OK, I heard from the nurse and was informed that I'm really lucky to get an appointment so soon - apparently there was a cancellation so my appointment is at 9:00 on Dec 13th. Apparently it usually takes at least a month to get in so I'm grateful that scheduling was in my favor. Don't know the name of the doc yet - I have to call to find out.
I've heard great things about the Women's Center at the University so I'm looking forward to it.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Update
I just got a call from the doc (you know it's never good news if the doc calls instead of the nurse) and apparently the radiologist was reviewing my x-rays and suspected that whatever he was seeing was more significant than what my OB/GYN thought. So they are setting up an appointment with a specialist at the University and I'll know within the next couple of days when that will actually be...
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
My HSG
The test went much better than expected! I think I was overwhelmed and confused because I had no idea what we would find out, and in some ways I dreaded the results. But my uterus is perfect (praise Jesus) and both tubes seem to have slight "dilation" near the ends but are still open. The doc said we can see a specialist and see what they would recommend but she doesn't think we should do anything. I have mixed feelings about that Often women who have this test done end up getting pregnant right away afterward because the dye (iodine) cleans them out. It's almost like a cleanse in a way.
After the test we were leaving the hospital and Cam was asking what I was thinking and I just became completely overwhelmed and didn't really know what I thought. It all felt so personal and I didn't want to discuss it in public (there was a stranger walking about 15 feet ahead of us) so I ended up crying but didn't really know why. I think I just needed time to process and it felt like Cam was grilling me but I just wasn't ready to talk about it yet.
Physically I feel just fine. The worst of it was the actual injection which they had to do twice because the doc and tech weren't in sync and the tech didn't realize the doc was doing the first injection so that kind of sucked but Cam brought up the point that maybe that was good since my tubes got a double flush that way ;) It was uncomfortable but I was so prepared for that... and I feel perfect now so it's all good. I imagine I'll still need more time to think about our options but ultimately I can't imagine the test having gone much better than it did. Thank God for that!
After the test we were leaving the hospital and Cam was asking what I was thinking and I just became completely overwhelmed and didn't really know what I thought. It all felt so personal and I didn't want to discuss it in public (there was a stranger walking about 15 feet ahead of us) so I ended up crying but didn't really know why. I think I just needed time to process and it felt like Cam was grilling me but I just wasn't ready to talk about it yet.
Physically I feel just fine. The worst of it was the actual injection which they had to do twice because the doc and tech weren't in sync and the tech didn't realize the doc was doing the first injection so that kind of sucked but Cam brought up the point that maybe that was good since my tubes got a double flush that way ;) It was uncomfortable but I was so prepared for that... and I feel perfect now so it's all good. I imagine I'll still need more time to think about our options but ultimately I can't imagine the test having gone much better than it did. Thank God for that!
Monday, November 26, 2007
21 Days Come to an End
My 21 days of faith experiment ended yesterday. I gleefully broke my fast by enjoying a beautiful meal at Oyama, a wonderful Japanese restaurant with my family last night. I always like eating Japanese food because I feel like I ate something good for me and never feel like I'm going to explode when I leave (except one time several years ago when I had sake and it gave me such bad gas I thought I was going to die - seriously. But that's a different story and believe it or not Tums came to the rescue so I survived. HA!)
Now I'm looking back and reflecting on all the things that the 21 days did in me. What I realized was that going deeper into faith can be frustrating, scary and difficult. My 21 days were a whirlwind of emotions as God called things out of me to deal with. And you know what? I had to deal with them because of my fast from cooked food. Any other time I probably would have noticed God bringing something up and then fighting Him by burying myself in some unhealthy behavior like eating a whole bag of Doritos. I would feel the pain of my weaknesses and self medicate with junk instead of and saying, "Yes, I do this or that, and it's not OK. Jesus help me change it."
So what I'm taking home with me out of this experiment is faith. Not because I asked for a miracle and saw a miracle happen on the outside but because God showed me many small miracles inside and helped me to begin to change the ugly parts of who God never intended me to be.
