Journey to Baby Giggler Journey to Pregnancy

When I look back at the past eleven months, I’m still in disbelief that I currently have AJ. I went into trying to conceive knowing that there was a chance that we were going to have to work extremely hard in order to get a baby. I had known for eighteen months since I was diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), that it would play with my fertility and I may not fall pregnant easily. I had no doubt that T’s side of things was all ok, ADF would have told him if there were any issues with all of that, so any doubts that I had regarding us falling pregnant all had to do with my own body’s ability to conceive.

If you look back in the archives of the blog you will see a few posts where I talked about the things that I was going in order to boost my chances of conceiving. I went to my doctor three months before we started and got a full check-up to make sure everything was ok, I started taking prenatal vitamins, I started to track my ovulation, I started eating better and lost weight as it can impact your fertility as well. I did everything I could in the lead up to us actively starting to try for a baby to increase our chances.

Having said that, I still didn’t believe that we were going to have an easy time of it. At the earliest, I thought that we would fall in the latter half of the year and would be looking at a baby around May. So, when we started to try in April 2019, I went into it with the mentality that it was very possible that we were going to have to work hard in order to have a baby.

I was not expecting to have my own bodywork against me the first month, however.

We entered April and the weekend I was supposed to ovulate I found myself in a lot of pain. At first, I thought that maybe I was having some weird PMS stuff and it was hitting me early but as the day progressed and the pain got worse, I realised that it was located in one area in particular. Concerned, we went to the ER where the doctors suspected that I had some cysts rupturing. I spent the rest of the weekend in pain at home and that week an ultrasound confirmed what was suspected. The ruptured cysts must have made my hormones go really whacky because for the week before my period that cycle I was some horrible PMS, that included nausea and sore boobs, and for a brief moment, I considered that I had ovulated early and we were pregnant. That hope was dashed when my period hit me and I spent the next 7 days in mild pain.

The fall out from the cysts rupturing continued after my period stopped. I had weird twinges of pain in my abdomen over the course of the month but it was never something that I needed to go see the doctor about. They completely disappeared the weekend I ovulated this cycle only to return the following week. However, this time we had exhaustion playing on us as well. T’s job was working him hard and I was going through a weird funk that usually hit me at the beginning of winter when I was adjusting to the cold. So, neither of us felt like we had a lot of spare energy but we still had a bit of fun over that time of ovulation. I just didn’t think that it would be fruitful.

The rest of the month was pretty quiet as I dealt with the twinges still and I remember thinking the week leading into my period that I felt pretty good. I wasn’t even craving the things that I would normally crave. I put it off as a weird side effect of the cysts once again and prepared myself for my period to arrive.

At this time my period would come anywhere from cycle day 28 to cycle day 31. It was just a matter of being prepared for when it decided to show it’s face. Day 28 arrived and nothing happened. I brushed it off, thought that it was just going to be closer to day 31 and continued on with life. The days passed with no sign of Aunt Flo, but I still thought that it was just going to start later. Day 31 arrived and there was still no sign of my period. Instead of thinking that I was pregnant I was groaning because I thought that I was going back to my irregular days before I was on the pill where I would go anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks between my periods.

On top of that, from day 29 I was having these twinges in my abdomen. These weren’t the painful ones that I had been feeling for a while, these felt like a string being pulled. I’m going to sound like a broken record but once again I thought this was just something to do with my cysts and pushed it to the side but made a mental note of it just in case I needed to talk to my doctor.

I had no other signs that something positive had happened this month until midway through day 31. As some of you may be aware, I like to listen to true crime podcasts. I find them interesting and hearing the details never bothers me. On this day, however, listening to the details of this particular case made me feel like I needed to throw up. I was driving at the time and I almost had to pull over onto the side of the road to do so.

This really grabbed my attention and for the first time, I started to consider that maybe something else was happening and what I had been feeling had nothing to do with my cysts as all. Being halfway through the day, I decided to wait until the following morning and I would take a pregnancy test. If it came up negative and I was still having these reactions to listening to my podcasts, then I would go and have a chat with my doctor about what was going on.

On the morning of the 9^th of June, I woke up at 7 am and went to the bathroom. In my half-asleep daze, I almost forgot to take the test and just managed to grab one in time. I did what I had to do, placed it to rest on the counter and finished up. As I stood up, I looked down at the test and had to do a double-take.

There were two lines.

The second one was faint but it was there. I picked it up and stared at it as the second line got darker and darker.

Not trusting my eyes, I grabbed my phone and took a photo of it and used an app to manipulate the picture to see if the second line showed up in it as well. Sure enough, it was in those manipulations. In complete shock, I did the first thing that I could think of and I started to laugh. I was laughing as I walked out of the bathroom and it was loud enough to wake T up.

He looked at me with bleary eyes and said “Are you alright?” as he misinterpreted my laughter for me crying.

I replied, “I’m pregnant.”

He didn’t get up. He didn’t smile. He just went “Oh, ok” and went back to sleep.

His reaction still makes me laugh to this day as it wasn’t one of uninterest. It was one made by a half-asleep man.

Despite everything that I had done so far, I still didn’t believe what I had seen. So, I sent the picture I had taken earlier off to a friend in the US who I knew would still be up. She replied to me in seconds saying “Yep, your eggo is preggo” and I knew in that moment that I wasn’t seeing things.

We were going to have a baby.

We had managed to fall pregnant in the first six months of us trying, something that I had honestly believed would not happen for us. Not only that, but it had also happened in our second month of trying. I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulder and then suddenly replaced with a new one.

Falling pregnant had apparently been easy for us but I knew a lot of couples who were having a lot of trouble trying to conceive and they had the same medical history as us. One of my SIL’s was like that and spent a good eighteen months trying to have their first baby and here I was falling pregnant at the drop of a hat. I knew that there was honestly nothing I could have done to control this but it still made me feel very guilty that we had been so very lucky to fall so damn quickly.

That guilt is still with me now. I don’t know why we fell so quickly when others can’t. I even have friends who when I was celebrating the birth of AJ, they were having miscarriages, and while I know there is nothing I can do about it and I really shouldn’t feel guilty, it doesn’t stop the guilt from happening.

Looking back, I feel kind of stupid that I put everything that I was feeling on my cysts. Now I don’t think that they would have carried on past my period, but at the time I think I was so sure that it wasn’t going to work that month that I needed something that I would say was the cause of my symptoms. It definitely helped because it stopped me over analysing everything I was feeling at the time and I was able to get on with things without wondering if a test would show up positive if I took one in that moment.

After getting what I was seeing confirmed, I decided that I was going to get the ball rolling then and there. I went to the doctor that day they confirmed the pregnancy with their own test before I was given all the referrals for blood tests (including the Harmony Test) and my first ultrasound. By the end of that Saturday, everything was feeling a lot more real and I was ready to for everything that was about to happen.

Oh, and if you were wondering about T and what his reaction when he was fully awake: he would later wake up completely an hour later after I climbed back into bed and as I cuddled into him would look at me and say “And you doubted my potency.”