HcG Drop

Got a voice mail from the doctor today with my HcG results from last Thursday:  477. Far lower than the 7900ish that it was just four days earlier. It was a miscarriage, all right. I have another blood draw scheduled for this coming Thursday. I don't know if it will be zero by then... I don't know how long it takes for these things to drop. But I'm kind of hoping it will be zero, or really close to zero. Then at least it will feel like this part of the nightmare is over. It will be easier to tell myself it was another BFN and move on.

The bleeding is pretty much gone now, just the faintest brown tinge. All my pregnancy symptoms are gone... everything I'm feeling is pretty much related to depression. And I haven't taken the hormone pills in four or five days, so I think my mood swings are adjusting. By adjusting, I mean that I feel crappy all the time instead of giddy/cranky/wistful/crying at commercials on TV. Instead I listen to co-workers talking about becoming grandmothers, and how their daughter/friend/acquaintance just had a C-section, and respond to emails about new babies just born that have to be added to our existing cases, and basically deal with babies and kids and pregnant women all day long... and I feel kind of like a hungry orphan peeking in the window on some rich kid's Christmas dinner.

The only person at work who knows about the miscarriage is my boss. She called me this morning and asked how I was. I told her I was feeling crummy, but I'll get over it. She asked if I should go home... but the thing is, I can't. If I take even more time off, I'll only be more stressed when I get back to work.

I don't want to live through the next three months of waiting. I am SO TIRED of waiting. Waiting for AF, waiting for insem/embryo transfer, waiting to POAS, waiting between ultrasounds for leftover cycts to go away after being on birth control. Waiting. Waiting. And waiting to get pregnant so that I can finally divert funds to the other things I want to do with my life, like getting married and changing my name and working on home improvement projects and basically getting back to having a life again, instead of living for each next-step in the TTC journey.

I can't get over how CLOSE we were to putting an end to the wait. So close I could taste it. I got two weeks of blissful hope, of happiness brighter than anything I’ve felt in years… only to have it taken away. Two weeks of joy, one week of horror, and four days – just four days – to process grief. To be followed by three months of nothingness, before there can be any attempt at renewed progress toward a dream that I may never achieve, because it isn’t something you can accomplish through hard work. There’s no magic formula that guarantees you’ll get pregnant by following the right steps, or surviving enough loss. I can’t earn this from the universe. All I can do is keep throwing the dice until the money runs out.

In the meantime it feels like all the color has gone out of the world. Oh, and did I mention that my little fish at work died on Tuesday last week? In all the chaos it seemed like such a small thing, but I'm sitting here staring at his empty tank and feeling like it is an overly dramatic metaphor for the current state of my soul.