Ladies in waiting: Waiting in Early Pregnancy
So, the pregnancy test was finally positive! You’ve been waiting months for this!
Now you’re waiting again. Your waiting for the first OB appointment so the pregnancy can be confirmed even though you took four home tests! Then you’re waiting for the first ultrasound and the first glimpse of your baby.
Waiting is difficult – very difficult. You have questions. Am I really pregnant? Could all of those home pregnancy tests be of false positive? Can I get excited? Am I just kidding myself?
What if I get too excited?
Questions that go unanswered create anxiety. It's easy to turn to the Internet to try to find answers yourself. But the Internet can be a rabbit hole, a spiral of fragile reassurances at best and a junkyard of misleading and inaccurate information at worst.
The Story of Cinda
Cinda is a 29-year-old woman who is currently in the first trimester of pregnancy. It took her four months to get pregnant during which she was sure she “would never succeed.” She was full of anxieties and doubts. She put all of her faith in her ovulation tests which she took many times at mid-cycle “just to make sure.” At the 10-day mark after ovulation, she would begin pregnancy tests --several each day-- “just to make sure.”
Now that she is pregnant, the anxiety continues. She is afraid of being “too happy” about being pregnant because, if she miscarries, she will be “too devastated.” So, she tamps down on being happy and excited and joyful while holding on to her intense anxiety. In this way, she feels protected.
Cinda feels more comfortable when she feels poorly. For example, when her breasts ache, she interprets this as confirmation that the pregnancy is going well. When she is nauseated, that's confirmation that the pregnancy is going well. When she falls asleep on the sofa at 3:00 PM, that's confirmation that the pregnancy is going well. In fact, the worse she feels, the more comfortable she feels about the pregnancy. Feeling badly validates the pregnancy for Cinda in a way that feeling good would not. Her doctor told her that she would probably start to feel nauseated at about six or seven weeks. Cinda has noticed that she feels nauseated at 5 weeks. Is this a problem she wonders? Is this a sign that something is not right?
She told me that once she has her eight-week ultrasound and she can see the baby's heartbeat, then she will no longer be anxious. Although she admits she might be anxious until she gets her 16 week anatomy scan and then anxious again until she gets to fetal viability in second trimester. But as we talk more about the anxiety, she admits that, indeed, it will probably not go away at all.
Cinda uses her anxiety to protect herself. She worries that if she is “too happy” about this pregnancy and she miscarries, she will be too devastated. In my experience caring for thousands of women in first trimester, this is not the case. No matter how happy people are about the pregnancy, when people miscarry, they are devastated. Being happy about a pregnancy does not protect them from sadness when bad things happen.
I encouraged Cinda to celebrate this early pregnancy and not be anxious about being “too happy.” At the six week mark, Cinda and her husband celebrated the pregnancy with balloons and paper hats and noisemakers. They enjoyed spending time together being silly and happy.
