Testing times 

Let me cut straight to the chase and let you know I have recently had a positive pregnancy test. By recently I mean a week ago today. In itself there’s very little more to be said about a positive pregnancy test. But since then I’ve been thinking about how utterly loaded they are and how they can make a seismic impact whether they return two lines or one.

One and done

At 42 and with over two years since my last pregnancy ended in a very traumatic miscarriage (taking my total up to three) I had started planning my future as a family of three; my husband, my daughter and me. I had finally sorted through the baby clothes and started giving them away. We sold the changing table. I wrote an article about what it means to be ‘one and done’ when the power to choose was never in your gift. I read endless blogs and comments about one-child families, looking for the reassurance I needed that my daughter’s life without siblings could still be joyful. 

So when I say I wasn’t expecting the test to be positive, I really mean it. In the days leading up to the test I had gruelling lower back pain and stabbing pains in my lower abdomen. Both standard signs that my period was coming. I have endometriosis so pain is par for the course. I thought nothing of it. I took painkillers and felt irritable.  

Ruling out

In the end I took the test because I thought I might as well; I had tests, my period was due, I wanted to go out for a run and I thought I should be sure before I set out. I was ruling out pregnancy, because ruling it in was absurd and unrealistic.  

The dip-stick test 

There are many different types of pregnancy tests out there and I happened to have the cheapest ones in my bedside drawer. They are essentially cardboard strips of about half a centimeter width and 8cm length. Without giving you chapter and verse, you dip the end in your wee and wait for it to soak up through the test window where your result will appear. No lines mean it didn’t work. One line means it worked and you’re not pregnant. Two lines, however faint the 2^nd line, means there’s enough of the pregnancy hormone hCG in your urine to indicate you’re pregnant.  

The ghostly apparition

Over the past two and a half years I have taken about two pregnancy tests. Both were when my period was late enough to raise more than a shadow of hope. In both cases in the moments the test window activated, I would swear I could see the ghost of a 2^nd line. When you want something badly enough it’s amazing what you can convince yourself is real. I stared hard, unblinking, willing the line to move from my mind into reality. At the end of the obligatory 5 minutes it was clear there was no 2^nd line. It was the same on both occasions.  

On this occasion I took the test without hope or expectation. So when the ghostly apparition of the telltale line appeared in the first few seconds I knew well enough not to let my mind dictate the narrative.  

The torment of the test

As an alumni of the sub-fertile collective and a veteran of miscarriage I am familiar with the power and unique pain a negative pregnancy test brings with it. Having struggled to conceive and experienced two miscarriages before the arrival of my daughter I have come to view the pregnancy test with dread. When I fell pregnant for the third time I couldn’t bring myself to test. My period was late and it was beyond the point at which you could put it down to a touch of the irregular cycle. The test hung over me like an impending storm. If it was negative then I was plunged back into the turmoil of trying, waiting, hoping. If it was positive then how could I trust my body to carry this baby to safety when twice before it had brutally expelled my hopes and dreams?  

Ever the pragmatist, when I told my husband of my conflict he said ‘We need to know.’ I tested the following morning and for reasons I’ll never fully understand, that pregnancy stuck and my daughter arrived safely in the days before Covid stopped the World from turning.  

Hello, goodbye

My fourth pregnancy began and ended on the same day and it wouldn’t be me who would see the pink lines that day. Referred to my local EPU by an out of hours GP because I had been bleeding for 3 weeks I was asked if I could be pregnant. Call it denial or wilful ignorance, but I replied ‘It seems unlikely given that I started bleeding on the day my period was due’. Which was true. I didn’t feel the need to elaborate further. Afterall, they had taken down my history of two lost pregnancies and long periods of infertility. I mistakenly believed it was implied that contraception isn’t something I prioritise given that any pregnancy would be wanted and ‘planned’ pregnancy had long since flown the nest of probability.   

Soon after, the senior nurse flung the news at me that my pregnancy test had come back positive. Something inside me was probably expecting the news, so in response to her cold and insensitive delivery I replied ‘Given I’ve been bleeding for 3 weeks it seems unlikely I’m going to have a baby, doesn’t it?’. 

It would involve another 2 months of bleeding, a course of antibiotics, moments of excruciating pain, incidents of insensitivity bordering on hostility from the same nurse, one midnight trip to A&E with a suspected infection in my uterus and finally an operation to remove the final traces of that pregnancy.  

Seeing things 

I have a strawberry shaped kitchen timer in my bathroom. I use it to time my daughter when she’s brushing her teeth, desperate to ingrain within her the importance of good dental hygiene. After taking my most recent test, I set it for the standard 5 minutes. When it shrieked its alarm I returned to the bathroom to see two dark pink lines on my test. As hard as I have stared at negative tests in the past, I stared at this test harder, willing my eyes back to reality, fully expecting the 2^nd line to fade. I read the leaflet that comes with the test again.   

The test was, without doubt, positive. As was the test I took the following day.   

Hoping for the best, expecting the worst

When I was pregnant with my daughter I waited for it to go wrong. For most of my pregnancy I felt like I was expecting a miscarriage, not a baby. Telling people I was pregnant felt like I was courting disaster. Every scan threatened bad news as I sat in the waiting room to be called. I could not use the words ‘I’m having a baby’. Even my husband and I would dance around the subject of what the future would look like. It was a lot of ‘maybe, hopefully, if all goes well’ right up until the end.  

A double rainbow? 

And then she was here. Our glorious, unbelievable miracle. Despite my fear and shades of superstition, in spite of my inability to truly believe she was real, she made it. Our rainbow baby.

I feel greedy in hoping for a second rainbow when others are still waiting for their first. And yet I’m determined to lean into this pregnancy in a way I never have before. I have to because this will be my last one, however the story ends. And that’s why I’m choosing to share this story as it unfolds. Not talking about my previous pregnancies neither saved them nor destroyed them, but my silence confined me with my own fear. I am done with that. I don’t want to trade in shame and silence any more. I want to be honest.  

Right now I’m pregnant. The hope of another baby is real. And I’m over the moon.