Hospital. ALL fricking DAY!  Never mind, instead of seeming a bit extortionate the £2.50 flat rate for parking seems quite good value for FOUR WHOLE HOURS!  Mmm.

So yes, Mr BC and I have made another baby, once again, via a single debauched drunken shag.

However. Ah yes, there’s always a “but”.

It may not be a go-er and it’s probably ectopic.

Or is that pain of the infection which I also have?

We won’t know for sure until I have a scan on Friday, although the blood test results are good.  Lots of HGV* hormones in the blood.

In the meantime, it’s double strength on-the-wagon for the sake of the antibiotics as well as any possible future spawn which might be in the offing.

I will probably be rather quiet until then since thinking about it is doing my head in and trying to concentrate on anything makes it worse.  In fact, the only way not to dwell on it is to sit around like a big lemon reading other people’s blogs, watching telly, playing video games or pursuing other supremely time wasting yet uncomplicated activities.

So, more on this story… Later.

* Yes, I KNOW it’s not HGV as in lorry, that’s a joke.  I’m completely aware it’s my levels of human chorionic gonadotrophin - or the rather more snappy HCG, for short - we are looking at and yes, I only put the whole name in because anything that long which contains the word “Gonad” has got to be worth a mention.

On the whole, as a repository for my mental trash, this blog works quite well. I’m pleased, overall, with the varied nature of the results. That’s why I’m very irritated with myself to be bloody wittering about not being pregnant again. It’s just that I’m a proactive person. Stuff happens, I evaluate the situation and do something. Waiting is not my strong point.

I’ll have a period in a day or two, I promise and we’ll all be back on track. It’s only particularly bad because this has been a particularly psycho month…

Never mind, two weeks of waiting are in the bag. Only somewhere between 24 hours or a week to go - depending which menstrual cycle I’m on and NO! Don’t try to follow me on your moped.

That said, as well as period pains and sore boobs, I have thrush (aren’t anonymous blog’s great, who could I tell that to in the real world, apart from my Mum) a sure sign that the painters will be arriving in next two or three days.

At least I seem to be able to handle the temperature charting in a spirit of genuine enquiry rather than the desperate need to know which seems to dog my other family planning activities… except for the nookie, of course, thank heavens that’s still normal.

I do find this difficult though. If it was the 60s I’d be fine. I’d do my usual diet and when I got pregnant I’d reduce the exercise a little but not too much and that’d be it. It isn’t the 60s though, it’s the paranoid 21st Century so the advice conflicts.

On the one hand they tell you to avoid making a big thing out of trying to make children. Relax and continue with your normal routine while you try to conceive, they tell you. Possibly eating more healthily and taking exercise a bit more. Do what’s right for you, they say.

Well, doing what’s right for me, if staying sane is the right thing to do, is to cook a good meal every night and drink a glass of wine with it - not for nothing is my ancestry French - and I’m talking good wine here, too. Doing what’s right for me is having two apples for breakfast with a slice of aged Guyere, Brie and Comte. Nope, none of them are pasturised. Doing what’s right for me is enjoying exercise, quite strenuous exercise at that, 3 times a week.

On the other hand there is this suggestion that your baby is in dire danger from the moment you conceive and the slightest wrong move on your part could wipe it out.

Perhaps, what they really mean is, do what’s right for you, so long as it’s what we tell you…

That poses a tricky problem for me. It means there are going to be two or three weeks every month when I might contain a baby but I don’t know if it’s there or not and have no way of telling.

The suggestion is that once you are pregnant, if you should eat any unpasturised cheese - ie any cheese worth eating - drink wine or run around too fast then, if you have conceived and are growing a baby it will die. So what do you do, three weeks on the wagon and not exercising and two weeks off? Go on the wagon entirely under the guise of “getting healthy”?

