Faint

When I was little, I had a problem with fainting. I have fainted because I lost a tooth, stubbed my toe, had my hair curled, popped a zit, to name a few. I had a good track record once I hit my teenage years. I only fainted once in high school (to my memory). I made it through college only fainting once as well. I was sitting in my freshman linguistics class and suddenly everything went dark. I was in the front row, too. That was embarrassing. I made it through 8 faint-free years. I have to start over now.

A few weeks ago, I was at the doctor’s office having some blood work done. Normally, I don’t have a big problem with having a little blood drawn, but normally, they don’t take the blood in a painful torturous way. This time, they were literally drawing the blood out of my arm. I didn’t watch, but John explained it to me. He said there was a little thing inside the vial that looked like a plunger that was pulling the blood out. Well, as you can imagine, if someone is having to do all that work, then they’re obviously moving around a bit in my veins, and that makes my veins very unhappy.

I started to feel hot and nauseous, and I knew what was coming. I tried really hard to keep it from happening. About halfway through the second vial (of four), the nurse asked if I wanted her to stop for a bit. I told her no, because who wants to go through all of that again in the other arm? Not me! She managed to get all four vials and slap an itty bitty bandage on me before I quickly let John know I was going to pass out. About 45 seconds later, I came to. I was lying on the ground with two unfamiliar faces leaning over me. I was so confused and asked “where am I? What happened?” It started to come back to me, and as it did, I realized how hot I felt. They helped cool me down, and I told John about how, while I was out, I remembered hearing Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. Hey, at least unconsciousness was entertaining, right? I felt bad for John, though. That must have been frightening to see me pass out (a first in our relationship). To make matters worse, he said I kept my eyes open when I fainted. Sorry, honey. I will work on that.

The word “faint” has been occurring a few times in my life as of late. In fact, the reason why I was at the doctor was because of something else that was faint…

A faint line on a pregnancy test! That’s right, we’re expecting a little one to arrive early next year! As of today, I’m just a couple days short of the 13 week mark, which also means I’m a couple days short of completing my first trimester. Woohoo! I was not lucky enough to escape the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester, so I will be happy to leave that all behind. At the same time, this is all going by pretty fast, and I do want to be able to enjoy every moment – painful or not – so I also don’t want to wish away the time.

I was pretty sure the test was right, but it was such a faint line, so I didn’t know how excited to be. Once we got to go to our appointments (I’ve had 3 scheduled appts so far), it started so seem so much more real.

5 week ultrasound - the baby is between those 2 little cross hairs

8 week ultrasound

12 week ultrasound

I will try to blog about more topics that just pregnancy and babies, but for now, this is pretty much all I can think about. Bear with me!