Finding Out

By mid-February of 2010, I was pretty sure. My husband and I were eating dinner, enjoying a quiet evening, when it occurred to him. He looked up from his plate and said, “Not to jinx it or anything, but….” He didn’t even have to finish the sentence, because for several days I had been thinking the same thing. My period was late, by at least a week.

I said, “I don’t know. I’ll have to check the calendar when we’re done.” For several days I didn’t want to jinx it myself. One time a couple of years before that I had a miscarriage. At that time, I was only seven weeks along. I had only just taken a pregnancy test to confirm my suspicions. I had only just made a doctor’s appointment with an OBGYN for confirmation. Before I even got a chance to have a doctor’s confirmation, however, a heavy period had started up. Turns out I had miscarried. But that’s a long story for another time.

That other time I had announced it to the world, loudly and proudly, the very second I found out and the over-the-counter test showed me a pretty pink plus sign. We were so excited. A major part of our agreement to get married was the dual desire for children. After a slew of medical and financial problems in the early years of our marriage, we decided we were ready to try, and try and try. So of course when the first time we tried without “protection” yielded a positive result, we were ecstatic. There were dances of joy and everything. Then the miscarriage.

So this time, understandably, we were reluctant to tell anybody. I checked the calendar after dinner and nodded to myself. “Yep,” I said. “Almost a week off.” And my period has always been regularly reliable. I never missed a month. I could practically time it to the moon cycle. Four weeks from the first day of my previous menstrual cycle, I was absolutely guaranteed to start up the next one. So when I was late by a couple of days, and because I was “feeling it,” I knew. But just to be sure, this time we took about four over-the-counter pregnancy tests.

Mind you, we didn’t actually take four OTC tests just to be sure. No, we took four of them because the ones we bought were the cheapest ones available for sale. And because they were the cheapest ones available for sale, they were also not the most reliable. Four OTC pregnancy tests, and I still wasn’t sure I was pregnant. These cheap Equate, generic brand, tests had a funky way of revealing the results that could have possibly been “false positives” according to the insert. Every single time I took one of the tests, the — disappeared and only the | part showed, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. There was a shadow of a nearly invisible — that showed with the | for all of a half second before vanishing like disappearing ink. This happened four times!

So I made an appointment with an OBGYN, a large practice going by the company name of Paragon. I felt like the luckiest woman on the face of the planet, because this group had midwives, and I was super psyched about having a midwife instead of just a doctor. My brother took me to my first visit because my husband was working. He was more excited than I was, I think. Myself? I was more anxious and uncertain than anything.

The midwife I talked to had no idea I wasn’t sure about being pregnant, which is kind of funny in retrospect. Here I was, all nervous and unsure, wanting to be absolutely 100% certain, and she already thought I was. She offered me congratulations after congratulations, gave me a “new mom-to-be” care package. At the end, realizing I hadn’t peed in a cup for them, I asked, “Aren’t you going to do a test?” She stared at me as if I were some alien creature for several minutes and then asked, “You mean you don’t know if you’re pregnant?” I explained the thing about the Equate cheapo pregnancy tests. She sounded surprised. She informed me that really the tests they do in office are the same as you get over the counter, and she had never heard of an OTC test giving up results like that before. Ironically enough, they didn’t even have any tests in their office that day. So she scheduled the lab techs to do a blood test on it along with all the other panels they usually do.

The next day I went in for my very first ultra sound. Everything was really rushed that first month. My husband again was working, so my brother took me again. I know my husband’s a little jealous and disappointed that he wasn’t the first one to see our baby-to-be, but that’s okay. He sees so much more of her than my brother does these days. The very instant I saw that little baby seed in my belly, I knew. It helped that I was told “after 8 weeks, your chances of a miscarriage are practically nonexistent.” Sure enough, I was just 8 weeks along at the time of the ultrasound. But we still waited a few weeks before we made The Big Announcement….