I love my husband, I love our life together. I love my life and I want children to be part of it but I don’t want my life to be making children. It’s stressful and I am finding that making changes like giving up alcohol and cheese merely focus me on all the negatives of not conceiving when, month after month, my period arrives. That’s just going to make me miserable, a state in which, I’d lay bets, I am even less likely find myself in a position to leap up and cry “bingo” in the Mecca Hall that is baby making.

Conversely, if you have a miscarriage, they tell you it’s just bad luck that killed your baby and nothing to do with the fact you drank half a bottle of wine a night for the first six weeks of its life because you didn’t know it was there. So… on the one hand, there is this immense pressure “if you don’t give up all these things you’ll kill your baby” on the other when it all goes tits up, the story is “your baby died of bad luck, not because of what you ate and drank”.

Does that mean the whole food thing is a load of old cobblers then? I know they’ve just recently changed their minds about peanuts - peanut allergy is lower in countries where they eat a lot of peanuts, suggesting eschewing them while pregnant is not necessarily the answer. So the advice is now, “eat them unless you have a peanut allergic person in your family”.

As you can see. I am bad at waiting

Everyone says is. “Relax, you will conceive in your own sweet time.”

I say. “Fuck off!”*

* Mrs M, I think you may enjoy that one!

Here’s a whinge, the point being that if I can have an almighty hissy fit on line I don’t have to do it in the real world. Sorry peps. Also, if I manage to do it in an amusing way, somebody somewhere might laugh or conversely, realise they aren’t the only one and that would be i) positive and ii) make me happy again.

You know that bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallis tells the boxer bloke “that’s just pride, fucking with your arse…” Well, this is just hormones fucking with mine, ok? It’s genuine though and when I sat down to write this morning, it’s what came out… so I’ve left it here.

Now, this month, I have been feeling distinctly hormonal, early. As you all know, Mr BC and I are trying to make spawn. Unfortunately for me, feeling pregnant is absolutely no different to the usual PMT I get so it’s impossible to tell when my tits start aching, my memory goes on the blink, my breath gets short, I feel dizzy and get sort of… preparatory stomach cramps whether it means I’ve hit the jackpot or am just up for a normal visit from the er… painters. Sometimes I think it may be extra bad because I’m growing a practise bag.*

*When you get pregnant the baby and stuff is inside a bag. Occasionally, you’ll grow one of these bags with nothing in it. You don’t need to have even been near a man for this to happen it’s just your body practising in case it ever needs to grow one in earnest, kind of like military exercises. This is perfectly natural and I have a theory that the months where I have particularly bad PMT, even for me and think I’m pregnant, only to get the blob as usual are months when my body is growing a practise bag. It’s a bummer but at least it means that if it has to grow a bag for real, it’s going to be very good at it.

So this month… looking at last month’s temperature chart, I thought that maybe I ovulate a bit earlier than I had previously believed and found that if this were the case, Mr BC and I had unwittingly had a shag at exactly the right time. Hoorah!

Even more intriguing, the following day I had gone for my bike ride and got the bonk, for the first time ever. Normally there is plenty of blood sugar and I’d had the usual large breakfast and not done anything out of the ordinary. It was so pronounced I had to stop and eat some blackberries on my way home. When I thought about this I remembered a friend who said she knew she was pregnant from the day after because her hormones were all over the place. I wondered but well… like I said, you never can tell…

So… a couple of days later my boobs started to ache, really badly, worse than ever before in fact - including the time I was pregnant.

Hmm… is she or isn’t she? I thought.

