I originally wrote this in 2007 and never shared it, so it now sees the light of day. It describes an experience when my husband and I were trying to get pregnant in 2003. My sons are now almost 18 and 16. I’m appreciating this challenge and the self-created requirement of having to share what I write.

In Pursuit of Pregnancy #2: Down for the Count

Two advantages to having a baby in later years are readiness and awareness.

I had been hyper-aware of my body since starting our attempts to get pregnant. The slightest change in mood or stomach rumblings and I was off to Walgreen’s for a pregnancy test. I asked our Godson’s mom if she knew it for sure when she was pregnant. She paused a moment and nodded with conviction but didn’t elaborate.

Frustrated, I awaited the sure sign, whatever it was, different than anything I had ever felt. I read about all the symptoms in What To Expect When You’re Expecting. I still didn’t get it so I called the Advice Nurse at Kaiser for more certain insights from the experts.

“Hmm,” said Nurse Anita.

“Yes?”

“Hold on a minute. I’m looking it up in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

This really happened.

That month, instead of a period, I only spot-bled a couple days. A week later, my breasts felt unusually tender. A few days later my abdomen felt heavy, lower in the gut than the discomfort of indigestion. Something was happening in my body that had never happened before. The feeling though mild was, indeed, entirely new.

Six AM on a Sunday I sat on the edge of the tub looking alternately at my watch and the home pregnancy test sitting on the sink. The cat mewed for her breakfast outside the door.  I blinked at the indicator. There was a faint line in the plastic window. I read the directions that came in the box for the third time: “A faint line—is also positive.”

Nudging my husband awake, I asked him to look at the test in the bathroom. I lay back down in bed waiting for him to tell me it was my imagination and fuzzy morning vision. But the line WAS there.

In disbelief, I took the test again the next morning. The advice nurse recommended a blood test since the line was so slight. It could be an early pregnancy, she explained, or it could be a tubal one (Also called an Ectopic pregnancy, when the egg implants in a fallopian tube or somewhere else in the belly). That sounded scary. But I comforted myself that I wasn’t having the severe cramps she said usually accompanied this condition. The other possibility was an “unhealthy pregnancy,” vague and ominous.

Though I promised my husband I wouldn’t tell anyone about testing possibly-positive, my girlfriend at work asked me directly while on our noontime jog, well two girlfriends. So, what could I do? I was relieved to share the news. Though Doug and I both were careful not to commit totally to the idea that we might be pregnant, we fantasized about telling our parents that they would finally have grandchildren. It was a long 24-hours awaiting the results of the blood test.

Since we started this process, I have spent a lot of time in the basement laboratory giving blood. Sometimes I come out with a cotton ball taped in the crook of my arm with no mark beneath. Sometimes I look like a junkie for a week, the skin of failed attempts gray-blue around the vein. I started to see the same bloodletters on shift at my usual seven a.m. ritual, learn their personalities and who was best with the needle. I never watched the needle hit skin. It’s always the visual that kills me.

There was the old, Eastern European woman with platinum-died hair who always had some wisdom to impart. Despite her seeming lack of attention and squinting over bifocals, she was great with the needle. The young handsome man working part-time left a lingering bruise every time, but crooned adorably, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” The African man built like a big bear with the huge smile and a lilting accent liked to make fun of the Eastern lady. He always left a clean mark. The serious Chinese-American woman who said nothing after confirming your name, even when you tried to make conversation sometimes hit the vein, sometimes not.

Each time, the results were available the next day after two p.m.. Though I was dying to know about this particular blood test, I made myself wait until three o’clock to call. I don’t really know why, masochism, fear of failure or success. Doug was waiting for my call.

I was pregnant. But the nurse explained that though the pregnancy hormone (Human chorionic gonadotropin hormone or hCG, present only during pregnancy) was in my body, the count was low. There were only a few hundred. A healthy pregnancy would mean at least a thousand. 

I marveled at this: a whole new hormone in my body. As if the ones I had weren’t enough. (hCG is made by cells formed in the placenta, which nourishes the egg after it has been fertilized and becomes attached to the uterine wall. It’s also the most likely cause of morning sickness. Hard to tell with the simultaneous rise of other hormones already in the body: progesterone, estrogen, and Thyroid-stimulating hormone, or TSH). 

I was told to come in to test again the next day to see if the numbers increased or dropped. 

I had two long hours to kill between the second blood test and my appointment with Nurse Patty to find out the results. So, I did what any nervous, possibly expectant mother would do, I went for a walk in a cemetery. It was near the hospital, and I had heard it was a good place to walk. Trekking up the hill among the vast lawns and tombstones, I read the inscriptions dating back to the early 1800s. Many graves were for babies.

No running that day. I was paranoid about jarring the poor thing inside me. The night before I read about foods that have particular vitamins and nutrients a baby would need. I made sure I slept. Suddenly taking care of myself, eating right seemed easy. It was a priority. No more chocolates from co-workers in the afternoon or over-filling lunches. I would get enough sleep each night. My habits of living had all improved, even just for one day so far. I laughed aloud at the thought: if only I took this sort of responsibility for my body when it was just for me.

