I never thought the day would come that I am nearly eleven weeks pregnant with a natural pregnancy and it's viable. And I feel guilty about it.
In early February, I approached my husband late one night.
"My period's late."
"How late?"
"Like a week..."
"What are you thinking?"
"I don't know."
I did know. I had done copious amounts of research when my period was more than a day or two late. Can periods be late for reasons other than pregnancy? Can you skip periods when you traditionally have had a pretty regular cycle? Can breastfeeding make you skip a period? That last question was where I hit the jackpot. It turns out that lactating women can have a skipped period. It's normal. I still was anxious. This never happened after my first daughter.
"What do you want to do?"
After talking for a while, I determined that I would not take a pregnancy test unless I skipped a second period. I do not like home pregnancy tests. I have had more false positives on pregnancy tests than actual positives or negatives. After my first miscarriage, the OB center I was at (and then quickly left after they poorly handled the beginning of our infertility) requested I do weekly blood work to check my hcg levels. Once we realized that each blood draw cost over $80, I stopped. The OB clinic was not amused.
"Is there anything else I can do that will not cost $80 a week?"
"Well...I guess you could take a home pregnancy test once a week and then once it comes back as negative, you can do a blood draw a couple weeks later."
I chose that option. Week after week for over a month, I dutifully took the home pregnancy test, cringing when I saw the digital screen light up with "YES." What a liar.
I kept to my decision of not taking a pregnancy test until 12 February. I felt a little off all day. By 13 February, I was noticeably nauseous most of the day unless I was munching on the Aldi brand of extra toasty cheese crackers. By that evening, I knew what I had to do.
We needed to make a CVS run because our sweet baby was teething and she could expel liquid baby medicine from her mouth with high entertainment value for the person not giving her the medicine. We bought her chewable medicine and while we were there, I determinedly walked a couple aisles over to grab a pregnancy test.
That evening between putting the baby to bed and tutoring a sweet boy who lives in China, I took the test. My husband was reading bedtime stories to our three-year-old and I solemnly walked out and stared at him. At a break between books, he looked up. "Well?" I showed him the test. "It's negative?" I shook my head.
A positive pregnancy test for a naturally conceived child has only ever meant one thing to me. A miscarriage. Seeing a positive test brought out so many emotions. I was not excited. I was sad and anxious. I did not want to have a miscarriage again. How would we time the miscarriage? Having a miscarriage when you are childless is one thing, but having a miscarriage when you have two sweet girls who love to cuddle up with you and be with you all the time is another.
That evening, my husband and I started talking about the logistics. "I think it would be best if the miscarriage could happen on a Friday so I have the weekend for all the heavy bleeding. If I could time it, I would want it to start around dinnertime. I think with miscarriage #1, I bled the most heavily for around four or five hours." In a factual manner, we talked through how we wanted it all to happen. It never occurred to us that we would have a little miracle arriving later.
I picked the worst week to have to schedule an OB appointment. First, there was a huge winter storm to tear through our area and many states. The OB office was closed for most of Monday and all of Tuesday. Second, neither my phone nor my husband's phone worked for the next two weeks due to ice on the cell phone tower. If the OB office tried to leave me a message, I never received one and every time I tried calling from my computer, I never got through to a human. Third, when I was able to connect with someone, they sent in labs for a blood draw and scheduled an OB history appointment for me. In my mind, this made no sense. I didn't need to give anyone an OB history because this pregnancy would not progress. I was told that during the OB history appointment, I would schedule an ultrasound.
The two blood draws went off without a hitch and we discovered that my hcg level was not decreasing like I dreaded.
