K, so after I hit publish, there’s a 12 hour window before I pretend to forget about this, agreed? Good.

Some of you have been reading a whiles and you know about my history-o-baby-loss. Some even know that Isobel was a baby I was never supposed to be able to carry to term, never mind that she was born on her due date. So, especially with her and a lot with baby #2, I’ve been paranoid.

Petrified. Sure it was not going to happen.

Okay, that last one was more Isobel, but still, since I’ve been virtually symptomless this time around and had that killer flu three weeks back (can you say 102.9 degree fever?), I’ve been worried.

Convinced we’d go to listen to a heart beat for the first time and there’d be nothing. Convinced that every cramp was the beginning of a horrible death. At least until I figured out I’d just had to pee or had gas or something. Half sure that my back killing me for the last week has been the indicator that I should stop thinking names and start thinking alcohol again.

But, it, like most painfulish things, has also been getting ignored and not talked about and has lived in the recesses of my mind. Until I went to get a glass of water tonight and felt something.

It wasn’t blood. It was just not rightly coloured stuff. And there was a bunch of it.

And then I started freaking. And thank god Mr Lady was online to tell me to just go get it checked out, otherwise I’d have exploded in freaking outism at JDawg immediately and given his, uh, state, I don’t think it would have met with the right reaction from him. What ever that would have been. I suppose there’s no right reaction.

Almost as soon as I said, “Well, there’s a problem, I think, and Mr Lady said I should go so I don’t worry.” And started crying. He said, “You don’t think, do you? No, no way. It’s too late. No way. Didn’t this happen before? I remember it. Oh, no that was later, I remember now. Okay, go, if you need to go. We’ll be fine,” which was oddly kind of assuring.

So, I turned on the baby monitor to full blast and put it about two inches from where I knew his passed out head would be in three minutes and I cabbed it to the ER. And they saw me right away.

And if you live here, you know that does not ever happen, especially at St Paul’s, at nearly midnight, with all of the drug-seekers and cop abusers and methadone-less junkies and shizo-effective people off their meds littering the waiting rooms. So I was less comforted than I could have been, cuz UH, HELLO? They think I’m an emergency-emergency.

Waited for about 10 minutes in total between triage and meeting the doctor. He said it was rare, this late in the game - 11 weeks - but that my back pain could be indicative of something. He tried out the regular ultrasound, but I was too empty-bladdered and he was too non-ultrasound-inclined to see much more than the fact that I DO HAVE A UTERUS.

I have to go back for one of those lovely, invasive, cervix-scarring really sensitive ultrasounds. But they drew some blood. So my hormones will tell them something, most likely.

So now, I wait. For a call, fever, cramps, a tide of red emotional turmoil. To find out if this is a threat, I over did it walking today, there’s tubes being involved, or absofuckinglutely nothing at all.

Baby #2: this is your first time out. You get 1/12th of a minute for making mama feel something bad that an epidural is not immediately following.