A definite maybe
It's been four months or so since I last posted, which has mostly been because I haven't been sure enough of what I felt to write anything coherent about pregnancy, and partly because general life has been pretty overwhelming during the interim. Perhaps I should get the general life issues out of the way first:
a) Mum has made a splendid recovery from her hip replacement, and is now more mobile than she has been for some time, which is just as well because
b) Dad has ended up in a residential home since I last posted. He suddenly, one day at the end of July, became extremely ill - collapsed at the top of the stairs on his back with his spine arched and his limbs flailing, exactly like an overturned beetle - scarey stuff in a parent two weeks short of his 82nd birthday - and, after Mum called out the ambulance service NOT ONCE BUT TWICE (because they just put him back in a chair the first time) he ended up in hospital. They originally wanted to discharge him the following morning, but when Mum said she didn't think she could cope straight away, he was transferred to the local community hospital, where he ended up staying for the next five weeks. It turned out that his dementia had been exacerbated by a urinary infection, which I should have thought of because I'd heard of it via Cecily's blog, but I didn't put two and two together. Since then, umpteen people have told me that they too have relatives whose dementia has suddenly got much, much worse following a UTI, although I still don't know why this happens.
Anyway, while he was in the community hospital he was seen by a psychogeriatrician, who immediately, pretty much as soon as he laid eyes on him, said that it was unreasonable for Mum to cope at home any longer, and that he should be transferred to a residential home. So Mum and I then had to visit lots of residential homes to choose a suitable one. The one 100 yards from our house reminded me of nothing more than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", being a maze of featureless grey corridors behind locked doors, with bare rooms containing empty-eyed residents staring at the walls, and (worryingly) most of the staff sitting on the fire escape stairs smoking and chatting rather than looking after the inmates. However, the others we visited all seemed far more humane and open, although all smelling of stale urine and boiled cabbage to greater or lesser degrees, and we eventually chose one about a mile or two from both our house and Mum's, which Dad has now been living in for about six weeks. Given he was strange and reclusive when I was a child, let alone since the dementia has kicked in, it's hard to tell which of his current foibles are due to illness and which are part of his remaining psyche. He spends most of his time in his room, often wearing a hat and gloves. He can't remember very much at all from the last sixty years or so, although he knows who we all are still. He tells the same anecdotes again and again, but can't appreciate the simplest account of anything that's happened in our lives. J sums it up well when she says that he's delighted when we arrive to visit him, pleased when we leave, and the intervening time is basically spent, by all parties, filling up the minutes until we can reasonably go. Although we are some twenty miles from London, he's convinced that the home is on the edge of the Hogarth Roundabout in Chiswick, and for some weeks was sure that the road was flooded from Chiswick up to the Elephant and Castle, so that he expressed wonder every time we arrived that we'd managed to get through the water without a boat. This particular convinction now seems to have died down, and has been replaced by the certainty that John's parents (who are currently on a cruise ship bound for the Caribbean through a Force 9 storm, but that's another story)must be careful that their boat doesn't run over a whale. Still, at least he's clean and fed (indeed, eagerly eating bacon and eggs every morning), and Mum is somewhat freed from the burden of care she's been struggling with for so long.
c) Copper the dog, who is seventeen and a half, has had some recurrent problems with blood in the urine (and urinating on the floor, but that we can deal with), which eventually led me to do a very fancy Xray of her bladder, involving a catheter and various dyes, in order to establish that there's nothing wrong with it. While obviously this is a huge relief, the previous few weeks, in which I was increasingly sure that she had a bladder tumour, were obviously very stressful - and, of course, she's still seventeen and a half, so sooner or later something else is going to go wrong.
d) J has started at secondary school, which has also been very stressful, because she's found the initial process of settling and making new friends to be very hard. As a mother, it's also very hard, not least because the loved one comes home, unloads the day's issues onto Mum, and goes back to school the next day restored and refreshed, while Mum spends the whole day with stress-induced diarrhoea, worrying about daughter's welfare and her own inability to make things better. However, as I write we are on half term, which is a great relief, not least because I don't have to get her onto the 7.40 train for two weeks, which is far more difficult than catching the train myself would be.
In comparison with the list above, my job, John's job and E, the younger daughter, are none of them so draining of my mental reserves at present; which is just as well, because most of my mental reserves for the last four months have been busy with deciding whether to try again for another baby.
Seriously, I have never in my life, ever, spent longer making a decision than this one, or found a decision harder to make. In every previous choice, it's been pretty clear to me what I wanted to do, or ought to do. With this one, I have spent hours and hours and HOURS of time thinking about it; driving to work, in bed at night, peeling potatoes, in the bath.... and I have spent just as many hours on the treadmill of the Internet, reading other people's good and bad stories.
