Dealing With Pregnancy Number 5

It sounds a little bit daunting even to me to say out loud “this is my 5^th pregnancy”.

I wrote a couple of months back that I had been having a pretty difficult time coming to terms with the loss of pregnancy number 4, so I wasn’t sure how pregnancy number 5 would go.

I had been pretty stressed in the lead-up, as I was worried about having had so many D&C’s (sometimes you can get scar tissue which can make it difficult for an embryo to implant) and whether it would impact on our future ability to fall pregnant, plus I think the residual hormones were just wreaking havoc on my general state of mind.

So, I was surprised when I took the pregnancy test and felt pretty OK about it all.

It was Christmas Eve, so I thought I had better take the test even though there was a long shot of showing a result at 6 days early (usually if you’re lucky and have a good quality test kit you can test 5 days early).

I had worried that I might miss out on a lot of the Christmas festivities being on “pregnancy drink and food alert” but it turned out I didn’t actually really think nor care that much about skipping the wine and fresh prawns on the day.

If anything, I think all of the Christmas and New Year celebrations were a perfect distraction from thinking about the status of pregnancy number 5!

I managed to put it out of my mind so much so, that a couple of days after we had welcomed in the new year, I was packing up ready for us to head home after a couple of days of visiting my parents when I started to feel a bit sick… and thought to myself “Oooh I don’t feel well… I wonder if I ate something… oh hang on, that’s right – I know why I feel sick!”

It was funny that my first thought wasn’t of morning sickness, it was “I must have eaten something dodgy”! LOL!
I spent the next few days after that enjoying the rest of our break, chilling out by the pool and burying myself in a book.

I was able to keep myself at arm’s length when it came to thinking about the pregnancy, right up until the point where I figured I had better go get a blood test to confirm it.

So, I went and took the test and then I was able to forget about it again for a few more days as it appeared my OB was on holidays (I’m guessing since I didn’t receive the results until about half a week later!)

Eventually, he called and said the test results were fine and asked if I wanted to take some follow-up tests to confirm that the levels were increasing as they should be.

I declined further testing, based on the premise that the levels usually go up anyway and regardless, I would want to go for a scan at some point anyway.

So, we agreed to leave any further testing and booked in our scan for the 25^th of January. By that stage, we will be well over 7 weeks and should get a fairly good indication one way or the other as to whether the pregnancy is viable.

I haven’t been able to keep the pregnancy at the back of my mind this past week or so as the intermittent “morning” “afternoon” and “generally any time it feels like it” sickness seems to hit fairly regularly to remind me that it’s there.

Plus, if you follow along on Instagram you may have seen that my stomach is looking quite large already (and as the nice lady who speaks little English at one of my favourite dress shops pointed out when I picked up my regular size (6) to try on “That no fit you! You try size 10!”)

I had a couple of weeks of blissful unawareness without symptoms but now that the sickness and the belly have presented themselves I’m afraid I can’t really ignore what’s going on anymore, even if I try to.

But even so, I feel OK about it all and ready to handle whatever comes our way next 😊