Tags
Autobiography, Choice mother, Choosing single motherhood, Conception, Cost of IVF, Donor conception, Female empowerment, Knock yourself up, Memoir, Pregnancy, retroverted uterus, Single mother by choice, Trying to conceive, TTC, Writer
Each day of the first trimester of pregnancy must seem like walking on a knife edge for any woman keen to be a mother, but for a soon-to-be-thirty-eight ‘last chancer’ who has invested everything in self-funded IVF the wait to the safer fourth month can be almost unbearable. One is advised to ‘forget’ one is pregnant despite the need to scrutinise every menu item and deal with pregnancy symptoms.
Like my mother, I was lucky enough to avoid morning sickness but the fatigue has sometimes rendered me incapable of making the epic journey from my bed to the sofa. And for the first time in my life I’m almost completely filling an A-cup (which I know because, also for the first time in my life, I’ve had to buy a bra to support the weight of my new breasts!).
I spent the entire three months wishing I could be put into a kind of stasis, only to be woken when it was time for my twelve week scan. To add to the frustration, the hospital arranged my scan for 13 weeks and a day (next Sunday) so another week of waiting and worrying lies ahead. I’ve tried to avoid search engines and forums – too many horror stories from women who have had a normal scan and strong heartbeat at 8 or 9 weeks and then learn, at the twelve week scan, that the baby has died with no apparent cause. This is known as a silent or missed miscarriage and I can’t even imagine the agony of thinking everything is fine and then receiving this news.
Although I still feel pregnant, I can’t feel my uterus at the moment. Most of the pregnancy books and websites mention that one should be able to feel the hard ball poking up over the pelvic bone by now. I’m hoping the reason mine remains elusive is that I have a retroverted uterus, which means it is tilted backwards towards the spine. This is common and seen as another version of normal, but it often means that pregnancy takes longer to show and the heartbeat can be more difficult to hear. At some point (supposedly around 13 weeks) the uterus is supposed to flip forward and right itself. In very rare cases, the uterus doesn’t move forward and becomes ‘incarcerated’ within the pelvis, leading to miscarriage in the second trimester. Another possibility I don’t want to think about.
And so I’m preparing myself for another long, long week and thoughts of ‘surely God or fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to let something go wrong now, not after all I’ve been through’. I just want to be through the scan and setting my sights on the calmer waters and ‘glow’ of the next three months.