Be still my heart

Dearest Emi,
Two weeks and two butt shots later, we were back in Dr. Chan's office, this time to see his nurse practitioner since he was vacationing in China. It was April 24 and you were one day shy of 11 weeks. We still had another week to go before we passed the first trimester - the threshold that signaled we'd made it past the "danger zone" when most miscarriages occur.

Something like 10 to 25 percent of clinically diagnosed pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the American Pregnancy Association. But other studies, including one cited in a 2005 Washington Post article, have shown as many as 31 percent of women will miscarry. Dr. Chan told us roughly 70 percent of women who have two miscarriages go on to have perfectly normal pregnancies. More than a year ago, we were sitting in his office listening to those statistics and all I could think was in school 70 percent was barely a C. I didn't like those odds, especially since insurance companies won't pay for tests until there's a third miscarriage. The best explanation we could get for two consecutive miscarriages was bad luck.

So unlike the first time, I wasn't eager to jump right in and start trying to get pregnant again. Instead, your daddy suggested we take a trip that summer - a week in Paris. (Emiko, in case you don't know by now, your daddy is a very, good man.)

We had a wonderful time in one of my favorite cities in the world. We ate beouf bourguignon for the first time at a bistro in the middle of an enormous flea market, cruised along the Seine as the Eiffel Tower glittered in the night, browsed art museums and sipped cafe cremes from outdoor cafes as we watched Parisennes bustle past us. I felt like I was on a second honeymoon. We joked that if I got pregnant, we'd name the baby Paris.

But you didn't come into our lives until nearly a year later. By then, I'd had my regular, annual physical and my primary care physician had ordered a blood test to check for lupus and other auto-immune diseases that could have led to the earlier miscarriages. For whatever reason, having those ruled out made me feel much more at ease, and I woke up one day ready to try again. I remember going to Costco and buying a box of ovulation tests and home pregnancy kits. Two cycles later, I was peeing on a stick in the ladies' room at work, trying not to get too excited as a second, pink line slowly came into view.

The anxiety set in almost immediately. From the moment we found out about you, I worried whether you were getting enough calcium, protein and folic acid, if you were the right size, were you growing properly? Normal became my watchword. Was it normal for my breasts to be swollen and achy one day, then perfectly fine the next? Was it normal to feel nauseous all day and even well into the night? But most of all - was your heart beating normally?

So although we'd managed to get further along than the previous pregnancies, the endless worries would overwhelm me days before each ob/gyn appointment. Your daddy faithfully accompanied me to every doctor's visit for moral support and was usually the only guy in the waiting room. "Do you think the raspberry is okay?" I'd ask anxiously.

"I know the raspberry is okay," he'd always reply.

Dr. Chan's nurse practioner was a large, friendly, Mother Hen-type whose booming greeting immediately put me at ease. As she squeezed the warm gel onto my stomach, she asked about the two miscarriages, how I was feeling so far and chatted about grandparents and baby names. Then she got out the fetal doppler monitor, a brown box that looked like it was from the 1970s, and explained that fetal heartbeats can be detected sometime around the 10th week although she's been able to find it as early as nine weeks. She quickly added that just because the doppler can't pick up the heartbeat, doesn't mean there isn't one. The baby could be hiding, or moving around. "If we can't find one, we'll do an ultrasound to make sure everything is okay," she said, pressing the probe against the fleshy area just above my pelvic bone.

Over the staticky din that blared from the aging speaker, I could easily hear slow, rhythmic beats. "That's you," the nurse practioner said, as she moved the probe across my body. More meandering yielded nothing, but she pressed ahead, increasing the pressure on soft flesh. "This kid's a wiggler," she proclaimed after we heard a few, fleeting blips. Several moments later, she finally cornered you.

Rapid, short, steady pulses penetrated layers of amniotic fluid, fat, tissue and muscle, ringing out through the small examination room. I held my breath to enjoy this audible proof of life.

"Is it a normal heartbeat?" I asked.

"Absolutely. It's very good."

As we left Dr. Chan's office, your daddy held my hand and asked if I felt better.

"Absolutely," I said.