On the one hand, in the "why put yourself through it?" corner: I have two great children. I'm still married to their dad, and we still have a good marriage, and he's not particularly keen to have another child. So no reason to have a late child because I'm onto a second marriage, or because my husband is desperate for an heir. And, of course, I have the enormous, incalculable positive that I have two healthy daughters. This obviously means that my difficulties are grains of sand against the mountains faced by most Internet fortysomethings contemplating pregnancy, in that I'm really just being greedy in thinking about a baby at all. I am already a mother, and I can't even begin to imagine the pain of some of the people whose lives I've encountered online, who are my age or older and have no living child to show for years of heartache.
If I get pregnant again (and previous history suggests I will), the likeliest thing, by statistics, is that I'll have another miscarriage. The next likeliest thing is that I'll have a baby. There is a significant chance of an abnormal conception of some kind, that doesn't miscarry early on its own: a blighted ovum, a molar pregnancy (might be rare, but my goodness, it sounds horrible), a chromosomal problem (most likely Down's, of course), an ectopic (but I'm low risk for that). There's a significant chance of medical complications in the pregnancy, at my age: placenta previa, pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, and so forth; not to mention piles and all those other nasty side-effects. And, if I do end up with a live baby, what if it's autistic (commoner with older sperm, I read this week), or has some terrible illness of some kind? How can I cope with the 7.30 station run and a new baby? Am I insane even to consider it?
On the other hand, if you are 41 and considering a baby, I am in a pretty good position. I know I'm still very fertile - out of the six times in my life that I've had unprotected sex while ovulating, I've conceived a recognisable fetus three times, and ended up with a baby twice. I conceived the last miscarriage baby even more quickly than I did E, eight years earlier. My menstrual cycle is still regular: I have 2 days of gungy cervical mucus each cycle. I have never had an STD, and my fairly chaste and dull romantic past makes me pretty sure that my partners haven't either (all two of them). Although one can't rely on anecdotal evidence, it does seem to me that, of the many witty, bright, incredibly determined and resourceful women who write infertility blogs (and I've certainly read a lot of them this summer), very many seem to have had, by their own accounts, pretty colourful pasts, generally involving lots of partners. I'm sure that many of these women are struggling with blocked tubes and other manifestations of pelvic inflammatory disease, which may well, in many cases, have been caused by undiagnosed chlamydia.It seems dreadfully unfair thus to be dealing with the consequences of youthful indiscretion, twenty years or so later, but it's another complication which doesn't particularly apply to me, and I can't but be grateful for that.
So: I know I'm still doing quite well on the fertility front. I know I can carry a fetus to term. As far as I know, I am in good health: while I'm not particularly fit by gym-going standards, I'm on the curvy end of the correct weight rather than frankly obese; while my diet could be better, it could be worse. There's really no reason why I shouldn't have a successful pregnancy, except that I'm 41.
Discussing my risk factors, though, is rather evading the question of whether I want to do this again or not, and if I do, why? Lots and lots of people have two kids. Why do I feel so sure I want three, especially as I was an only? I don't know. My sister in law has four boys, and said, after the third, that when she looked round the dining table she felt there was someone missing, and she couldn't bear it. John (fraternal love shining out) dismissed this as sentimental twaddle, but I know exactly what she means, and I feel just the same about the third child I don't have. I found an old comment thread on Julie's blog recently, in which someone said, "You never regret the children you have, only the children you don't have", and I think that sums it up exactly. If I don't try again, I am going to regret that third child always, I know.
Somewhere else I read (I don't know if this is true or not) that last century, the AVERAGE age at which women had their last child was 42. It certainly seems to be true that having a subsequent child late in life is easier to achieve than having a first. Mum had me at 39 (and I was her first and only child); Dad's mother had his younger brother at 41. John's very pragmatic about the whole thing; he says that if I want it that much, he'll go along with it, and we'll deal with whatever happens.
And last time, because I did it accidently on purpose, I didn't go onto folic acid until around the time Mizuko was conceived, or a couple of days later, and I didn't give up caffiene or alcohol until I knew I was pregnant, either. This time, I'm going to do all that sort of thing before we try to conceive. Not that I think that will make any real difference to my chances, but it can't hurt.
Why haven't I tried before, if I've decided what to do? I think it's taken me this long to be in a place where I'm ready to try, as it were. If I hadn't miscarried, I'd still have six weeks or so of pregnancy to go - 40 weeks is a very long time. I've just finished ovulating. I plan to go back onto folic acid when I have my next period, so that I have a complete cycle on it before I try to conceive, just in case it does reduce the risk of Down's, as some research claims. And then, in December, we'll try again, try just once more. I think.
