April 30, 1999

Tonight we went out to a nightclub. I didn't want anything to drink. I'm not an alcoholic or anything, but since I rarely drink at home, I hardly ever pass up the opportunity elsewhere, whenever we go out. But that night the very thought of alcohol made me slightly ill, and I stuck to soda. This continued.

May 5, 1999

All this week, my breasts have been extremely sore, as bad as they were the first month I was on the Clomid. Also, they seem to have suddenly swelled another couple of cup sizes. This, along with my sudden distaste for alcohol, gets me to wondering, so even though it hasn't been two weeks yet, I go ahead and take a home pregnancy test, just in case. It turns out negative.

May 8, 1999

By the next weekend, we had finally reached a two-week mark, so that afternoon I went ahead and took another home pregnancy test, expecting nothing. Several cycles before, I had gotten my hopes up over similar symptoms, only to have it be nothing. So when I went back three minutes later and saw that little pink line in the result window on the test, I couldn't believe my eyes. I just stood and stared at it, completely speechless. Then I went ballistic, jumping up and down. I ran into Brian's office and said, "Guess what?" Then I held it in front of him to look, not realizing he couldn't see the lines. He said, "What, what is it, I can't see it." I said, "It's positive!" Then I burst into tears.

Brian didn't believe it at first either. I didn't understand his seemingly complete lack of emotion, until I asked him about it. He said, "Couldn't it be a false positive?" I tried to explain to him that there almost is no such thing as a false positive, and when you do have one it's usually because of a previous pregnancy. I even took another test the next day, which also came out positive. That seemed to make him feel a little better.

May 12, 1999

Women who have my condition, polycystic ovarian syndrome, often do not produce enough progesterone to sustain a pregnancy once it is established. After all, the problem was a lack of hormones in the first place. So I went in to the doctor's office to let the vampires suck out some blood for testing. They ran a pregnancy test, of course, and confirmed that I was indeed pregnant. They also checked my progesterone levels, and they were actually even higher than average for this stage of the pregnancy. So everything was looking good!

May 24, 1999

Anybody who has talked to me in the past knows how much I've wanted a home birth. Now that I was pregnant, there didn't seem to be anything to stop me, so we made our first visit to the midwife we picked out. She's a wonderful lady, and she really helped to put some of Brian's worries to rest. She spent a lot of time with us, much more than we would have gotten from a regular doctor. We went over my diet and how I was feeling, and she weighed me and did a urine test for sugar and protein and stuff. Then she tried to hear the baby's heartbeat with a Doppler device, but it was still too early and we couldn't pick anything up. We left with a big stack of books from her lending library.