8 weeks

This is a rather bittersweet milestone. I was supposed to be 8w1d during my first pregnancy when I went in for the ultrasound that showed there was no longer a heartbeat and the baby was only measuring 6w3d. And given what happened at my last ultrasound this time around, I'm not feeling as happy to have reached 8 weeks as I thought I would be. So, assuming the remaining baby is still doing ok, this is the most pregnant I've ever been, and I thought I would feel more confident at this point. Instead I just feel more worried than before, now that everything is just pinned on the one remaining. I guess as some small consolation, my nausea was worse yesterday than it had been, since I inexplicably was worried that all of my symptoms were going to stop since we now knew that the one baby had passed. That's why I had been trying to pin down when the heartbeat may have stopped so I could remind myself that I still had some pretty noticeable symptoms even after that point to try to nip that worry in the bud. My internet research (always taken with a grain of salt) also revealed that Vanishing Twin Syndrome is apparently quite common, with up to 1 out of 8 singleton births starting out as twins (and I did not double-check that stat, so I may have just perpetuated false information here). That makes me feel slightly better too, since I'm just so worried that having one pass is just going to lead to the second baby passing too... and although it's entirely possible that the second heartbeat may still stop too, that happening would likely be completely independent of the first baby passing.

On a slightly more upbeat note, I've also had a few more symptoms crop up lately, which are more of the digestive tract variation, so I won't get into the details of that here. But one of the very first symptoms I had (like, within days of transfer) was a sudden inability to form coherent sentences... I normally can get a bit tongue-tied, but this was a whole new animal, since I would just say the complete wrong word (usually at least getting the first couple of letters right before veering off into randomness), forget what I was saying, or just end the sentence at a completely different place than I planned to. It was frustrating but also a bit funny since it was so weird. And then a couple of weeks ago, I was on my way to eat at Chick-Fil-A, which is a straight shot from my house - literally, two turns to get out of my neighborhood, go straight for about 2-3 miles, then turn right into the parking lot. I somehow managed to turn at the light before the parking lot, and I didn't even realize I had switched lanes to get into the turn lane until it was too late. I somehow snapped out of whatever daze I was in to realize what was happening (which went like this - "What am I doing? What?! NOOOoooo..."), but since there was a divider, I couldn't even get back out of the turn lane. So instead I took a nice little detour, probably involving an illegal U-turn, just so I could have my fast food since nothing else seemed appealing. And then yesterday at work, I managed to have the concentration of a gnat, since I kept trying to work on something that I needed to have done the day before, but yet I kept getting distracted. A coworker came by to talk to me about it, I swore I would have comments to him within the next couple of hours... and then I immediately started working on something else. I would suddenly remember again, start working on it again, get distracted by something else and leave off in the middle of my edits. Once I actually left the document on top of my keyboard so I would remember to work on it when I got back from the printer, and yet I still immediately forgot as soon as I removed it from my keyboard so I could unlock my computer. And when I did actually get to it and was taking notes on the hard copy, I managed to leave the last letter off of nearly every word that I wrote. So weird.

So here's this week's comparison pic. Although the bloating felt worse this week, it actually looks about the same in the comparison to last week's picture. So really, the only thing notable in this week's pic is the presence of my trusty Sea-Bands :)