And if anyone infertile has got as far as the bottom of this post, I most sincerely hope not to have offended or upset you by agonising over this when I already have children. I know very well that I am very lucky, but I still have found it very hard to make this decision.
a) Mum has made a splendid recovery from her hip replacement, and is now more mobile than she has been for some time, which is just as well because
b) Dad has ended up in a residential home since I last posted. He suddenly, one day at the end of July, became extremely ill - collapsed at the top of the stairs on his back with his spine arched and his limbs flailing, exactly like an overturned beetle - scarey stuff in a parent two weeks short of his 82nd birthday - and, after Mum called out the ambulance service NOT ONCE BUT TWICE (because they just put him back in a chair the first time) he ended up in hospital. They originally wanted to discharge him the following morning, but when Mum said she didn't think she could cope straight away, he was transferred to the local community hospital, where he ended up staying for the next five weeks. It turned out that his dementia had been exacerbated by a urinary infection, which I should have thought of because I'd heard of it via Cecily's blog, but I didn't put two and two together. Since then, umpteen people have told me that they too have relatives whose dementia has suddenly got much, much worse following a UTI, although I still don't know why this happens.
Anyway, while he was in the community hospital he was seen by a psychogeriatrician, who immediately, pretty much as soon as he laid eyes on him, said that it was unreasonable for Mum to cope at home any longer, and that he should be transferred to a residential home. So Mum and I then had to visit lots of residential homes to choose a suitable one. The one 100 yards from our house reminded me of nothing more than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", being a maze of featureless grey corridors behind locked doors, with bare rooms containing empty-eyed residents staring at the walls, and (worryingly) most of the staff sitting on the fire escape stairs smoking and chatting rather than looking after the inmates. However, the others we visited all seemed far more humane and open, although all smelling of stale urine and boiled cabbage to greater or lesser degrees, and we eventually chose one about a mile or two from both our house and Mum's, which Dad has now been living in for about six weeks. Given he was strange and reclusive when I was a child, let alone since the dementia has kicked in, it's hard to tell which of his current foibles are due to illness and which are part of his remaining psyche. He spends most of his time in his room, often wearing a hat and gloves. He can't remember very much at all from the last sixty years or so, although he knows who we all are still. He tells the same anecdotes again and again, but can't appreciate the simplest account of anything that's happened in our lives. J sums it up well when she says that he's delighted when we arrive to visit him, pleased when we leave, and the intervening time is basically spent, by all parties, filling up the minutes until we can reasonably go. Although we are some twenty miles from London, he's convinced that the home is on the edge of the Hogarth Roundabout in Chiswick, and for some weeks was sure that the road was flooded from Chiswick up to the Elephant and Castle, so that he expressed wonder every time we arrived that we'd managed to get through the water without a boat. This particular convinction now seems to have died down, and has been replaced by the certainty that John's parents (who are currently on a cruise ship bound for the Caribbean through a Force 9 storm, but that's another story)must be careful that their boat doesn't run over a whale. Still, at least he's clean and fed (indeed, eagerly eating bacon and eggs every morning), and Mum is somewhat freed from the burden of care she's been struggling with for so long.
c) Copper the dog, who is seventeen and a half, has had some recurrent problems with blood in the urine (and urinating on the floor, but that we can deal with), which eventually led me to do a very fancy Xray of her bladder, involving a catheter and various dyes, in order to establish that there's nothing wrong with it. While obviously this is a huge relief, the previous few weeks, in which I was increasingly sure that she had a bladder tumour, were obviously very stressful - and, of course, she's still seventeen and a half, so sooner or later something else is going to go wrong.
d) J has started at secondary school, which has also been very stressful, because she's found the initial process of settling and making new friends to be very hard. As a mother, it's also very hard, not least because the loved one comes home, unloads the day's issues onto Mum, and goes back to school the next day restored and refreshed, while Mum spends the whole day with stress-induced diarrhoea, worrying about daughter's welfare and her own inability to make things better. However, as I write we are on half term, which is a great relief, not least because I don't have to get her onto the 7.40 train for two weeks, which is far more difficult than catching the train myself would be.
In comparison with the list above, my job, John's job and E, the younger daughter, are none of them so draining of my mental reserves at present; which is just as well, because most of my mental reserves for the last four months have been busy with deciding whether to try again for another baby.
Seriously, I have never in my life, ever, spent longer making a decision than this one, or found a decision harder to make. In every previous choice, it's been pretty clear to me what I wanted to do, or ought to do. With this one, I have spent hours and hours and HOURS of time thinking about it; driving to work, in bed at night, peeling potatoes, in the bath.... and I have spent just as many hours on the treadmill of the Internet, reading other people's good and bad stories.
