Thank you so much for your sweet comments and especially for your prayers. I can not even begin tell you how much your prayers for my child mean to me.
So here are the details! Back in April my hours were cut at work so Jeff and I had this long talk about it not being the best time to try and get pregnant (insert laughter here). When my 27th birthday came up in June I was feeling really down about all of it so Jeff planned a fun birthday celebration to cheer me up. We had no idea that I was pregnant at the time.
A few days later I was feeling super nauseous every morning and thought to myself "Self, you've got to stop eating birthday cake for breakfast" and so I went to the store for muffins. I was late but didn't think much of it because that's typical for me. I debated over buying a pregnancy test because I had promised Jeff a few months before that I'd quit buying them. "They're expensive. And besides, they just make you sad every month" he'd said. But they were on sale so I snagged a pack.
Later that day I remembered that I had the test and decided to take it mostly because I'm kind of addicted to taking pregnancy tests. Hence the reason I was forbidden to buy them. And as I was taking it I thought "Jeff is going to be so mad at me for wasting money on this test" and then all of the sudden it came up positive. Like, really positive. Then I took all three of them just to be sure.
I didn't do anything cute to tell Jeff. I just called him at work and told him. I couldn't wait six hours. And then I started freaking out about how I'd had a martini on my birthday because I didn't even think I could be pregnant and OH MY GOSH I WAS ALREADY A TERRIBLE MOTHER. And he sweetly talked me down from that and celebrated with me.
Two days later I started bleeding and having pain. I called the doctor and they told me to come in right away. I was a bit unsure of my dates (irony alert: for the first time in my married life I hadn't charted) and so I had no idea how far along I might be. They did a sonogram and couldn't see anything except some fluid near my ovaries. There were two possibilities: that I'd just ruptured a cyst and the baby was still too small to see or that I was bleeding internally and having an ectopic pregnancy.
Being concerned about the second, they began to do blood work every 48 hours. Have I ever told y'all that I tend to pass out when my blood is taken? The nurses love me. My blood work was good- my progesterone levels were about 3 times higher than normal. What is crazy about that is that people with my condition typically lack progesterone and need supplements during pregnancy. The excess of it is what is making me have all-day morning sickness. For awhile, I couldn't turn my head an inch without swimming with nausea. But the higher those levels, the better it is for the baby so even though I didn't even know it was possible to be this ill, I would take it and more if it means a healthy baby.
I laid in bed for two weeks straight, trying to keep down toast and praying that the bleeding would stop (which it did) and the baby would not be ectopic.
So seeing our baby healthy this week, hearing it's little heartbeat…I can't begin to describe it.
I feel as though this is how people in the Bible must have felt watching God perform big miracles like healing the blind or parting the sea.
