The Wait and the Water

Unlike other blogs I've been reading, I have not been anxiously peeing on pregnancy tests this weekend to see if I can figure out I'm pregnant before my official doctor's pregnancy test this week.

Why tempt fate? Why get excited by a false negative? Or a false positive?

Or throw away money at CVS to go buy the tests?

So this week is it...I'll learn if our first IVF venture was successful or not.

I just made a list (in my insomniac state; it's 5am over here) about what I'll do next if the test is positive, or negative. If negative, start working out hard every day to take off the ten pounds I've put on since I've started trying to conceive and call the fertility doc to figure out what to do next. If postive: call my army of docs and figure out when to get the eyes lasered, when to see the endo next, when to see the high risk ob/gyn, and oh yeah, maybe read a few pregnancy books so I can overanalyze every bodily feeling.

Speaking of, despite some odd twitchings here and there, and another story I'll get to in a moment (and I apologize now for the TMI part of this post), I really don't feel all that different. Occasionally, I forget and pick up something not-all-that-heavy, and I get a little abdominal ache. I don't know whether to cheer silently and think, "that's our embryo! You grow!" or to freak out and think "Shit! Did something bad just happen?"

And diabetic-wise, sugars have been OK except for a few weird highs, along with some more lows because I've gone back to correcting highs (i.e., more than 140 an hour after a meal) with what I think is my own mental calculation of Insulin On Board (I still have a Minimed 508 pump), only to go low and snarf Life Savers a few hours later. And eating a shitload of Trader Joe's chocolate yesterday certainly helped contributute to my current insomniac state (I corrected a 227 at 3:30am). Ugh. Is the embryo, if it's still in there, choking on too much sugar? Did that chocolate craving just make my future kid's abdomen a little bit rounder? Just increase the kid's chances of being diabetic by 1 percent?

Working long hours all last week helped keep my mind off of things within, although frankly, the hours of my job are really annoying and make me resentful. I love the essence of what I do, the field I'm in, and the job title/publication of where I work, but working 'til 8, 10, or 11pm one week every month is truly getting old. My mother worries it's stressful to do so, but I'm not stressed because I know it's going to happen every month. I just wish I could make more money working out of my own home, being my own boss. (Send your lucrative freelance writing/editing/research assignments my way).

On Friday, however, I got some news. Working at 7:30pm, trying to finish up a very long week, my eyes blurring from reading some copy in a typeface that frankly, was hard to read, yet chosen by a pompous art director, I picked up the phone to hear Mr. Lyrehca's voice.

"We have a problem."

"What?"

Turns out it was a toilet on the second floor of our house. A toilet that, yes, had gotten clogged earlier in the day by someone who wondered if constipation was a positive sign of an early pregnancy. Although the toilet looked OK when that someone left for work in the morning, the toilet instead somehow leaked all day. Water flowed from the second-floor bathroom, to the first floor kitchen table (with all sorts of paperwork on it) to the basement and garage. For 12 hours.

Nice.

I finally got out of work (my boss seemed sympathetic when I told her and added "I hope we don't need a whole new kitchen") and got home around 8:30.

Driving home, I had visions of Hurricane Katrina floating through our house. Would we need to spend thousands of our (IVF!) money to renovate the kitchen? Was the bathroom OK? Was sewage floating through the house? Did I need to call in, among many other high-priced professionals, a feng shui expert to figure out why bad things were happening?

My husband is a handy man. Not officially. But we happen to own a wet-vac (yes, a vacuum for water), and he went to work sucking up the wetness on three floors. By the time I got home, I didn't see any water on the floor anywhere. Soggy papers, a water-logged library book and upholstered kitchen chair, and some paint bubbles all over the kitchen ceiling and walls, yes. Two feet of water, no.

Turns out my visions of Katrina were overblown, and that there never was two feet of water, but just wetness on three floors. And after we called in a flood disaster company to assess the scene at 11pm Friday night, they agreed that Mr. Lyrehca had done a great job cleaning up the (sewage-free, they confirmed) water, and that they didn't think they needed to break through the kitchen ceiling to see if there was any mildew. Instead, they left three humming fans and dehumidifiers, which have been blowing and drying things out all weekend.

As I pointed out to Mr. Lyrehca, while having a flood is annoying, a waste of our savings, and an effin' hassle, it was not what I pictured when he called and said we have a problem.

Nobody broke into our house and stole precious irreplacable things. We did not lose anything in a fire. No one died. As of right now, I can still think that I might be pregnant.

In the big picture, it was just a little water, water everywhere. Right now, there are more important things to worry about.