So yeah….where to begin? Obviously, the pictures show that we had a positive pregnancy test last Wednesday (18th). What is weird about the whole thing is that I’ve never had a positive pregnancy test before Aunt Flo was due…and Wednesday was 2 days early!! With Alexis I was a week late before the positive showed up, and with Lilly it was the day I was due. The estimated due date from the online calendars suggest a date of November 27th. That’s Luke’s birthday, and Black Friday!! (No shopping this year… lol) We are very excited and of course quite nervous.
For some background, in February 2008, my SIL had a miscarriage at about 6 weeks. That rocked the family, and kind of fast tracked our want for another baby. In March, I got pregnant, and so did she. She was two weeks behind me. We found out on April Fool’s Day that we were expecting, and I had my first appointment April 29th. On April 30th, I started to bleed, so on May 1st we had an ultrasound. That revealed a little baby bean, only the size of 6 weeks (we were supposed to be 8 weeks) and no heartbeat. We had started miscarrying. That weekend I had 2 birthday parties planned for Lilly (her first birthday parties). I had to go through one of the happiest moments in my life with something devastating happening to us. It was hard to tell everyone, because at the time, no one even knew we were pregnant. We made a stepping-stone for the lost baby (We named Riley Willow) and placed it out on our land in remembrance.
Since May, we have been trying to get pregnant again. At the end of October, I got another positive pregnancy test. Five days later, I started bleeding. Since it was so early (I was 4 weeks, 5 days) I went in for blood testing every 48 hours, and after 2 rounds, my progesterone was stable at below 5, which means no pregnancy. That miscarriage is called a chemical pregnancy, since it was so early an ultrasound wouldn’t have detected anything. I didn’t feel much with that one. It all happened so quickly; I was just numb from it.
Fast forward to December. That was our due date, and we took lovely pictures of some roses (you can see on the photo blog), and took them out to the land. SIL’s pregnancy was doing great, except the little booger decided to come 16 days late, so she wasn’t even born in December, she was born in January!!
So here we are now. We have some personal milestones to hit for this pregnancy, and we’ve already lasted longer than the chemical pregnancy we had, so that is makes us a bit hopeful, even though anything could happen. March 31st is our nurses’ appointment. We will be 5 wks 4 days. We never made it to an appointment with the chemical pregnancy. April 17th will be our 8-week mark, which is how far we made it with Riley. May 15th will be our 12-week mark, which will significantly decrease the chance of miscarriage, because we head into the second trimester. We will have heard a heartbeat by then if everything goes well.
I really do believe though, that loosing Riley was due to a viral infection. I started loosing my voice on what looks like the day after we would have conceived, and I didn’t get my voice back until I started miscarrying 8 weeks later! At 6 weeks, I went to a family physician and he prescribed a medication I took for a few days that he said would be safe. When we had our ultrasound, the baby had stopped growing at 6 weeks. I can only think that the medication along with the viral infection stopped the pregnancy.
So I nervously wait until the nurses’ appointment. I will then see if they want to treat me any different since I’ve had these previous miscarriages. It didn’t seem like the receptionist took notice of the message I left regarding them when I called in for an appointment. There’s nothing much that could be done anyways, besides blood testing that I would pay for out of pocket at $50 each time. That’s the great thing with crappy insurance. We pay for everything until the deductible is met, so lets hope we have to pay the full $2500 for a little one this year!
