SLEEEEEP

Sleep. It’s all I can think about. It’s all I want to do. The only reason I’m writing this blog now is because I just finished my lunch and I have a meeting in half an hour that I need to stay awake for. In my finer moments I have actually tried to figure out whether I could quit my job now and just sleep for the next 7 months.

It's a...beating heart

This was the big morning that I returned to my doctor’s office to find out for certain what is going on in my insides…and the news is good. I have a 6-week-old fetus complete with beating heart and nice big yolk sac. I feel really good about this, which is a total turnabout from my last pregnancy, when I was in a perpetual state of disbelief. I’m excited about embarking on this big journey on purpose. I’m looking forward to maternity clothes and decorating a nursery and shopping and eating extra food at Thanksgiving. I’m looking forward to time at home with Natalie and her new little sibling, and to teaching them to get along. I’m not quite to the point of thinking about the sleepless nights and how I’m going to get any rest with a toddler around. Sleep when the baby sleeps isn’t going to work this time, but I feel ready for this.

No news sucks, and my news sucks more

After an agonizing day of waiting to hear from the doctor’s office on Monday, they finally called me at 5:30 and went through this little circus with the pharmacy because it was suddenly URGENT that I start taking some hormones. Everything was normal in the blood tests except progesterone, so I have to take supplements to keep my body from deciding that I’m not pregnant anymore. This happened with Natalie, too – same sucky song, second sucky verse. This time, I don’t feel like it is working, though. I feel a little increase in the hormonal side effects, but not much, and there is some cramping. Do we really have to talk about this today? I’d rather talk about something else. If you’ve ever taken progesterone, then you know what I’m saying here. If not, then you can just go enjoy your hormonally balanced life.

I don’t have any music, books, or scriptures today. There is no room in here for that stuff right now. I have been reading this week’s issue of TIME magazine, and I was really taken off guard by an article about women becoming suicide bombers. This is becoming a serious issue, apparently, and I am so thankful to live in a world where my husband isn’t going to shame me into blowing myself up and killing people to save his honor. Seriously. It seems that after going deeper into the demographics, most of the women are wives who have been accused of adultery or another crime or unmarried young women who have been told that they were not good enough to marry. Their husbands or families then “give them the option” of becoming bombers to spare their families shame or to avoid prison or stoning. And the reward? They are told they will be the most beautiful of the 72 virgins that await a male martyr in heaven. Nice. The other disturbing statistic is that on average, the women who take this track are better educated, older, and hold a higher social status than the men. The article included a picture of a mother dressed in her bomb gear kissing her toddler son goodbye- with a smile on her face. It was obviously a posed picture, and the background was some propaganda-style posters. This picture has been haunting me. What could drive a mother to leave her children for this fate? I have to believe that that mother had the same love for her children that I do for mine, and I just can’t imagine the forces working in her life to bring it to that end.

Is anybody in there?

Where is Beetlejuice when you need him? Cause I’ve got myself trapped in the world of the not-quite pregnant but definitely suffering the symptoms, and I need some help getting the heck up outta this joint. Beetlejuice probably just deals with the dead, anyway. Maybe I just need Michael Keaton.

At the doctor’s last week, they took my blood, urine, cervical cells, etc. and then asked me why exactly I thought I was pregnant. This is actually one of my greatest doctor fears lived out. I even saved a home pregnancy test for the day before the appointment just to be sure that I was not dreaming this whole thing up. I seriously spent a significant amount of time before the appointment with visions of the lab tech walking into the exam room holing my pee and a stick and saying something like “Lady, your crazy. There’s nothing in that uterus of yours but your own crazy self.” Apparently Wanda Sykes works at my doctor’s office.

That’s not exactly what went down, but I did have a very long ultrasound in which the tech asked me several times whether I was sure about the first day of my last period and did not find what she was looking for. After some time waiting in the consultation room, my doctor came in and told me that he thinks it is most likely that I ovulated late in my cycle, so things are not as far along as they would have thought. However, there could also be some serious problems – ranging from a simple unviable ovum to early miscarriage on down the list to ectopic pregnancy – that could produce the same symptoms. I had to come back for more blood work on Friday and I still have no idea what is actually going on in there. Why don’t they call me? Does that mean everything is just fine in there, or that they have called the men in white coats to come and get me for imagining up a pregnancy? Surely if it was miscarriage or something, they would have called me…right? Could I have imagined up a pregnancy? The thing is, I’m not sure. I took 4 home pregnancy tests that all came out positive. My boobs are sore, my period is now 2 weeks late, and I can’t keep up the energy to get through a day without a nap. Somehow that is not enough to convince me that this is real.