On the one hand, in the "why put yourself through it?" corner: I have two great children. I'm still married to their dad, and we still have a good marriage, and he's not particularly keen to have another child. So no reason to have a late child because I'm onto a second marriage, or because my husband is desperate for an heir. And, of course, I have the enormous, incalculable positive that I have two healthy daughters. This obviously means that my difficulties are grains of sand against the mountains faced by most Internet fortysomethings contemplating pregnancy, in that I'm really just being greedy in thinking about a baby at all. I am already a mother, and I can't even begin to imagine the pain of some of the people whose lives I've encountered online, who are my age or older and have no living child to show for years of heartache.
If I get pregnant again (and previous history suggests I will), the likeliest thing, by statistics, is that I'll have another miscarriage. The next likeliest thing is that I'll have a baby. There is a significant chance of an abnormal conception of some kind, that doesn't miscarry early on its own: a blighted ovum, a molar pregnancy (might be rare, but my goodness, it sounds horrible), a chromosomal problem (most likely Down's, of course), an ectopic (but I'm low risk for that). There's a significant chance of medical complications in the pregnancy, at my age: placenta previa, pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, and so forth; not to mention piles and all those other nasty side-effects. And, if I do end up with a live baby, what if it's autistic (commoner with older sperm, I read this week), or has some terrible illness of some kind? How can I cope with the 7.30 station run and a new baby? Am I insane even to consider it?
On the other hand, if you are 41 and considering a baby, I am in a pretty good position. I know I'm still very fertile - out of the six times in my life that I've had unprotected sex while ovulating, I've conceived a recognisable fetus three times, and ended up with a baby twice. I conceived the last miscarriage baby even more quickly than I did E, eight years earlier. My menstrual cycle is still regular: I have 2 days of gungy cervical mucus each cycle. I have never had an STD, and my fairly chaste and dull romantic past makes me pretty sure that my partners haven't either (all two of them). Although one can't rely on anecdotal evidence, it does seem to me that, of the many witty, bright, incredibly determined and resourceful women who write infertility blogs (and I've certainly read a lot of them this summer), very many seem to have had, by their own accounts, pretty colourful pasts, generally involving lots of partners. I'm sure that many of these women are struggling with blocked tubes and other manifestations of pelvic inflammatory disease, which may well, in many cases, have been caused by undiagnosed chlamydia.It seems dreadfully unfair thus to be dealing with the consequences of youthful indiscretion, twenty years or so later, but it's another complication which doesn't particularly apply to me, and I can't but be grateful for that.
So: I know I'm still doing quite well on the fertility front. I know I can carry a fetus to term. As far as I know, I am in good health: while I'm not particularly fit by gym-going standards, I'm on the curvy end of the correct weight rather than frankly obese; while my diet could be better, it could be worse. There's really no reason why I shouldn't have a successful pregnancy, except that I'm 41.
Discussing my risk factors, though, is rather evading the question of whether I want to do this again or not, and if I do, why? Lots and lots of people have two kids. Why do I feel so sure I want three, especially as I was an only? I don't know. My sister in law has four boys, and said, after the third, that when she looked round the dining table she felt there was someone missing, and she couldn't bear it. John (fraternal love shining out) dismissed this as sentimental twaddle, but I know exactly what she means, and I feel just the same about the third child I don't have. I found an old comment thread on Julie's blog recently, in which someone said, "You never regret the children you have, only the children you don't have", and I think that sums it up exactly. If I don't try again, I am going to regret that third child always, I know.
Somewhere else I read (I don't know if this is true or not) that last century, the AVERAGE age at which women had their last child was 42. It certainly seems to be true that having a subsequent child late in life is easier to achieve than having a first. Mum had me at 39 (and I was her first and only child); Dad's mother had his younger brother at 41. John's very pragmatic about the whole thing; he says that if I want it that much, he'll go along with it, and we'll deal with whatever happens.
And last time, because I did it accidently on purpose, I didn't go onto folic acid until around the time Mizuko was conceived, or a couple of days later, and I didn't give up caffiene or alcohol until I knew I was pregnant, either. This time, I'm going to do all that sort of thing before we try to conceive. Not that I think that will make any real difference to my chances, but it can't hurt.
Why haven't I tried before, if I've decided what to do? I think it's taken me this long to be in a place where I'm ready to try, as it were. If I hadn't miscarried, I'd still have six weeks or so of pregnancy to go - 40 weeks is a very long time. I've just finished ovulating. I plan to go back onto folic acid when I have my next period, so that I have a complete cycle on it before I try to conceive, just in case it does reduce the risk of Down's, as some research claims. And then, in December, we'll try again, try just once more. I think.
And if anyone infertile has got as far as the bottom of this post, I most sincerely hope not to have offended or upset you by agonising over this when I already have children. I know very well that I am very lucky, but I still have found it very hard to make this decision.
posted by Alison at
2:29 PM
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