When I was a teenager, there were a lot of things I thought I would do when I was older. Having a baby was one of them. I didn't really think too much about getting married and having a baby, but I definitely thought about how wonderful it would be to have a baby. When I saw a little baby in a restaurant or a mall, I'd always get a sense of how much I wanted one of my own. Not that I wanted to have one out of wedlock, but I didn't really have the longing for a life partner or the strong desire to find someone I could spend the rest of my life with until much later in life. But the desire and longing for a baby was much more apparent much earlier on. I could relate to Monica's character on Friends in the episode where Ross had his son and she was talking about how much she wanted one. At that point, she didn't have a man in her life to have a baby with. But she knew she wanted one. Then, later on, after a serious relationship ended for her, she wanted to go to a sperm bank to get the ingredients to make a baby. I thought that was a little extreme, but I could see the thought process behind it all.
As it turned out, getting married was relatively easy for me. I found a man whose smile and sparkling eyes drew me to him almost instantly. I would not describe it as love at first sight because I was a little unsure and unsteady in the beginning and it did take us some time to know and understand each other, but today I am completely sure I married the right man for the right reasons.
After the wedding, it was not like we wanted to have kids right away, but we both knew that we wanted to have kids eventually. Just before we got married, he asked me how many kids I wanted. I said I wanted two, but I definitely wanted at least one daughter. Now we had both been born and brought up in a country where, even today, people want to have sons to carry on the family name and to take care of the parents in their old age. Female infanticide and female feticide, though made illegal, are still practiced in some areas. And I told him I wanted to have a daughter. He was drawn to me after I was completely honest and upfront about that.
Life was not completely smooth and dreamy for us after our wedding. Around our first anniversary, we had a major bed bug infestation and had to give up all our lovingly bought furniture and our lovely and comfortable and spacious apartment because the bugs were simply everywhere. We later learnt that both the furniture company that we bought almost all our furniture from, and the apartment complex where we were living, were known for bed bug infestations. We had just been naive and had not done enough research on either of the two.
We spent close to a month looking for a reasonably priced apartment to move to, since we had just taken a significant financial hit. On the evening of our first wedding anniversary, we were a little late getting back home after looking at an apartment that we went to see after both of us got back from work. Dinner that night was pizza from a fast food chain restaurant. Not exactly the way we would have wanted to celebrate our first anniversary. The saving grace there was that, a few months earlier, we had celebrated our first anniversary of getting engaged with a lovely dinner with live music and champagne aboard a cruise ship.
Around the same time, my husband slipped on ice in the parking lot at his workplace and badly injured his wrist. The wrist had been injured and operated upon before and the surgeon who had done it the first time was a very experienced and well-respected hand surgeon. He did not recommend operating again right away, but wanted to try a few other things first and wait and see how things went.
Also at about the same time, he developed a problem in one of his calf nerves which caused him a lot of pain. None of the doctors he saw about that gave him a very definitive diagnosis or a very bright outlook on that.
And in the middle of all this, I did not get my period for about four months and thought I might be pregnant. I had some nausea and dizziness from time to time, which fueled the fire of my suspicions.
When I mentioned to my husband that I needed to take a pregnancy test, he was evidently shocked. He was clearly not yet ready to have a baby in the midst of everything else that was going on in our lives at the time. Even so, we obviously needed to know what was going on and then decide on a course of action. I bought a box of home pregnancy tests and took all three tests in the box within a span of a few days. They were all negative. Then I bought a box of a different brand and took all of those. Still all negative.
I made an appointment with a gynecologist to find out what was going on. She wanted me to visit her office for a blood test to confirm whether or not I was indeed pregnant. I had to take that test a couple of days before seeing the doctor so that the results would be available when I saw her. I went in for the blood test the day after we moved to our new apartment. The nurse called me the next day to say that it was negative.
A few days later, I got my period and all the other pregnancy like symptoms disappeared with it. I called the gynecologist's office and told them that I no longer had the issues for which I had originally made the appointment, but I would want to come in and have a general check-up anyway.
