The Power of Jinx

What does a smart person do when they have big plans next summer that include a move from California to Colorado, finding a new job, and a husband graduating from law school and taking the bar exam?  She has a baby. At the same time.

Not smart, you say?  Perhaps a little context might change your mind.

Last year about this time, I started really feeling that itch. Married women in their 30's know to what itch I am referring.  It is the gut instinct to add a little romance, chaos, expectation, mixed with a tempting of the fates, to the sublime experience of being a total yuppy who is happily married and without children.  Let's multiply.  Last year, I decided that the timing was right to have a baby.  Let's do it before I'm automatically in that class of women termed "high risk" at the quickly approaching age of 35.  Let's do it while my husband Tyler is in his last, easiest semester of law school for the free day care.  Let's do it while I have health insurance, and a job that pays enough to support a growing family.  Let's do the grown-up, mature, thoughtful thing, and plan a pregnancy.

Ty was at the mid-point in his law school and we had gotten the hang of law school flow.  My IUD was about to expire in six months anyway.  So I made the appointment to have the IUD removed.  Coincidentally, it was Valentine's Day, 2011.  How appropriate.  At the appointment, the nurse practitioner said most women are pregnant within a year.  A year? I thought, It won't take us a year, surely.  Besides, a year from that point, the timing would be all messed up.

Well, I was right.  In June my period was conspicuously late.  I was at a Jason Isbell show at the Casbah with my nursing buddies Jamie and Allison, and I started to suspect Ty might have gotten the deed done.  I was dead tired.  I volunteered to be the designated driver that night, and the next day I peed on the stick.  Two lines meant that I was impregnated.  A flood of competing feelings came over me.  Ecstasy, satisfaction, anticipation, worry and even dread.  I ordered all the books and read them, devoured all the information from WebMD, quit taking ibuprofen, got on the wagon, started discussing names, shopping strollers, and making plans for a perfectly timed, late February delivery.

My birthday, July 17th, rolled around and Ty and I followed Widespread Panic from LA to Vegas for three shows.  I was pretty proud of myself for not being a lame pregnant person.  And indeed I started feeling better on the trip.  I wasn't so extremely fatigued any more.  And my stomach was less finicky.  I finally joined Ty in seeing a Widespread show sober.  We had a blast. 

We got home on Tuesday from our roadtrip to Vegas and the next day I had my first prenatal check up.  As a nurse, one of the things that I became acutely aware of through nursing school was just how many people get all up in a woman's business once she becomes pregnant.  I was not looking forward to this experience of student nurses, student doctors, student techs all getting vetted in my womb.  But, I knew I had to make peace with that.  And I wanted to go to the doctor because I had lots of questions.  Can I take anything for insomnia?  I wasn't sleeping well at all.  Can I take something for the constant heartburn?  What about this log jam up my ass?  Is the constipation from the prenatal vitamins?  So I spent an hour talking with my student doctor, student medical assistant and nurse practitioner before we got down to the real point of the exam, the transvaginal ultrasound.

This is a piece of equipment that looks like a cone-style vibrator, that when probed around in a vagina, should render an image that someone with a keener eye than me can recognize as a growing embryo at 10 weeks.  The nurse practitioner started with a machine that didn't work.  She couldn't get the picture to come up on the screen.  She switched out the machine for another ultrasound machine, so I got extra time with that wand up my hoo-ha.  When the picture came up on the screen, all she said was, "Hmmmm."

There was no baby on the screen.

Fast forward two and a half weeks later through an early morning phone call on a Sunday urging me to go to the Emergency Department, several more dates with the transvaginal ultrasound and a formal sonogram.  There was an embryo, but there was no yolk sac.  I had high pregnancy hormone levels, but they were dropping.  If I had been pregnant, it had stopped developing very early on.  Maybe corresponding with feeling better?  But it became clear, there was not going to be a baby.  Rather than wait any longer for nature to take its course, I opted to have a procedure to remove what are medically termed the "products of conception."

Of course there was some aweful conversations, reactions, and days of sorrow that followed.  I fully ran through the stages of grief, but kept the facade of remaining strong to the outside world.  I took a week off from work.  At my follow up appointment, a new nurse practitioner told me that it is no longer recommended to wait to try again.  Especially considering my age (I just turned 33, wtf!).  And she gave me the closest thing to an explanation for the miscarriage that I could tolerate: there isn't good data about hormonal support of a pregnancy within the uterus after a hormone-laden IUD is removed.  But my period did not return 28 days after the D&C.  And when it did, it was irregular.  The days of the year were quickly passing, along with my great idea for a well-timed, super-planned pregnancy.

So in October, two mentsrual cycles after my miscarriage, I kind of got fed up.  Fed up with calendars, and timing sex, and anticipating stuff that is truly beyond a person's span of control.  So I quit marking up the calendar.  And I quit trying to time sex with my husband.  I quit boosting my legs up in the air after sex to give the swimmers the aid of gravity.  Ty and I also had a conversation about timing.  If we got pregnant this cycle, it would coincide pretty close to his taking of the bar exam.  In Colorado.  When we were planning to move.  While I would need to be changing jobs.  When my health insurance benefits would be tenuous.  Probably not the greatest timing.  But...

That itch wasn't exactly gone.  In fact it was compounded by a little regret, jealousy of other pregnant women, and fear that maybe we will be one of those couples who can't conceive.  Would we need in vitro?  Would we have to adopt?  Would we never have children?  So I convinced Ty that while maybe we shouldn't exactly try to get pregnant this month, we should still have sex when we felt like it.  C'est la vie, whatever will be will be.  Maybe the bad timing was the ingredient we needed.  Maybe what we needed was the power of jinx.

I've had a bad cold now for two weeks.  I was starting to feel better, but today I felt more worn down.  I felt dead tired.  And then it occurred to me my period is about a week late.  So I peed on the stick, and up popped two blue lines which means a positive pregnancy test.  I brought up the due date calculator on my web browser to find that my estimated due date is my birthday, July 17th, 2012.  One week before Ty takes the Colorado bar exam.

Looking forward, I'm not looking too far forward.  It's a bit overwhelming thinking about all the plans we have for next summer.  But my pregnancy last June taught me a lesson: not to take it for granted that we'll get there.  I've got my fingers crossed for a healthy pregnancy this time, knowing that the only thing I can do is get through each day thankful for what a little bad timing can bring our way.