At last able to be obnoxiously wordy again!

Apparently my blog-posting juju is directly related to my access to a computer of my own for extended periods of time. Shocking! (This is a fancy way of saying YAY I HAVE MY COMPUTER BACK...FOR NOW ANYWAY. PIECE. OF. CRAP.)

So. I'm going to tell you a story now and when I get to the end hopefully you'll see that I have a point. Hopefully I'll have a point. But let me just tell you now not to get your hopes up, because I'm not pregnant. Okay. Moving on.

In September 2005, Ben and I got married. It had been a stressful year, what with me graduating from college and getting my first "real" job and then planning and carrying out our fabulous wedding, all within just a couple of months.

So when I found myself heavily fatigued in October, I wasn't terribly surprised. I had even skipped my period in September due to the stress. Well, stress and probably the fact that I'd just gone off birth control. Yes, I went on birth control for three months before my wedding solely so I wouldn't have a horrible wedding-day period a la Sixteen Candles. But that's a different story.

Anyway. I could date my fatigue back into the spring of my last semester of college, but it was suddenly qualitatively different. I would go to work, come home, scarf dinner, and then pass out on the couch until time for bed. It was getting ridiculous. Plus I just felt different. A little voice in the back of my head kept whispering that it was possible that I could be pregnant, since my period never showed up in October...but then again, I knew I wasn't pregnant when I skipped in September, so I could shake it off and tell myself there was no way. I started feeling so many scary symptoms that I googled them. It was completely unsurprising to me that all the results came up with the possibility of a pregnancy, but I told myself that was very very very unlikely but made sense since I probably had some hormonal imbalance or something.

Speaking of classic denial, why was I so sure I wasn't pregnant? Well, my whole life, I'd had medical experts telling me how hard it was for a diabetic to get pregnant. And I had had several hormonal issues and also been told that would potentially make it hard for me to conceive. AND I'd heard that it usually took a long time after one goes off the pill for conception to be likely. And what I was looking at here was me getting pregnant one month after my wedding and one month after going off birth control and during a crazy wild life-changing year in which I thought nothing in the near future could top what I'd already been through. I thought it was going to be a quiet time in my life. Ha ha ha!

Well. So Ben saw the trail of my internet searches and freaked out just a little, so we did end up going to the store and getting some pregnancy tests just to be sure. That little voice in my head kept telling me maybe there was a baby inside me, but I was just SO SURE that it was wrong and it was just my psyche playing tricks on me. So I peed on the stick and guess what? Negative.

That's right. It was negative. So was the one I took a week later. So I scheduled a doctor appointment. And of course they asked me about pregnancy, and I told them about the home tests. So they ordered a bunch of blood tests, including of course a pregnancy test, just to be sure, even though it was unlikely.

Fast forward a few days. I come home from work at 5:00, exhausted as usual, to a message from my doctor on the answering machine to call her. Well, now I think I'm probably dying or something. After all, I "know" I'm not pregnant so I know there must be something seriously wrong with me, since they never call you if all the results of your blood tests are normal. I quickly dial back only to get a nurse who tells me the doctor is with a patient and will call me back as soon as she can.

I sweat it out on my own for the next 30 minutes, imagining all sorts of horrifying conditions and my eventual demise, before Ben gets home at 5:30. Then we freak out together, or maybe I freak out at him and he listens and who knows what he really thinks about it all, but at least I wasn't alone.

5:45...

6:00...

6:15...

6:30. The phone rings. I pick up and it's my doctor, calling from her cell phone while she's driving home from work. Oh Lord, this can't be good, I think. She apologizes for taking so long. Then finally she says: "Well, you don't have mono. You're not anemic. Your diabetes is fine, your kidneys are fine, etc. etc. etc. But you are pregnant."

OH MY GOD I'M PREGNANT. I start laughing and crying hysterically as soon as I get off the phone, and poor Ben, he doesn't know what's wrong with me, and obviously it must be bad. I finally spit it out that I'm pregnant, and our world changes, forever, for the better.

So why did I tell you this story today? Well, you see, I was SO CERTAIN that I wasn't pregnant! Even though I had that little voice whispering in the back of my head that I was.

So now, in 2008, I have all these weird symptoms, which are NOT the ones I had back then, but I don't know the cause, and I'm worried about my health. I am about 99% sure that I'm not pregnant. It's VERY unlikely. But you know what's wrong with that line of thinking? The little voice in the back of my head that now says HA HA HA, you were wrong before, there's no way you're gonna figure it out on your own now. *cue singsongy voice: you can never be su-ure*

So I'm not sure what to do. I'm worried there's something wrong with me. Probably it's just some weird hormonal swing. But. It could be something more serious. Or...well...there's a Very Slim Chance that I could be pregnant, I suppose. But that's so unlikely.

Sound familiar?

Freakin' psyche. Everything I see and think about tells me that a pregnancy is unlikely. Hence why I began this post with I Am Not Pregnant. But, as Ben points out, I can never say that ever again with true confidence.

And then there's the little part of me that says, well, if you're not pregnant, what the heck's wrong with you?

But then I think about how I've been feeling the baby-cravings lately, so I think I'm just psyching myself out. And since I really don't think I'm prepared for another baby at this point...I also hope I'm not pregnant but that it's just some very benign hormone imbalance issue. Maybe my body is just finally resuming normal transmission since that fateful October 2006, and has to go through some crazy swings first?

Help me out here. Tell me what non-scary, non-harmful things are wrong with me that are also non-pregnant.

Oh and did I mention that Ben and I both had dreams last night that we had another baby? What's that about?

Whatever it is, I feel like maybe if I confess it now, I will find the answer. Maybe tomorrow I'll discover more certainly that I'm not pregnant. Or maybe an angel will come down from heaven and tell me to name my child Xev Chiyana Louise. Because that's the only reason a person would name their child that.

Right?