time flies

well, i would be 11 weeks today, but my midwife recalculated my due date based on hegels protocol (or something along those lines), so now i'm due on the 13 january instead of the 11. i guess i can use the extra two days, but i want my baby now! or at least, i want the pukiness and pains in my hips to go away.

in other news, apparently the old wives' tale was right: stress can cause infertility. no surprise there, really. there was a study a few months ago connecting stress with early miscarriage - they had a study group of women and tested them every day for cortisol (a stress-related hormone) and pregnancy, and discovered that over 90% of the women who had early miscarriages (many so early they might not have been detected if the women were not getting bloodwork done constantly) had high levels of cortisol - way above average. the latest study shows a correlation between stress and ovulation problems (they also suggest that having clowns in ivf clinics would reduce stress - i think that would only work if the woman undergoing treatment was allowed to beat the clown up).

for us, i know reducing stress helped. in the month before i got pregnant (after i read the first study), i made a conscious effort to reduce stress in my life, and to not let life stress me out. i spent a lot of time counting to ten and breathing deeply and reminding myself that since i'm not a surgeon or a firefighter, no one is going to die if something goes wrong.

a big part of de-stressing was not thinking about conceiving. i stopped reading ttc and pregnancy forums. i abandoned the fiend (aka fertility friend - no pal of mine!), which led to too much hyperanalysis of meaningless details. i kept taking my temperature, but just wrote the numbers down in order on a piece of paper, to help me resist the urge to compare charts for signs. i tried not to dwell on it.

lo and behold, i am now at almost 11 weeks! and last week's ultrasound shows a healthy little embryo.

you would think people would be happy to hear good news, wouldn't you? but it seems a lot of the infertility crowd - the women who have so much of their lives invested solely in their ability to be pregnant - are not happy, not happy at all. they see it as blame-the-victim talk. they've already had their mothers-in-law tell them "just relax and stop worrying about it, and you'll get pregnant." and truly, stress isn't the only thing to cause infertility.

but it is a factor. and it's a factor for a lot of people. and if reducing stress can help a number of women overcome their infertility, isn't that what matters most?