so, anybody ’round these parts friends with, um, Tom Cruise & Katie & their fun Scientology crew?

’cause if you’d like to theft their much-reported personal ultrasound machine and bring it on over to my house, that would be really, like, cool.

i saw my doctor today. my blood hcg levels are rising appropriately, apparently, so that means that either there’s a baby in there that last week’s ultrasound missed, or that nobody’s filled my poor body in on what’s really going on. totally inconclusive. and because we live in a city (or rather, a glorified hamlet) where the six OBs all share one clinic but have absolutely zero ultrasound equipment at said clinic, i have to wait until the overloaded, overstressed diagnostic imaging department at the local hospital - who do every x-ray, CATscan, MRI, and ultrasound for every medical condition within a fifty-mile radius - get around to fitting me back in. maybe tomorrow.  maybe two weeks from now.  sweet merciful jesus, the waiting. i don’t know who has the mental stability this waiting demands. i don’t…i’m eroded and drained and cycling through the stages of despair in ever shorter circles, like a poodle chasing its tail.

and yet, i couldn’t title this post “the sixth circle of hell”…i tried, and changed it. because there’s still this shred of hope. and it’s excruciating even to contemplate, and feels mostly like a nasty trick i’m trying to keep juggled up in the air along with all the lead weights just waiting - aching - to fall on my head. but it’s there, waving its eager hand in the air while i try desperately to master the mysterious art of non-attachment. and i’m trying to look at it as good, that hope.  i remember realizing with surprise, after Finn died, that the not knowing that had been so torturous during the long weeks of bedrest with that failing pregnancy was not nearly so terrible as having to confront the finality of knowing, in the end.

i do not think it would be quite that way again, this time. but still, i’m trying to let hope linger around and not kick it to the curb prematurely. trying.

but if anybody wants to FedEx me that Tomkitten ultrasound machine thingy, only slightly used…that would be most kind.