But I had felt another change to my body that day, not a good one. Hard to describe. My abdomen had a dull ache. There was spot bleeding. I didn’t know what to think about this, but it instinctively felt bad. The long strides comforted me, as well as the thought that I would know definitively in under two hours what my body had decided. My body is well-designed, I cheered myself, it’ll do its best. It’s a lean, mean, baby-making machine.

Here lies Charles McRoy, beloved son of Molly and James, 1872-1873.

With a knock on the examining room door, Nurse Patty entered. “I have bad news,” she said, not wasting words or allowing hope.

My numbers had diminished. The pregnancy didn’t take, she said. I suspected as much. But the disappointment still dried my mouth. She examined me, purely for my own peace of mind. At one point, she mentioned the word “miscarry.”

Yes, my God. I had a miscarriage. It sounded much worse that way, labeled with that whispered word. “She had a hard time with it.” “She doesn’t want to talk about it.” That’s the way I had always heard miscarriages talked about before. “She has miscarried five times, the last after three months, poor thing.” I knew I got off easy with only three days of knowing, six weeks of a fertilized egg in my body. I was determined to talk about it, not hide it away like some shame or horrible secret or untouchable memory. But later when it came time to share the news, some people I told quite naturally, others I didn’t feel like mentioning it to at all.

We had dinner guests that night, conversation on the couch, games on the floor with their two children, take-out Chinese at the dining room table. I ate too much Mu Shu Pork and tried hard to listen. Since I hadn’t okayed telling people with Doug, I resisted sharing the news. I said nothing. It just about killed me. After they left, Doug revealed that he had told them during a tour of our new and improved backyard, so they knew the entire time anyway. On the same wavelength after that, he encouraged me to talk about it with anyone I wanted as much as I needed.

Piling laptop, gym bag, purse, lunch into the passenger seat of my car the next morning, I suddenly doubled over with sharp cramps. The sensible thing would’ve been to return to the house, call in sick and camp out in the bathroom. But I started the engine and directed the car through freeway traffic, through the toll plaza and across the bridge. The whole way, the cramps intensified. I leaned forward, moaning aloud, weeping involuntarily in my speeding Toyota fishbowl. 

In the parking lot outside my office, I left everything but my keys and scampered hunched toward the first-floor restroom, past the CEO and men in suits smoking cigarettes and chatting in German on the patio. It was the day of the annual board meeting. These guys visited only once a year.

The downstairs bathroom had been retiled too brightly, but hardly anyone used it, which was a relief. It became my home for a while. I sat in amazement through continued contractions, a mini-preview of childbirth, that I told myself I must remember, “’cause Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” At one point, I ran upstairs to tell the two girlfriends who knew my plight where I was. “So, you know,” I said, “and also for your support.”

As I rushed back down, tears welling up—at work, great!—I realized that was why I kept stubbornly driving my usual route to the office. I needed to be around people.

Trying a stroll around the parking lot, which didn’t help at all, a kind co-worker with her office dog honed in on me, sat me down outside the café, and got me a drink and an Advil. I must’ve looked as bad as I felt. Running my hand over the dark, soft fur of her dog, Dillon, felt like a miracle. I didn’t feel like telling Joan what was going on, but when my carpool buddy Dan happened outside for a mid-morning snack, I had no trouble telling him I miscarried. A tender soul, who had just seen his girlfriend through ovarian cancer, he opened his arms automatically to pull me to him, hugged me close and whispered, “It’s alright.” That was all it took. Tears gushed.

“Breath with me,” he said. Inside the tinted window, the directors of the company were filing into the boardroom with their donuts. I tried not to think about them.

“Call Doug,” he said, “Do you have a friend who could come stay with you? Go home.”

My husband was between classes at the high school where he taught and in answer to my cell phone alert, came out to sit with me in the car. The cascade of tears had continued the entire way back across the San Mateo Bridge and now soaked his shoulder as I clung to him. Several students glanced into the car windows on their way to class. I was oblivious until Doug suggested I drive to the end of the parking lot by the gym. It was humorous in a way, but I couldn’t tell him so through the sobs.

And the strange thing was that I actually felt fine about it, even with streaks of salty tears and a stuffed nose “I even see the humor in the whole thing,” I choked out. But I kept crying anyway.

Ahh, the power of hormones. All I could figure was this pregnancy hormone was a powerful presence and was not happy that my body had rejected it. Once at home, I stroked my cat, yanked weeds from the jungle of our new rose garden with the sun warming my back. Tears subsided into melancholy. Later in the evening, I lay immobile in front of the TV. My mood had lowered to near depression. The whole thing fascinated me and I felt lucky to have this at least partial understanding of post-partum depression. No wonder some women suffer so much while their bodies readjust with the retreat of powerful hormones.

The next day, I was exhausted, but the sea change had passed. And I’m now one of the many women in America who have miscarried. (One in eight pregnancies end in miscarriage.)

My husband and I take a positive spin on the whole thing though. My body wasn’t quite ready. But, we found out we COULD get pregnant! The machinery worked after all. We felt a new confidence and hopeful for the next month. And while waiting for a successful pregnancy, well, the practice wasn’t torture!