a special birthday story

Happiest of birthdays to my sweet, kind, funny, goofy, loving husband Mark. I can't wait to see you squirm next year on your 30th birthday, but I hope you enjoy your 29th today! Thanks for always loving me, buying me food, and working hard to allow me to stay home with Beau. I love you! Happy Birthday!!!

One more thing...last year on this day, Mark got a rather unconventional gift. It was on his birthday last year that we found out we were pregnant! I am pretty sure I've told the story before, but here goes just for old time's sake.

I had just gotten out of the hospital (more of that story here) the night before and had worked a full day. Mark's dad had tickets to a Dallas Stars hockey game the night of his birthday so he stayed in Dallas to go to the game while I had the night to myself. I had pretty much talked myself out of any chance that we were pregnant because of everything that had happened at the ER the night before, but hours of boredom and obsession with pregnancy (I have developed that obsessive personality later in life) led me to try one of those cheap pregnancy tests that I already had on hand. I was going to the bathroom (TMI sorry, but details matter) when I thought, what the heck? I have these tests laying around, I might as well use another one since I'm bored. I took the test and walked out of the bathroom. I was really horrible at waiting on those things and never made it the full 3 minutes, so I walked back in to look at it about a minute later. That's when I saw the faintest second line on the test, one that I hadn't seen on the many tests I had taken before (again with that obsessive thing). A huge smile overtook me and my face got flushed while I giggled and thought this was crazy and it couldn't be true. I think I walked around saying "what?!" to myself over and over. I was still in denial (since the test at the ER the night before had been negative - it was a blood test, and should have been much more sensitive to HCG than a dollar store pregnancy test, but whatever) and quickly read the instructions on the test box. That's where it said "CORPUS LUTEUM CYSTS MAY CAUSE FALSE POSITIVES". 

...

Less than 24 hours had passed since I was discharged from the ER with a ruptured (corpus luteum - my diagnosis) cyst. My high came crashing down quickly. Crap! What did it mean?! I googled like crazy and came up with no answers (no surprise there). Finally I decided I would call the ER. Yes, that's a good idea. They were medical professionals. Maybe they could look up my chart from the night before and re-test my blood or something (there are two types of pregnancy blood tests; quantitative and qualitative. One says YES or NO to pregnancy, the other gives a numerical answer. If the HCG in your blood is over a normal level, you can be considered pregnant, while the YES/NO test would say NO at that number). So I did. I called the ER and talked to a nurse on duty. I explained the situation and he goes "No, you can never have a false positive". Hmm. I told him what the box said so he yelled to a doctor in the background and then goes "Oh, yeah, I guess you can have a false positive. I don't know what to tell you". Gah! They couldn't tell me anything about my blood because they had already thrown it out. I hung up without any answers. 

Meanwhile, Mark and his dad got back from the Stars game. I had always wanted to do something super special when I found out I was pregnant, but this was the weirdest situation and I didn't have the brain power to put something together, nor did I want to hype up the situation if it turned out to be a false positive. I made nervous small talk when his dad dropped him off and then let him get settled a bit at home before I gave him the news. I remember it perfectly...we were in the kitchen and I started stammering "Umm soo...you know that cyst I have? Well, sometimes they can, like, release HCG and they, like, can, ummm, make pregnancy tests be wrong and ummm, I know they tested me at the ER and it said negative but umm I don't really know what to think because ummmm, I took two tests tonight and ummm...they were both positive. butidon'tknowifit'srealornot." hahaha I think Mark heard "I'm pregnant" even though I didn't say it and his eyes got huge and a smile wiped across his face. Seriously, he was SO excited. He goes "You're pregnant?!" and I said "I don't know." and we hugged! The rest of the night was spent with me talking his ear off about the whole crazy scenario. 

I went on to have two blood tests over the next (excrutiatingly long - it was Christmas!) week (plus I took about 7 more tests) to figure out if I was pregnant or not and, well, we all know how that turned out! It is such a fun memory for me and I hope Mark always remembers it as a special birthday because of the news we received. :)