Hope, of a sort.

Who'd'a thunk that cervical fluid would actually make you feel better?

So yes, I've still been upset. Kept my office door shut today because I don't really feel like dealing with people, and I really should be focusing on getting work done (something that hasn't really happened in a few weeks). Joe has been a rock, coming in when he hears me cry, giving me a shoulder to cry on. Being sick the last few days hasn't really helped the mood because having a fever just makes all the little aches and pains worse.

But for the last few weeks, I've continued tracking my basal temps. It's been all over the board, my system apparently is having difficulty clearing out the hormones (the fact that my hips still hurt means that the Relaxin hormone is still doing things to me), and the fact that I am now on CD18 without having ovulated yet is somewhat disturbing. I normally ovulate on CD14. I know that many women have problems rebounding after a D&C or even just a normal miscarriage, but I have been getting a little worried that I saw no signs of anything at all. I know they say to wait up to 6 weeks for a period before thinking things are abnormal, but that doesn't mean I haven't been somewhat worried that O hasn't showed up yet.

But last night I started to notice a cervical fluid change. I went from "dry" to "sticky". Usually that starts to mean that the system is prepping for O. This morning I checked again, and found it was almost creamy, plus I checked cervical positioning, and it was relatively high, and softish. This starts to point to the system actually restarting itself, and one of the reasons I never stopped temping after the miscarriage. I needed to know when my system was actually rebooting.

While it still hasn't O'd, it means that it's recouping. Obviously everything's not "systems as usual" yet, but it's working on it.

Of course, this means that BD time for the next O may come right in the middle of Christmas... When I'm down at my parents' house. Oy. Nothing psychologically kills the sex drive like doing it in your parents' house.

However, the fact that I'm starting to feel my body working towards O means it's healing. And that, right there, is at least cause for some hope.

I will still wind up being an emotional basket case for a while, as my hormones are still going off the deep end (my low temps this month are nowhere near what my low temps have been in the past, indicating that pregnancy hormones, while diminished, are still rampant). But there is at least a little something to try and give me a little hope.

Losing this little one isn't going to go away, ever. The experience changes you in a way you might never have anticipated. Much as the rest of the world may not even have ever been aware of its existence, I was. I could feel it. There was something in there. It was more than just a parasite to me. It was my genes, my womb, my child. And it's gone. This means now for the rest of my life, I will forever have to fill out medical charts with "surgery" on them and have to explain it over and over, something that I really don't want to have to do. I don't ever want to have to go through this experience again, to say it is less than pleasant to have your system come to a crashing halt and be in tears and depressed for weeks on end is an understatement.

But whatever that child was, it would be a disservice to that child to never try again. After doing some research yesterday, I found that 50%-90% of all first-time pregnancies end in miscarriages (they can't really track the chemical pregnancies). Why? The mother's immune system recognizes the father's genes as a foreign body, and tries to expel it (I hate having to refer to this child as an it, but I never knew what gender the child was). Apparently after a first miscarriage, the likelihood of a second goes way down, because the mother's system starts to recognize it and doesn't attack it. So while this was way further along than one might wish for it to happen, this little one may pave the way for the next one to be born.

That, combined with a little CF, gives me hope.

I would do anything to not have lost my first child. But that child may have given a chance to the one who comes later.

It's never easy. It will never be easy. But I can at least hope for the future.