I started out asking Jesus to step in to my life and help me change my eating lifestyle but the very first night God told me that He wanted to work on something else. And I was pissed! And then God told me he wanted to work on that too!! HA ha. It was a crazy start to something that was supposed to be faith building - God tearing down my useless defenses first. Isn't He smart? But I felt like I was going nuts and the new thing we were working on wasn't going well.
The bedtime routine with my daughter was getting completely out of control so I knew only after God pointed it out (duh) that this was the miracle I needed to see in my life right now. I was spending hours each night trying to get Adi to sleep and much of that time was spent with me crying and cursing God for not helping me. Oh man, did I ever have to repent for that! But I felt alone, I felt abandoned and I felt like there was really no point in praying any more if God wasn't going to answer my prayers.
I had come to a point of giving up on hope and deciding that I was going to have to do it on my own, without the help of my God. It didn't take long for God to set me straight on that because now I felt dead spiritually and my only chance at life was to admit I couldn't do it on my own and I begged Jesus to forgive me and just be with me. I think that was the weekend I desperately needed to be in worship and church but I was scheduled to serve in the toddler room. Funny how that always seems to happen. Kind of like God saying, "Don't depend on worship and church - depend on Me! Turn your eyes to Me!"
My next lesson was patience. This one keeps coming up for me. I don't know if I'll ever get it right. God showed me that I needed to be patient with Adi. She's two and a half. She's just a child - what she needs most from me are love, consistency and patience. So I knew I had to slow down. I had to look at some resources and figure out a plan. And then I had to stick with the plan and finally (and most importantly) I had to be patient!
Another place where patience became vital was in waiting for my period to come. It's so hard to just wait around, not knowing when I'll be able to move on and get my test done and find out what the heck is wrong with me and why I can't seem to stay pregnant. I felt myself getting irritated because I felt very much like I was experiencing PMS (with meltdowns and extreme emotions) but I couldn't tell if it was because I actually had hormones doing crazy stuff or if it was because I didn't have cooked food to turn to. So I had to be patient and wait.
Finally another Sunday came and I was so completely on edge to begin with. I didn't know if I had any faith at all. I was so low and so desperate. And then I had to listen to a testimony about grasping for what we want vs. waiting and receiving what God has for us. Though I had heard the testimony before it threw me way off. I was feeling good about deciding to have the HSG done and then all of a sudden I was forced to consider whether doing so was just grasping and not waiting and receiving. I think I wrote a blog entry about this because it was pretty relevant. Ultimately I came to a place of knowing in my heart that I have two choices. I can continue on the way I have been and take the risk of having many more miscarriages, or I can accept the technology that could tell me what is wrong and possibly help me prevent it from ever happening again. My heart can't keep going through miscarriages. I just can't. I'm getting the test and once again, I feel good about that.
That same afternoon I went to a prophetic ministry time that was wonderful and affirming for me. God told me to keep praying. He told me other things that I desperately needed to hear and I left feeling like Jesus had restored me. I felt my faith grow, my heart heal, and the spirit of joy.
My final week was probably the easiest in terms of faith but the hardest in terms of my fast. I stayed on my fast through both Thanksgiving dinners that we attended and it was miserable. But I did it. Cam was so proud of me and I was just a grumpy old fuddy duddy! But family made it all better and I was grateful to have been able to make a choice between cooked and raw food and that there was an abundance of each. So many people in the world (including right here in our country) aren't so blessed.
This post is already so long. There's so much more I could say and other ways I can see God working in me but I think I just want to close by saying that my faith experiment was exactly what it should have been. Did I see an answer to prayer? Yes, I did. Just not in the way I expected to. I think 21 days was perfect for me and I can't wait until the next faith experiment comes up - if God did all of this in 21 days, I can only imagine what He could do in 40!
Now I'm looking back and reflecting on all the things that the 21 days did in me. What I realized was that going deeper into faith can be frustrating, scary and difficult. My 21 days were a whirlwind of emotions as God called things out of me to deal with. And you know what? I had to deal with them because of my fast from cooked food. Any other time I probably would have noticed God bringing something up and then fighting Him by burying myself in some unhealthy behavior like eating a whole bag of Doritos. I would feel the pain of my weaknesses and self medicate with junk instead of and saying, "Yes, I do this or that, and it's not OK. Jesus help me change it."
