Exhale

“But please, use contraception,” the endocrinologist said in her clipped Indian accent as she wrote out my prescription for anti-thyroid medication. “We don’t want you getting pregnant and having to get genetic testing or something.”

I shifted my weight on the crinkly white paper and avoided her over-the-glasses gaze by studying the posters on the wall; cartoon drawings of overweight people with lines pointing to swollen feet and struggling eyes – symptoms of diabetes.  I might as well have been in the school nurse’s office getting a premarital sex lecture.

But my husband was there, embarrassed and yet probably feeling justified for having pulled out a month earlier.

“It just doesn’t really seem like this is the best time to try,” he said, days after we’d found out something was wrong with my thyroid, and a few months after I’d started acting like a coked-out mouse hopped up on caffeine.  I can’t remember if we finished the sex or if I cried.

This endocrinologist’s lecture was delivered not to someone who was too young or not ready to become a mother; I’d been wanting to conceive for almost a year.  What I didn’t realize was how unhappy my body would be to have Pill-withdrawal after 11 years of drug-regulated cycles.  Or that I was generally on the verge of a health crisis.

After having finally started menstruating again after four months of no periods, it was a real pisser to be told that once my reproductive system was working, I would have to put it out of a job for the greater good.  The don’t-you-dare message felt like a slap in the face, as though I were one of the irresponsible teenagers I’d spent so much time with as a high school English teacher.

* * *

I knew a thing or two about unplanned pregnancies.  If one year I didn’t have students who were already moms, I was sure someone would get knocked up.

Suzi was a Goth girl with pierced lip and earlobes who wrote in her poetry portfolio about the miscarriage she’d had a year earlier – the day before she was to get an abortion.  She felt like it was a gift from God, and I didn’t disagree.  But then she told me – and her friend in another class then wrote in her poetry portfolio – that despite having now gone on the Pill, Suzi was kinda freaked out that her period was late.

Another year, Jackie in 2nd period told me in a journal entry that she was three months along.  Her mom was going to help her out because she’d been through the same thing. I bought the baby some Spanish/English board books.

Dawn was not fond of my class and so opted not to come most of the time or to glue her head to her desk when she did.  Her white friend Tiffany told me that Dawn said she was going to try to give herself an abortion, so Dawn offered to pay for it.  But then Dawn later told Tiffany she wasn’t pregnant. We all crossed our fingers; the social worker’s report of home life seemed grim enough for a teenager, let alone an infant.  By May, Dawn was still failing my class, and her bellybutton was out to my chalkboard.  The father was reportedly dating another girl in the same English class.Sabrina stayed after school to talk with me one winter afternoon, a conversation that ended with me writing her a pass to be late to track practice and giving her a ten-dollar bill so she could buy a pregnancy test. She never gave me a full report, but I figured it was negative.  A few months later she revealed that there was a new fetus afoot.

Then a full year after that, I saw her pregnant belly in the parking lot and she told me about her previous miscarriage.

The kicker was Nikki, whose pudge I’d questioned directly in the hall one day.  Junk food, she blamed.  She didn’t face the music until the Blood Driverejected her for anemia and her friend confirmed to me what I’d suspected. Problem was, Nikki hadn’t taken a test.  It turned out she was almost five months along by the time she went to the city health department.  Initially planning to travel to the next state to terminate, she opted instead for adoption.  I don’t know if she disclosed the fact that she’d been something of a party-animal and had refused to give up her allergy or cold medication.  I do know she asked not to see the baby or learn the gender.

* * *

After watching all these pregnancies for a few years with the sigh of a wanna-be sociologist and the bent of a pro-choice activist, once my own thoughts turned to motherhood, I saw these girls’ fertile bodies as encouragement that mine would work the same way.

When it didn’t, I got pissy.

Or maybe my getting pissy was actually part of the problem; mood disorders and thyroid disorders can act like peanut butter and jelly, or two horny teenagers – hard to separate.  In March, I went off the Pill and was surprised that my first period didn’t come for two and a half months.  In June, I started plunking down gobs of money on ovulation-predictor kits only to have another six-week wait.  I finally read about Fertility Awareness and saved myself some money as the next dry three months went by with nary a temperature shift.  Still, the OB at my November appointment insisted on doing an internal exam to rule out pregnancy before he wrote me a lap slip to get my blood tested.  Positive I hadn’t ovulated, I felt like the cold-gloved fingers inside and the rubbing on my belly pushed a lump of hard nothing right up into my throat.

A few days later, I got a call from the OB’s nurse that my case needed to move out of their hands.  Decidedly not an almost-mother, I was bound for the endocrinologist’s (full) schedule book.  While waiting for an appointment, I read and learned that if I had autoimmune hyperthyroidism – Graves’ Disease – my risks for both fertility problems and miscarriage would be higher.  When I handed a friend who had a months-old baby a glossy yellow pamphlet about the disease, her reply of “that sucks” both angered me and made me feel validated for my newly reignited depression.  Anti-thyroid medication – if my body responded to it – could potentially put the disease “into remission,” but pregnancy, maybe other hormone changes, or really anything could jerk my body back into symptomatic disease, which could be worse the second or third time it came around.

That was back when everything was almost hypothetical. The numbers on my blood labs made it clear I had a problem, but until I got the radiology results, there was still the chance that it wasn’t Graves ’.  Then, in February, almost a year after I’d gone off the Pill, I left the nuclear medicine facility with a clear diagnosis, the next steps to be discussed in the endocrinologist’s office.

* * *

That was the appointment I took my husband to.  I didn’t want to hear what I knew the endocrinologist was programmed to say: that I should assault my body in order to make it able to produce a baby someday.

I don’t know if my husband felt admonished or relieved by the just-say-no-to-bareback warning.  Clearly I was in no shape to become a mom.  The doctor said it wasn’t even safe for me to run or do any strenuous exercise during treatment. There went childbearing.  There went the Cherry Blossom Ten-Miler I’d registered for.  What could I do?

“Walk.”

I thought about being ten years old and wanting to try water-skiing the first time I had the opportunity, but my arm was broken from having fallen as a clumsy roller-skater.  Afraid of failure, I sat out of a friend’s roller-skating party a few months later, and after eighth grade, I spent the entire summer on a friend’s boat without trying water-skiing.  After one disastrous, spaghetti-armed attempt in late August 1989, I haven’t tried since.  I knew the doctor was right.  We weren’t ready to be parents.

But I was sick of being scared.

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Jessica Claire Haney has published poetry in Earth’s Daughters, Court Green and Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  In addition to her personal blogs, Jessica’s writing has also appeared online on the Motherverse Mothering Out Loud Blog and Mothering Heights Second-Annual Mother’s Day Online Anthology, and she writes regularly for DC Metro Moms Blog. Jessica has an essay forthcoming in the Journal of Attachment Parenting International. She lives in the Washington , DC area with her husband and toddler son.