As I write this, I am 40 weeks and 2 days pregnant. I sit swollen and nauseous on the couch in my husband’s underwear (I swear I grew out of mine overnight) hoping and praying for my waters to break.
A few hours ago,
I was at the hospital having a membrane sweep – more commonly known as a
‘stretch and sweep’ or as my husband mortifyingly called it, a ‘scratch and
sniff’. This process is the stretching of the cervix and sweeping of the
membranes to initiate labour.
Apart from some back pain, nausea and extra pressure on my pelvis, I feel the
same as before and remain unconvinced that my son is heading towards the exit
any time soon. After trying an array of methods to induce labour over the last
week to no avail, my new tactic is ‘don’t get your hopes up’ and I plan on
sticking to it until his head is literally leaving my body.
Although the wait has been slightly torturous, it has left me with plenty of time to reflect on the highs and lows of pregnancy; the things I wish I’d known, the things I’ll remember for next time and simply the experience as a whole. It is one that has not been easy but something I am eternally grateful for. So, if you managed to stick with me through all the ‘membrane’ talk, allow me to share with you, my pregnancy journey…
Chapter one: It’s actually hard to fall pregnant.
In high school sex-ed class the main focus seems to be scaring kids out of having unprotected sex because to quote ‘Mean Girls’ – “you will get pregnant… and die.”
You’re made to believe that if you even have one slip up, you will UNDOUBTEDLY become a teen mum with no future. A frightening thought for a 16-year-old that leads to major insecurities later on. The first time I thought I was pregnant, I was fresh out of high school and on birth control but – “people can still fall pregnant on The Pill you know, if you get a stomach bug or forget to take it, you’ll get pregnant… and die.”
You spend your teen years and early twenties panicked that you’re pregnant because apparently, it’s that easy. Then, like some sort of sick joke, the day comes when you’re ready for a baby and nothing happens.
If you’re reading this and you’re planning on trying for a baby soon or you’ve been trying for a while, please know that it can take some time. In fact, the timing has to be pretty spot on each month for you to even be able to conceive. Sure, miracles happen, but if not, try not to stress and give it time.
… but not too much time.
After a year of trying (and a year of tracking my cycles and buying pregnancy tests and crying in the bathroom) I decided it was time to visit my doctor and have some tests.
At first my doctor thought I may have had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome but after further tests it was revealed I had Hypothyroidism, which was wreaking havoc for my hormones and cycles. I was lucky that it was such a simple fix. I had a lot of blood work done and had my medication changed frequently until we landed on the right dosage for my body and within a few months, I was pregnant.
I got up early and snuck to the store for the test, raced home to take it and almost fell over when I saw it was positive. I packaged up the test and wrapped it in a box with a note saying, ‘Congratulations Papa,’ and surprised Steven when he got home from work.
My dream of becoming a mother was finally coming true.
Chapter two: The nightmare of pregnancy forums.
When we first started trying for a baby there was nobody else I knew who was also trying to fall pregnant. None of my close friends had babies and so I didn’t really know what to expect and had a lot of questions.
Of course, in this day and age there is an online group for pretty much any topic and with a few strokes on the keyboard you can find a whole bunch of people with the same questions as you.
Reading through online forums you can usually find the information you’re looking for or at least find comfort in finding someone else as clueless as you. The exception to this rule is pregnancy forums.
These online groups are often filled with women dishing out advice that you really don’t need and are harder to decipher than the Da Vinci Code. The women on these pages use abbreviations for EVERYTHING – nobody uses full sentences, and everyone seems to just know what these codes mean.
For example:
BBT – Basal Body Temperature
BD – Baby Dance (Sex)
DPO – Days Past Ovulation
BFN – Big Fat Negative (Pregnancy Test)
BFP – Big Fat Positive (Pregnancy Test)
CD – Cycle Day
CF – Cervical Fluid
DC – Dear Child
DH – Dear Husband
EBF – Exclusively Breastfeed
LO – Little One
MS – Morning Sickness
POAS – Pee On A Stick (Pregnancy Test)
TTC – Trying To Conceive
… The list goes on and on.
“My DH and I have been TTC for ages. We did the BD on the right CD but my POAS lead to a BFN.”
I left those sites feeling more confused than ever. Seriously, is there a handbook out there that I don’t know about?
Chapter three: There is no “safe zone.”
I soon realised that I was never going to be one of the mums on the Internet who is down with all the pregnancy lingo. I found my groove and once my brief wave of morning sickness had passed, I began eagerly counting down to the “safe zone” – the three-month mark where you can finally let the world know you’re expecting.
It had taken us over a year to fall pregnant so once it finally happened, I was so relieved and thought that all our worries were behind us. I never thought for one second that something would go wrong and as we edged closer and closer to twelve weeks, the possibility of never getting to meet our longed-for child was not even something that crossed my mind.
