First doctor's appointment...

I still wasn't feeling much better about finding out I was pregnant. I had started to sink in and I was starting to accept it but I felt like I still had a long way to go. I called the doctor to make an appointment. Maybe I was still wrong. There are false positive tests, right?

From my calculation I was about 8 weeks along when I went to the doctor. They agreed. They did a urine test and it came out positive. I guess I wasn't too surprised. Then they decided to do a sonogram. Nothing special, just one of the antequated machines that was in the office. I watched the screen as the familiar fuzzy screen came up. The doctor immediately located the yolk sac. Then I waited and watched. She searched around for what seemed like an eternity. And then there was nothing. No heartbeat. I think my heart may have stopped as well. She told me that my uterus didn't really feel like I was 8 weeks and that the measurements were indicating that I was just over 5 weeks. Still too early to see a heartbeat. She asked me to make an appointment with another office in a couple of weeks just to make sure everything was ok. She said she wasn't concerned.

I walked out of the office devastated. I didn't even think I wanted this pregnancy and now that I was faced with not having a living being in my womb I was unprepared for the sadness and sense of loss that I felt. And there was nothing I could do but wait. Hard to not think about something like that. It consumed my free thoughts all the time, at work, at home, in bed when I was trying to fall asleep. I didn't show my emotion to my husband because I didn't want him to worry about me. I just kept it all inside.

My mother and I went to see Marley & Me at the movie theater after that appointment. I thought it would be good to get out of the house. I had read the book and knew it would be a tearjerker but I just wanted to get my mind off of the situation. Bad choice of movie for that. In one scene, the character played by Jennifer Aniston found out she was pregnant. They were so happy. Then at 10 weeks they had a sonogram and there was no heartbeat. She had lost the baby. It was almost unbearable to sit there. I think I went through a whole box of tissues in that dark theater, hoping that wouldn't be me in a couple of weeks.

My husband and mother were very reassuring but I knew that if the calculations were indicating that I was 8 weeks and I was measuring 3 weeks behind, the fetus could have just stopped growing and died at 5 weeks and I was still carrying the remains of the pregnancy. Why couldn't a time machine just take me into the future so I could just know for sure? But I waited.