I didn’t want to be percieved as difficult, but I had to say my piece. I didn’t want all the notifications and things if I had miscarried. I wanted to emphasize the negative experience I had last year although it wasn’t that many but it felt so so demeaning.
Your lab results are back! You’re good for pregnancy.
Your due date is in a month! Make sure you follow these tips.
Your blah blah blah was checked. Blah blah.
I said all those things to the nurse practitioner, even before Chris came into the room and even before the ultrasound. Partially because I wanted to protect myself, I didn’t want to know anything until I knew that it was certain. I had already known how common it was to be pregnant and not have it work out.
For the last few weeks, I had been feeling like I didn’t feel very pregnant. But there it was. Always.
But I thought that’s how it was going to be.
So maybe I wasn’t surprised, but also surprised when the NP looked around on the ultrasound and simply stated what she saw. There was the gestational sac! But it was empty. There wasn’t a fetus. It seemed to be not there. And even then, I was feeling like I failed again. Or at least my body failed. I had been anticipating this, but I had not been anticipating it.
So as she was describing it, I teared up. All the effort we had put in. All of it. A second time. I would be someone who had two pregnancies, but they both didn’t carry to term. Or even barely past several weeks.
I had structured my life so nobody put pressure on me to be a parent. And so it was only me. Nobody knew.