Unfortunately, pregnancy loss is not as rare as most people believe. It’s simply not something people discuss which is why I suppose, a lot of women like myself, never think it will happen to them.
I had a scan just after six weeks and everything was fine. I had doctor checkups and a midwife appointment, and everything was fine. Everything was fine. Until it wasn’t.
My doctor told me that we were low risk for chromosome disorders: we were both young, healthy, non-smokers with no family history, so if we didn’t want to get the nuchal scan done, we didn’t have to.
Neither of us were all that concerned but we decided to get the scan anyway. Steven was unable to get the day off work, so my mum came with me to the hospital.
We had just announced the pregnancy the day before and were on a high. Lying flat on my back, I looked up at the screen and saw our baby. I was so happy. The doctor went over everything thoroughly – ten fingers, ten toes, the lungs, heart, leg bones, arms, tummy and head. It seemed to me that everything was just how it should be.
However, at the end of the scan some 50 minutes later, “something doesn’t look right,” escaped from her lips and knocked the wind out of me. I could see my baby wriggling around on the screen right in front of me, what did she mean something wasn’t right?
I wiped the gel from my stomach as she left the room to make some phone calls. About fifteen minutes later she returned saying she had sent copies of my scan to another hospital and was waiting on confirmation. She asked me if Steven would be able to meet us at the Hospital and my stomach sank.
I made a teary phone call to my husband and he came right away.
‘It was too good to be true,’ I thought.
An hour later the doctor confirmed that our baby had a neural tube defect called Anencephaly, a disorder where the skull doesn’t form. There is no cure and although the baby can survive pregnancy, the survival rate after birth is 0%, with most babies living only for a few hours or a few days at best.
I had to make an impossible decision and end my long-awaited pregnancy. There was no future for our baby, and I couldn’t bear to carry her knowing she would only suffer.
The following months were dark and peppered with challenges. I returned to work as an early childhood educator, but it took a long time for me to step foot in the nursery.
I know this part of my story isn’t pleasant and is probably not something you would want to read about, but it is a part of my story nonetheless and I believe that sharing it may help someone else.
When you go through a difficult time in your life, you can start to feel alone. Each individual journey is different, but we all have one thing in common: sometimes life is awesome and sometimes it sucks balls.
Nobody’s pregnancy story is written like a love letter; there are thorny parts to this beautiful rose it’s just that some people’s roses are thornier than others.
Motherhood is a gift, but nobody can pretend that it’s easy. If you’re reading this right now and you’re struggling or just having a bad day, you’re not alone and it does get better – which is exactly why I chose to tell this particular part of my story.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that you can’t spend your time waiting for the worst. Trust that everything will be okay – you were built for this; you can do it. You can only go up from here.
Chapter four: The way up.
I’m one of those people who likes to think that everything happens for a reason. I hope and pray that this is the way the world works because it makes all the painful stuff easier to swallow.
You hear people say, “it will happen when it’s meant to happen,” and it can sound like total bullshit. But sometimes, sometimes it’s true.
We didn’t try for another baby for a long time. It was a year later and on the first go – I was pregnant. Call me crazy but I knew within 48 hours that I was knocked up. I told Steven and he said, well, that I was crazy.
Four weeks later I asked him to take a pregnancy test with me. It had taken us so long to conceive the first time and I had taken many, many negative tests so I was too scared to look at it. I sent Steve into the bathroom after the recommended three minutes to check the result.
“It’s negative,” he said, sitting down on the bed beside me.
“Well then why do I feel like this? What’s wrong with me?”
I had to check for myself before I threw the test away and was done. Glancing over the sink I saw two pink lines – it was positive!
“It’s positive you idiot!”
Steven couldn’t believe it, “You must have sent me in before it was done!”
In his defence, they don’t make those tests very easy to read, especially when you have a ‘boy look’.
It was nearly a year exactly since we had fallen pregnant the first time; in fact, the due dates were only six days apart. Now all we had to do was wait for the three-month scan.
As it turns out my body needed ten times the amount of folic acid than what other people needed, so I had taken the prescribed dose for three months to reduce the risk of another neural defect. However, there is no way to tell if your baby has Anencephaly until the twelve-week scan, so we did all we could do to stay positive and waited out the first trimester.
In a freaky twist of fate, my nuchal scan was scheduled for the exact same date as our first baby’s. I kept my eyes shut the entire time, refusing to look at our baby until the sonographer confirmed everything was okay. I made her say it about three times until I was game enough to look and there he was… our little miracle.
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I took a few breaks while writing this post as it was a difficult one, but somewhere along the way I gave birth – hoorah! When I started writing, I was 40 weeks and 2 days and our little boy made his dramatic entrance at 41 weeks and 2 days – but that’s a story for another time.