The Toll

I was ten and a half weeks pregnant when we received our at home doppler. I knew there was a chance I would not be able to find the heart beat so soon. The doctors don't even try that early. Joe and I attempted to find the baby's heartbeat that night but to no avail. I was not discouraged. It was really early to expect to find a heartbeat.  The next morning, after Joe had gone to work, I had a hunch. So I brought out the Babybeat Doppler. Sure enough, I didn't even have to fish around, there was that beautiful galloping sound at 176 bpm. And then I doubted it.

I doubted I had heard what I heard. Even though, I had heard it for awhile. Even though, I looked up fetal heart tones on the Internet and the sound I downloaded was the same that had come from my at home Doppler. Even though, if anything in my body had a pulse of 176 bpm besides a baby, I'd probably be dead. And I knew I was crazy to be doubting what I had heard when there had been no mistaking it, but then again part of me wondered if I had made it up because I had wanted to hear it so badly. If hysterical pregnancies exist, couldn't hysterical hearing?

When your body keeps betraying you, ( and I don't care if a miscarriage is "nature's way") you stop trusting it. When you look for blood on the toilet paper and twice the absence of it doesn't mean a damn thing because your baby is dead anyway, you start to doubt your own experience. When you're in the midst of your first miscarriage, and are still having morning sickness, symptoms mean shit.  When you go through five packs of pregnancy tests with mixed results because  the egg was fertilized but didn't implant, you start to hate your body for reasons that have nothing to do with image.

I am sixteen and a half weeks pregnant now. Part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am too familiar with the baby and pregnancy loss community to ever think there is a safe point. It annoys me when people ask me when I have the ultrasound to find out the sex. That ultrasound is the ultrasound that is going to let me know if my baby is healthy so far. Some women go to that ultrasound and are not so lucky.  Every night I go to bed and pray for a full term, healthy, live birth. I hope I am covering all my bases. I know more than any pregnant woman should about all the crappy things that can happen. And I no longer have the luxury of thinking they won't happen to me because some of them already have.