Heartbeat

It's taken me a while to update you on our scan, which took place on Tuesday. The ultrasound nurse was lovely, and we saw our baby's little flickering heart. It measured one day smaller than I had thought, at 6 weeks 3 days, which is probably due to later implantation, but everything looked good and the nurse was very positive about it.

And yes, there's only one. Realistically, I'm relieved that this means there are likely to be fewer complications. Secretly, though, I'm a little disappointed that it also probably means our baby will be an only child - and I feel very ungrateful for feeling any sort of disappointment when I've got what we have longed for for so long.

I was thrilled and relieved to discover that because I'm on all the immune treatment, the clinic wasn't going to discharge me as soon as I'd had my first scan. In fact, I get another scan two weeks after the first one, and then another again at 10 or 12 weeks. I don't think I could have stood waiting for six weeks between scans at this stage, so I'm hugely excited that we'll get to see the baby again in only another 10 days or so.

The clinic only prescribes enough drugs at each appointment to last until the next one, which I suppose is sensible in case anything goes wrong and the drugs are no longer needed, but this caused us huge stress on Tuesday. We were in a strange city, four hours from home, and had no idea where we could go to fill our prescription. After we'd been to two pharmacies that didn't have half the stuff we needed, I rang the clinic in despair and a lovely lovely lady phoned round for me, found a place that had most of what we needed, and then got the doctor to write another prescription for everything they didn't have, because one of the problems we had is that you have to get everything on a single prescription in the same place.

The sticking point was the gestone - nobody had any. I had my jab for Tuesday evening, so sent DH into London with the gestone prescription on Wednesday morning with instructions to pick it up from one of the pharmacies near XXXX clinic during his lunch break. He phoned me in a panic at lunchtime, having tried several different pharmacies and been told the same story at each - there's a national shortage of gestone and he would find it very difficult to get any before the middle of September at the earliest.

After much angst, and the longest lunch break ever for poor DH, he eventually found a pharmacy which had been keeping back two boxes (exactly what we needed) for someone else who hadn't turned up to pick them up, so he sweet-talked the pharmacist into letting him take the two boxes.

That afternoon, I had a lot of twinges in my stomach and some other fairly odd feelings, and I managed to convince myself that although we'd seen a heartbeat the previous day, the baby must surely have died. I felt really sad, and worried every time there was another twinge. I also googled like crazy, and read that if I was miscarrying I could usually expect heavy bleeding and stronger cramps than I was feeling - but I have several friends who've had missed miscarriages, so that only made me feel a little bit better.

Since then, I've been on crazy symptom-watch - am I feeling as sick as I was last week? Why don't I get that dizzy feeling any more? Am I weeing as much as I was? It's 10 pm and I haven't collapsed with exhaustion yet - why not?

And the answer is that I think everything's fine at the moment. Last night I felt as sick as a dog, and this morning I was woken at 5:30 by a wave of nausea that was so strong I really thought I was going to throw up for the first time.

I'm trying my best to go with the flow and just enjoy this whole experience without worrying about every little thing. But don't expect me to be sane or rational for the next few weeks...