The painful bits abated to normal pre-blob levels after about five days but the curious light headed feeling continued and I have started to find myself getting very tired. Cautious optimism but I have a 30 day cycle, if I really have ovulated when I thought we’ve bingoed it on day 10, which means even with early testing kits I have to wait TWO WHOLE WEEKS (aaargh! For the love of God.) to find out whether or not we have created Mini Us and THREE to find out, for sure, since the first symptom arrived on day 11…

Now, not all of you will have tried for a baby but let me assure you, it’s not the fun it’s cracked up to be. You have two or three weeks where you may be pregnant each month and during those you have to decide whether you are going to act as if you are, abstaining from all things, or carry on as normal, potentially jeapordising - if doctors are to be believed - the life of your newly forming baby. So that’s three weeks of thinking things like this…

1. Should I drink wine at all? I shouldn’t if I’m pregnant but I might not be and I love the way it compliments my cooking.
2. Should I continue to exercise and if so, how, should I go about it? If pregnant “strenuous” exercise is to be avoided. How strenuous is strenuous?
3. They say “no heavy lifting” if you are pregnant. How heavy is the lifting involved? Would it cover items like the computer bag - containing my lap top and papers - which I carry down the path to my office each morning?
4. Would carrying a Dyson hoover up three flights of stairs count as “heavy lifting” if so how will I do the housework two weeks in every five?
5. What about walking down the hill from the supermarket with a bag of heavy shopping, does the heaviness go on weight or is it about what I find easy to lift? I’m always assuming the latter.
6. Does scrubbing vigorously at the fine layer of cat hair over the drawing room carpet (I was sure I closed that door) with the “stair attachment” until the perspiration drips off the end of my nose (it doesn’t, I promise but I like the comic effect of the idea) come under the title “vigorous exercise”.
7. I can go 10 miles a day on a bike at about 10 miles an hour without getting out of breath - I do get stiff and tired but not breathless… is that too vigorous?

The problem, as ever, is one of striking the happy balance between doing the things that I need to do, like housework and carrying heavy shopping, not to mention the things which keep me sane, exercising, enjoying fine wine, coffee and good food like prawns and unpasturised cheese and doing what you are supposed to do when you are pregnant - sitting still, as far as I can tell, or “walking briskly” (which bit of “my leg’s fucked and I can’t walk more than about a mile” do they not understand) not to mention avoiding doing or eating anything that might remotely be considered pleasurable (I told you this was a whinge).

So on the one hand, I should carry on as normal because otherwise when I get my period it’s ten times more galling and makes me very sad? On the other hand, while going on as normal is usually better for my mental health, if I don’t cut back and I am pregnant, will I kill my baby? What if I have been pregnant several times before now and not realised because I killed it with my sybaritic excesses? Scary. Huh?

(Yes boys, women DO over analyse… EVERYTHING, just like this in fact, I’m a laid back, pragmatic, un drama-queeny one. Even my husband says I am low maintenance.)

Now the sensible part of my brain says “you KNOW all the answers to these questions, just chill, relax and what will be will be”. It’s right, of course, but the sensible part of my brain has clearly never tried to make a baby - more to the point, if I took its advice the rest of me wouldn’t be, either!

Well… that’s what the emotion gremlins (new one for the list of fairies I think) have been doing to me for the last week. This is the most realistic and pronounced set of symptoms I’ve had outside my real pregnancy since it happened. The big tellers last time were… Sore boobs, feeling completely knackered - you know sleeping through the night and waking up feeling like you haven’t been to bed at all - and of course, feeling a bit dizzy and la-la.

This morning, I wake up and realise that no, I’m not pregnant. I’ve just got a fucking cold! Arse! D’you know, when I was a kid I used to get a cold in September each year and it would last the whole winter through. These days, it’s so long since I had one that I had forgotten what it feels like when you fight it for a while before it really takes hold. Yes! Got it in one the symptoms are sore glands (boobs), perennial knackeredness and, because your brain is slowly filling up with snot, dizzieness.

Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

Anyone like to primal scream with me? Here we go. AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHH!

Mmmmm… that’s better.

I loathe and detest having colds! They detach you from reality, it’s like living behind a pain of glass and it goes on for ever. It takes me weeks to have colds others will throw off in a day. Yes, I’d lay bets I’m the only woman in the entire world who gets Man Flu.

