Sep
25

Weekend, Noun: Any two day period taken or given as a weekly rest period from one’s work. *Updated*

So, when we last saw our heroine, she was whining unbecomingly about not being pregnant. Nothing, she thought, typing her insipid blog entry, has the power to ruin a girl’s day like a negative pregnancy test.
How wrong she was (the narrator muses darkly).

I have a stash of tests, of various brands, in my bottom desk drawer. Once I start taking them, I tend to keep on doing so until my period arrives. Usually this only involves testing once, as everyone knows the most reliable method of inducing menstruation is not a course of Provera, but rather peeing on a ten-dollar stick.

At eleven days past “ovulation” my tests were so negative as to emit a black hole-like sucking sound from where the second line would have been.
The next day I took two tests, which were both, again, resoundingly negative. Cue flouncing, whining, etc.
I am no fool, after all. Stories about persons who tested negative until a child was actually expelled from their vagina notwithstanding, a pregnancy that hasn’t implanted by 12 dpo is statistically behind the eightball.

Two hours later, I looked down into the trash to see a positive pregnancy test beaming up at me.

One of the tests had remained negative, but the other, the ept brand, had developed an unequivocal blue plus sign. This was no evaporation line. This line was the color of the cruel Bluejays that swoop past our windows to bother the cats. No jeweler’s eyepiece and headlamp were needed to see it; the line was visible at arm’s length. Faint, yes. But there.

The next morning, I eagerly peed on another assortment, including an ept.
All. Negative.

And they stayed that way. No matter how many times I took them out of the trash and stared at them, no matter how I pleaded and offered backrubs, chocolate, a room of their own, they remained resolute.
“Infertile twit,” they said, in a chorus of tiny voices, “Barren Fool.”

I know that home pregnancy test results are invalid when read after ten minutes. I also know that the other explanation for a positive followed by a negative is the unpleasantly named “chemical pregnancy,” which makes it sound as if I was involved in an accident with a tanker of radioactive goo, and instead of superpowers I received a tiny, glowing embryo in my midsection.

I tried not to think about it, which was easier than it sounds, because I had twenty pages to write on postpartum depression, twenty pages that were due on Sunday.
And boy, did that cheer me up! There’s nothing like reading about misery and infanticide to keep a girl chipper.
(That was a little joke, there.)

I didn’t leave my desk all weekend, and though my weekend may have been easier if I had started my paper, say, a month ago, it certainly wouldn’t have been as exciting.
Besides, procrastination has a long and noble history. Lincoln was a notorious procrastinator–as you probably remember from history class, the Gettysburg Address was improvised. Abe had meant to write it weeks earlier, but instead he sat around whittling and throwing spitballs at Mary Todd, and the next thing he knew there he was, everybody staring at him and nothing to say.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he began, stalling for time—“four score and seven” takes much longer to say than “eighty-seven,” you see—and happily, the rest came easily. Though of course in the end, procrastination is what killed him. The fateful night he attended the theater, Mr. Lincoln was supposed to be working on a speech he was scheduled to give at a veteran’s hospital the next day.

But that’s all beside the point. The point is, I finished my paper last night, and then I may or may not have Googled “ept false positive” and “ept positive after time limit” and “ept criminal negligence false hope.” And I may or may not have drafted a slightly insane letter to the Better Business Bureau. And finally, I may or may not have begun muttering “‘Error-Proof Test,’ HA!” until the Actually came over and wrapped his arms around me, at which point I may or may not have started to cry.

What a refreshing break from the workaday world that was.

Update: …And I just got my period.
Am I on Candid Camera or something?

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |