Why hello uterus

I am not completely sure if this is actually a pregnancy symptom, but it sucks and I am pregnant, so lets blame it on the baby. I have this intense pain in my butt. Yeah, like kind of in my hip, but more centered on my right butt cheek. It is acute and my best analogy is adding ice water to an exposed cavity. It doesn't happen when I stand on it necessarily, but any time weight changes, which is all the freaken time in case you weren't sure. Walking Ella almost made me cry, and speed walking with my kid today (we were very late for an interview) made me get light headed. I read online that you can have sciatic nerve pain because your uterus grows and presses against it. But come on! I am six weeks pregnant, how big can my uterus be? It hurts so bad, and when I sit down or lay down after it hurts, it sort of feels like a joint that needs cracked, except there is no joint and as soon as I move at all I get sharp, excruciating pain. And my uterus still has to grow, a lot. Maybe it will move or something. Or maybe it has nothing to do with my uterus. Regardless, I have morning sickness (at night it seems) and pain like never before. Awesome. I am tempted to call in sick tomorrow.

Ick

Let's play the game of "what did Donna eat today?"
I woke up and immediately ate a strawberry Eggo, like before I even walked Ella.
Than I had another one before work
Around 9:45 I had a Babybel cheese
Then at 10:30 I had an apple with peanut butter
Then at 12:00 I had a V8 and an Amy's Burrito and a guy I was eating with gave me more food
So about 2 I ate a burrito that dude gave me
Than I ate a bag a chips
Around 3 my kids and I shared an order of Orange Chicken, sweet and sour chicken, fried rice and wontons
Then I left work and got a hotdog and blizzard at Dairy Queen.
I am pretty sure that is WAY over the limit of 300 extra calories. However, I seem to get morning sickness around 6PM, so I won't be eating anything else. Let's hope.

Week Six

This week the baby is the size of a pea. I have no idea when this week though, since it doubles in size like every day :) I think it is super cool that we have the technology and the medical expertize to know that the baby is doing at six weeks, when it is the size of a pea.

"Growing like crazy, baby is starting to sprout eyes, ears, nose, cheeks, and chin. Those little hands and feet -- still webbed like paddles -- might wiggle by week's end, the heart is beating (almost twice as fast as yours!), and blood is starting to circulate."

My next doctor's appointment is at eight weeks exactly, so even if it is miss dated I should be able to hear the heartbeat since it will definitely be in the seventh week if not in the eighth.

I felt kind of yucky yesterday, although I think it had more to do with only eating 1/3 of an amazing black forest cake and goldfish crackers all day than anything. This morning I feel a little bit nauseous, but I am not convinced it is morning sickness since I still feel hungry, I think I just ate like crap yesterday and am feeling the affects today. Plus, I am drinking coffee, so I can't have morning sickness I don't think. Although smells are bothering me WAY more than they used to and walking the dog has become a game of "don't puke" in the morning. On a side notes, Mike is leaving for the week. I won't see him until Saturday. It seriously makes me want to cry and have a breakdown, which I am blaming entirely on the hormones since I am not usually that crazy. This is what it says about my pregnancy in week six:

"You've probably stumbled on the truth by now: Thanks to your surging hormones, morning sickness can (and does) occur morning, noon, and night. As you feel yourself turning yet another shade of green, just try to remember it's for an amazing cause -- that rapidly growing baby inside your upset belly!"

Will it ever be easy?

I got more test results, still waiting on the Rh results. My hCG levels are raising, they are still in the super low end of normal, but they did double. I know from reading a lot of other people's pages that they actually triple in 48 hours a lot of times, and mine definitely aren't doing that. However, the doctor said they did double and that is good enough. I was reading about it and it could mean that I am less pregnant than I thought I was, like conception happened later, but I really don't think so and that is not what the ultrasound showed. I am not sure why they are low, hopefully it is just how I am. The normal range is sort of ridiculous, and as you go up in months, so does the spread. Hopefully next week I break the 10,000 mark. Hopefully I am Rh positive and I won't have to get RhGAM shots since I am sort of over having needles poked into my arms.

I am also still having some mild bleeding. Nothing like last Friday, but "normal" is none, so it is still worrisome. The doctor said I may just bleed and they may never know why, which isn't comforting at all. But as long as I am not having cramping and bleeding (like last Friday) a miscarriage isn't imminent, could still happen, but not right then, so I will go with that. It sucks because until we hear a heartbeat there is no way to be sure. Lots of babies grow at this stage and then the heart doesn't develop. Come on little heartbeat. I just with I had high hCG levels OR no bleeding, having both makes it more scary. On the bright side, low hCG means no morning sickness, and the cyst on my ovary doesn't hurt as much. Although, I would almost be happy to have morning sickness because it would mean everything is getting better. Morning sickness can be a good indicator of pregnancy.

Bartenders

Every Sunday night Mike and I go to Old Chicago for dinner and beer. We rarely miss going and it has always been a good way to end the weekend and get ready for the week--no need to cook, super relaxed and our time together. Well, you don't go somewhere every week for years and not get to know, well everyone, in a restaurant. We are actually pretty good friends with the bartender. Mike plays golf with him, we BBQ with his family, pretty normal friend things. The problem is, I am pregnant, and our whole relationship with this person (and a few others) depends on beer consumption. Depends may be harsh, but it would definitely stand out if I just stopped drinking. We have even joked with him before that he would find out we were pregnant before most people. However, with all of the dangers with the baby lately, I really don't want to tell him about it until the second trimester. I don't want to tell anyone. But we still have to go to the bar and have dinner, it is our thing. So now I go and get a beer (I don't actually order it, I just sit down and it appears) and Mike secretly drinks it while drinking his. He has to drink twice a fast because otherwise it takes him too long to finish his, which looks suspicious too. Tonight his tactic was to take large gulps of mine when no one was looking. This made it look like I really liked my beer and resulted in a refill. So Mike had to down four beers in an hour, which cracks me up. Normally I am a little jealous that he can drink and I can't, but now it is that he HAS to drink, and I can't, which seems almost fair.

Return to the ER

Yesterday we went to the Great American Beer Festival for Mike's quarter century birthday. Yes, he is the baby, I try to not think about it most days. Anyway, aside from it being awesome for everyone who was not DD, I had a particularly uncomfortable day. As soon as we got to the festival, I noticed some spotting and increasingly severe cramping, which of course I looked up immediately on google. Essentially it said it is not a good thing, but it is common. Not normal, but not super critical. However, as the night progressed it went from spotting to actual bleeding. I was torn between telling Mike and ruining his evening and not telling, but as the night progressed it became clear to me that I wasn't going to be able to just ignore it. So, instead of staying out drinking all night and being DD for four drunk frat boys, I took them all home.

Of course, upon arrival at anywhere with an internet connection, I immediately looked up what first trimester bleeding could mean. The data was terrifying. First of all, 50% of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage, usually in the first trimester. Now, this goes back to science actually making life suck. A lot of those happen in the first few days of pregnancy and it used to be that your "period" was just a few days late, when in actually conception happened but implantation went awry. However, not that you can find out you are pregnant 5 days sooner, you can also find out you miscarried 5 days sooner, which is to say at all. Moving on with the stats. About 20-30% of women bleed during the first trimester after you take out implantation bleeding, which happens to more like 50% of women. Some of the reasons are known, and some aren't, but 50% of women who bleed eventually miscarry. The reasons that are known also suck: miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, STDs, etc. By the middle of the night the bleeding was bad and Mike and I agreed I would go to the doctor in the morning.

So, after sobbing uncontrollably for a good hour I fell asleep. Kaiser opens at 8:00 on Saturdays and has an Urgent Care center at the Westminster office. I was so relieved that the ER was not my only option. So I called the emergency nurse to have a phone consult before my appointment. The nurse was helpful and walked me through a lot of information. At the end of the phone call, she told me to go, immediately, to the ER. She said not to drive and not to speed, but to get my husband to take me to the hospital and to arrive there within the hour. Her words were somewhere along the lines of, we don't know what is actually wrong, but if it is ectopic, it can be life threatening and we have to rule that out before we can do anything else. Terrifying. I woke Mike up and told him the news and we headed to the ER. Neither of us thought it was that severe, but essentially it is one of those things you have to do. Like an appendicitis, you don't put it off until Monday. So for the second time Mike took me to Good Samaritan where I answered all sorts of things that I have never said in front of another person before. Being pregnant really decreases privacy.

The doctor saw me, they took a crap ton of blood and took away my hot chocolate (so that if I did have to have surgery, I wouldn't be full). I love this hospital, and most of the people there, but I really didn't like my nurse because she didn't seem to have a clue. Like, she asked me if I had a tampon in. What? I am pregnant! Anyway. Also, the IV dude sort of sucked and used some sort of huge needle. I am not exaggerating. I told the nurse that it hurt and I told the doctor I didn't need the IV because I wasn't having a problem with liquids, but no luck, they left the bastard thing in the whole time.

Pretty soon I went to ultrasound to check for the location of the pregnancy. The x-ray tech is quite possibly my favorite person right now. They did belly ultrasounds, which was fine, but they couldn't see anything. Then came the totally awesome inter-vaginal ultrasound. Fun times. She took a ton of photos and told me she would explain them later. That is when I got the best news, she could show me exactly where the baby was in my uterus. At four weeks we could see it, actually 4 weeks and 5 days, which is exactly where I thought I was, which was awesome. Not much of a baby, just a small dark dot, but it was there. I also have a cyst on my ovary which makes it tender and can cause some cramping, but also raises my progesterone. She went through all the scans with us and talked to us. Apparently I have a Y shaped uterus, which is abnormal but not dangerous. So the baby nestled into one side of the Y and the other side of the Y could still be unaware that I am not pregnant and could be sloughing old cells like a normal period. It doesn't hurt the baby, but it can lead to bleeding throughout pregnancy. She was awesome. At the end she told us that she isn't actually supposed to tell me any of this, but often in the ER they don't go over it with you and you have to wait until you see you OBGYN to get any information. I am so glad she told me, because that is exactly what happened.

I went back to my room and had a pelvic exam (with Mike in the room, how is that for awkward) and a catheter to extract urine. Super fun times--apparently I have a small urethra. That shit hurts. Then we waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually they came in and told me my urine was fine and my ultrasound showed my pregnancy was in my uterus so it was safe. They also said my cervix was closed, which is good because it opens when there is impending miscarriage. All good. I did have an infection that I remember reading about, but they can't treat it until I am past my first trimester. It causes cramping in the lower abdomen. That was it. Nothing about my ultrasound or anything. I am SO GLAD the x-ray tech told me. The doctor told me that if I am going to have a miscarriage, I will have one. There is nothing they can do about it, and nothing I did to cause it, it just is. It is predestined genetically at this point. She told me could definitely still have one, but it is not impending nor guaranteed and I can carry the baby to term as far as my blood work and other tests are concerned. I have to back in to track my beta levels of hgc. Finally the shitty nurse took out my IV and informed me that indeed the needle was really big and that was why it hurt. No shit. I never actually had any fluid, just an empty IV for four hours. Regardless, the shitty nurse gave me my discharge papers BEFORE they got the results on my creepy infection, so my diagnosis was pregnancy. $100 for piece of mind was totally worth it.

It took me a long time to research the infection because I didn't know the name and I couldn't find it. It wasn't on my discharge paperwork because the shitty nurse wrote it up before I was actually discharged. Essentially it is from having the ph balance off, which is the result of pregnancy or an excess of semen which changes the ph. Whatever. It is essentially Mike's fault, but so is the baby, so I am good with it. :)

Who knows?

As of today, I am finishing my first month of pregnancy. One down, eight more to go, and to be fair, half of the first one doesn't even really count. So, who knows? Well, all of you. We have told my mom (I want to tell my dad in person, so that will be about 8-9 weeks), Millie, Rachel and I think Ella knows. Mike is telling his parents tomorrow--so that brings the count to 5 people and a dog. Oh, and everyone at my dentist office. I had to get my teeth cleaned today, this was scheduled two months ago, but I had to tell them I was pregnant because of X-Rays and other treatments. It was SO NICE to tell people. People are so into it. Everyone asked about the due date and if it was my first and on and on. It made it more real for me and it made it fun and happy instead of so scary. I am sure I will get over people asking as soon as I am showing, but for right now, it was awesome. We are waiting to tell siblings and other close friends and family until after the first trimester, or at least the first sonogram when we can hear the baby and make sure everything is okay. It will be a slow process of telling people because we both want to tell people in person. It is hard not to tell people.

EDIT: I am uploading pictures that I took months ago (I am 20 weeks now). I remember thinking that I looked so pregnant, and that everyone would know. I had even taken out my belly ring because my stomach was stretching and it itched and got caught on things. Although the baby was microscopic, I was bigger in these photos than I was prior to being pregnant, thanks to early pregnancy bloating. It is about the same as having a period for 3 months, with added nausea, in case anyone wanted to know.

Many more tests

It is actually November 27th, but I wanted this to be in a logical order and I just now downloaded all of these pictures, so I rigged the date on blogger. When I first took my pregnancy test I was all alone, on a Saturday morning, and Mike was out of town for the weekend playing army. I didn't want to tell him over the phone, especially because it was so light. I didn't tell anyone. I just walked the dog and then sat around all day trying to see if I felt any different. Then I went a bought a bunch more test. Then I took them all. Seriously people, just go with digital, some of these are impossible to read.

This one was the second one. I took it that afternoon. Do you see a second line? Yeah, not enough to be convinced though.

These ones I took next, the following morning, see digital is worth it:

Finally, I took one last one, after I had told Mike and everything. I was having some spotting and felt like I was getting my period, and well, I had it sitting there, so this was about a week later.

Is that a plus?

This morning I decided to take a pregnancy test. No particular reason, I just felt like it. I really didn't think I was pregnant, but I bought a three pack of tests and Millie turned me onto this site that sells them super cheap so I figured I would take one. I am not supposed to have my period until Monday (or maybe Wednesday, I had one month when I was two days late, inexplicably) so it was early anyway. Really, I think I was putting off walking the dog. This is what I got:
Is that a line? I can't really tell. I know I have read that a faint line is still a line, but really, that faint? It seems like it is too light for me. And Mike is out of town. I really want to ask someone about this, but I feel like Mike should know first. So I have to wait two more days before I can even ask someone.

I will obviously be taking a few more tests if this is how they look. Fuckers. They really can't make it easier than this? Anyway, I am super excited, but I am also really nervous because I am afraid I want it so much I am making up fake results. I know that if I start thinking I am pregnant, and then I am not, it will be more crushing that normal, and I am not sure I can take that. I am sort of in shock, and freaking out (not about being pregnant, about thinking I am and then not being). I want to try a digital test, but they are like $30, so I want to wait until next week, but on the same note, I really DON'T want to wait until next week. Fuck, I hate the army. I need Mike.

The pill

Not being on the pill sucks. Bad.

Clear, Blue, Pricey

No, I am not incubating yet. Well, I suppose I could be, but I don't think so, which I suppose is a good thing because it would be really irresponsible to drink three Rio margs, a few beers and a martini if I thought I was pregnant. On an irrelevant side note, I really do need to stop drinking so much. I went the first few months always thinking I was pregnant. Now I am always convinced I am not. Since moving into that state I must say I am right a lot more often.

I am, however, extremely frustrated. The frustration manifests itself into all sorts of other things, but essentially I am frustrated that I am not pregnant. This sometimes manifests into hating all teenagers, all religions, all babies, all pregnant women, all women on the pill, all women not on the pill and mostly into hating all people who get pregnant without trying. I find this an amusing phrase because not trying to me means not have unprotected sex, but apparently there are a lot of people out there that disagree and are surprised when unprotected sex results in a zygote. Because apparently not trying to them means...I don't know what. What does fucking trying mean?

Anyway, I digress. Frustration. All of the time. If one more fucking person tells me that everything happens for a reason I am going to shove scissors through his/her ears. This violent inclination also bleeds into people telling me that they are certain it will happen when the time is right. What the fuck? These are the same people who say the time is never right and if you wait for the right time you will never have a kid--because reasonably when is it good to gain 40 pounds, completely ruin a perfect body, halt a career and put more stress on a relationship (or marriage) than anything else possibly could? There is no right time people! Therefore, I will NOT get pregnant at the right time. Or when we are ready. Or when the universe decides it. Or when our relationship is ready. Or when we can handle it. Or when Allah wills it. Ojala my ass. (thank you Mr. Jenkins for explaining the etymology of Ojala in the Spanish language while learning the freaken subjunctive--it is quite suiting at the moment). We will get pregnant when scientifically sperm meets egg, embeds into uterine wall and develops a feeding system and heartbeat. Yes, Virginia, that is where babies come from.

This brings me to modern science. See there is this idea out there that to get pregnant you have to try. Obviously this is not true since teen pregnancy rates are not significantly decreasing. People get pregnant all the time without trying. With that being said, there are significant amounts of people like me out there, who depend on instant gratification and want a fetus NOW! So, they do what is called charting. They write down EVERYTHING to see if they can predict when they ovulate. See, pregnancy depends on ovulation, and you have a much higher chance of getting pregnant if you have sex during ovulation, although many people get pregnant outside of that time frame. This assumes that everything is medically okay other than timing. Theoretically you ovulate two weeks before your period, which is freaken awesome if you have a consistent period. Then it is just basic math. Luckily, I could create my own fucking calendar company based on my cycle so counting back two weeks should be easy. And it is. Except I am not pregnant. So either I do not ovulate on the day I think I do or something else is wrong. Lets hope it is ovulating on a different day, because that is much easier to fix that other issues. So, I have two options. Chart or pee. Charting entails writing down my basal body temperature every day and then looking back on it to see a spike (which only tells you after the fact that you ovulated) and keeping track of my cervical mucus. Sounds like super fun to me. The other way to dish out $50 and buy an over the counter ovulation predictor kit. Guess what one I chose? So now, for a month, I get to pee on a stick and see if I ovulate. If I do, yeah, have sex, make baby. If not, I will email my Dr. and say I know it has not been a year yet, but I am not ovulating. Maybe she will be in a good mood and see me or tell me what I can do to hurry along my ovulation cycle. If it says I am ovulating, and it is at the same time that I think it is, I will email her that. If I ovulate at a different time I suppose Mike and I will try to have a baby on that schedule for a few months and hope.

So, essentially I am heavily in the science part of baby making. I am not going to pray, or wait for the right time, or believe it happens for a reason. I am going to pee on a stick and see if I can manage a little smiley face and two weeks later a plus sign. In the meantime, I will try to not actually commit any violent crimes.


PS--Let's not forget how ridiculously expensive pregnancy tests are either--since those run about $7 a pop. That is a lot of money to pee on is all I am saying.