What to expect when you're not expecting yet

We've spoken before of how pleasantly surprised all the doctors and nurse practitioners have been with our preparations. I really started to understand the flip side of that surprise this week with our visit to the Yale Student Health center Monday.

Everything sitcoms have taught me about pregnancy has painted it as regimented, monitored, and above-all, scheduled.

• Day one of your pregnancy: Start taking pre-natal vitamins, one month ago.
  
• Day two of your pregnancy: Wife begins craving pickles.
• Day three of your pregnancy: Husband's anxiety over crushing responsibility, lost youth manifests in hilarious, seemingly-unrelated psychosis of questionable verisimilitude.
  

The process in this... discovery phase of pregnancy seems wholly self-guided.

We've had great, detailed conversations with a lot of whip-smart medical professionals, but sometimes all I hear is:

“I'm going to recommend a 24-hour urinalysis. Just, you know, take a day and get this done some time before you become pregnant.”

“Oh, so you'd like to get off your class C and D migraine meds? You might consider looking at and switching to one of these alternatives before you get pregnant. You know, talk with your primary care doctor about it.”

“So you had a football-sized tumor removed as a child. Oh -- visit an oncologist? Sure. Yeah, that might not be a bad idea. I mean, if you want. So really, you're not pregnant yet?”

They've imparted lots of great information and helped us work through all the preparations to feel confident going into this. I just hadn't considered that there's not much to the process at this point beyond advice. Anne's basically healthy; until evidence suggests otherwise, all our necessary bits are in working order; really, we're not pregnant yet. Any changes at this point depend on our initiative -- why would a doctor ever change Anne's migraine medicine out of the blue, when it's doing an okay job at regulating her migraines with a minimum of side-effects?

This may not be revelatory to anyone but me. And it's not like my doc is hunting me down with a blood pressure cuff, so I shouldn't have been flat footed on the idea. Just noticing, is all.

Will it be Dorothy or Theodore?

I wrote in the last post that I pretty much always think I'm pregnant. A monthly ritual that grew out of this in the past was me calling Sean and opening with a cheerful "I'm not pregnant!" It felt different to say it this month, but not so bad. We weren't expecting to get pregnant in the first month of trying, and I haven't been to a doc about the triptans yet, so it's not terrible news. I got a bad migraine Wednesday night and popped a triptan without any worry, which was nice. And it hasn't been so bad, endometriosis symptom-wise. It turns out the vitamin B-50 I take every day to prevent migraines is also good for preventing cramps. Excellent!

But yeah, it's still disappointing. So, based on my recent research, I think we made need "a touch of destiny" to jump start this project.

So, solemnly and according to the pirate code, I vow that if I get pregnant this summer, resultant baby will have a name derived from ancient Greek.

Speaking of Greek ... let's not speak of Greek right now. Certainly not in Greek, though I'm amazed at how much I've learned in four days. I'm going to go put my 100% quiz up on the refrigerator when I'm done writing this, but I'm putting in 8 hours of studying outside of class (which is four hours) every day. Getting pregnant under these conditions would definitely be a miracle--I haven't learned the word for that yet, but I bet I will soon.

Oh, so the subject line ... names help us as mnemonics for vocab words, like in the lesson we learned today there's a word that transliterates roughly to "dorahn" meaning gift ... Dorothy and Theodore both mean "Gift of God" because doro/dore=gift and thy/theo=God. Anyway, I'm keeping my eye on the Greek names.