When you first find out you’re pregnant, you’ll feel like everything in your life is changing all at once. It’s exciting and huge and especially if you’re anything like me you will want to start preparing right away. The only problem is, the world and people around you who haven’t been through it before (and even some who have) are not in the same rush. Most women find out they’re pregnant between 4-6 weeks (some as early as 3 if they’ve been tracking and planning). A lot of women have symptoms right away too, making it feel even more life changing. You’re hard at work growing a human inside of you and everything going on around you is completely unchanged.
After finding out we were expecting, I had another 5 week wait until the first time I set foot in a doctors office to confirm and talk about the pregnancy. This might be slightly inflated due to COVID 19, but in general 8-10 weeks seems to be a common time for a first prenatal appointment because it gives the best chance for heartbeat and ultrasound images. If you’re familiar at all with the trimesters of pregnancy though, that is most of the way through the first trimester! And time slows down when you’re taking life day by day both thrilled and terrified something might happen and you might be one of the statistics of early loss of pregnancy.
Even after the first appointment, I experienced an underwhelming change in day to day life. Fighting fatigue and food aversions, trying to explain to friends that you feel entirely different today than yesterday but somehow still just “tired and alright” because there isn’t a huge vocabulary out there for you to get your point across to people who aren’t or haven’t experienced anything like this before.
Some healthcare workers who work in obstetrics or midwifery are amazing at their jobs and bring enthusiasm and kindness with them to every appointment, but there is the chance you are seen by someone who is underwhelmed by the newly pregnant, or even second trimester patients. This can be heart-crushing to be treated like you don’t know what’s going on (because you don’t, but you want to learn!), and to be dismissed after one question and a few seconds of hearing babies heartbeat as “good to go” for another 4 weeks until your next scheduled appointment. This appointment that you’ve had circled on your calendar and counting down the days to discuss the first trimester screening results and see baby again to confirm everything is going well and you’re doing everything right, over in around 15 minutes because you’re still “only 15 weeks”. No party poppers or congratulations for making it into the second trimester, or excitement behind the news that the bloodwork and scans are showing no risks for anything so far.
That “only 15 weeks” seems like the longest 15 weeks of your life so far, but you are just supposed to hurry up and wait until you’re farther along to feel baby, get the anatomy scan, get more bloodwork done, come back for another appointment. It feels like all the hard work you’ve been putting in to grow a tiny human (the size of various citrus fruits now) is mundane and unimpressive to everyone else. No bump, no kicks, nothing but lots of unpleasant symptoms for you and nothing to show for it to the rest of everyone else.