So what I'm taking home with me out of this experiment is faith. Not because I asked for a miracle and saw a miracle happen on the outside but because God showed me many small miracles inside and helped me to begin to change the ugly parts of who God never intended me to be.
I started out asking Jesus to step in to my life and help me change my eating lifestyle but the very first night God told me that He wanted to work on something else. And I was pissed! And then God told me he wanted to work on that too!! HA ha. It was a crazy start to something that was supposed to be faith building - God tearing down my useless defenses first. Isn't He smart? But I felt like I was going nuts and the new thing we were working on wasn't going well.
The bedtime routine with my daughter was getting completely out of control so I knew only after God pointed it out (duh) that this was the miracle I needed to see in my life right now. I was spending hours each night trying to get Adi to sleep and much of that time was spent with me crying and cursing God for not helping me. Oh man, did I ever have to repent for that! But I felt alone, I felt abandoned and I felt like there was really no point in praying any more if God wasn't going to answer my prayers.
I had come to a point of giving up on hope and deciding that I was going to have to do it on my own, without the help of my God. It didn't take long for God to set me straight on that because now I felt dead spiritually and my only chance at life was to admit I couldn't do it on my own and I begged Jesus to forgive me and just be with me. I think that was the weekend I desperately needed to be in worship and church but I was scheduled to serve in the toddler room. Funny how that always seems to happen. Kind of like God saying, "Don't depend on worship and church - depend on Me! Turn your eyes to Me!"
My next lesson was patience. This one keeps coming up for me. I don't know if I'll ever get it right. God showed me that I needed to be patient with Adi. She's two and a half. She's just a child - what she needs most from me are love, consistency and patience. So I knew I had to slow down. I had to look at some resources and figure out a plan. And then I had to stick with the plan and finally (and most importantly) I had to be patient!
Another place where patience became vital was in waiting for my period to come. It's so hard to just wait around, not knowing when I'll be able to move on and get my test done and find out what the heck is wrong with me and why I can't seem to stay pregnant. I felt myself getting irritated because I felt very much like I was experiencing PMS (with meltdowns and extreme emotions) but I couldn't tell if it was because I actually had hormones doing crazy stuff or if it was because I didn't have cooked food to turn to. So I had to be patient and wait.
Finally another Sunday came and I was so completely on edge to begin with. I didn't know if I had any faith at all. I was so low and so desperate. And then I had to listen to a testimony about grasping for what we want vs. waiting and receiving what God has for us. Though I had heard the testimony before it threw me way off. I was feeling good about deciding to have the HSG done and then all of a sudden I was forced to consider whether doing so was just grasping and not waiting and receiving. I think I wrote a blog entry about this because it was pretty relevant. Ultimately I came to a place of knowing in my heart that I have two choices. I can continue on the way I have been and take the risk of having many more miscarriages, or I can accept the technology that could tell me what is wrong and possibly help me prevent it from ever happening again. My heart can't keep going through miscarriages. I just can't. I'm getting the test and once again, I feel good about that.
That same afternoon I went to a prophetic ministry time that was wonderful and affirming for me. God told me to keep praying. He told me other things that I desperately needed to hear and I left feeling like Jesus had restored me. I felt my faith grow, my heart heal, and the spirit of joy.
My final week was probably the easiest in terms of faith but the hardest in terms of my fast. I stayed on my fast through both Thanksgiving dinners that we attended and it was miserable. But I did it. Cam was so proud of me and I was just a grumpy old fuddy duddy! But family made it all better and I was grateful to have been able to make a choice between cooked and raw food and that there was an abundance of each. So many people in the world (including right here in our country) aren't so blessed.
This post is already so long. There's so much more I could say and other ways I can see God working in me but I think I just want to close by saying that my faith experiment was exactly what it should have been. Did I see an answer to prayer? Yes, I did. Just not in the way I expected to. I think 21 days was perfect for me and I can't wait until the next faith experiment comes up - if God did all of this in 21 days, I can only imagine what He could do in 40!
