Pregnancy: Week 5
I wrote this post back in July, when I was five weeks’s pregnant, and just starting to accept that this little baby might be here to stay! Now that I’ve made the official announcement, I’m finally publishing it!
The human body is a funny thing. Sometimes when you are ignoring the signs it’s giving you to slow down, it takes matters into its own hands and stops you in your tracks. That’s what happened to me in week 5.
A bad case of tonsillitis knocked me off my feet and sent me first to the doctor and then straight to bed. I was signed off work for four days! It’s the longest I’ve ever been off sick in my life.
But I guess I needed it. By the time the weekend came around I was starting to feel human again. But better still, I was starting to let myself believe that this pregnancy might stick.
During my visit to the doctor, I had asked him if this pregnancy was riskier given my two previous miscarriages. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “Your risk of miscarrying is higher because of your history than it would be if you’d never had a miscarriage. You just have to wait and see.”
I went home, curled up on the couch with some crappy daytime TV and my antibiotics, and cried. When Charlie came home from work I announced to him that if we lost this baby, I was done trying. He talked me down and sent me to bed.
I got up the next morning feeling slightly better and I took a new test – a cheapie one from Tesco. The line was definitely darker. Over the course of that week, I did a new test every morning – and each day that line was just a little bit darker. It might seem as though it was crazy to keep testing. After all, a positive test is a positive test right? That’s what they say anyway. But I felt a little crazy. I think I was literally worried sick. When I miscarried, the lines never got darker, only lighter. So as I looked at each day’s test and compared to reassure myself that the line was darker than the day before, I felt some of the worry begin to lift.
By the end of the week, that line was definitely darker
Finally just over a week from when I had taken the first Clearblue Digital test and read “Pregnant 1-2 weeks”, I took another which said “Pregnant 3+ weeks”! Woo hoo! All the signs were good.
Exactly what I was hoping to see!
Find my complete Pregnancy Journal here.
Lisa, I just wanted to say a big thank you for sharing these early pregnancy posts with us. It must have been very hard for you in those early weeks and I feel privileged to have this insight into your thinking. Your honesty makes for compelling reading! Keep them up! xx
mind the baby recently posted..Saying yes to no girls allowed
Thanks MTB. It was actually therapeutic to write these posts at the time even though I wasn’t posting them immediately. I know I’m not alone in that worry in the first few weeks – and many people have a lot more cause for worry than I did and they get through it. But I thought it was important to be honest about silly things like the incessant testing, because I know that reading about someone else behaving that way would have helped me feel more normal at the time!!