Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Blood everywhere

<-- More Daintree National Park

It's funny, how your mind leaps ahead.
For one week, we knew we were pregnant.
Pictures in my mind:
  • Telling Mum at Christmas and how beside herself with delight she'd be. I was going to get her a card, you know, one of those ones that says 'Merry Christmas Grandma,' and give her a flight up to visit the new baby after next August, as a present;
  • A working bee to transform the current bathroom into the baby's room;
  • Making a quilt for the cot with some bright thick silk kimono offcuts I bought specially in Cairns last week;
  • Working out the budget - how I was going to support my wife & child - I'd need to stop travelling, it'd be tight but we'd be okay;
  • And of course, all the things we need to do to child-proof the house...
I got home last night and had one night with pregnant Lovergirl, lying with my arm over her belly. I suppose it was dead even then.

Now - blood everywhere.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh no. I'm really sorry. That's known as a chemical pregnancy, when it doesn't get to the stage of showing up in clinical signs such as a heartbeat. It happened to me in my first IVF (and other times). It's usually because the particular egg that was fertilised didn't have enough 'oomph' to keep going.
Still, it shows that pregnancy can happen.
Take care.
Suzo

Anonymous said...

What is a chemical pregnancy?

A chemical pregnancy is another name for a very early miscarriage.

When implantation occurs, but the pregnancy fails to develop properly, it is called a chemical pregnancy. That's because you were technically pregnant (you produced the chemical HCG), but a normal pregnancy did not result. You see it as a regular period, or a period that is a few days late.

Chemical pregnancies occur very frequently. That is probably what happens in most of the months that you are trying but don't get pregnant. These are not considered miscarriages (though they are technically very early miscarriages), and have no effect on your ability to get pregnant in the future.

It can take up to a year to get pregnant. That's not because there were no sperm to fertilize the egg. If you are actively trying, there usually is sperm available. The egg is there, too. However, many things can go wrong.

Human reproduction appears to be a very wasteful process. Every woman is born with millions of eggs and each man produces trillions of sperm during a lifetime. Most are never even used. Even when the conditions are right for pregnancy (a sperm meets an egg) many things can and do go wrong. The egg could be abnormal, the sperm could be abnormal or the combination could be abnormal. In any of these cases, the fertilized egg could fail to grow.

Or it is possible for the egg to grow, but then when it gets to the uterus, it doesn't implant. Or it implants, but stops growing and is washed out with a menstrual cycle. Or it starts growing and you miss your period, but then it stops growing. In that case, you would get your period a few days late.

Even after a pregnancy is fully established, there is still a 20% chance of miscarriage.

Anonymous said...

oh.
take care of yourselves.
xxx

Stegetronium said...

thank you very much for concern & thoughts
It's two days later & we're recovering, trying not to make a huge mountain out of a very common molehill experience... I suppose a week is not much really - it's just that - it took us so long to get to this point, you'd think it would be only fair that it would go smoothly from here...

Anonymous said...

I'm so sorry.

Anonymous said...

Coming in late on this--very sorry.