A degree of reassurance

You people are so great - thank you so much for your messages yesterday. I feel well and truly cyber-hugged.

Last night was a VERY disturbed night - DH thinks he might be getting a cold, which, on top of the usual snoring like a freight train, entails an awful lot of moaning, tossing and turning, rubbing his feet together in a bizarre fashion which makes the whole bed shake, clattering about to get himself drinks, and generally waking me up every half hour or so.

On a night like this, I usually end up moving to the spare room to get a chance at a decent night's sleep, but as the spare room is cooler than our bedroom, I didn't want to screw up my temperature reading, so I kicked him out instead. Then I remembered that I'd put my Cyclogest in the spare room, because it's cooler than the bathroom. Knowing I'd be needing it before he was ready to get up, I had to get up to go and get it (and then go to the loo, because my bladder is suddenly the size of a pea).

By this time, I was thoroughly wide awake, so Insomnia Hour started early, and ended up lasting a good couple of hours. My normal time for taking my temperature came when I had been lightly dozing for about an hour, so I took it and found that it was between Friday's and Saturday's temperatures - not brilliant, but not disastrous. I duly recorded it and eventually managed to get back to sleep.

The next time I woke up (I should point out that it was an extra-long night, because not only was I so tired that I went to bed at 9, but the clocks went back last night) was at 6, which is the time I used to take my temperature before Insomnia Hour set in and I started doing it earlier. I'd probably had an hour and a half of good, solid sleep, and it was about five hours since I'd got out of bed.

This time my temperature was 37.03. In all my months of charting, this is the first month it has ever exceeded 36.80 (which was very rare itself - I usually barely hit 36.65 at my peak) at that time of the morning, so either the progesterone is behaving as Sonja described, or there's still a bit of hope.

My BBT is probably the thing I trust most to tell me what's going on, and obviously I did have the spotting yesterday, but two other things happened yesterday that I've never experienced before. Since I've never taken extra progesterone before, I have no idea whether they're connected with that, or even just totally random events.

The first is that my plan was to get some lunch when I went to meet my friends for coffee. I'd had a small breakfast, then driven DH over to visit his parents and stayed an hour with them before coming home. When I got home at about 1:00, I had a splitting headache and felt shaky, and just knew I had to eat something before going out.

I had a cereal bar and a handful of dried mango, following which I felt so full that I never did have anything to eat when we got to the coffee house. The headache and shakes took a few minutes to subside, but definitely improved as soon as I'd eaten something. I know this is fairly normal for some people if they haven't eaten for a few hours, but it's never happened to me before.

The second odd thing was that DH got me one of my favourite drinks after supper - a mug of hot Ribena. I sat there with the mug next to me, watching television and noticing a foul smell like stale dishwater, and idly wondering where the foul smell came from and whether I should stir myself to track down the source and clean it up.

When I picked up the mug, I realised it was my Ribena that was smelling so bad. I was barely able to take a sip from it, and when I did, it tasted not of stale dishwater but very strongly of plastic. It was so horrible that I wasn't able to finish it.

So, who knows? I'll be upset if I get more spotting, or if it gets any heavier than it was yesterday, but the total despair of yesterday has once more given way to a little bit of hope and a whole lot of confusion.