There’s no point wasting an early pregnancy test now, it’s obvious what it is and god help me not only am I not pregnant but I’m going to have to put up wall of menthol versus well of snot for the next week or two, to boot! Grrrrrr…!

Everyone has to have crap days or they wouldn’t appreciate the good ones and yes, I’d lay bets many of my brothers and sisters would give their eye teeth to have this as a good day. Things could be so much worse… but I just had to have a gripe about it somewhere because it’s so blummin’ irritating.

Right then, I’d better go do some work… pipple toot.

——————————————————————————–

Stop press (10 minutes later): have just had a blub on Mr BC and feel so much better. I know for sure that I would rather spend my life with him than anyone or anything else in the world… If we don’t have kids so what, we have each other… this whole baby making thing is stupidly stressy and I really shouldn’t let it or my racing hormones get to me.

I explained Mr BC that if it was just a case of having a go and getting pregnant or not it would be ok and how it’s the conflict between my pleasure and runny-about-loving existence and what you are supposed to do when you are trying for a baby (renounce anything remotely enjoyable) which causes me to worry. We agree that once you know you are pregnant, doing the right thing will be easy, just this simple rule, if it’s fun stop it!

I really do have a bare faced cheek to complain about anything but or course that, lovely readers, is why I do it here. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to and because it’s here, I don’t feel the need to say it to the people I meet, those poor unfortunate souls who are trapped and can’t up and leave the way you can without being rude!

Thank you for indulging me.

Not that I’m a spoiled brat or anything.

Pipple toot.

First up, apologies University Update readers, I only mention cholestorol once and in passing.

Well this month was another minger for PMT. I was dizzy, breathless, tired, sick - yes, in the mornings - and constantly hungry but on the up side, very happy. I did wonder if it was a bit more than PMT but I did a pregnancy test which was negative, not, of course, that any of them guarantee much before your period is due.

I was supposed to be taking part in a medical experiment this morning, basically they give you a free health check, cholesterol test, thyroid, blood tests, glucose test, fitness test… they tell you how much fat to muscle your body contains… etc etc. I’ve thought of doing something like this for some time because my weight is way over the body mass index chart thing for my height and since I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it, other than make sure I stay reasonably fit, I thought it might be good to check up on the things which might be affected by my excess lard.

However, you’re not supposed to do the test if you’re pregnant which, taking the particularly bad PMT into account, I thought I might have been. So I rang them yesterday, explained the situation and they said better safe than sorry and put it off. So this morning, when I woke up and took my temperature it was back down to 36.28 so I knew a visit from the painters was imminent. Damn! I should have gone for the tests then, especially as, here at home, a visit from the plumber was imminent, too.

Further investigation showed that the painters had, indeed, arrived and I was on the blob. So I went down to the kitchen to retrieve my black underwear from where it was airing and a pair of trousers. As I stood by the washing machine in my trousers and bra there was a timid knock at the door. Thanking the lord, in his bounty, for not putting me near a window I quickly pulled my pyjama top over my bra - had to because selecting a shirt from the airing mound would involve walking across in front of the window.

Phew, half dressed then, I welcome the plumber, who, even for a workman, is early - it’s 8 o’clock.

I offer him a cup of tea, which he gratefully accepts and escort him upstairs to the bathroom. Luckily I have time to fill both the sinks in the kitchen before he turns the water off, that’s good because I need to wash my hair. I hastily pull on a shirt while he is out of the way and do so. I realise I haven’t drunk enough coffee for what my friend calls “motility” and that now I will have to face that, as well as anything “the painters” produce after he turns the water off, ie, with no flush. Bugger!

After a short time he comes down to the kitchen with the basin, I open the door for him. We are called to look at the tiling behind. The new basin will not be against the wall so we need to tile over the hole. The hole in question is deeper than the tiles we have as the last lot covered over the previous set with the new instead of removing them first. Never mind, we have some old white tiles in the barn Mr BC tells him cheerily. Mr BC is very busy with work at the moment so I suggest I go and look for them. He is clearly grateful and tells me where he thinks they are, so off I go.

