GD and also worried about no symptoms at 6 weeks
Hi there, this is going to be a little bit of a whinge so I apologise in advance but I just need somewhere to vent and I want to preface this by saying I feel really guilty for even thinking it but I know GD is real and it helps to know others feel the same.
I am literally the only one out of my friend group who doesn’t have a daughter. The last one in our group just had her first and it was a baby girl. I don’t know why I wanted a daughter so bad because my relationship with my own mum is not great, we don’t hang out and go get our nails done or anything so maybe I am better off not having a daughter.
My first pregnancy happened by accident but we were about to start trying so it was a happy and unbelievable accident. DH had been wanting to have kids for years and I kept delaying for travel and fun I guess but I was ready to start trying. That pregnancy ended in an MMC at what should have been 10 weeks but the baby stopped growing at 7 weeks. I didn’t tell anyone (apart from DH) and kind of sunk into a depression for a while with a single focus – getting pregnant again as soon as possible which of course made things even harder and take even longer. I obsessively temped and OPK-ed and BD-ed every second day until we gave up and made an appointment to discuss IVF options. The IVF doctor told me about a tubal flush which he said had the effect of increasing fertility as it cleaned the tubes out and made it easier to conceive for the next few cycles. I was super keen to try but he said I had to wait until my period came. “Why?” I said “in case you’re pregnant now” he said, and lo and behold I was. Almost a year after I lost my first pregnancy I was pregnant again. We didn’t care about gender but I think I secretly hoped a tiny bit more for a little girl because all my friends had girls and I wanted my kids to be best friends with my friends kids.
DS1 was a surprise gender until he was born but it was ok because I knew we would have another chance for a girl.
My next pregnancy became stressful for a different reason. I contracted CMV in my first trimester which can have catastrophic effects on the baby ranging from blindness to deafness to organ or brain damage or even death in utero. My doctors basically advised me to terminate without outright saying it. Amniocentesis found CMV in the amniotic fluid and under normal circumstances that would mean a 10% chance of the baby being born affected by some form of disability, The amount of CMV in my amniotic fluid was so high that those odds now jumped up to 60% chance of being born with a disability. We were also told that we would be unable to try to conceive again for at least 2 years if we did choose to terminate or we would risk the same thing happening.
We decided to continue on with the pregnancy and it was extremely stressful. I would have scans every fortnight to look for damage or calcifications on the organs, signs that the disease was taking hold. I held my breath at the start of every scan until she said all was looking normal. And then as the next scan would creep closer my anxiety would creep in again and take hold. Every other week I would go to hospital and have a 4 hour IV infusion of an experimental treatment to try and stall the effects of the CMV. I also had an MRI on the babies brain while still in utero to look for signs of brain damage. In all the chaos, I didn’t think I was really worried about the gender because the bigger worry was whether the baby would be ok. I knew I wanted it to be a girl but I just had a feeling it was a boy and I couldn’t keep the slight note of disappointment out of my voice when I told people although I tried to make it sound playfully sardonic. I think I kept that one a surprise because I wanted to hold on to the possibility of a girl for as long as possible. We were extremely lucky and DS2 was born asymptomatic with no effects from the CMV which I will forever be thankful for. My midwife called him a he when they were breaking my waters so I had a few hours to get used to the idea that I was going to be a boy mum before it was fully confirmed. I guess I didn’t really have GD back then because I just felt so happy and lucky that he was alive and healthy. And I think I secretly thought we had 1 more shot at a girl (I was 36 then).
DH and I talked about a 3rd and we decided that we would try PGD because we heard that if you have 2 kids of one gender and naturally conceive a 3rd it is an 80% chance of being the same gender (another boy). We live in Australia where PGD is not legal so we knew we would have to travel to the US for it with both kids. We put a bit of money aside specifically for that and we planned to attempt the trip in Feb this year when my work contract finished. I ended up getting another work contract that completely overlapped my old one so we decided to delay the US trip until August. And then the Pandemic happened.
Now it looks like overseas travel will not be back to normal for YEARS. I can’t risk taking my kids somewhere they might contract COVID (still don’t know the full effects of the CMV on DS2’s little body – although thankfully he is still symptom free) and with 2 week quarantines at either end I couldn’t be away from them for 6 weeks so we sort of gave up on the idea of PGD. I started looking at what foods might help sway pink but I hadn’t really thoroughly looked at it and just did a combo of googling what different people had said. I reduced meat and upped my dairy and I started intermittent fasting and eating mostly green soup and yogurt and walnuts – more to lose weight than anything else – didn’t know skipping breakfast could sway pink then so that was a bonus.
My friend had just had her baby girl and I was feeling kind of depressed about being the only one with no daughter. DH wanted to use protection to BD so we could do a proper sway later in the year and I said we didn’t need to bother because it took so long to fall pregnant the other times (nearly a year and then over a year). 2 weeks later I got my period and I think I was like on the verge of being about to buy a pink sway diet plan but then my period only lasted 1 day. I felt weird in the stomach but thought maybe cramps? But after a full day of no bleeding I was like hmm maybe…? I had some opks as I had decided to start seeing what my cycle was doing and when I was ovulating so I peed on them and they came up super positive. I grabbed the kids and ran down to buy some tests and they all came up positive. I was super shocked because we only BD-ed once and it was what I thought must have been 6 days before ovulation (I must surely have been wrong about that). So then I thought wow what if this is my girl? Excited for a couple of days but then I did a clearblue test with the weeks on it and it came up as 1-2 weeks when I thought it should have said 2-3 weeks. So then I thought chemical. I went and got my blood drawn and the betas were on the lower end (368 at 4 weeks 4 days) but they were more than doubling every 48 hrs (and then 2186 at 5 weeks 1 day) so doc said just wait for the dating scan and then come back.
I know low betas generally mean boy and I don’t feel sick at all which also usually means boy. I have dark chin hairs which also seems to point to boy but I think these hairs were already here before I got pregnant. I had been trying to IPL them for a few months which meant I had to stop plucking them so they had become more noticeable I guess. Anyway my point is I’m 99% sure now it’s a 3rd boy and I just keep thinking about what a messy and dirty house I’m going to live in now and how I will never have a little shopping buddy to go get our hair done and have coffees. I know it’s stupid.
I’m also now around 6 weeks and have zero symptoms even though aa week or 2 ago I felt kind of bleurgh, so part of me also now thinks it’s a chemical or MMC and just hasn’t started bleeding yet. Is one small part of me hoping it is an MMC so I can start again and try a proper Pink sway diet? I don’t know. I just know I feel miserable and like I have a 0.000005% chance of the outcome I want which is a healthy baby girl. I’m just bummed. I’m nearly 39 so this was pretty much my last chance and if it is an MMC who says I can even get pregnant again? Maybe this was my last chance at a baby at all let alone a girl. I dunno. Maybe I am being selfish and I definitely feel ashamed for wanting it to be a girl but how can you change your feelings?
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk and letting me vent, sorry if I offended anyone.
