In The Beginning

Only logical to start at the beginning, right?

Fall of 2008. Jared and I had been married just over 6 years. We had been blessed with two beautiful daughters, and we started talking about "trying" for #3. Our second daughter was just 16 months, still nursing and not sleeping so great at night, so I thought maybe in another 3-4 months I'd be ready to think about it.

Then one day in November, I started feeling those familiar symptoms. I sat down to dinner one night and the spaghetti sauce tasted disgusting. I couldn't force myself to eat it. I mentally consulted my "internal" calendar. I knew my period was due sometime soon. Come to think of it, I'd had some spotting on Saturday, but now it was Monday and I still hadn't started. Hmmm. Jared was preparing to leave for a business trip, so I told myself I'd wait till he got home--surely by then my period would have started. . .or if not, I'd be "late" enough that a pregnancy test would be accurate.

Hah. I should have known myself better! By the next morning I was planning my trip to the store. In the parking lot as I hoisted my toddler out of her carseat, an unmistakeable wave of "morning sickness" washed over me. I didn't need a pregnancy test. I knew. Still, I grabbed the test and drove home, hands shaking with anticipation.

At home I locked myself into the bathroom and took the test. The second line popped up almost immediately. I was startled to hear a voice in my head say, "Of course. It's William." (This was a little strange to me--I'd never had any promptings or premonitions like this with my two girls. We waited to "meet" each of them before we picked their names, even.)

That night Jared called from his hotel, and I told him the news. I don't really remember the rest of this conversation. We probably talked about whether we'd need a new car, how we were going to manage 3 kids in the 2 bedrooms we had upstairs, how I needed to find a new OB. . .the kinds of thoughts that would keep my mind occupied for the next several weeks.

The next 4 weeks went by in a haze of fatigue, nausea, and excitement. We hadn't told our families yet; but Jared was sure it was only a matter of time before they noticed my fatigue and queasiness. Thanksgiving weekend we went with Jared's family to have family portraits done. Although I was disappointed at how the photo of the four (five!) of us turned out, now I treasure it--the only "family portrait" we have.

One Sunday, the day before my daughter's 4th birthday, I began spotting. At first I wasn't concerned; I'd spotted throughout the first trimester with both my girls. As the evening wore on, the spotting got heavier. We had company, and I was busy enough playing hostess that I couldn't think about it too much, but by bedtime I was a wreck. Any bit of ambivalence I'd felt about this pregnancy were gone--I wanted this baby. Desperately. I went to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night to a gush of blood. I got out of bed, turned on the laptop, and began searching for information about early miscarriages. Eventually I crawled back into bed and cried myself to sleep.

I had been scheduled for my first OB appointment later that week, but on Monday I called and arranged an appointment for that morning. The ultrasound, to my great relief, showed a perfectly-sized baby with a strong heartbeat. The OB told me to call back if the bleeding got heavier. I went home, and it did just that. Back to the office that afternoon, where another ultrasound showed the baby still doing fine. . .and nothing to explain the bleeding. And so began the waiting.

For four weeks the bleeding came and went. Even though bedrest hasn't been proven to do anything, I tried to take it as easy as I could with two little ones underfoot. One by one, we spread the word to our family. By Christmastime I was happy that the cat was out of the bag, for now I could act just as exhausted and miserable as I felt. At 12 weeks another OB appointment showed things going just fine still. The baby had a nice strong heartbeat in the 160s--a "girl" heartbeat, my OB said. But I knew better. I was convinced this was a little boy. I'd even bought a pile of flannel in boy prints to make new burp cloths and blankets.

Now that we'd passed the first trimester, I started to relax a little bit. Surely the bleeding would stop soon, just like it had with my girls. Even though the OB had said he didn't see anything to explain the bleeding, I felt it was probably a subchorionic hemorrhage--something I'd had with my first pregnancy, and a fairly common cause of bleeding in early pregnancy. It's kind of like a mini-abruption; the placenta pulls away from the wall of the uterus and blood collects underneath it. There's no accepted treatment for them; the majority of the time they resolve on their own without causing any problems. I had read everything I could find about SCHs during my first pregnancy; and now 5 years later I was amazed at how much more had be written (or, at least, made available on the internet) about them.

As I started my second trimester, my nausea went away and I started to gain back the weight I'd lost. Around 13 weeks I *thought* I felt the baby moving. By 14 weeks, I was sure that's what I was feeling. At 15 weeks, Jared even got to feel one particularly strong kick! It was such a thrill and a relief to feel my little one moving around--but as the weeks went on and the bleeding continued, my anxiety grew. It wasn't stopping like it was "supposed" to.

At 17 weeks, I went in for another checkup. My OB had said he'd do an ultrasound at this point and would probably be able to tell us if we were having a boy or girl. Just moments after he started the scan, he announced, "You wanted to know, right? Because this one's easy. It's definitely a boy."

A boy! Wow. We needed to start discussing names--we'd talked about boys' names in before but never could find much common ground. I figured we'd need the whole 23 weeks I had left to find any that we agreed on! I recalled the little voice I'd heard when I took the pregnancy test, and I figured I'd better add William to the "short list" and see what Jared thought of it.