Fertility schmetility - January

The New Year started with a “bang” quite literally and by January 8th I am so nauseous. Seriously I can’t eat, everything tastes bad, and everything smells bad. Surely it’s too early for morning sickness. Surely I’m not pregnant... Nobody over 35 gets pregnant within a month of coming off the pill. Nobody. What to do? Ask a doctor! So while walking around the Stop and Shop I call Lynn, she’ll know.

“So how early can you get morning sickness” I ask her as soon as she picks up
“I take it you think you’re pregnant?” she asks
“Well I don’t know I’m an oncology nurse my patients really don’t have to worry so much about fertility and I hated my maternity rotations so I didn’t pay attention and last time I had no symptoms” I blurted out. And it was one long almost incoherent sentence utterly devoid of punctuation.
“Well are you late?”
“No – I’m not due on ‘til next week” I say, “But I need to pee all the time, I’m nauseous all the time, and I’m dizzy”
“Needing to pee all the time comes later”
“No! The internet said it can happen right away because of the increase in blood flow to the kidneys” I protested, “It was on the internet – the internet knows everything”
“Jo, take a deep breath”
I stop in the middle of frozen deserts and take a deep breath. I’m being crazy, I must be.
“Maybe I’m being crazy” I say, a little ruefully.
“Look you could be, and if you are you are going to end up delivering at my wedding”
Damn Lynn and her ability to do math in her head.

I do finally come clean and tell Robert what I am thinking. His reaction is initially exactly as I expected – he is mortified. I bite my tongue when he asks those two stupid questions
“How? Why”
Well, duh, I am thinking…penis, vagina, sperm, ova, blah, blah, blah, we had sex.
“But you had wine – how could you do that if you thought you were pregnant”
“Well I didn’t think I was pregnant when I drank the wine”
He makes that “harrumph” sound that always irritates me, narrows his eyes as if he has suddenly developed x-ray vision and can see into my uterus.
“Okay, “he says, suddenly becoming the grown up in this little drama, “We need to do a test, and we need to proceed as if you are – no beer”
I smile, for a guy given to tantrums over stupid little things he really does step up when it is something big. We wait patiently for the next week, wondering if the fact that every other commercial is for a pregnancy test is a sign of some sort.

The nausea goes on for another couple of days, until the morning I rush out to work and forget to take my Prozac. No nausea. Surely not. Prozac has never made me sick before. So I miss it another day, no nausea, and another. Damn. It must be the Prozac. I have an appointment with a new psychiatrist the following week so I stop the Prozac altogether.

I meet my new psychiatrist who tisks at me for restarting the Prozac at 50mg after a 3 month self-prescribed holiday and restarts me at 20mg. It seems that the nausea was indeed caused by the drug. I stop at the bathroom on my way out of the hospital and lo and behold – not pregnant.

I was actually surprised at the way my heart sank.

And that was how it all started. It was if that one scare set off a weird uncontrollable cascade in me. I had always scoffed at the idea of a biological clock, viewing it as something invented to force women into pregnancy. Not so much now. I suddenly discovered (what I picture as) a giant old fashioned alarm clock with bells on the top living somewhere inside of me. Tick tock tick tock.