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| My sister's congratulatory gift for the 'bean'. She painted it in oil. It's called 'Shetland in Grass'. She knows my weakness for ponies. |
Yes. I am pregnant. It happened. How, I do not know. Running on one ‘cylinder’, with odds of <20% WITH Clomid, never mind without Clomid to help me ovulate. Back in January, my doctor decided not to renew my Clomid prescription. I’d taken my last ones in December and failed to get preggers. I was pretty depressed to say the least. But I found her decision to stop easier to accept than I thought. I was sad, granted, but I was also relieved. Not thinking about it all the time, not stressing myself out about it... it is probably the reason why we were received this incredible surprise back in March.
I’m sure the loss of 30+ lbs had something to do with it too.
Yes, I will not lie. I heard this story OVER and OVER and OVER again when we were struggling with the whole fertility thing. “You shouldn’t worry about it... it’ll happen. My sister/friend/cousin’s best friend’s brother’s coworker was trying for years and years. They gave up and boom, as soon as they did, she got pregnant.” Or “My brother in law and his wife tried for years, and then decided to adopt a baby from China. Two months after the adoption went through, she was expecting.” I heard these stories ad nauseam these past seven or eight years. Now we’re one of them.
My last Clomid treatment was in December. After Doc cut me off the Clomid, I said “screw it” and finally decided to give in and turn the spare room into a sewing room. So the bed went into the attic, and it was reorganized so there was room for a cutting table, and my sewing table, the shelves, my trunk for costumes... and I won’t lie, the room is AWESOME. So of course, of COURSE, the moment I do this, I find out I’m pregnant.
Finding out was sort of an exercise in convincing myself. I was feeling awful during the middle of March—I took a day off work for being extremely ill. Weeks back, out of habit, I’d marked the first day of my cycle in February on my calendar, but I’d forgotten about it. I had no need to track it anymore, I wasn’t taking Clomid. So I just flipped the next month on the calendar over and didn’t pay it any heed.
My birthday rolled ‘round (I’m marginally sure that this child was conceived on or near my birthday), and somewhere along the line, my one working ovary popped out an egg, and somewhere along the line, a horde of eager swimmers swarmed it and one tenacious little bugger punched through and got the whole thing started. It happened. Holy crap!
I was about weeks on when I began to suspect something. For one, my ‘girls’ were MEGA sore. They get sore as a mean when my cycle rolls ‘round, but they were super-extra-grandé-sized sore. They are ‘don’t even look at my boobs or THINK about looking at my boobs’ sore. I was also getting really bad tension headaches EVERY day, suffering from light sensitivity, I had to pee constantly and I just wasn’t feeling well. At some point, it occurred to me that maybe I should see if I was late. So I looked at my calendar, and thankfully, I marked the date of my last cycle. At that point I was close to 9 days late.
I’ve been late before, and after all the constant years of disappointment, I refused to give up the idea that I was fooling myself. I convinced myself that if my cycle didn’t start by the 12th day, I’d get a pregnancy test.
When you struggle with infertility, getting a pregnancy test is a torturous thing. You are filled with hope every time, and when it comes back negative, you are so crestfallen, no matter how well you’ve convinced yourself not to get too excited. Over the years, I used to sit and plan all the ways I’d tell my husband if I came back with a positive, I had all these elaborate ideas, like a treasure hunt with baby-items, or whatever. Stupid stuff. But this time, I was too afraid to believe it. So I called my husband and warned him; I was late, I wasn’t feeling hot, my boobs hurt, so I was going to get a pregnancy test. He also had a little trepidation about it. He knows how disappointed I got, and didn’t want me to be crestfallen again.
I left work during lunch and zipped up to Walgreens and bought a 2-pack of EPT tests. I had to swing by the bank, and I was so anxious about it, I actually did the test at the bank. I sat in their restroom staring at the positive with complete incredulity. I thought I was reading it wrong. That maybe I did the test wrong. I read the instructions several times to insure I was reading it right, and feared I’d held it in the stream too long, or at the wrong angle, and got this false positive. I rushed back to work to confer with my coworkers. I spread the instruction sheet over the table and the three of us studied it like a bunch of generals in a war-room studying a map. We looked again and again and the consensus was; positive. The line that was faint was the one that was supposed to indicate negative. The line that indicated positive was not only quite blue, it was heavily darkly blue.
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| I still thought there was room for doubt. Go figure. |
But doubt still filled me, so a few hours later, I did the test again. Once more, the test was positive. It was a fast-positive, immediate. No waiting time for the line to darken, it was a strong, vivid blue line. You’d think after getting positives on two 99% accurate tests would be proof enough, but for someone who has lived with disappointment over pregnancy over and over again, I STILL required convincing. So the next day, I went to a pregnancy resource center, and because I made the mistake of telling the lady I was an atheist, I had to endure long-winded faith-based lectures about the pitfalls of abortion (::oy::) and was then subjected to attempts to coerce me to find faith-based support groups for parenting. Their intentions were respectable but wholly unnecessary. In general, Atheists are not evil fetus-ejecting jerks. We can be decent, respectable, loving people (with an occasional streak of cynical snarkiness of course). I smiled and thanked the lady, and proceeded with the test. She set a timer for five minutes but I got a positive within 20 seconds of my urine being dropped onto the test. This was my first clue about my HCG levels. They are SKY HIGH.
At that point, I accepted the fact that I was pregnant, and I totally lost it. I burst into blubbering tears while clutching the hand of the center’s volunteer lady. She was so sweet, and she even gave me a pair of knitted booties. I texted my husband. Mind you, it’s hard for a young, healthy young woman to hold onto her baby for the first three months.
I wanted a blood test (further confirmation perhaps) and to talk to my OB. That was when I found out she retired without telling me, and I had to hunt down a new OBGYN. I found one, had my first appointment the next week, and our first ultrasound the week after.
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| Surprise, motherf**kas, I iz here. |
This first trimester has been HORRIFIC. My HCG levels were 10x what is considered normal. I’ve been violently sick for weeks. I’ve lost six pounds in two weeks, in fact, I’m at the lowest point I’ve been on the scale in many years, and have broken my WW plateau. I am quite sure I’ll gain it back and then some if I get through this colossally horrid pukey phase and am able to eat anything besides bagels, bananas and rice crispies.
So I’m on my way, and the little lima-bean in my tummy (now about the size of a kumquat and looks disturbingly like a teeny-tiny Voldemort) is still there (at this point...) we’re about to embark on our next appointment today, and hopefully we’ll have a new ultrasound soon enough. Because I’m of ‘Advanced Age’ I will need a specialist doctor who is used to geriatrics with babies and more monitoring to ensure a healthy pregnancy.
As I get closer to the end of the first trimester, the chances of the baby sticking around to full term become much better.
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| This is how my husband chose to announce it on Facebook. Yes, those are my toe-socks. |
I will have to find something to do with my horse for the rest of the year. I was hoping to pasture him; I don’t want to lease him out to an inexperienced or bad rider. I have that to figure out, and the sewing room now baby-room. I’m trying not to panic. :)
Thank goodness I didn’t get rid of all that baby stuff. Who knew?
