Surprises

Someone in the blogosphere just got a big surprise (pregnancy), so in honor, I thought I'd finally post about the biggest and best surprise of my life.

December 2004 We had two little girls. N was almost 3, and K turned 7 months. I had been very busy at work all of November and December. We had just sent off a big report. I had worked on it almost non-stop from 12/17-12/23. I stopped working on it when I had a migraine aura at about 7:30 on 12/23.

I was getting a little worried about me. My husband was worried about me too. I had felt a little "off" for a couple of weeks, but I'd attributed feeling off to how much I was working. In addition, I had another reason to account for the off feeling...

N had thrown up on 12/7 and our nanny had also been sick the next week with the stomach flu or food poisoning. I had been surrounded by throw-up for a couple of weeks. If I think about throw-up, even when I'm not pregnant, I feel sick. In my mind, the fact that there was actual throw-up in my life was enough to make me feel funny.

There were a whole bunch of things that were going on, and if I hadn't been working so much, I might not have been too busy to correlate all the weird stuff that was going on with me and I might have realized sooner...

The weird things...

-Tea didn't tasted good (I love tea)
-I felt cold... it felt the same as when I was pregnant early on with K and I was COLD
-I kept thinking it's so good I'm not pregnant now (because I was working so hard and not taking good care of myself)
-I'd been craving protein and feeling really low blood sugary when I didn't eat enough
-I had been having a harder and harder time pumping
-It had been hurting when K was latched on
-I had this crying fit... I couldn't stop crying... I attributed it to feeling overwhelmed by work (I never have crying fits)
-The aura thingy (like a migraine aura)... It felt like an aura, but instead of flashing lights I got dizzy
-I felt like my stomach was really out of shape even though I hadn't gained weight. I looked at it and thought, "I NEED TO GO TO THE GYM!"
-Friday night (Christmas eve) I ate a tangerine and immediately felt totally ill

After eating the tangerine and then laying around clutching my stomach for 1/2 an hour, I thought, citrus doesn't usually bother me, unless I'm pregnant.

I decided that the next day (Christmas day) I'd pee on a stick. I decided I would be doing it to confirm the null hypothesis... Null=Not pregnant. Alternative=Pregnant. Once we knew I wasn't pregnant, I'd go to the doctor and figure out what was wrong with me, though I figured it was probably just stress.

Sol, I pee'd... and almost instantly the test turned positive... Wait. I'm supposed to be confirming the null. This is wrong.

It was super-duper positive... The test line was about 10 times darker than the control. I showed my husband and he decided that it must be a defective test. He ran out and bought two other brands. I pee'd. Both of the other brands were also instantly positive. We wondered if the whole city was full of defective tests?????!

I was shocked and overwhelmed. I had had problems getting pregnant. I had taken drugs to get pregnant. Getting pregnant on my own did NOT COMPUTE. I couldn't get pregnant on my own. I needed progesterone suppositories to make a pregnancy stick. When I was pregnant with K my progesterone was really low... 8... They like it to be 20. What was happening? How could I possibly be pregnant??? How could I possibly be pregnant enough to make the test turn dark so instantly?

My mind was also racing because I had a 7.5 month old baby. How on earth would we manage? I was so enjoying getting back into a routine. I was starting to feel like me again. How could I continue my career? I was just getting back into the swing of everything. I had taken on new responsibilities at work.

I started trying to calculate how far along I could possibly be. If I had ovulated when I thought, then I'd be about 7 weeks. (After K, my cycles returned when she was 2.5 months old so I thought things were kind of normal.) I figured there was a chance that everything was still all wanky, and that I could be as much as 9 weeks, but I didn't really think so.

...

To be continued.