Monday, November 19, 2007
Scheduled Appointment
I called my doctor this morning with confidence and a little bit of excitement to finally schedule my HSG. The official appointment is next Wedn the 28th at 7:30 a.m.
I have to admit that hearing a testimony again yesterday that I had heard once before at the women's retreat really had me thinking and second guessing myself. The part that kept playing over in my head was that my friend was writhing beneath the technician's hand as the test was performed, and how violating the experience was for her.
I had to stop and question, once again, whether doing this test was actually an act of loss of faith. That idea felt devastating to me and I just didn't know what the answer was. After Cam and I talked more about it, we agreed that going forward with the test was the right thing for us to do. Though my faith has been a bit shaky as of late, I don't consider my faith to be placed in the medical community rather than Jesus. If anything, I'm more dependent now on Jesus than ever before.
For me, I believe that moving forward with the test is accepting an option that has been laid before me, technological or not (wasn't it God who blessed the individuals with the insight to develop the technology in the first place? That's a whole other question - sheesh). At this point we're opting for a diagnostic test to tell us why we've been pregnant five times but only have one child. To be honest, I don't know exactly what we'll choose to actually "do about it" once we know what the problem is. That's the next step, the next level. And I trust Jesus to help us through that as well.
When I look back at my life and remember some the times I've writhed through something, I can see that something good came from the most memorable (and painful) experiences. I writhed under the hand of the ultrasound technician as we saw the first images of our little Adi in my womb because my bladder was so full I thought it might explode. But we saw a healthy baby in there and that made it worth it. I writhed in my bed for 4 or 5 nights struggling through contractions before I gave birth to my daughter. The writhing was worth it.
Having an HSG and writhing once again beneath a technician's hand will be well worth the possibility of preventing another miscarriage. My heart and mind just won't let me continue running into the same brick wall again. I can't just keep doing what I've been doing the same way and expect different results. I am comfortable and confident in my decision knowing full well what to expect but it will be far far better than enduring the loss of another child.
I have to admit that hearing a testimony again yesterday that I had heard once before at the women's retreat really had me thinking and second guessing myself. The part that kept playing over in my head was that my friend was writhing beneath the technician's hand as the test was performed, and how violating the experience was for her.
I had to stop and question, once again, whether doing this test was actually an act of loss of faith. That idea felt devastating to me and I just didn't know what the answer was. After Cam and I talked more about it, we agreed that going forward with the test was the right thing for us to do. Though my faith has been a bit shaky as of late, I don't consider my faith to be placed in the medical community rather than Jesus. If anything, I'm more dependent now on Jesus than ever before.
For me, I believe that moving forward with the test is accepting an option that has been laid before me, technological or not (wasn't it God who blessed the individuals with the insight to develop the technology in the first place? That's a whole other question - sheesh). At this point we're opting for a diagnostic test to tell us why we've been pregnant five times but only have one child. To be honest, I don't know exactly what we'll choose to actually "do about it" once we know what the problem is. That's the next step, the next level. And I trust Jesus to help us through that as well.
When I look back at my life and remember some the times I've writhed through something, I can see that something good came from the most memorable (and painful) experiences. I writhed under the hand of the ultrasound technician as we saw the first images of our little Adi in my womb because my bladder was so full I thought it might explode. But we saw a healthy baby in there and that made it worth it. I writhed in my bed for 4 or 5 nights struggling through contractions before I gave birth to my daughter. The writhing was worth it.
Having an HSG and writhing once again beneath a technician's hand will be well worth the possibility of preventing another miscarriage. My heart and mind just won't let me continue running into the same brick wall again. I can't just keep doing what I've been doing the same way and expect different results. I am comfortable and confident in my decision knowing full well what to expect but it will be far far better than enduring the loss of another child.
Oh Sweet Jesus!
I can not believe what a roller coaster I've been on over the past several days. I've gone from angry at God and blaming Him for all my shortcomings, having complete sobbing meltdowns, doubting my ability to parent, feeling like I don't deserve another child, questioning whether I have any faith at all, being shattered into a zillion tiny pieces (most of this happened Saturday and Sunday morning!) to a place of peace and joy. Which leads me to wonder if I'm a complete psychopath!!
