Making it to the Halfway Point

What are little boys made of?

What are little boys made of?

 

Slugs and snails

And puppy-dogs' tails,

That's what little boys are made of.

 

What are little girls made of?

What are little girls made of?

 

Sugar and spice

And everything nice,

That's what little girls are made of.

 



Me at 15 weeks

For 20 weeks now, we've been growing and waiting. Waiting and growing. For 20 weeks, all our family and friends have been itching to know a central question - boy or girl. In fact, Kevin's mom, who's so excited, couldn't wait, and so she just went ahead and bought us some gender neutral clothes...lol. And for 20 weeks, 150 students have asked what feels like a gazillion times a day if we know what the baby is, or if I have any crazy food cravings, or if I'd thought of any names (cause their name is available), or if I've felt the baby move, or if....you get the picture. The way they act, you'd think it was their little brother or sister coming into the world!

Now when people ask Kevin and I what we want - our answers are always the same. Me - a happy and healthy baby; we've waited too long to care. And while Kevin will agree, he really wants a girl. If you've never met any of the extended Banes bunch - it's all boys. A virtual smorgasbord of testosterone. On the Banes side, Kevin has no aunts, 6 male cousins and 2 girl ones, and just an older brother. Among the cousin's kids, boys definitely outnumber the girls. Plus, do you know how hard it is to come up with a boy's name that's not already being used, or as a teacher, that you don't have an aversion to?



Mom made me put the
fake bump on cause
I kept complaining
that the clothes
were too big!

So for 20 weeks, we've kept ourselves busy. We've had work, Saturdays spent either at an Aggie football game in College Station or watching it on TV, chores around the house, and just life in general. Since I've taken on National Honor Society this year at school, it hasn't been too hard. The hard part was actually having a weekend to go out and find some maternity clothes. I made it in regular clothes to about 15 weeks, but after that it was just more of a comfort issue than a bursting out of my pants one. My mom, bless her heart, spent a whole Saturday with me going around to different stores trying to find something that'd work for school and wasn't going to break the bank. Now, if you've never had the opportunity to wear maternity pants - you are missing out. Honestly, I don't know why I waited to so long! On the comfort scale, pregnancy pants fall between wearing pants with elastic and wearing no pants at all - they're that good.

It's been a good 20 weeks - no over-the-top crazy sickness, the hubs and the kiddos at school take care of anything I need - just some smooth sailing. We had been scheduled to do our 2nd trimester ultrasound the Tuesday after Thanksgiving - so that's what we had been telling people; we'd know boy or girl after Thanksgiving. But then, at one of my checkups (they've been watching my blood pressure), after going over my list of medications with her again, she checked my anxiety meds in her magic book and discovered it was a Class D and could potentially cause harm if taken in the first trimester. Well, talk about too little, too late. None of the doctors I had seen thus far had caught it, so all we could do now is go get a Level 2 ultrasound, which could tell us if there was any harm. Do you know what it's like to have anxiety about anxiety medicine? My OB tried to reassure me though that this was not my fault, and that the studies just said there was possibly a link. That did nothing to help - I'm a worst case scenario type thinker. So for two weeks while we waited for our appointment, my brain was full of "what-ifs."

 

Our scan was scheduled for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We hadn't told anyone about it or the reason why we were going - we just didn't want to get everyone worried if it turned out to be nothing. Plus, I think it was just something that Kevin and I wanted to face on our own. Our child, our thing to worry about. So, we checked in at Katy Memorial Hermann, and I got my little medical bracelet, and we were on our way! The ultrasound tech was super nice and made sure to tell us about everything she was seeing on the screen. Of course, if she hadn't, we'd have never known what we were looking at. It's still a mystery to me how they know exactly what they're seeing, and I just see blobs. When you do a Level 2 ultrasound, they measure all the baby's parts. Length of femur, circumference of head, size of internal organs - it's really detailed. She had asked us very early on if we wanted to know what the sex of the baby was, and of course, we said yes! She made no promises because the baby was being a bit squirmy, but she'd definitely try. I just remember looking at all the different images and just being amazed about how something so tiny, yet so awesome was growing inside of me. We also just had to have a giggle because the baby just looked like a mini-Skeletor to us because at this point in its growth, there's no cute baby fat to plump it up. Then all of a sudden, she got her shot to see the gender, and asked one more time if we wanted to know. YES, we both said together, and she told us, congratulations on your baby girl! I, of course, immediately teared up, and just cried through the rest of the ultrasound. That was our little girl on the screen. Our precious daughter. Kevin, of course, couldn't grin any larger, and was just itching to tell me "I told you so." But more than anything, what we wanted to know was if she was okay, and she was! Everything was there and measuring on schedule. When we met with the geneticist afterwards, she told us that after her research into the drug, the chance for any problems wasn't any higher than what the normal population would have experienced anyways, so we shouldn't worry. It was definitely a relief!

