The worrying

Weeks go by so slowly when you are counting them.

Weeks four through twelve are horrendous.  You're frozen with fear over being on the wrong side of that nearly-twenty-percent first trimester miscarriage statistic.  Eight weeks makes your first appointment but all your OB can do is prod at your abdomen and guess whether your uterus is associated with the correct fruit comparison.  Then you go home.  Your baby's heart could have not started to beat when it was supposed to and you wouldn't know it.  Or it could start and then stop and you'll have no idea until you start to bleed, days or weeks later.  You obsess over your symptoms.  Are they appearing?  Are they "normal"?  Are they lessening?  Because the girls on Google say that they lost their morning sickness before that missed miscarriage.  It doesn't matter that a hundred other girls said their symptoms wax and wane in a healthy pregnancy.

Then you finally hit week twelve!  The much sought-after week twelve!  It's glorious, and you feel unstoppable for at least three solid minutes before the worry returns. 

You're told that the worry lessens as you go along.  And it does, somewhat.  I certainly feel more confident in the second tri than I did in the first.  But no matter what week you're at, you'll hear about someone who lost their baby one to two weeks ahead of you.  People love to tell pregnant ladies stories they've heard about dead babies. 

I think the worrying doesn't go away until birth.  And then you just get a whole new set of worries.  So I suppose that my best advice is to keep yourself as distracted as possible.  For the love of god, don't Google things.  Don't read about pregnancy on the internet.  And think about population.  Every single human on this earth was once an x-week-old fetus.

And now I'm only at week fifteen!!  Week twelve happened six months ago.  How am I only at week fifteen??