How long, oh Lord, how long?

Beta: 29. Down from 37 in 48 hours.

A little while after thanking the nice doctor for this information, which is, you know, dreary and sad but at least Zombryo isn’t ripping me a new one somewhere important, and for giving me the follow-up plan of ‘come back in exactly one week for another beta test’, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked any of the really quite pressing questions I did actually have.

So I’ll ask you guys. Some of you might know.

1. Am I going to bleed again? (At a guess, almost certainly I will. Heigh ho).
2. OK then, when will I bleed? Keeping in mind I bleed like a punctured fire-hose, it’s quite important to me (and no doubt to my colleagues) that I don’t start that at work.
3. I’m taking the tearing pain for granted, and I do have a fair amount of co-codamol on stand-by, and a prescription for more. We’ll just draw a veil over that aspect of it all. I’m braced, much in the manner of someone in a tumbril (But it would nice to know when).
4. I am missing a hell of a lot of work. Again. Work are being sweet as anything about it, but seriously, how long is this going to take? When can I go back? Should I go back while waiting? No, scratch that. That is mental. See punctured fire-hose above. Remember how much I bled in October, when I was barely four weeks pregnant. The lavatories at work are seriously not a good place to miscarry.

In other issues currently bugging me, I received a letter from the Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic this morning. Aaaaaaaand… it was merely a note from Senior Doctor, to my GP, and this being my courtesy copy, saying on the 7th of December I saw this lady did tests referred her back to the Assisted Conception Unit yada yada yada. No results. No dates for when I might see the ACU. No idea what my blood test results say. No idea, in fact, whether this latest miscarriage was preventable. Or predictable.

The thought that H and I have been sucker-punched while still on our knees from the last go-round, and this, oh, if only by an infinitesimal maybe, could have been prevented…

(There is a tiny room deep inside my head, and inside it I keep a version of me, who howls and punches the walls until her knuckles bleed).

Plan for tomorrow. Call RCM. They sent me a letter with their number on. They can take the consequences. Also, call the ACU and ask if they know anything about this referral. Count my sanitary towels. Go to the shops and fill my prescription for co-codamol. Stock up on ice-cream. Admire the snow while it lasts.

(H has posted again. He’s not exactly enjoying this either).

Snowed under

So, our instructions were, return to Mothership this morning for another beta, 48 hours after the previous one, to see, you know, what, if anything, Zombryo is doing, and, possibly, when he/she is going to do it (so over the waiting, chez May. Over. It).

We woke up to an inch of snow, and more falling all the time from a sky like a tupperware lid.

No problem, we both own big boots. We stomped through to the train-station, and found the trains were running a little late, but still fine. So we got to Mothership on time, and they were able to take blood pretty much within ten minutes of our arriving.

And the nurse recognised me from October, Goddamnitalltohell. No one wants to hear ‘ooh, are you back here again?’ from the nurses at the Early Pregnancy Risk Assessment Clinic.

To my annoyance, all the veins in my right arm, including The Really Good One You Can’t See But Can Feel, had disappeared, so the nurse had to go back into the same vein they punctured on Monday, which while not massively bruised was, you, know, bruised, and this hurt like a, well, it hurt. Also, I am getting a rash from the tape they stick your cotton-wool ball down with. It’s a bitch to get off again later.

And then we trundled, slid, trundled, back to the station, to find in the 30 minutes we’d been up at the hospital, the transport system had noticed it was like, proper snowing, and was beginning to fold. We got on a train that was running about 15 minutes late, which a fellow commuter referred to as ‘the last train out of Siberia’ in a voice juicy with sarcasm. H checked the travel updates on his iPhone, and woah, sarcasm misplaced. Points frozen, train-wheels skidding on the lines and unable to grip and pull the train along, electric engines burning out, station after station shutting.

Sadly, even the most fresh and inches-deep snowfall looks revoltingly sordid after five minutes of traffic and pedestrians and dogs (urgh. Yes you do still have to pick it up if it’s snowing, you horrible little dog-owner). The handkerchief-sized front gardens were the prettiest, with each leaf and twig bearing its own little inch-fat snow-cone. At one point H scooped a handful of snow off a wall and, looking sideways at me, threw it at the (deserted) bus-stop.

‘Satisfying?’ I asked.

‘It would have been more satisfying to throw it at you, but I don’t know how you’d react,’ he answered.

‘I don’t know either. I might have cried. I am terribly, terribly brittle and precious at the moment.’

‘Exactly,’ he sighed.

And then I walked under a tree, which decided this was a good moment to off-load a little weight, wompf, right onto my hat. H started sniggering helplessly, which set me off laughing after all. I threw a snowball at him, naturally. I have my pride.

And now we are back at home, and waiting. I double-checked with the nurse, and they won’t call back until evening, but at least now I know evening means after dinner and not, say, 5pm.

The snow is still falling. It’ll be just fabulous if I need to go back to hospital and we can’t get there.