I am not very proud of this fact, but I was only about a month short of being 28 years old when I finally saw this doctor, and that was the first time in my life I saw a gynecologist. I was not someone who would go to a doctor for a fever, like some people I knew, or pop pain killers at the first hint of a headache. I did not remember ever having gone to a doctor for anything other than a mandatory immunization or a moderately serious problem like a cough that did not go away after more than a week or, more recently, a fractured ankle. I hardly ever took pain killers. Unless they were also fever reducers and I needed them to reduce a fever.
Anyway, this particular gynecologist was aware of the fact that, in India, where I was born and brought up, people do not routinely go to gynecologists and routinely have pap smears. She explained the procedure to me before she did my first ever pap smear. She did not, for a moment, make me feel like I was stupid or ignorant or careless about my health.
She also talked to me about my menstrual cycles in general. I told her I had some irregularities every now and then, and about once a year I had a cycle that would stretch out to be two or three months long, but the last one which had me thinking I may be pregnant, had been unusually long even for me. She talked about how a normal menstrual cycle works, how the eggs start to mature in the follicular phase, and then ovulation occurs. Then there is a 12 to 16 day period that they call the luteal phase in which the lining of the uterus thickens and, if the egg was not fertilized, the lining is shed at the end of this phase. She pointed out that if a woman's cycles are longer but she is ovulating, then it is the follicular phase that would be longer than normal. The luteal phase is usually of a more or less constant length for any particular woman, and that constant is between 12 and 16 days. She said I should know all of this because I would need that information when I started trying to have a baby. She had asked me if we were planning to have kids at some point in the future, and I had said yes.
There was some information that was not new to me, but the key piece of information that she gave me that I hadn't known about before was that the length of the luteal phase was roughly constant. I had heard earlier about how changing a workout or exercise routine or an unusual amount of stress could change the length of a menstrual cycle. As it turned out, that could happen, but only if the event occurred early enough in the cycle to affect the time of ovulation. Once you are past the point of ovulation in your cycle, extra stress or going on vacation or any other change of pace cannot change the time you get your period. We hear about how people go on vacation and then are caught completely unaware by a period that arrived almost a week early. That happened to me too, when I was 16 years old. But what is actually running your hormones during that cycle is the excitement, anxiety or stress levels that changed in anticipation of the vacation. Now I was not tracking my ovulation times when I was that age. I had no reason to do so. But if I had been, I would have seen that I had ovulated earlier than usual during that cycle.
The reason why I say that this piece of information was key is that it is what, later on, led me to find out that there was something not quite right with my cycles, beyond the fact that they were sometimes unusually long. More on that later.
As it turned out, getting married was relatively easy for me. I found a man whose smile and sparkling eyes drew me to him almost instantly. I would not describe it as love at first sight because I was a little unsure and unsteady in the beginning and it did take us some time to know and understand each other, but today I am completely sure I married the right man for the right reasons.
After the wedding, it was not like we wanted to have kids right away, but we both knew that we wanted to have kids eventually. Just before we got married, he asked me how many kids I wanted. I said I wanted two, but I definitely wanted at least one daughter. Now we had both been born and brought up in a country where, even today, people want to have sons to carry on the family name and to take care of the parents in their old age. Female infanticide and female feticide, though made illegal, are still practiced in some areas. And I told him I wanted to have a daughter. He was drawn to me after I was completely honest and upfront about that.
Life was not completely smooth and dreamy for us after our wedding. Around our first anniversary, we had a major bed bug infestation and had to give up all our lovingly bought furniture and our lovely and comfortable and spacious apartment because the bugs were simply everywhere. We later learnt that both the furniture company that we bought almost all our furniture from, and the apartment complex where we were living, were known for bed bug infestations. We had just been naive and had not done enough research on either of the two.
We spent close to a month looking for a reasonably priced apartment to move to, since we had just taken a significant financial hit. On the evening of our first wedding anniversary, we were a little late getting back home after looking at an apartment that we went to see after both of us got back from work. Dinner that night was pizza from a fast food chain restaurant. Not exactly the way we would have wanted to celebrate our first anniversary. The saving grace there was that, a few months earlier, we had celebrated our first anniversary of getting engaged with a lovely dinner with live music and champagne aboard a cruise ship.
