...and today

i woke up in the wee hours and went to the bathroom (including number two - so much for post-op constipation, eh?) and took a couple more tylenol before going back to sleep. i pretty much spent the whole morning in bed, sleeping off and on, between phone calls. i think the phone rang at least a dozen times this morning. sheesh. give it a rest, people.

my abdomen is tender, but my hoo-ha feels fine, and my bleeding has slacked off considerably from yesterday. my throat is sore, from the breathing tube, but not too sore to tolerate half an egg sandwich this morning and a little more eggplant and even a little salad this afternoon. i had some kind of reaction to the sticky stuff on the tape they used on me, but the redness and swelling is going away now that i've scrubbed off all the sticky residue. my iv spot is still swollen and very sore, though, and that kind of freaks me out.

one of the calls this morning was from the resident that apparently was present during the procedure, to check up on me. when he asked me if i had any pain, i told him about my tender abdomen, and he said, "do you think it will get better?" what kind of question is that? how should i know??? i laughed, maybe a little too hard, and told him i hoped so.

then, almost as an afterthought, he asked me if i woke up in the operating room or in recovery. i told him i woke up in the operating room, when they ripped out my breathing tube, and he asked me what i remembered, and if i remembered hearing anything. i thought it was a weird question, and paused, and he quickly said they were "kind of doing a survey" to see when people woke up and what they remembered. so i told him i remembered the tube coming out and seeing my ob off to the side and having the ekg tabs ripped off of me and then being wheeled out. he wanted to know if i remembered anything said, and i said no. so now i'm a little suspicious. it sounds to me like someone said something they shouldn't have and they were worried about it, but if so, they can rest easy.

justin and i were huddling in bed a while ago, and i told him i hoped that my cycle kicked in right away so that in three weeks i would be having a period. he wanted to know why that was. i explained that if everything was in working order, i'd have a period at the end of this month, and another at the end of november, and then we could try to get pregnant when we're in italy the middle of december.

the ob told me friday and again yesterday that it would be okay to try again after a couple of cycles, just so we could more easily date a pregnancy - which is helpful, since we conceive every time the second the condom comes off, regardless of when in my cycle that occurs. but then while i was in recovery, he told justin that, really, i was okay to try after the two week love-ban is up; i just wouldn't have the benefit of a couple of cycles for dating.

i know that a week ago i was feeling unsure about being pregnant, but it was a lifetime ago. over the course of the week, i realized that i would have some of these same feelings whenever i got pregnant, regardless of whether it was last week or two years from now. and weirdly, after losing the tadpole, i feel stronger now. mentally, i feel ready to try again yesterday (so to speak). i think a romantic week in italy would be the perfect time to make another baby. after the whole zofran-inspired fecal incontinence episode, i feel downright zen-like about another potential eight months of nausea. and every month that we wait, the likelihood of birth defects and a non-viable pregnancy only increases.

wouldn't it be lovely and charmed if justin felt exactly the same way? of course, it isn't that easy.

justin would like to wait until after hans's birthday, in february, to try again. he thinks it would be tough on a pregnancy to experience the inevitable surge in grief that will occur then. and he needs a break from the anxiety of pregnancy; for him, the longer we wait, the longer a vacation from anxiety he gets, but for me, the longer we wait, the longer i'm anxious.

justin would like us to both lose weight before i get pregnant again. he also thinks that pregnancy has proven to be detrimental to my health and that if we wait it will be better for me. this line of thought makes me want to thwack him. justin is currently five pounds more than he was when i got pregnant with hans, while i (a pregnancy and a quarter later) am 16 pounds less than i was at this point. given those statistics, one could actually argue that another pregnancy would be better for my health. and i don't understand why he thinks pregnancy is bad for me, except that he finds the vomiting alarming, but it's not a permanent health crisis, and it's always been treated before it's become any kind of actual detriment to my health. he thinks that whatever it is that he perceives as a benefit to my health associated with waiting trumps the increased risk of a problem-ridden pregnancy. while i agree that we both could stand to lose weight, i find the rest of his health concerns and the priority he places on them over the increased risk of pregnancy problems completely absurd.

what he finds absurd is that, as far as i'm concerned, if we wait until after hans's birthday, we're essentially waiting until june. that's because, as i've explained to him many, many times over the last five years, i do not want to conceive in march and have a christmas baby; i don't think it's fair to the child. and i do not want to conceive in may, which would mean a february baby, and that is hans's month. that leaves just april as a window, and then if that doesn't happen, it's june before we're trying again, and i am not keen on trying one month, and then not the next - it seems too unnecessarily emotionally punishing at this point. he finds my christmas concerns as irrational as i find his perceived health benefits, although he does get the february thing.

so after we cried, and yelled, and laughed, and argued some more, we've found some middle ground: we're going to each lose ten pounds in the next ten weeks. and we're considering skipping italy in december and spending two weeks in asia in january, but we'll see. the lucky thing is that (despite the fact i still want to thwack him) we love each other. we'll find a way to work it out. plus there's the fact that i'm not going back on the pill, and he gets tired of using condoms. we may plan to wait until january, but sometime before then, we will finish a box of condoms, and he will not want to buy another.