K.I.D. Positive - 7ish weeks

So I'm sitting there in the doctor's office. Bottomless. I am alone and have been waiting for the doctor to validate my nakedness for near 20 minutes. There are photos on a corkboard of all the babies this particular doctor had delivered. They are usual babies. Wide eyed. Gummy. The girls have bows and the boys are older and already dirty. I am freezing. My legs look like what I imagine the corkboard must look like underneath all those futuristic photos. I am not handling the silence well. I am beginning to think that they have me half naked to teach me some sick lesson about unprotected sex. I don't know.

 

After what had to have been a half hour, the doctor walks in, smiles, and says, "Oh, you didn't need that; I'm not going to examine you." The nurse who asked me to undress is, of course, nowhere to be found and I now look like a pants-ditching weirdo. I put my pants back on. She asks what's going on. I say that I received several positive pregnancy tests and I wasn't given a due date. I am still not even sure that I want to keep it, quite frankly. Money is tight. I had to hold back tears when the front desk lady asked for a $70 copay. "I haven't got it", I say. "Do you want to reschedule?", she asks. "No." "Well when do you think you'll have it?" "I don't know..." They "waved" the upfront copay and elected to bill me. 

 

Back to the doctor...

She has me pee in a cup. Again. It is the third cup I've peed in in a two week span, except this is a plastic dixie cup with a cardboard lid. Again, I figure it must be to instill some sort of lasting fear in me. It is working. 

I pee in the cup and head to the lab. For the second time that morning, I am asked to take off my pants. She seems serious. I take them off and position myself in the stirrups at the foot of the examination table. I am nutella. I am less-than-fresh bed sheets. Spread. 

 

"Cold gel" she says as she inserts her dick-shaped camera into my nethers. I try not to enjoy it. The pleasure is mostly overridden with fear. I am watching a black and white image on the screen and it reminds me of a whale shark, for some reason. She goes further until she comes upon this impossibly small, dehydrated shrimp looking thing. And in this shrimp, there is a thing. Fluctuating. Expanding the blackness with a white outline. A heart, she says. Beating at 122bpm. She prints me a photo of this teensy peanut. She has typed BABY underneath it. 

 

Let us jump to the NOW.

The due date is September 22nd. 

Feelings of joy are eerily absent.

I feel angry about all the terrible things my body is in for.

I feel scared that I'll be working too often to know the kid.

I feel terrified that my marriage will likely suffer due to the added stress.

I feel inadequate in every which way.

 

I am tired.

And I have nobody to blame but myself.