Left & Right Hand

Spine

Profile Shot

 

My Mom

Kevin's mom

So as we giddily giggled our way out of the hospital, we were now stuck with another problem: how and when to tell our parents! We knew a whole week before we had told them we would know, so we wanted to do it in some kind of surprising way. We weren't spending the Thanksgiving holidays with both families, but we wanted them both to find out at the same time - so I came up with a puzzle for them to solve. I emailed it to my brother Stephen, with the explicit instructions that he was to put it in an envelope and give it to my mother at 3 PM on Thanksgiving Day. Of course, he wanted to know what it was all about, but we wouldn't tell him. Thirty minutes later he was texting us back that he had figured it out...twerp! LOL. We were spending Thanksgiving in Caldwell with Kevin's family, so we took the puzzle with us and gave it to his mom at 3 pm to work on. Kevin and I just squirmed as we watched his mother work so hard to figure it out. Thirty to forty-five minutes later, their reactions were priceless! My mom was texting me, and his mom was doing the happy dance! They were both super excited to meet their granddaughter, little miss Emma Lynn Banes. Her name is special to us. Her first name is for both my great grandmothers - Emma Graf and Emmie Wright. Both of whom were extraordinary women of faith and family. Her middle name is my middle name, my mother's middle name, and my mother-in-law's middle name. It's kind of tradition in my family to share middle names with parents, and Kevin and I liked carry that idea on.

 

 

Our Thanksgiving puzzle

 

So now as we enter the second half of our pregnancy, we've got a lot still to do! Nursery bedding's been picked out and ordered. The room has to be painted. We've got to register! So much to do, and so much to look forward to. 

 

In the end, boy or girl - it's definitely everything nice! 

Me at 20 Weeks

The Best and Worst of Times

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..." from A Tale of Two Cities

 

I think maybe Charles Dickens was on to something. As an astute observer of humanity, he saw that everything is a study in contrast and balance, that there is good to be found within bad and light within the darkness.  In another one of his novels, Great Expectations, he taught us that while we are often made for great things and expected by ourselves and others to accomplish them, that the road to get there is often not one we had in mind.

 

The Worst of Times

Kevin and I are currently working on year eight of marriage, and we dated for five years before that. I think it was just everyone's expectation that we would just want to start a family as soon as we got married, but we were quick to dispel those ideas by telling everyone we were on a "five year plan." To us, there was no need to rush right into things, and we knew, given my family's history, that things might not be that easy either.

 

About three years in our marriage in 2008, we began to get that itch and toy with the idea that maybe we were ready. I mean, we had our cute little house, good solid jobs, and my 7th period class had taken to calling me Mama Banes. The idea was tempting, so when I went to my endocrinologist appointment that Spring Break, I had planned on telling them we were a go, and I wanted to check all my hormones to see if anything was out of whack. Unfortunately, that was just an afterthought the minute my doctor said she felt a suspicious lump on my neck during the routine physical exam. Within six weeks, I had gone through a neck ultrasound, a biopsy of the nodule, to the devastating news that it was cancer, and it was malignant. Now, malignant papillary thyroid cancer has a 96% survival rate, or as we were told, it was "the best type of cancer to have" (although to this day, I still say the best cancer to have is NO cancer). It was a quick surgery to remove my thyroid completely, and about two months later, I had to do a dose of radioactive iodine to kill of any remaining thyroid cells.

In 2008,
after my thyroidectomy

 

Since it hadn't spread to any of my lymph nodes, I was done - no chemo, no radiation. Two months later - it was like it hadn't even happened, except for the fact that we now had to wait at least two years to even start thinking about a family. I'm not going to lie - it was a hard two years. Two years of watching friends and family celebrating their own additions and trying not to feel jealous or left out. Two years of people asking when we were going to start already. Two years of people making comments about whether we knew what we were doing or why we didn't like kids or a myriad of other callous and ignorant remarks. Two years of just feeling like we were missing out.

 

So, when those two years were over, we were definitely in the game now; we were ready, no more waiting! We tried, and the tests kept coming up negative. So we tried with me tracking things natural family planning style, and nothing happened. I went back to the endocrinologist, and she said I was stressed (really?) and gave me meds for that and some Clomid to help the process along. Three more tries and three more results of negative. By then, that pregnancy test and I had developed quite an adversarial relationship to say the least.