I find one lot but they are wrong, used and too thick. I know we have some thin ones so I start to go through a pile of boxes we have been meaning to go through for about 2 years. They contain not white china, as I thought, but old videos. I find a mouse’s nest in the cushions for one of our loungers and a manky old blanket with holes eaten in it. I also find two union jacks bought by a friend of the family for the coronation of Elizabeth II. They are a bit knackered but at least the mice have left them alone. I rescue them. I am able to stack the boxes more tidily than before, making more room although I throw the blanket into a bin liner.

Great, I am going to spend the afternoon with five ladies with babies and I am now covered in mouse wee with no chance of washing it off. Mmm… Free dose of Weil’s disease with every cuddle.

I throw the blanket away and go to report my blank on the tiles front. Never mind, at least everything is tidy now. Mr BC goes and find the tiles we were both thinking about, immediately. Bugger. I take off my mouse-wee covered top and throw it on the washing pile. I wash my hands in the basin of water I’d used to wash my hair and change my second Mouse Wee, a.k.a. Weil’s disease infested top too. Both are replaced with something clean but less appropriate. I also grab a moment or two to dry my hair. Luckily I washed my gymn towel so it’s there with the airing washing rather than with all the other towels - and the plumber - in the bathroom.

Finally I make myself some toast, finish my coffee and head off to my office, to do some work. No sooner have I sat down when I realise I need to have a big pooh. We have two loos but one - if it’s still plumbed in, that is - is in the bathroom with the plumber. The other is downstairs and has one tank full of flush but, since the water is turned off, no more. Can I really do a huge pooh in it? What if Mr BC wants to do one, too? There’ll be no flush left for him or  I will have to leave it. Er… no. However mellow it is for yellow it’s definitely down for brown.

Never mind!  I remember that I live in the middle of a cathedral city with award-winning public loos.  Phew!  So, I saunter off to find one.

Except that one of the many lovely effects of the blob is a monthly dose of Delhi Belly. So while running is not something I can do with confidence I walk as briskly - and hopefully as normally - as a person frantically clenching their buttocks can to the closest set, about 200 yards away in a nearby car park. I do what I have to do, thanking my lucky stars that I have these splendid, sparkling clean amenities here, close by which wouldn’t be available if I lived elsewhere. I’m going out this afternoon so at least the painter’s excesses can be disposed of down a flushing bog and with any luck by the time I return the plumber will have finished and the water will be back on…

Thinking about it, I could have saved myself a lot of hassle. If I’d worked out when the blob was due and realised it coincided with the arrival of the plumber I would have known I couldn’t possibly be pregnant this month, sod’s law just wouldn’t give me that kind of leeway.

Make no mistake, I want a baby but I also know the first thing that pops into my mind, if I ever do get pregnant will be. “Brilliant! Almost a whole year without a period!”

AND I have a sodding stomach ache.

So what does this prove? It proves that when a workman has to come to your home, no matter how far in advance you arrange it or how carefully you plan, they will always arrive at the most inconvenient time. Even if you have planned it to minimise the disruption, something will happen to make it inconvenient, like the blob.

So today’s piece of sage advice for life is this.

Don’t plan.

Be aware of what might happen and make sure you have anything you might need but don’t plan per se, just fly by the seat of your pants because no matter how minutely you do plan that’s what you’ll end up having to do.

Ok it’s not a great title but you get my drift. Last night, in the kitchen, with “the End” by the Beatles - the really and I mean REALLY funky bit at the end of Abbey Rod playing er… quite loudly I was laying up the trays for supper. We usually eat in front of the TV off trays, slobby but hey…

So there I am strutting about the kitchen Mick Jagger style (only it doesn’t look cool, rock ‘ard or even human when I do it it looks like I imagine the dog that plays the piano out of the Muppets would if he took an acid tab). As I’m rootling about in the draws, bum waggling and head nodding like Ralph the Dog (as previously described). I look up and there’s Mr BC. I dunno how long he’d been there, probably far too long because he was grinning.

