she's convinced she could hold back a glacier, but she couldn't keep baby alive...

We're coming up on four months since we lost our little Bean, and instead of getting better, it feels like things are getting harder for me lately. Maybe it's because now that we've been given the okay to try again, my cycles have gone wonky. It's pretty much impossible to get pregnant if you don't ovulate. I've had two terrific cycles since the miscarriage when we weren't allowed to try, and now that we've been given the okay to try to get pregnant, nothing works. LOVELY.

So this is what's brought me back to blogging. I need a space to work through this and chronicle our hope for a family.

First a little about me.

My name is Suze. I'm married to Mike. We've been together for just over 8 years now, and we celebrated our second wedding anniversary in August.

We began trying for our first child in May 2009. It took more than a year before we'd get our first positive pregnancy test (BFP) but on May 26, 2010, we got a surprise. I was a day late. So I took a test. And when the second line came up, I didn't believe it. I'd peed on so many sticks in my life, all of them negative, I never really thought I'd see a positive test. I was meeting our Reproductive Endocrinologist for the first time that day - we'd finally got a referral since we'd been trying for a year with no luck. I went to the appointment, but instead of going through my medical history to discuss what testing he wanted to do, as was expected, he instead sent me for bloodwork, telling his assistant "This woman decided to make things easy for us by showing up pregnant." That's when it finally started to sink in. After all this time, I was pregnant! I couldn't wait to get home to tell Mike (who, of course, had guessed. The perils of having a really smart husband who knows you well, and also of being someone who gives everything away in her voice...). We were so excited, but still cautious. We told our parents, but no one else.

I had pregnancy symptoms soon after - nausea, food aversions (sugar. I couldn't stand sugar or candy or CHOCOLATE! I am a chocoholic normally but while I was pregnant, I couldn't stand it), and utter and total exhaustion. I'd never been so tired in all my life.

One of the benefits of seeing a RE is early ultrasounds, so we were scheduled for our first ultrasound at 6 weeks. That's when I first started to fear something was wrong. The baby couldn't be seen on the ultrasound, and the gestational sac was measuring only 5 weeks - a full week behind where I should have been. The RE wasn't worried - he just figured the dates were off. But I'd been charting, I knew when I'd ovulated, I knew how far along I should be. My doctor and my naturopath both tried to reassure me, telling me that my strong early pregnancy symptoms were a good sign. But to "ease my mind" the RE scheduled a new ultrasound 12 days later.

I did my best to think positively and believe that everything would be alright, but at the second ultrasound, at what should have been 7w5d, the baby was measuring only 6w2d, and its heartbeat was only 50 bmp (it should have been well over 100). The ultrasound tech was a sweet woman who told me not to worry, that maybe we were just catching the start of the heartbeat, but in my heart I knew better. And my worst fears were confirmed when the doctor came in to see me. "I'm afraid the news isn't good," he said, as kindly as possible. But a miscarriage was inevitable, he said.

Exactly a week later, at 8w5d, on June 29, 2010, I lost our little Bean.

The months since have been a rollercoaster of emotions. And doctor's appointments. At the same time as I found out about the pregnancy, I was diagnosed as being Hyperthyroid. I had always been hypothyroid, so this was strange. We were told this needed to be checked out before we could try again. Finally, at the end of August, we got the okay to try to conceive (TTC) again. We're hoping before long we'll be pregnant again, this time with our take-home baby.