At officially six weeks in, I feel some symptoms of pregnancy, namely needing to pee more often and getting a bad taste in my mouth if I don’t always have a beverage handy. No nausea or sore breasts, though, but I never really had either of those the first two times either. While in many ways I don’t mind missing out on these symptoms as they sound unpleasant, they do make these early weeks extra unnerving, with so few obvious signs to reassure me I am, in fact, still pregnant.
Author’s Personal Collection/Mary Mathes
I’ve read that many women who are pregnant after a miscarriage dread every trip to the bathroom for fear of seeing blood, but this is not my experience.
There was no blood to tip me off that anything was wrong when I lost my first baby; I found out she was gone when the ultrasound tech told me she couldn’t find a heartbeat. With all the estrogen and progesterone I’m taking to help this frozen embryo transfer take hold, I assume if I were to miscarry, there would be no bleeding this time either. I’ll have to wait for an office visit to find out.
My first ultrasound is this Wednesday, at 11:30. I agreed to the time before remembering that my husband, Mike, is allowed to come to these appointments with me now; COVID protocols have been lifted. It would be more convenient if it were earlier in the morning, but we’ll make it work. A client at work suggested Wednesday afternoon as a possible time she’s available to meet with me this week, and I hesitated to commit to it. What if the ultrasound doesn’t go well, and we find out the baby is gone? I’m not going to want to deal with work under those circumstances. But I don’t want to plan my life around assuming bad outcomes either. So, I scheduled the meeting.
I am extra anxious ahead of the ultrasound because I recently had a disturbing dream.
In it, I was picking my son up from daycare. I gathered up his things as usual, and his teacher told me he’d had a good day. Then I noticed there was another child still in the room, but not just in the room, she was contained within a small glass or plexiglass enclosure, a bit like a fish tank. She was laying inside it, seemingly content with a toy, but she was smaller than the other toddlers in that room and clearly not developmentally able to be out in the main room with the rest of the class. I gathered that she stayed in the box for her own safety. I felt sad for this little girl, but my sadness quickly shifted to disbelief as the teacher began to hand her to me to take home.
I was taken aback. Was this also my child? Why did I not remember that? Did I have another car seat in my car for her? The teacher handed her to me and shuffled us out the classroom door, the last children to be picked up. A few steps outside the door, still thoroughly confused as to how I could have forgotten I had another child, I realized the teacher had not sent me off with this little girl’s things. No jacket, no water bottle, no collection of the week’s art projects. I turned back to the classroom to ask for her backpack and was met with a locked door. As though they had given her to me and then bolted before I could ask too many questions.
At that point, I awoke; there was no chance to find out if I did, in fact, have a second car seat, what her name was, or if I brought her home with me. (And if I did, was my husband equally surprised to learn of her existence?) This dream has unsettled me, sparking worries about the health of our baby and whether he or she will make it. I hope the ultrasound will offer some reassurance, though I know I won’t feel completely secure until they hand this baby to me in the delivery room.
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