The day came for the OB history appointment and because our phones were still not working, I drove to a nearby building in town and did the 45-minute long appointment there. The nurse was very sweet, but when she realized this was not an IVF pregnancy like my two daughters, she became very excited for me. "You must be so happy! Did you take more than one pregnancy test? Well, congratulations! You and your husband must be so thrilled." I did not want to tell the nurse that, no, we were not excited, because we did not want to get excited about a pregnancy that we were positive would end in heartache. At the end of the appointment, she told me about the next step. "We really only schedule ultrasounds at ten weeks unless it's high risk." This is my sixth pregnancy. I have two children. Both my children were conceived via IVF. How was this not a worrisome pregnancy? I felt sick with frustration at the end of the phone call. I didn't even bother to write down the date and time that was scheduled for me because I was determined that I would either start to miscarry sooner than that or we could find a different clinic that would do the ultrasound sooner.
No such luck. My husband called a clinic in town and discovered that in our area of the world, ultrasounds are rarely done before ten weeks.
The feelings of frustration melted away within a day or two and I focused on getting through the next two weeks until the ultrasound. The biggest challenge, as we expected, was the closer we got to the ultrasound, the more we talked about the pregnancy as though it were going to result in a live birth. I started thinking about October in a positive light, whereas before the OB history appointment, I refused to look up what a potential estimated due date might be. I began thinking of the baby I was carrying as a boy.
The evening before the ultrasound, we told my daughter. Her original emotion seemed indifferent. We emphasized that we didn't know if the baby would be healthy and if he/she would be able to be born and live with our family.
The day of the ultrasound, we drove the 75 minutes to the clinic. (Road work now means that the drive will be an hour and fifteen minutes. We still feel committed to going to the hospital and working with the midwife and her staff.) My husband decided to make it a family outing with the idea that if I did receive bad news, I probably would struggle driving the distance home by myself.
He dropped me off at the imaging center and he took the girls to Costco to wait out the ultrasound and OB appointment. I was taken back my the ultrasound technician within a few minutes of arriving. I was more than a little glad for the mask I was wearing because I am sure I looked terrified. The tech had the imaging wand on my abdomen within a minute of me getting into position and I glued my eyes to the screen. Almost immediately I felt a wave of relief. I saw a small figure and more importantly, I saw the tremor of a heartbeat. I was strangely very collected as she went through the motions of a ten week ultrasound. Having been to enough ultrasounds with my first two, I was able to correctly identify that I had a sub chorionic hemorrhage even though nothing was said to me. (I was hoping I only got those with IVF pregnancies.) The measurements of our little one gave a slightly later due date which did not surprise me. My estimated due date was given to me based off a 28-day cycle and mine are normally 31 days long. The tech asked me a few times if I was feeling okay. I was speechless the entire time she measured everything. When the scan was complete, she took me through the secret hallways to get to the OB clinic. I passed the nurse that works with my midwife and felt at home. She gave me a very surprised look. "Oh, hi!"
Several minutes later when she called my name in the waiting room, we were able to chat. "You just had a baby! A girl, right? Did you do IVF again so soon? A natural pregnancy!? Congratulations!" When the midwife came in, we had a very similar conversation. After I told her our reproductive endocrinologist had given us a 0% chance of getting pregnant naturally, my midwife told me that she had gotten pregnant with her tubes tied. We also connected when I told her that I provide child care for a friend. She ran a daycare before she went back to school to be a midwife. I really hope she is the one to deliver this baby this time.
We chatted a bit more, I learned that I get to do genetic testing at my next appointment, and I left. My husband happened to be pulling into the parking lot again as I got dressed, so our timing was perfect. I was able to show my three-year-old the ultrasound pics and after scrutinizing them for a few minutes, announced that only two of them looked like a baby.
We make one stop on the way home and I asked her how she felt about the baby. Her eyes got misty as she told me, "I'm just so happy that the baby is healthy!" We were all feeling a similar emotion to hers.
I guess I'm having a baby at the beginning of October!
And I feel guilty. We have five beautiful embryos in storage waiting to join our family. We have a duty to those embryos. I also feel bad because we are supposed to be infertile. I am currently supporting two friends (and maybe a third soon) who are doing rounds of IUI. I dread telling them that I got lucky. Why was I so blessed when others suffer?
We obviously need this baby in our lives this year.