Well, blessed be the name of the Lord for He has spoken into my life through a wonderful ministry time at a friends house yesterday afternoon. God reminded me that when I was suffering, he was there. He encouraged me to continue praying and not to give up - which is exactly where I was... about to give up. Jesus picked up every last one of the zillion pieces scattered about and held them in His hands as He lovingly put them back together - and then He blessed them. He encouraged my marriage, gave me permission to rest and reminded me to trust. And there was so much more that I'm still processing. How miraculous and glorious is our God. I stand in awe.
This morning a bittersweet joy arrived with the start of my period. It's so odd to feel joyous when my period finally comes after each miscarriage - it's a sign that my body has healed and I get a fresh start when any other period just means that I'm not pregnant. So 7 to 10 days from now I will undergo the infamously invasive and horrifying dye test... no matter how invasive or how horrifying the test might be I'm grateful to be having it. And I'm choosing to go into it knowing that God gave me lemons and I'm going to make lemonade!!
Well, blessed be the name of the Lord for He has spoken into my life through a wonderful ministry time at a friends house yesterday afternoon. God reminded me that when I was suffering, he was there. He encouraged me to continue praying and not to give up - which is exactly where I was... about to give up. Jesus picked up every last one of the zillion pieces scattered about and held them in His hands as He lovingly put them back together - and then He blessed them. He encouraged my marriage, gave me permission to rest and reminded me to trust. And there was so much more that I'm still processing. How miraculous and glorious is our God. I stand in awe.
This morning a bittersweet joy arrived with the start of my period. It's so odd to feel joyous when my period finally comes after each miscarriage - it's a sign that my body has healed and I get a fresh start when any other period just means that I'm not pregnant. So 7 to 10 days from now I will undergo the infamously invasive and horrifying dye test... no matter how invasive or how horrifying the test might be I'm grateful to be having it. And I'm choosing to go into it knowing that God gave me lemons and I'm going to make lemonade!!
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Days 8-11
Oh man, it's been so hard to keep up with posting lately. Bed time is not going well. I've wondered over the last several days if this faith experiment is more of a faith test! Ugh. The best part about my experiment, believe it or not, is the fast from cooked food. I'm loving it.
I'm on my lunch break right now and I'm eating a Sun Burger on Sun-Dried Tomato Bread. It's fabulous - I love having a dehydrator to be able to make all sorts of amazing alternatives to cooked food. I can't believe it. You really have to check out my raw food blog to see pictures and recipes for some of the stuff I'm eating. And I feel great. I don't really want to eat cooked food right now (that could change at any given second, I'm sure.)
The faith part of my experiment has been shaky and difficult. I realize at certain moments that I have so little faith. And in others I can see that, yes, I do believe that Jesus can be my everything if I just give him a chance!
The daily devotionals as outlined are really helpful for someone like me, someone who has read only bits and pieces of the Bible but ultimately am clueless. Certainly not a theologian and I don't really want to be either.
Somehow I keep on keepin' on even though it feels very empty some days. I'm a little discouraged but don't want to bail on my commitment so, onward!
I'm on my lunch break right now and I'm eating a Sun Burger on Sun-Dried Tomato Bread. It's fabulous - I love having a dehydrator to be able to make all sorts of amazing alternatives to cooked food. I can't believe it. You really have to check out my raw food blog to see pictures and recipes for some of the stuff I'm eating. And I feel great. I don't really want to eat cooked food right now (that could change at any given second, I'm sure.)
The faith part of my experiment has been shaky and difficult. I realize at certain moments that I have so little faith. And in others I can see that, yes, I do believe that Jesus can be my everything if I just give him a chance!
The daily devotionals as outlined are really helpful for someone like me, someone who has read only bits and pieces of the Bible but ultimately am clueless. Certainly not a theologian and I don't really want to be either.
Somehow I keep on keepin' on even though it feels very empty some days. I'm a little discouraged but don't want to bail on my commitment so, onward!
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