9 Months Miserable

So now I'm sitting on the toilet with a pregnancy test in my right hand and my head in my left. My heart is racing and mind is preoccupied because of what I already knew. I'd missed my period and I was nauseated, just as I was with my first pregnancy. As I placed the stick in between my legs, urine started to flow. And after about 10 seconds, I was done. I brought the stick up and out, noticing that I had not only saturated the absorbent tip, but my right thumb was wet as well. By the time I'd wiped, and pulled my clothes up, the test had resulted. And there it was sitting on the bathroom counter....the beginning of my new life. I was neither excited nor upset about the news. I guess because I knew I was pregnant way before I saw the confirmatory lines on the stick.

My preganancy was less than ideal. He already had two children, with the youngest only months old and I was physically, mentally and spiritually disgusted. The bigger I got the more miserable I was. I suffered from intractable nausea and vomiting and stress incontinence. So that means everytime I threw up, I peed on myself. And because it made me even more nauseus, I could not swallow saliva. So, I would either walk around with a cup, lined with a paper towel, or spit in any nearby garbage can. It was so bad that my family would only allow me to use two cups in the entire house.

The worst and most miserable of the pregnancy was the yeast infection. It started around 12 weeks and didn't disappear until delivery. I mean my Nurse Midwife tried everything. When traditional anti-fungals didn't work, she tried Boric Acid. And when that didn't work, she instructed me to inject plain yogurt into my coochie. Well guess what America, that shit didn't work either. The yeast was hormone dependent. And the further along I got the worse it got. After peeing, the mere act of wiping was an ordeal. It soothed the itch that was "par for the course", causing me to wipe even more. The wipe would turn into a scratch and then my coochie would be on fire. I would have to then sit in front of a fan with my legs open so that I could calm the fire storm.

The physical changes weren't the only stressors of my pregnancy. The fact that he didn't disclose all truths regarding his prior/current relationship also created mental and spirtual discord. Although they had broken up, part of her felt as if he would eventually come back home. He'd left a good majority of his belongings at her place and was living with me. He also failed to tell me that we worked at the same hospital.

It was a normal day at Halifax Hospital. I was working in Telemetry and one of my patients had belongings that needed to be stored. As I would always do, I took the belongings down to the cashier's office. The receiving person was a young black woman. I probably had encountered her a thousand times before, but didn't remember her. But I would definitely remember her after this encounter. The process for storing patient belongings involved signatures from both the deliverer and receiver. And on this particular day, I paid attention to the recipient's signature. It was her. There I was standing before the mother of his kids. My eyes quickly went from the belonging validation form to her face. Within seconds, I'd scanned the parts of her that were most visible. Her complexion was dark and her eyes and face were round. She looked just like the baby boy I had become very comfortable with over the past 7 months. And on her third, left finger was a ring......