Up and down and up...

So, I went to a nurse practitioner last week to see if all was going well with Poppy. We've been calling it Poppy because when we first found out we were preggos, it was the size of a poppy seed. It has a better ring to it than "rice grain" or any of the other comparable sizes it can grow to be.

Back to last week. The NP did an ultrasound and it looked like this.

WTF?

That round black spot at the bottom? Poppy's house. Or sac, rather. It was too early to see Poppy itself, but the sac was promising. It meant we weren't hallucinating and the four pregnancy tests we took were not kidding.

To be sure we were all good, they drew my blood twice, two days apart, and tested it to make sure the HCG hormone levels were increasing as expected.

The nurse practitioner called me last Friday afternoon to tell me that the HCG level had dropped, actually, which meant "the fetus hadn't thrived" and I would miscarry. She said if I didn't get my period by the following Friday, I should come back and they would give me what I call "the magic miscarriage pill" so that my body could restart and we could get on with our lives.

It was hard to digest. I went and cried in the bathroom stall at work, and then my friend Kristin came in and we cried together in the bathroom stall at work. High school styles. Then, later, I went home and hung out in bed for a few hours, alternately reading Entertainment Weekly and bawling my face off. Then Thayer cooked dinner and we watched Dirty Dancing and I felt a little better. The next day we went to the beach, because it was nice out and I was feeling melancholy like this:

Sad Girl on a Beach

But after a few hours of chilling with our friends the Bentons and jumping into the freezing cold Puget Sound, I felt like this:

Girls Alive on a Beach

I'd decided not to coffee or booze it up, because it just felt wrong while it was still in there. It felt disrespectful somehow. So I waited it out, feeling stranger every day that I was pregnant with... nothing. That I was just waiting to miscarry.

Today was the day I went back to the doc. The day of the magic miscarriage pill. I've been dreading today all week. Thayer, too. We were going together. To hold each other's hand and bear it together: the confirmation, the visual proof that it was gone.

And gone it was, as the nurse practitioner searched and searched with her ultrasound wand and could find nothing. "No, it's not there anymore," she said.

And then--

Her brow furrowed and her eyes got wide and she mumbled, "Well now, of course, as soon as I say that..." Goosebumps covered my entire body, and I squinted my eyes and thought as hard as I could, Please don't say anything unless you're sure. 

"Yes, there it is. There's the sac. And there's a heartbeat."

It was hard to see with all that water in my eyes, but I saw Thayer's hand cover his mouth, and his eyes turned pretty dang red too, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm not.

"Well, I guess the roller coaster continues!" she said after we WTF'ed all up and down that clinic room.

I had another blood test, and my HCG levels are sky-high. We're on track. We are on track. I thought today was going to be the gateway to a record shitty weekend, and instead, here we are. Still pregnant. And beyond stoked about it.

Penguin house

See that penguin-shaped black thing left of center? Now see that tiny white dot in the penguin's belly? That is Poppy.


.