Around the same time, my husband slipped on ice in the parking lot at his workplace and badly injured his wrist. The wrist had been injured and operated upon before and the surgeon who had done it the first time was a very experienced and well-respected hand surgeon. He did not recommend operating again right away, but wanted to try a few other things first and wait and see how things went.
Also at about the same time, he developed a problem in one of his calf nerves which caused him a lot of pain. None of the doctors he saw about that gave him a very definitive diagnosis or a very bright outlook on that.
And in the middle of all this, I did not get my period for about four months and thought I might be pregnant. I had some nausea and dizziness from time to time, which fueled the fire of my suspicions.
When I mentioned to my husband that I needed to take a pregnancy test, he was evidently shocked. He was clearly not yet ready to have a baby in the midst of everything else that was going on in our lives at the time. Even so, we obviously needed to know what was going on and then decide on a course of action. I bought a box of home pregnancy tests and took all three tests in the box within a span of a few days. They were all negative. Then I bought a box of a different brand and took all of those. Still all negative.
I made an appointment with a gynecologist to find out what was going on. She wanted me to visit her office for a blood test to confirm whether or not I was indeed pregnant. I had to take that test a couple of days before seeing the doctor so that the results would be available when I saw her. I went in for the blood test the day after we moved to our new apartment. The nurse called me the next day to say that it was negative.
A few days later, I got my period and all the other pregnancy like symptoms disappeared with it. I called the gynecologist's office and told them that I no longer had the issues for which I had originally made the appointment, but I would want to come in and have a general check-up anyway.
I am not very proud of this fact, but I was only about a month short of being 28 years old when I finally saw this doctor, and that was the first time in my life I saw a gynecologist. I was not someone who would go to a doctor for a fever, like some people I knew, or pop pain killers at the first hint of a headache. I did not remember ever having gone to a doctor for anything other than a mandatory immunization or a moderately serious problem like a cough that did not go away after more than a week or, more recently, a fractured ankle. I hardly ever took pain killers. Unless they were also fever reducers and I needed them to reduce a fever.
Anyway, this particular gynecologist was aware of the fact that, in India, where I was born and brought up, people do not routinely go to gynecologists and routinely have pap smears. She explained the procedure to me before she did my first ever pap smear. She did not, for a moment, make me feel like I was stupid or ignorant or careless about my health.
She also talked to me about my menstrual cycles in general. I told her I had some irregularities every now and then, and about once a year I had a cycle that would stretch out to be two or three months long, but the last one which had me thinking I may be pregnant, had been unusually long even for me. She talked about how a normal menstrual cycle works, how the eggs start to mature in the follicular phase, and then ovulation occurs. Then there is a 12 to 16 day period that they call the luteal phase in which the lining of the uterus thickens and, if the egg was not fertilized, the lining is shed at the end of this phase. She pointed out that if a woman's cycles are longer but she is ovulating, then it is the follicular phase that would be longer than normal. The luteal phase is usually of a more or less constant length for any particular woman, and that constant is between 12 and 16 days. She said I should know all of this because I would need that information when I started trying to have a baby. She had asked me if we were planning to have kids at some point in the future, and I had said yes.
There was some information that was not new to me, but the key piece of information that she gave me that I hadn't known about before was that the length of the luteal phase was roughly constant. I had heard earlier about how changing a workout or exercise routine or an unusual amount of stress could change the length of a menstrual cycle. As it turned out, that could happen, but only if the event occurred early enough in the cycle to affect the time of ovulation. Once you are past the point of ovulation in your cycle, extra stress or going on vacation or any other change of pace cannot change the time you get your period. We hear about how people go on vacation and then are caught completely unaware by a period that arrived almost a week early. That happened to me too, when I was 16 years old. But what is actually running your hormones during that cycle is the excitement, anxiety or stress levels that changed in anticipation of the vacation. Now I was not tracking my ovulation times when I was that age. I had no reason to do so. But if I had been, I would have seen that I had ovulated earlier than usual during that cycle.
The reason why I say that this piece of information was key is that it is what, later on, led me to find out that there was something not quite right with my cycles, beyond the fact that they were sometimes unusually long. More on that later.
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