I'm pregnant! Now what?

Long-time readers of this blog may know that my husband and I have been trying to get pregnant for many years. Well, it finally worked!!! I’m now 31 weeks along and we are beyond excited. We had our baby shower the other weekend and I was so grateful, not just because it was beautiful, fun, and delicious, but also because it felt like such an amazing milestone in this journey.

I couldn’t believe it when our doctor first called to say that I was pregnant. I was totally convinced it hadn’t worked, after so many failures; I couldn’t imagine we’d get pregnant on our first round of IVF. I’d just wrapped up a major project at work and had decided to take 2 weeks off. We did the implantation and then took a road trip and went camping for the next few days. I tried not to focus on what may or may not be happening in my body and just enjoyed myself – although I was less than pleased when I got bitten by 2 mosquitoes in the first 5 minutes setting up the tent (OMG zika?). When we got home I decided not to get my hopes up and didn’t take a pregnancy test, after all I didn’t feel nearly as terrible as I had with any of my previous pregnancies so I couldn’t be pregnant –  just goes to show what I know/knew.

The first 4-5months were scary and exciting. We were trying not to get our hopes up that this one might work, but I also didn’t want to miss the joy of it. My husband didn’t get excited until he saw me throwing up – I usually have a stomach of steel and hadn’t gotten morning sickness any of the previous times– unfortunately, me throwing up would become a pretty common site up until… well actually I’m still waiting for that loveliness to end, but never mind.

Trying to figure out who to tell when was tough. I decided to let our environmental health and safety person know pretty much right away since I work with isofluorane and other toxic stuff. They were great and had people come test the lab and me right away (although they did accidently forward an email with the info that there was an unnamed pregnant person in the group to a few of my colleagues, which was a little awkward, but it worked out fine). I had to make some work modifications so I told one of my coworkers when asking for help at around 8 weeks.

When my boss asked me for an updated plan for our upcoming year-long study, which I obviously wouldn’t be able to complete before my due date, I decided to tell him that I was pregnant (at 10.5 weeks). I was really really nervous to tell him, after all, I’d just finished one big study and we weren’t going to start the new one for a few months – and I’d need to go out on leave partway through. It would almost make sense if they let me go (I know they probably couldn’t easily do that legally, but I’m a worrier and I always try to think up the worst case scenario). My fears were totally misplaced – my boss has been so supportive and a huge advocate for me. He encouraged me to accept help, which felt totally unnatural, and helped me to realize that I probably wouldn’t be comfortable running 8 hours of behavior for weeks at a time at 8.5 months pregnant. Now that I’m getting a little closer to the end and I’m still retching, dealing with backaches and having to take breaks every few hours to eat and test my blood glucose (yup, I got gestational diabetes), I’m so thankful! He also brought up the option of my coming back part time for a little while once my maternity leave is over! I don’t know if I will take him up on this offer, but I am so grateful that it might be an option and I feel so supported.

Hopefully, everything will keep on going (pretty) smoothly both with the baby and at work and I can’t wait to report back what it’s like having a newborn while working in industry.

This story was published on February 20, 2017, on the blog, 'A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman' (available here) and has been republished here with permission.