Pregnant Pause: A disturbing blip on the baby radar

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Michele Henry

Your pillow faces north when you sleep: check. You have acne: check. Headaches: check. You are beginning to look like a small turkey (or another type of flightless fowl): check. You crave sour: check. You crave sweet: check. Your leg hair is growing faster than normal: hang on, let me get a ruler,

Old wives' tales have predicted – with uncanny inaccuracy 50 per cent of the time – that I am having a boy. And the other half of the time? "Congratulations, it's a girl."

Long before I spent hours on the Internet hedging my bets with dubious questionnaires, I had already concluded that I am (most certainly) having one of the above (even though it feels like I might be carrying a larger mammal).

I've just reached 20 weeks, the halfway point in what feels like an eternal gestation, and people expect me to have a definitive answer to this most pressing question.

"What are you having?" is something I get asked almost more frequently than, "What is your name?"

When I can't answer, people stare.

"Well," they say, "are you going to find out? Don't you want to know? Wouldn't it be easier to decorate a nursery?"

I suppose.

My husband has been resolute from the start. "I'm old-fashioned, I like to be surprised," he says, so why not wait until the Lentil's tiny legs emerge to find out whether we're the proud parents of a bouncing boy or a giggling girl?

As per our usual differences, I've been less steadfast in deciding. So I arrived at the doctor's office recently for our second ultrasound with an open mind and a half-hearted plot to corner the technician when Ted wasn't paying attention.

But, quick on her feet, the lab-coated woman flitted in and out of the room and before I got a chance. We were whisked out of the office and handed a report I was expected to present at my next visit with the Ob/Gyn.

I ripped it open.

Mischievously, my eyes scanned the computer printout: Body Part 1 normal, Body Part 2 normal, Part 3 normal, 4 normal ... But then my gaze snagged on the words beside Body Part 12. "See Comment." I scoured the remainder of the sheet. It said something about a blip on the screen. Then it added: "Opinion: likely of no clinical significance."

Likely? At that moment, I was likely going to have a heart attack.

Reminiscent of one of those sitcom scenes, where characters flash back on their lives during an emergency, my pregnancy rewound and replayed in my mind: the paralyzing fatigue, nausea, dizziness, vomiting and depression (a.k.a. lament over not being able to drink) that took over the first four months.

Suddenly, all the whining I've been doing about my "symptoms" turned solidly into horrible, heart-squeezing guilt.

My thoughts wandered briefly to the present, specifically when I realized for the first time, little more than a week ago, that those tiny pains I mistook for gas were indeed limbs making contact with my abdomen.

I mulled over these strange sensations with my friend Naomi. "It's so cute," I said.

"See," she said, "how quickly you can love this little thing?"

I do. It's true. I've already formed that bond with the Lentil (now the size of a honeydew melon).

With that, I flashed forward: signing up the baby for yet another daycare, happily accepting demerol, then an epidural, when the contractions begin (because I have already made the decision not to be stoic), a 50-hour labour, holding the baby.

And then it hit me (just like the pungent smell of fried sardines I've been cooking a lot lately): when I'm done packing on pounds, I will not be able to devote my full attention to losing them. Something – someone – will be more important.

For always.

This puts me in what my mother has termed, the "forever" stage of life. "A job you can change, even a marriage," she said recently. "But a baby is forever." Furthermore, she said, "You will never ever be 100 per cent certain you're doing anything right again. Mark my words."

Darnit! I'm crossing that rickety bridge into an entirely different universe.

All I want is a healthy baby.

And that's what I will have, my doctor assured me, two days after my near-fainting episode in the ultrasound waiting room.

"What does that blip mean?" I asked him, trying to halt the quivering of my lower lip.

"Nothing," he said. "Absolutely nothing. So just don't worry."

Ya, whatever.