the pregnancy story

it would not be right to pen down chuku's birth story without revealing the supremely embarrassing pregnancy story - sigh!

the fact is that i did not know that i was pregnant until i was at 23 weeks gestation which, in lay terms, means that i was nearly 6 months along before i "accidentally" found out that i was expecting a baby.

in my defense, i did not have the usual symptoms of pregnancy that most folks experience. for starters, my cycle has NEVER been regular so going for months without a period is a normal thing for me. i did not have any food cravings, morning sickness or sudden weight gain.

here's what happened. i had not had my period in a really long time and before i visited my ob/gyn on 15 september 2009 to discuss this, i took a pregnancy test which was negative. when i visited him, we discussed options for fertility treatment etc. and he started me on a course of hormonal pills to regulate my period. i was to have revisited his office for an ultrasound in 15 days time. however, dad had a surgery and i decided to go to hyderabad to help mom and dad out and figured that the fertility treatment could wait till i returned from there. i left for hyderabad on 6 oct 2009. i was there for nearly 2.5 months during which time i noticed some random strange stuff happening with my body that i did not relate to pregnancy in any way!

1. my hair, which has always been super straight and silky, turned dry and frizzy all of a sudden. i put this down to the fact that i was coloring my hair.
2. i was tired all the time. i mean ALL THE TIME! i put that down to jet lag, the fact that i was doing a lot of running around for mom and dad and was traveling around a lot with ved and my in-laws.
3. i was peeing more often than usual. this did not become a problem until around dec 2009 when i thought i was suffering from UTI cos i felt like i needed to pee all the time!

ved and i got back to charlotte mid-dec 2009 and i was continuing to feel tired all the time. it took me nearly a month to recover from what both ved and i thought was jet lag. since ved fell ill due to his allergies in india, it took him that long to recover from him jet lag anyway. in the meantime, the constant need to pee became a pain in the wrong place! once we got back to charlotte, ved and i started a fairly intensive workout regimen. i was becoming increasingly disillusioned with my slow progress in losing weight. despite my best efforts, i was only able to lose a pound or 2 here and there and my stomach did not seem to be reducing despite all the ab crunches i was doing! the earliest appointment that i was able to get with greg parker, my ob/gyn, was on 9 feb 2010. he completed my annual physical and asked me routinely if i was -pregnant - i said that i did not think that i was (what a joke!) but that i was not sure. he ran a routine pregnancy test - same as always when i visit him. we discussed fertility treatment options again and he sent me packing with a prescription for hormonal pills with the instruction that i was to go back for an ultrasound in 2 weeks time. i was at the parking lot, just about to get into the car, when he called me back into the clinic to give me the shocking and momentous news that i was pregnant. i drove back home in a daze to share the news with ved - both of us were shocked and ecstatic!

2 weeks later, i had my first prenatal ultrasound - i almost fell off the table and ved almost fell off his chair when we got to know that i was almost 6 months pregnant. we were pegging it at max 2-2.5 months!!! the strange behaviors of my body finally started making sense to me! it was like fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together - the whole picture was suddenly very clear!! and yes, i still feel very very stupid for not realizing much sooner that i was pregnant!!

a week later, chutku started moving around inside me - if no one had told me, i suppose i would have figured out on my own that i was pregnant by this point.

other than the backaches and need to pee all the time, i must say that i had a fairly easy pregnancy. i was eating healthy and exercising anyway since i had been trying to lose weight. i continued on the regimen, modifying the type and intensity of the exercises. the last month of the pregnancy was as miserable for me as it is for most pregnant women and it did not help that chutku was born overdue.

the birth story will be another post!