The Fever

That's right, I have it again. It's been occurring more and more frequently the older I get, and each case is a little more fierce than the previous one. I'm talking baby fever of course. Gah! And I'm not talking about the 'oh, look at the cute little baby' type twinges I'd get once in a blue moon in my early twenties, I'm talking full scale earth shattering uterine twitching type physical cravings for motherhood. And they can't be shaken, no, I've discovered that I've got no choice but to let the fever run it's course. It'll end when it wants to, and in the mean time I am at it's mercy. Each time the fever hits me, it gets a little stronger, and lingers a little longer, accompanied by dreams each night of babies and baby accessories and baby smells and big pregnant bellies. Last night I actually dreamed that I was holding my baby, still covered in after birth goop and not being totally disgusted by it.

It doesn't help that Vancouver is positively infested with young, hip pregnant women right now, maternity stores popping up at a similar rate to Starbucks and Lululemon. In fact, Lululemon has a maternity line now. It's like pregnancy is the latest accessory in Vancouver, and I, being legitimately ill with the baby fever, am enraged by that. Furthermore, I have a friend who is less than a month away from her due date, and I got to spend a weekend recently staring at her lovely round belly and mentally blocking out the talk of gestational diabetes and sore backs and so on.

Normally, to help shake the fever I'd go out dancing all night, drag my sorry ass home at around 9am and try to get a couple of hours of sleep. It's a temporary fix though, I'd spend a week feeling like shit and reveling in the coolness of my all night dance party and reminding myself how I couldn't possibly do stuff like that if I had a stupid baby. Of course in my current state of health, I'm not allowed to drink any alcohol or abuse any substances (they didn't specifically say that, but I'm pretty sure substances are out), so I can't even use my tried and true baby fever remedy. The stupid baby always wins.

Now the situation is interesting, because for the first time in nearly 11 years, I'm not on any form of birth control. Yep, they took it away in light of the whole life-threatening blood clot situation, and then gave me a stern talking to about how it would be very very very dangerous for me to become pregnant right now (pregnancy can increase the risk of blood clots) and the medication I am currently taking would be very very very damaging to any fetus I may decide to hang out with. So it's out of the question at the moment for those reasons (along with us both being in school still, money, blah blah blah, really bullshit reasons for not being ready), but is definitely in the not so distant future. So I have an appointment with a gynecologist to discuss alternate forms of birth control, but not until friggin DECEMBER 20th, and that's just the initial consultation. It'll probably be an IUD, which opens up a whole nother can of worms for me, but that'll be another post, another day. I have work to do, and babies to think about.