"Are you sitting down?"
These are the first four words I said to Lou about 5 weeks ago when I called him one morning at work. After he assured me that he was in fact sitting down, that's when I said...
"I just got a positive pregnancy test!"
(Notice: I did NOT say "I'm pregnant" because at that moment, I really wasn't sure that I was.)
And here's how the story unfolds...
[SPOILER ALERT: I'm PREGNANT! 10 WEEKS! Healthy baby! Strong heartbeat! Looking great! And here's the proof.]
But, I've gotten ahead of myself, so here's the whole story. (Instead of re-writing all this, I'm just cutting and pasting from my journal...)
Yea so – shock of all shocks – we are pregnant again. Absolutely, completely, positively by accident. No charting. No tracking. No timing. Just pregnant. By surprise. By a miracle.
We’ve been in our new house for only a few weeks. This means I got pregnant within the first two weeks of moving here. “New house; new baby” as our doctor said – oddly scientific phenomenon. Chalk it up to the new house, or fate, or completely giving up on ever having another baby, or divine intervention or whatever else you want to call it – but we are pregnant. And shocked about it.
So the story goes like this. After about a year and a half of charting everything on a very detailed spreadsheet, I gave up. I mourned the loss of little Camille in every way. And I mourned the loss of our vision for ever having another child. And I completely 100% gave up on the idea of every having another child. I honestly (and I think bravely) confronted that reality on an almost-daily basis. And it hurt. Even four months later. It still hurt.
Then we moved and we refocused. I joked that Josie may never have a sibling but she’d have one helluva playroom instead. We didn’t talk about getting pregnant, and if anything, we talked about not getting pregnant.
Then I had more doctor-ordered blood tests to make sure my hormone levels had returned to zero after the March miscarriage. And in May, they were still right on the border. Just above what was considered "normal." So, more tests and a serious possibility that all of this was being caused by uterine cancer. (Gasp!) Ultrasounds. More blood work. Chest xrays. Everything came back negative. And blood levels were back down. It was deemed a fluke and we all agreed it was probably best to avoid pregnancy for awhile.
So, (TMI alert) I got my period Memorial Day weekend when we were in Madison for Molly and Dave’s wedding. And thank goodness I had that event to mark the occasion because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized a five weeks later that my period was actually late. What?!
I had been feeling a little sluggish and tired. I checked the calendar and my period was about 9 days overdue. I dug out some old HPTs from a drawer in the closet and it was positive in about 3 seconds. Not gonna lie, “No f*cking way!” was the exact phrase I said aloud to myself in the bathroom. I called Lou. He was already at work like any other normal day.
“Are you sitting down? I just got a positive pregnancy test!”
Honestly, our first thought was that my hormones were still bonkers. So I called our OBGYN. And he called back later to tell me that positive HPT + late period = baby. (duh!) Still in complete shock, we scheduled an appt for 7 weeks (two weeks later) to check the viability of the pregnancy. Those two weeks were brutal! That appointment was July 13th. And our little tiny grain-of-rice-sized baby measured exactly 7w1d and his/her little heart was beating at 130bpm. I can’t tell you the joy that I felt when I heard that heartbeat. There are no words!
Here's the first look we ever had at our teeny, tiny little baby.
And then, the morning sickness started. Crazy morning sickness. Not eating and not drinking, all-day-long sickness. And before I know it, I'm back on phenegren and zofran again. And that's when the panic set in. Do I have another baby with three sets of chromosomes like Camille? Are we headed down the same path again? And then over the last several weeks, we're both sick with worry. And trying with all we have to be excited.
(More from my journal...)
Oh the doubt. It just keeps coming back. No matter how much I try to push it aside and tuck it away, it just floods back in.
Do I feel less nauseous today than I felt yesterday?
Is that a cramp or is my uterus just growing?
Why didn’t I need a nap today when I couldn’t survive without one a few days ago?
When will my belly ever grow?
There are just so many questions and so many doubts. And so much waiting and waiting and waiting.
There are promising signs, quickly overshadowed by fears of not letting myself be too optimistic. Will it hurt any less if we lose this baby and I spent the weeks leading up to the loss pretending like I knew it was coming all along? Or do I just let myself succumb to the joy of being pregnant again (especially accidentally) and just let my body do whatever it is ultimately going to do?
Too hard of a question for one person to handle. Which is why I’m struggling. Really, really struggling…
We would end up needing to wait a couple more weeks before we'd get a chance to be reassured. That appointment finally came
today!
We just returned from the doctor’s office and everything looks GREAT! I feel 20 pounds lighter!
With each step of today’s ultrasound, I let out a HUGE sigh of relief and felt a little more of the stress and anxiety of the last month or so lessen.
"There’s the baby." Exhale.
"See the flicker, That’s the heartbeat." Big Exhale.
"The baby measures right on at 10weeks and 4 days." Even bigger Exhale.
"Let’s listen to that heartbeat. 175 bpm." Breathe, Breathe, Breathe, Let it all go…
The amazingly synchronous thing about today’s appointment is that due to our doctor’s schedule, the only appointment we could get was in the exact same office with the exact same tech that was there when we lost Camille. It was so hard to walk back into that office, but there was something reassuring about seeing her face. It was such a beautiful opportunity to bring Camille into this pregnancy. An acknowledgment of her memory and an acknowledgment of the gravity of this moment. And when the tech explained to us that she had lost 5 babies between her first and second child, it all made sense.
And she let us look at images of our baby for an extended amount of time. And she showed us all the different angles and pointed out every detail. And Lou squeezed my hand and the three of us laughed at our baby dancing around inside of me. And we listened to the heartbeat again and again. And it happened…I finally let myself BE pregnant again. And I truly couldn’t be any happier!
