Everything's coming up ectopics
23.09.16, 1:59 pm

I’m now 10 weeks pregnant, and if I’m totally honest I’ve mostly hated all of it. The daft thing is, the actual pregnancy symptoms aren’t that bad – sore boobs, bloated, bit of a hangover feeling from 3pm until bedtime, really tired from lunchtime onwards. All of that’s a piece of piss to deal with, and a lot of people get it a lot worse.

My problem is my stupid, omnipotent, anxiety-drenched ectopic heartbeat. I am suffering so much with it at the moment; absolutely everything brings it on. Eating just makes me bloat for no reason at all, which is just catnip to the heart, and then I’m just anxious and angry for hours. Anxious that this, THIS may be the episode that puts me into an arrhythmia, and angry that it’s happening, that it won’t just leave me alone, won’t just beat normally like other people’s hearts. Cleaning my teeth makes me palpitate. Washing my hair. Cleaning the bathroom. The list goes on and on – it’s ridiculous. Some days it’s easier to cope with and some days I just want to give up on it all.

The hormones are also just insane. Most days I feel relatively sane, and then some days I’ll just feel horrifically blue for no reason at all. What usually happens then is that I battle through work, go home and lock myself away, Google a variant of ‘being pregnant makes me sad’ and read a forum full of people who feel just like I do. For some reason this is like flicking a switch, and I blub for a couple of minutes, and then I go off and have a hot shower and get on with things. It seems to flush it all out of my system, but I hate it because it’s so very much not like me.

I think once I hit the magical scan date of 18th October and can start taking my medication again, it should hopefully ease, though I know it probably won’t help completely. And a lot of me wants to panic about the later months, when the ectopic heartbeat will surely be SO much worse, but I force myself just to take one week at a time and not catastrophize about far away events. In the crappier times though, I do find myself thinking, ‘You know what? I’m not enjoying this at all. I hate it – I want to get out.’ And then I feel awful, because I don’t really want out, but the Baby still feels a totally abstract concept and not real in any sense. I’m not excited at all, because I’m still worried it’ll all go wrong, but also because it doesn’t feel like an actual thing. I mean, it’s currently the size of a grape! But maybe the 12-week scan will change that. Hopefully, the scan will be fine, and everything will be healthy and real looking, and it’ll be like, yes everything is crappy right now, but it cannot last forever and at the end you will get back something truly awesome.

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