Surprise! The Ninth Pregnancy

Surprise! 

So, there I am minding my own business and carrying on with my life. I had accepted that we would not have the 3rd child and was seeing the benefits of it: the kids are a bit older now and easier to manage, so we could have more freedom and do more things, easier to fit everyone and bags in the car if we are travelling, cheaper trips (well compared to a family of 5) and so on.

Then I commented with my husband J that I had been waiting for my period to come down for 3 weeks already, with a lot of pain on my breasts. He asked if I could be pregnant and I said no, I don't think so. I should add here that we had not had sex since my last period, possibly longer because I was mad at him, so I really did not think it was possible to have been pregnant. But once that seed was in my mind I just had to test it to get it out of my way. So I went for my morning run and on the way back bought a test at the pharmacy. Normally, if I did think there was a chance of being pregnant, I would have waited to test when J was home. But since I didn't think I was and just wanted to get it out of the way, I did the test on my own. And there it was: BFP! I freaked out! How could it be that after waiting for so long and giving up (and essentially thinking I had started early menopause) AND not having much sex, how on earth could I be pregnant? It was very strong and dark positive line so I freaked out that maybe I was pregnant longer than the 5 weeks based on my last period and rushed to the emergency to do an ultrasound to check how far along I was. In my view, this was an emergency. It was not a life threatening emergency, I get that, but an emergency nonetheless.

The lady at the emergency was very nice and suggested I went to a nearby clinic instead (since this was not really an emergency), so I did and was seen pretty quickly. I was really anxious and testing my friend like “how could this be” and “wouldn’t it be wonderful if I was like 10 weeks already or something”? Anyway, so it turned out that I was 5 weeks pregnancy but since I really didn't think I had had sex recently enough to be 5 weeks pregnant, I left the room feeling a bit disappointed as I somehow (again mind tricks) was convinced that it was a longer pregnancy that was retracting to miscarriage. I don't know where I got this from, but googling it turned out that one could not possibly see this on an ultrasound exam…

Suddenly, I decided to be positive. As far as it went for a 5 week pregnancy, everything was looking great. So I should I worry? Let’s try to enjoy this pregnancy and see how far it goes and hope for the best. Of course, my mind was going through a rollercoaster of emotions because when you give up on something you really want to then suddenly get a glimpse that it could be yours after all, you can not rest. You can not trust that it really will be yours. Specially something so out of your control as a pregnancy.

But there we were 5 weeks pregnant, happy, scared, nervous, thrilled, anxious, ecstatic all and everything at once. This was 29th November 2019.