Pregnant until proven otherwise

My next appointment at CWRC was scheduled for October 11, 2010, when I’d have the first of three blood tests that week. The levels of pregnancy hormones in your blood are supposed to double every other day, and by Friday of that week, with luck, I’d be officially pregnant. I’d only have one more appointment after that, several weeks later, after I stopped taking the progesterone, to confirm that my body was now producing enough hormones to maintain the pregnancy without the supplements. Then, I’d be officially discharged to my own OB. CWRC no longer delivers babies.

The ten days between the embryo transfer and the first pregnancy test were like a gift, I thought. Unless you undergo IVF, you really wouldn’t know that you’re pregnant for at least a few weeks. But since I knew I was potentially pregnant, I could start preparing myself right from the start. I had been taking prenatal vitamins for months already (yuck), but now I started following all the guidelines for pregnancy: no drinking, smoking (I quit years ago, so that wasn’t a hardship), drinking milk every day (yuck), no more soft cheese or cold cuts (don’t eat them anyway, except sliced turkey occasionally), and no more caffeine! I am a coffee person. I love my coffee, but I had practiced over the last year cutting out the caffeine, especially since my blood pressure was high at times.

Now, I’m no Snooki or Schmoochi or whatever that unpleasant person’s name is, but I do enjoy my wine, and sometimes my tequila and rum, and even my vodka made into a cosmo on occasion. But other than that, I’m practically a teetotaler. Ok, I do enjoy a nice icy cold beer on a hot summer day on the beach, but that beach is nowhere near the Jersey shore, so see, I’m nothing like her. And while the pendulum is swinging back just a tiny bit to the side of “maybe a glass of red wine occasionally is ok” rather than complete abstinence, and while I completely support each woman’s right to decide for herself without judgement whether or not she will have an occasional glass of wine while pregnant, I chose not to. At least to try not to.

My husband, in an effort to be supportive, vowed not to drink in front of me if that would help. I didn’t think it would matter one way or another, and frankly, I didn’t think he could do it. Not that he is a drinker, but he does like a glass of wine with dinner. We also have a traditional Sunday afternoon cocktail hour where I make some yummy cocktails. D’s favorite is the fresh raspberry mojito. So, I decided to come up with some non-alcoholic cocktails so that we could still enjoy cocktail hour together. See recipe below.

Another big lifestyle decision: to dye or not to dye? So, as you might have guessed from my site’s name, I’m almost totally gray. I started going gray, as did my mom, around 25. Since I have very dark brown hair I began to look like the bride of frankenstein in my late 20s, so I started dyeing my hair. I don’t usually think of myself as a vain person, but I also work in an industry (IT) where youth rules and gray hair marks you as the slow antelope. I read quite a bit about the topic, and even webmd.com calls it a myth that you shouldn’t dye your hair. I decided to err of the side of caution and not dye during the first trimester. Right before the transfer, I visited my stylist Tina at Jude and Me Salon. I had been dying my hair a lighter color and then having blondish highlights put on top. She advised me to go back to one color, as close to what used to be my natural dark brown. After the first trimester was over, she would use a semi-permanent color to keep the gray to a minimum. But especially towards the end of the first trimester, my gray roots were really showing. I always found that to be the big tip-off at work that someone was pregnant or trying to get pregnant, when her hair started growing out to her natural color. But in most women, that’s a mousey brown, not gray. I ended up buying what I thought was kind of a cute black knit skull cap/hat favored by hipster doofuses (doofii?) everywhere. I wore it for a couple weeks at work until I realized it just made me look like a 50-year-old-hipster-doofus wannabe. By that time, I was far enough along and I went back to Tina for the semi-permanent color. My high-risk OB never mentioned hair dye either in her list of dos and don’ts, I adopted the Irish version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which is “Don’t ask, don’t hear anything you don’t want to hear,” and happily dyed away the rest of my pregnancy.

Next time: It’s true! Now what?

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