Introduction

Hmmm... Things are kind of weird in my life at this time. I feel like I haven't done much at all with it... but if I think hard I realize I have a lot to be darn happy about!

I have moved from the other side of the world (Sweden) to the US. I have gone to college and come out of it with a 3.7 GPA, considering how I sucked in high school, that is way cool! I have met my soul mate AND married him! I live in a beautiful home on the water off of the Mexican Gulf. We actually have freaking DOLPHINS swim by our balcony!!! I have two wonderful dogs that are just the sweetest things. I have a fulfilling career in MY OWN company. No boss, just ME! I get to do stuff every day I actually love (I translate documents in between Swedish and English), and I can do it in my PJs if I had any, since I work from home in my virtual office. I bet a lot of people would be very happy to be in my shoes... Of course, there are a lot of shit about my life that absolutely majorly SUCKS... As in I have all kinds of medical problems... So think twice before you decide you want to be me or anything...

I am now 28. When I was 13 I had been sick for awhile and the docs discovered after ALOT of probing around that I had Chron's disease (inflammatory bowel disease). Well, that really sucks... But I always had all these other problems that my docs never really could explain, so I just suffered and tried not to think too much about it. When I moved to the US went to a family doc to establish a medical caregiver here. He took one look at my papers and me and told me he was pretty sure I had Lupus. Turned out he was right! Sounds bad, you might think. Well, it was kind of a nice. I finally had an explenation to all the other stuff that I had experienced! Lupus is an auto immune disease, just like Chron's. It basically means your own body has "too must immune system". It can't differentiate between what is supposed to be in your body and bad stuff that it needs to get rid of. So symptoms often include inflammation of the joints, but can pretty much happen all over the body, in organs and such.

Since then I have tested positive for several distinctly different diseases, but they are all there do to my screwed up immune system. I have Lupus (SLE), Chron's, Reumatoid Arthritis, Interstitial Cystitis (inflammation of the bladder), Thyroid Disease and Osteoporosis (due to the meds I used to take).

But despite all this shit I keep my chin up pretty good. My philosophy is that you only are as sick as you think you are. I never really think about being sick. Heck if I did I would be freaking depressed all the time! You could never see by looking at me that I am sick. Lupus is often called "the invisible disease". I look completly normal. Heck, sometimes I even look really good! :-)

I have recently gone off all my meds so my body can clean up in preparation to have a baby. I have had some drawbacks, but on the large part I seem to be doing really good off the meds. The stuff I used to take is an immune suppresant drug that keeps the immune system i order. It has to be stopped before atempting to have a baby since it can cause defects and miscarriage.

At this point in life my husband and I are trying to conceive our first child. THAT is scary! I mean; the idea of having a baby grow inside of you, and you being responsible for this baby's well being. Not just in the womb but for the rest of its life... At the same time it is an awsomely exciting thought. We are ready, we can't wait. I really wasn't that aware about how the human reproduction thingy works for REAl. I mean, don't get me wrong. I understand how babies are made... But it is such a freaking science! Here I have spent most of my adult life NOT trying to get pregnant, and now when I am ready to embark on this important journey, well, it is not EASY to get knocked up!

I have been frequenting different boards for people trying to conceive. There are a ton of them! And these people are pretty desperate! I now know all the ins and outs. Did you know there is really a 24 hour window of opportunity to achieve in this baby making business each month? Well, you do now! Apparently, an egg can only get fertilized after it has been released from the ovaries (ovulation). This happens about two weeks after the woman have had her first menstrual day (yeah, more details than you wanted...). But the thing is, everyone is different, so there is no guarantee on WHEN EXACTLY this ovulation happens! Big deal you say, well, when this egg is released it has only 24 hours to find a sperm and get fertilized, after that it desinegrates and vanish...

So how the heck would one know WHEN to stay alert and do the deed? Apparently there are all kinds of scientific ways of figuring it out, all too comlicated to go into details. My favorit is the Ovulation Predictor Kits; you piss on a stick every day, and the test will go positive when you are 24-48 hours away from having your ovulation. How is that possible? Well, just a few days or so before, the body have a surge in hormones, and the test can pick up this surge.

And the trick in making a baby successfully is to have sperms waiting around for the egg. Sperm can live 72 hours or more, and the journey for them is pretty long and hard to get up into the fallopian tubes where the eggs will be. So to maximize one's chances one should do some baby dancing. For those of you not into this stuff; it means to have SEX ;-) That way you have sperm waiting in the tubes when the egg is released and hopefully they will meet, get along well and get started... Sperm is designed so it can spend days just swimming back and forth in the fallopian tubes, waiting.

One intresting thing I didn't know was that some of them actually swim right out of the fallopian tubes into your guts!!! (The fallopian tubes are actually not attached to anything on the top.) So there could be women walking around with sperm swimming around in their stomachs! Kind of creapy but cool!

We tried for the first time in the middle of May, and I walked around every day after that thinking I was pregnant. I mean, I felt pregnant! You have to wait a certain amount of time before you can test to see if it "took". Well, 5 freaking minutes before I was going to take the test I got my period. 5 minutes! How much does that suck!!! So now we have to wait for the next time I ovulate to start all over again. I should ovulate around the 12 of June, so keep yur fingers crossed around that time. If we suceed then we would get a March baby! But as you might be aware of, it is common to have a miscarriage in the first three months; that is why so many couples choose not to tell anyone they are expecting until they are in their fourth month. So just because you get pregnant it does not mean you are guarantees a baby.. I friend of mine just lost her baby, and she was 12 weeks (3 months). Pretty scary... Well, enough for now.