hadn't quite read my notes or whether she just really doesn't know how to deal with bad news, but our encounter left me feeling really out of sorts. If only she'd just acknowledged that things weren't looking great, that alone would have made me feel better. You know, let's just be real here. Although I probably would've burst into tears had she shown me sympathy, so maybe it was for the best after all. Nothing worse than leaving a fertility clinic with a tear streaked face.

Anyway, as they gave me the results (of 257 or 275) on Weds afternoon, I was told to give up the progesterone suppositories so that they could get a 'truer picture' at Friday's blood test (they've cancelled our scan). The bad news is that I am now anticipating to miscarry in Finland. Not the best of summer holiday plans, then.

I'm not spotting or bleeding yet. Somehow my body really seems to enjoy being pregnant, it just doesn't know how to do it very well, I'm afraid.

I have to admit, though, that for as long as those numbers are creeping up, there is still this 1% portion of my brain that refuses to give up. I try to give it as little airtime as possible, because you know, that way madness lies. But until the numbers start dropping and I start bleeding, I can't seem to quite let go. Because, maybe, just maybe it'll turn out that I am in that magical 1% group of women who have super-duper low hCG levels  and still manage to have healthy babies (unless of course those women exist only in urban legends). Anyway, if that turns out to be the case, I solemnly swear to visit every pregnancy / infertility forum and share my unicorn story with the world.

Because a girls' gotta have hope. Even if it's just to get her through her summer holiday.

The other reason for this desperate scrambling for hope is that one of my best friends in Finland has just very recently had the courage to tell us that she is 7 months pregnant (with her fourth child). She felt so bad for us, that she left the telling really, really late. Like two weeks ago late. For that alone, I need to be just a little bit pregnant when I see her. I don't know if I'll be able to face her 7 months' pregnant belly (not to mention her wonderful brood) whilst I'm miscarrying. That'd just be too hard and too cruel. And yet I know it may (and with a great probability, will) happen. So I'm steeling myself.

Anyone got any personal experiences of stopping progesterone at the tail-end of a failing pregnancy? How long did it take until the bleeding began?