4 Weeks Pregnant, Wait, What?!
If we haven’t met in real life or online, let me do an introduction. Hi, I’m Michelle. I’m 39 years old and over the past few years I’ve been working on my health so that my husband, Chris and I, can start a family.
A little history… In 2014, when I was 34 years old, I went to my OBGYN for my annual visit. She asked me about my plans for a family and my future and I let her know that SOMEDAY I would like to have a family. Now at this point I was single, casually dating, but nothing serious on the horizon. The thought of working on a family at that time was in the distant future because I couldn’t even imagine marriage at that time.
My OB let me know that at my age my chances of naturally conceiving were already extremely diminished and given my current love life, the only chance of having a child would be to freeze my eggs now for IVF in the future. What shocked me about her statement was that she wasn’t even reading the room. I hadn’t expressed an extreme need to have a child and I didn’t ask her about my odds of conceiving a child. She brought it up as if it were her duty to let me know that my eggs were old and modern medicine was going to be my only saving grace.
I have no doubt that my doctor thought she was acting in my best interest. But rather than feeling empowered that I had the option to take charge of my fertility future (possibly), I left there feeling incredibly defeated and confused. That appointment left me with two thoughts, one, I need a new OBGYN stat, and two, I wanted to learn as much about fertility as I could to truly understand what it means to be a mid-30’s woman not yet on the road to babyville.
While I was able to find a new OB - I didn’t go for a few years because that experience had me feeling less than thrilled about seeing one and the “advice” about my body and future fertility did not end.
Friends and family came out of the woodworks to let me know of my impending menopause and if I didn’t act quickly, I would never have a child. At first, I brushed it off, even though it deeply bothered me. Then, I began letting them know that I wasn’t remotely interested in trying for a family for at least a few years. I mean, a husband would have been nice first, ya know. 🙂 To that they would respond, “well then you better start trying right now if that’s the case.” Regardless of where you are in your fertility knowledge, you know that starting to “try” now does NOT result in a pregnancy two years from now. This isn’t a marathon where you need to train, yes you can practice, but actively trying to get pregnant now, if you’re not ready, doesn’t give you a baby when you are. That is, unless we are African Forest Elephants who have a gestation period of almost 2 years. Thank goodness we are humans, right?!
This made me even more determined to really understand the female reproductive system and so I could truly understand what it would look like to have a baby in my late 30’s.
Now this brings me today…June 8, 2019.
We have friends in town staying with us and today one of my friends tells me she’s pregnant. Yay! She’s telling me about all of the things she’s not able to do now that she’s pregnant, ie take headache medicine, the foods she needs to avoid, etc. I’m sitting on the couch thinking, man, I did all of these things today! Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice told me that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take a pregnancy test. I’m not on birth control and my husband and I have just come back from vacation in Europe, so it would be a good idea to just take a test just in case. I walk into the master bath and take a test…you know, pee on a stick… and head back out to my friends. A few minutes later I head back to the bathroom to, in my mind, throw away the negative pregnancy test, and when I pick it up, I’m in EXTREME SHOCK! Whenever I got pregnant I had big plans to do something super cute to tell Chris and get the whole thing on video. Instead I scream for Chris and after he doesn’t come out, I walk into the living room waiving the test like a looney toon without having any words to share because I’m just in shock.
...As women we spend our time in this strange wait, wait, wait, GO GO GO, wait, wait, wait, GO GO GO, time loop. We spend a decade, or decades trying not to get pregnant by any means necessary. Usually this is messing up our bodies with hormonal birth control thinking that once we are off birth control all will be smooth sailing. Then, one day, we decide, IT’S GO TIME, and we come off of birth control and expect our bodies to comply and produce a healthy baby immediately. Once pregnant it’s back to waiting and hoping that the little one stays in for the appropriate 9+ months and then just like clockwork, something flips and we expect it to be GO TIME again and want the baby to come out ASAP. There’s not a lot of smooth transition, it’s more like stop and go traffic on an LA freeway.
Back to the story… In comes me, crazy-wide eyes and voice that can’t seem to get the words out to a room with my husband and two friends. I’m finally snapped out of shock when Chris, my husband, grabs the stick and puts on the counter. That alerted my germaphobe self to snap out of it because I don’t want something I peed on to sit on our kitchen counter. I know, I’m ridiculous. It all seems a bit of a blur to me now. I can hazily feel all of the emotions that came flooding in. And the questions that came flying my way from my own subconscious:
What does this mean now?
Is Chris excited? (as a little background, Chris is English, and doesn’t tend to show a lot of overt emotion).
Is the baby healthy? We just spent our Anniversary in London and I didn’t avoid drinking, hot tubs, travel, etc. What does this mean for our baby?
And about a million other thoughts.
As you can imagine, or maybe you have already been here. Once you become pregnant, it feels like everything is about to change.
So this is my story up until now. Because I have been looking online for information about early pregnancy and haven’t found a whole lot that I can relate to, I’ve decided to document this pregnancy, week by week. I’d like to include baby milestones for the week, my personal experience during that week, and any tips and tricks I can offer someone going through the same thing.
If you are someone who is following along during your own journey, I’m so happy you’re here and I hope this can help you alleviate some of your symptoms while connecting with someone who’s going through it with you. If you’re someone who’s already had their kiddos, I’d love to know how your experience was the same or different! If you’re someone who is on your own fertility journey, welcome, and I know how you feel. This road is winding and confusing, and it will work itself out.
Sending you light and love,
Michelle