 

During all this trying, time had rapidly passed, and we found ourselves facing 2011. We had moved, changed jobs, gotten a dog, but still felt there was that void in our lives. I knew we needed to go to an infertility specialist, but I kept putting it off saying I was too busy with school. What I really didn't want to do is go and have some doctor tell me I couldn't even do what I was biologically programmed for in this life. But we finally did, and when we went, the news wasn't good. When all the tests came back and the inspections were done, Dr. H, we'll call him, said I should just go ahead and start thinking about using donor eggs if I wanted to get pregnant, and that I had about a 5% chance of getting pregnant using my own eggs. Talk about devastating, but there was still that 5%, and Kevin and I, if anything, we're people who lived our lives against the odds. Oh, and on top of that, both my tubes were partially to fully blocked. It was straight to IVF, which in the U.S. is not covered by insurance or reasonably priced. So we did two cycles of IVF, one in the fall of 2011 and one in the spring of 2012, and we faced two more disappointments. At that point, Dr. H just treated us like we were idiots for still even trying without donor eggs, and it was time for a change.

 

The Best of Times

So we did our research again, and we found Dr. Dorothy Roach, a reproductive endocrinologist who specialized in poor or low responders to treatment. Immediately, things were different. She genuinely cared about our concerns, did her research into my different conditions, and made a plan of attack for us. At no time did she tell us we were on an impossible journey. At no time did she make me feel guilty that this was somehow all my fault like Dr. H did. At every turn, we were reassured and blessed by her office's caring and compassionate attitude.

 

The two transferred embryos,
aka our baby's first picture

We waited until the summer to try IVF again - one because her office was in the Woodlands and it meant quite a drive for me multiple days a week and two because she wanted my body to reset itself naturally - no drugs, a good diet, no stress (yay for summer vacation). That meant July was the month - the month of pills, shots, blood tests, ultrasounds, and waiting. Lots of waiting. July 27th, the retrieval date, came. I had made four eggs - three of which looked really good. Then, there was more waiting - they had to have time to be fertilized and grow. The big question this time was, would they? August 1st - the day of transfer. We had made it here twice before, but the status of the embryos were always less than desirable which led to negative results. This time, however, things were different. This time we had fighters. This time we had nurses and doctors who believed in God and the power of prayer. This time we actually had hope.

 

Then, came the dreaded "two week wait," which was actually only ten days. Ten days of self-doubt. Ten days of no ultrasounds to ease your mind that everything's okay. Ten days of obsessively watching the Olympics at all hours, just to get my mind off of things. Ten days of actually wishing I was back at school teaching. Ten days of having to fully rely on faith that this was all in God's plan.

 

August 10th - pregnancy test day. This time, Kevin went with me as I was not in a state to drive to the Woodlands by myself. I had always tried to be the "brave one" who could do it alone, but this time, Kevin had to sit and anxiously wait by the phone for them to call. We paid extra to have them do it in their lab because the test would only take an hour, about the amount time it would take us to drive home. I remember telling Kevin on the car ride home that I felt like I had just walked out of a major math test, just knowing that I had failed. There were lots of tears, mostly from me, as I tried to not let the fear and disappointment take over while waiting. We made it home though, and I crawled into bed to wait it out. Then, the phone rang.

 

The nurse, Janna, was on the other end, and her exact words were, "Hey hon, I have your test results (in a super calm, almost sad voice followed by a LONG pause). You're PREGNANT!" It was all kind of a blur after that, but I remember there was a lot of screaming and crying and thanks. It was truly an answer to five years' worth of prayers.

 

The baby at 12 weeks , 6 days - last day of the first trimester

 

Afterwards, we've been cautiously optimistic since we knew we had to make through the first trimester to really be safe. We only told those people who HAD to know. We secretly had little jokes and giggles amongst the two of us. We had nighttime talks in bed about how awesome and scary this was. We've had to lie to people's faces when they ask about kids (sorry guys!). We've had three whole months to just relish in the fact that we've gone through some of the worst of times to get to what we expect will be some of the best of times. Now, we're realists, so we know that not everything's going to be puppy dogs and rainbows (hello, morning sickness at night), but we're believers too. Believers that life and God doesn't just throw these curve balls at you without teaching you a lesson or leaving you stronger. Dickens was right; life can be the best of times and the worst of times. It's the adventure in between the two that makes us who we are.