Week 1 (Or is it 6?): I’m WHAT?!

My husband, C., and I went away to the shore last weekend for one final getaway before the cool fall weather sets in. We ate seafood at nice restaurants, shopped for souvenirs, and strolled on the beach. And I got sick. Now, I’m rarely ill (for non-hangover-related reasons, that is), so it was strange to find myself, virtually overnight, feeling queasy, stuffed up, and sore. Especially my boobs – boy, were they sore. Too much information? Well, it’s true. And, as I would soon find out, very relevant.

We got home on a Monday and I was so exhausted I went straight to bed. With another trip coming up the following weekend, I knew I had to get well ASAP. So I slept and drank tea and slept some more.

Then, the night before I was to leave, as I was packing up my toiletries, a sudden thought occurred to me: I hadn’t gotten my period this month, had I? You’d think I would know this for sure, since we women are supposed to track these things. But sometimes I get a little forgetful about marking it down on my calendar. I mean, it’s more or less the same time each month, so what does it matter?

Then, in a tiny, dark corner of my brain, a thought started to form: could I be pregnant?

In a way, it was laughable. I mean, we hadn’t even been trying. It had actually only been a month or so that we’d stopped NOT trying. C. and I figured, we’re going to want to have a baby at some point in the near future (since, as people kept helpfully pointing out to us, I WAS over 30 and we HAD been married two years already …). And I’d always heard it could take a while, sometimes up to a year or more. Certainly it had taken plenty of our friends that long. So I didn’t really concern myself with the possibility of getting pregnant right away. Except that now maybe I was.

Anyway, better safe than sorry, I thought, as I stopped by the drugstore on my way home from the gym. But there in the aisle, I had second thoughts. Those home pregnancy tests are expensive! Some of the fancy kinds are $18 a pop. I’m a frugal person; it pains me to pay $18 for a plastic stick I’m going to pee on and then toss in the trash. So I went with the buy-one-get-one-free store brand for $8.99. That way, at least I’d have a spare on hand for when we really started trying, right?

Hubby looked mildly surprised when I arrived home with my purchase. “Really?” he asked. “Huh.” I assumed that he also thought the chances were pretty slim that I was with child. When I came out of the bathroom, I set the kitchen timer for three minutes. To kill time, I asked him, “So, do you think I am or I’m not?” He glanced up from the TV and said casually, “Oh, I think you are.” WHAT?! Here I am, 99.9% sure I’m not having a baby. And C., who knows even less than I do about this stuff, pronounces me pregnant?

Just then, the timer beeped. I walked into the bathroom, picked up the stick – AND SAW A DOUBLE LINE! Just to clarify, that means I AM PREGNANT. (Believe me, I re-read the directions on the box twice more just to be extra sure.) Suddenly, my heart was pounding. My mouth was dry. My eyes grew wide with disbelief. I stumbled out of the bathroom, stick in hand. I showed it to C. “Wow. Congratulations, hon!” he said, in the same tone one might use to praise someone who’d just found a good deal on car insurance. Why wasn’t this a bigger deal to him? I asked. “Well, we were trying, weren’t we?” he responded. Um, yes, sort of, BUT IT CAN TAKE UP TO A YEAR!! Am I the only person who doesn’t think getting pregnant is a one-shot deal?

During the course of the evening, I re-check the stick about 20 times. My emotions ricochet repeatedly from fear to excitement to shock to wonder and back again. I mentally calculate how many cocktails I drank last weekend, and remember the raw fish – raw fish! – I ate. I recall looking forward to sampling the local microbrews and pinot noir on my upcoming trip. Scratch that plan. Thanks to one little plastic stick, my life has changed in the span of three minutes. I’m pregnant. PREGNANT!!

*I instantly went online to research my newly discovered condition. I soon found that answering the question “How pregnant am I?” is not that easy. See, it turns out that medical-types calculate pregnancy in terms of weeks, not months. That whole nine months thing? Wrong. Pregnancy actually lasts 40 weeks, and the countdown begins on the first day of your last period. If you’re wondering the obvious – How can I be pregnant before I’ve even conceived? – let me just say, I don’t get it either. All I know is by the time I found out I was pregnant, I was already considered six weeks along. Damn pregnancy math! It’s more confusing than algebra.