Raising the Stakes

Oh, my friends, thanks for continuing to follow the week-by-week saga that is my life. Thank you for all of your good thoughts, encouragement and general love. And, thanks for indulging me in the wild mood swings that accompany this particular rollercoaster. As you can tell, I'm pretty focused on one topic so I apologize in advance for the monotony that has become this blog. But, then again, like many of you, I started this blog to have an outlet for my feelings about one subject, so I guess this is completely in keeping with the MO of this blog. And, the rest of my life is extremely boring compared to this, so you probably wouldn't really want to hear about it anyway.

We go back on Thursday to get the latest look at how this pregnancy is progressing. It's been much harder this week to expect the worst given that last week had relatively encouraging news. I wasn't even expecting there to be a heart beat and we got that and a week's worth of growth.

An unintended consequence of this has been that now the stakes have been raised. Not only did we get another week, but hearing the heartbeat again gives (possibly false) hope that we might make it further. And what if there still is a heartbeat, but the growth has slowed this week? For as agonizing as last week was, I had the luxury of assuming that there were only two paths forward. It has now become more complex.

It's also hard not to begin to stop thinking of it as a pregnancy and start thinking of a little being. I had such a hard time when I learned that I was having a miscarriage last year in part because we had thought of the pregnancy as a baby. We had our special name for it and I indulged in reading the week-by-week updates from various pregnancy sites about its development. I've avoided this - I think that by thinking about it as a pregnancy, not as a baby, it may be easier if things go south (as we are still anticipating). Whether this will work is a totally different story.

Each week that we get development and relatively encouraging news, it gets harder and harder to make our negative assumptions about the outcome. In the end, I just try not to think about it, but inevitably, it sneaks and creeps in.
image: tadekk