Where have I been?

If I'm being perfectly honest, I have spent most of the last week utterly convinced I was pregnant.  Seriously.  Convinced.

Go ahead and snort, laugh, whatever you need to do.  But the signs were all lined up. Period late, that Human Hindenberg feeling, completely fuzzy-brained every single day, super-sore lumpy boobs (so unattractive, right?), the sweating, the ravenous appetite followed by nausea, so tired, and a creepy, twisty unmistakable Something happening in the uterus.

Disgusting.

The week before I was convinced that my thyroid was crashing.  I just had *nothing*, no energy, no brain power.  Just kind of a sad dullness.  Yes, I am still utterly heart-broken about Jasper, but this was beyond that, like the way the Dementors just suck all of the joy out of everything, or the Specters in the Dark Materials trilogy.

But a thyroid test revealed no change, really, from a test two years ago.  And still I felt like total crap.  In fact, I felt like more crap, sleeping way more than is normal, especially for someone like me, sleeping straight through from 8 pm to 5 am, so uncharacteristic.

From this, naturally the idea of pregnancy took hold, facilitated by the two-weeks-late period and the litany of woes enumerated above.  I emailed my doctor with my desperate plea, "Pregnancy or menopause?"  He promptly ordered me up the two tests, I stopped for a chat with a phlebotomist at Kaiser (they always need to talk to me about tattoos, go figure), and here we are.

According to the interwebs, yes, it's entirely possible for a vasectomy to fail after 20 years.  In my hormone-addled state, I also concocted a whole notion that the burst of new cell growth that Joe experienced following the end of his chemo had *of course* reversed the effects of that long-ago snip, knitted back together that severed vas deferens.  

More than that, I had the whole story of an abortion at age 48 pretty much written out in my head.  As usual, no matter what happens, that's the thought that runs through my mind: that it'll make a good story.  No matter what.  Momentarily, I entertained the thought that, given all of the women I know who have struggled through all of that bullshit in-vitro fertilization in their expensive attempts to carry pregnancies, that I should carry the thing and give it to someone? Was it selfish not to share it, freecycle it so to speak?

Yes, that was some crazy shit.

But naturally, as things go, I was in the bathroom when the email came, announcing that I had new lab results to review. In the bathroom delighting at the sight of blood and the feeling of let-down, yes, hurray, that I would finally get my body back and stop feeling like an idiot.

As for the menopause test, I'll have to wait for my doctor to interpret the results. I'm an ignoramus about that next part of the journey in this body, but eager to learn more, to experience it, if only to tell the story.

XX