The first ultrasound was Wednesday, the day after the election. I'd watched the returns from bed, mute with horror but thinking, "at least, on the bright side, I'm so anxious about the election that I've barely even thought about tomorrow's ultrasound." The feeling carried into the next morning - I drove through the drizzling rain into Manhattan thinking about the Supreme Court and deportations and the Handmaid's Tale and entertaining all kinds of great hyperbolic fears about everything.
My doctor - a new doctor in the same practice, as my last obstetrician passed away this summer; what an awful loss, he was such a kind and gentle doctor, though the new one seems pretty wonderful too - turned off the lights and started scanning and I swear, I can literally just feel it now when it's not good news. "Have you had any cramping or bleeding?" he asked.
"No," I answered, "Why? What are you seeing?"
He explained that he was seeing something - might have been a cyst, he wasn't sure - in the lower part of my uterus, right by the cervix, possibly IN the cervix - and he wasn't seeing anything else that looked like it should have looked by now. He ordered some bloodwork and scheduled an appointment that afternoon with the fancy ultrasound machine upstairs to make sure it wasn't an ectopic pregnancy.
We left and went to McDonald's where Leo threw his chicken nuggets on the floor and complained the whole time, and then we walked up through the rain to one of those Upper East Side indoor playgrounds where we paid thirty dollars for the privilege of chasing him through three small rooms of dubious cleanliness for an hour.
And then we walked back down to the hospital and had our second scan, where they were able to see that it was NOT ectopic (thank you, Jesus) and there was an identifiable yolk sac but no fetal pole. The upstairs doctor - the radiologist maybe? - came in to say that it might just be early, or it might not be good, and they wouldn't really know anything until they got my HCG results back and even then they wouldn't know for sure.
"Yes, okay, bad news, thank you," I said, "Please just say it, bad news, just tell me bad news, I need to hear it."
"We just don't know," he said. "You're measuring about five weeks. We just have to wait and see."
My HCG came back on Friday - just above 20,000. So: bad news. No five week pregnancy would have that kind of HCG. And my progesterone was a 13.5 - which is pretty dicey. They're having me come in on Thursday for a follow-up. I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope.
The awful, terrible irony of all this is that my morning sickness has been atrocious. I'm throwing up and sick almost all day. I absolutely hate going through it with no real hope of having anything good come out of it. Why can't my body just let it go, let it gooooo?