You know those moments when you are doing something really fun but also really stupid. The kind of things you do on your own but would never want anyone to see? Er… maybe you don’t but my personality has this kind of life of its own which I am often unable to subsume… I suspect it’s because if I actually got embarrassed the way normal people do I just wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, this was definitely a private do this alone and never be seen by anyone or you’ll have to kill them moment so I was swiftly attacked by the embarrassment gnomes and went into shy lady mode… He’s still taking the piss out of me about it this morning!

Then again, yet another of my friends is pregnant, once again throwing into stark relief the fact that I am very much not and that just like every single sodding month since we’ve been trying my er… go-days… this month, according to the Wee Sticks of Enlightenment are on days when there is just no hope of any action.

Tonight - massive wine tasting, Mr BC will be hammered and therefore accompanied by Snow White’s well known diminutive friends Sleepy and Droopy. So, no chance today - or tomorrow - massive dinner party, Mr BC and I will BOTH be a bit merry and sleeping over at some mates’ house with thin bedroom walls so no chance there either. And this seems to happen every month because most months, the week people tend to organise things is the week in the middle which is the BC fertility zone. Fucking sod it! (sorry non-swearers).

Anyway… getting to the point, I promise - what promoted the repeated playing of “The End” along with “Golden Slumbers” and more importantly “Carry that Weight” is because they are sung by what is clearly a raw and hurting Paul McCartney and when I’m raw and hurting they make me feel better - I do play them when I’m not sad, too because whatever mood one is in they are excellent lift-me-up material. But it was almost prescient that there should be a post on Chrisfiore’s blog which featured this music on the morning of the day I found this out. So I was already prepared and already listening to one of my favourite belt-up-BC tracks when I heard the news which though happy and good made me feel so sad…

Chrisfiore, I thank you.

Oh I’m delighted for her, don’t get me wrong but still empty and down and low and just pissed off for me… and of course, that makes me feel bitter and twisted and evil. Yes, sod the dwarves, I’m the Evil Step Mother!

“Hello, thank you for talking to BC, I’m afraid her generosity of spirit is completely absent right now… please leave a message after the beep or hold for the wrong kind of attention.”

Oh! Arse! And tonight, and tomorrow, I’m going to be hanging out with her and another pregnant friend, too (nose braced for upcoming rubbing in it two nights running) and I’ve got to be generous and happy for them and nice about it when I’m actually feeling slightly less kindly disposed to other humans right now, let alone a brace of pregnant ones, than Snow White’s Step Mum was to Snow White.

Oh sod! I will NOT be a miserable bag about this! I refuse.

Oh well, I have so much work I’m bloody drowning… perhaps I should stop winging, get off my arse and do some of that! It will make me feel more in control of my life and myself and therefore, better!

I’m not sure any of us have control of our lives but we do control the way we react although, that’s the most difficult bit…

So now I’ve dumped this here and I’ll have a quick dose of Abbey Road… perhaps with a little Comfortably Numb and a dash of I’ve Been This Way Before… The angst, the detachment, the jaw-droppingly fabulous VOICE. Mmm… a potent combo! That should do it. Yep and if it doesn’t… then I’ll think about how much I love my husband and how happy I am to have him whether or not we have kids and how I didn’t care whether I had any before the miscarriage and if it still doesn’t work I’ll get my iPod and Abbey Road and go cruising in the sun with the lid off in my car… and THEN get back to work.

I should point out you are meant to laugh if you find the writing funny. The way I defuse the world, my emotions and er… pretty much everything really, is by turning it into a joke. Funny is not scary so funny is easier.

Hey ho… (or should that be Heigh Ho)? Pipple toot!