So when you find out that you're pregnant you immediately start to think about the next steps. 1) I have to tell my husband...he'll probably want to know, right? 2) I need to schedule an appointment with the doctor. 3) I assume it's reasonable to wait until I'm clearly showing to tell everyone else around me. 4) Oh shit this is really happening.
I told my husband the day I found out. It was a Saturday and he was in a huge golf tournament so I waited until it was over because I'm clearly campaigning for wife of the year. He was very excited. So excited it made me feel bad for being a little freaked out. Thanks a lot, husband. The next step was to call the doctor and make an appointment. Since it was a weekend, I couldn't do anything until Monday. You find that a lot of pregnancy is just waiting for things. Case in point, when I did call the doctor on Monday, I found out that I wouldn't be seeing the doctor until I was around 8 weeks pregnant. So you're telling me that I JUST missed my period as of yesterday and now I have to wait 8 weeks before I can see anyone to find out what the heck I'm supposed to do next?
We had already decided that we were going to wait to make sure that everything was good and normal with this pregnancy before we told anyone, including our parents. You know what there is to do in 8 weeks when the only people who know you're pregnant are you and your husband? Read things online. Yes, the thing that got me into this situation in the first place is the thing that would make me want to wait to tell anyone I was pregnant until I had a healthy baby delivered and in my arms. In those 8 weeks I learned to be terrified not only of health conditions and defects, but also of the idea of a missed miscarriage. The idea that your baby could just stop developing without you experiencing any signs of miscarriage is truly horrifying. I cannot even imagine the hurt and suffering that people who experience this tragedy feel. This made even our first doctor appointment terrifying. I never imagined that I would be so lucky as to get pregnant after the first try. I expected to have to take a couple of months. Now that I got that positive test, I had something else to worry about.
Eight weeks after finding out the news that we were expecting an addition to the family in 9 months, we were ready for our first doctor's appointment. I hadn't had a pap test in...a few years....so first thing up was that enjoyable experience. I remembered why I'd been avoiding the doctor for so long. My doctor doesn't do ultrasounds in his office, I have to go to the local hospital to the maternal fetal medicine ward for those, so no actually seeing this pregnancy at this visit. What my doctor did do was a physical test to "feel" how far along I was. I had gone over when my last period was, how long my periods usually last, and all that jazz...I'm very regular and had been diligently tracking via my app so I had my dates down. So I was surprised when he looked at me and asked if I was sure. Of course I'm sure, do you not know how neurotic I am? If you don't now, you will soon, sir. He then proceeded to tell me that I "felt" farther along than I was supposed to based on the dates I gave him. This could be due to a couple of things, he said: either I could have developed fibroids (which they'd never discovered before), or we could be having twins. TWINS?! I decided I was ready for one of these kids, not two. I thought that I was anxious when I found out that I was pregnant. That was nothing compared to what I felt when he said that there was a possibility that I could be having twins. Because they don't do ultrasounds in the office, I would have to call in the morning and schedule an appointment for a dating ultrasound, which could take a couple of days to schedule. It was a quiet walk to the car for me and my husband. Ok, life has had it's fun. We got lucky and scored on the first try, but the goalie should have blocked that second shot.
It took two days for us to get an appointment, which we made first thing in the morning. I laid down on the table and was pleasantly surprised when the gel was warmed since you always see them warn you about it being cold in the movies. Then she started with the wand. My head started to race. What if she finds two? What if she doesn't find anything? What if I'm not as far along as I'm supposed to be? What if baby(ies?) stopped developing? Then, she said it. "Baby looks good! You're measuring exactly where you should be, give or take a day." "And there's only one???" "Yes, there's only one." You feel bad, giving a sigh of relief when there are people who struggle to get pregnant at all and you're hoping against hope that you only have one. Emotions and reactions are weird. We can't control them or how we feel. We also shouldn't feel bad for having certain emotions or reactions to our own lives. I was relieved that we weren't having twins because I was not ready to cope with the emotional, physical, and financial stresses that come with having two babies at once. That doesn't make me a bad person - it makes me a real person.
When you cross over one hurdle in pregnancy, there's always another one not far off. We crossed this hurdle, and now we had to think about prenatal testing and the considerations that can come along with those results. Our little secret was one step closer to being out in the open.
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