Gabby Writes

I realize it’s been almost a year since I last posted. I guess a lot has happened since then.

Big update on my fertility adventures. In December of last year, I went in to have an embryo transferred. I don’t know if I mentioned this before but I needed up having 14 eggs retrieved for IVF. 13 of them were mature enough to attempt to fertilize, 10 of them actually did fertilize, and eight reached the embryo stage the doctors aimed for. After the transfer, I had such a positive feeling about it. I don’t know how to describe it, I just felt like that was the moment it would happen. I would finally get pregnant.

Two weeks later, I went in to do the blood pregnancy test and . . . IT WAS POSITIVE. My feeling was correct. It was honestly the best thing to happen in 2025 after two people dying and other people having cancer. Something GOOD happened for once.

My pregnancy wasn’t so bad. I know a lot of people have had it worse than I did. I had a few moments of nausea/vomiting, but not too much. I honestly enjoyed using the pregnancy excuse to not do certain things. Like, no one expected me to help move things. It didn’t get annoying until closer to the end of the pregnancy. I ended up having gestational diabetes and gestational hypertension. I had to go in twice a week to have a quick ultrasound and then get hooked up to a fetal heart monitor for 20 minutes to make sure the baby was OK. And because of the hypertension, I was on watch for preeclampsia. Thanks to those things, I was scheduled to be induced at 37 weeks.

I went into the hospital at 7 PM on a Friday. They started by inserting a balloon in me so that I could get to three centimeters dilated. The most painful part of the whole process, actually. I got my epidural shortly after that.

Let me tell you, pregnant people, if you are on the fence about getting an epidural, do it! Oh my god, all the pain was gone. I also couldn’t move, but didn’t mind that. My mother-in-law wondered later if me not being able to walk might have hindered my ability to dilate more. Apparently, walking helps. I was just glad to not be in pain.

By Sunday afternoon, I was dilated 10 centimeters and ready to start pushing. I learned that the pain I had been feeling in my left side was contractions. I had never felt them before, obviously, and in the time before I was told to push, I was afraid the epidural had messed up since that happened earlier and I had to get it redone. Thanks to the epidural, though, the pain wasn’t even as bad as a period.

After an hour of pushing, on August 2nd, our little Sonny was born.

I didn’t get to spend much time with him immediately after his birth. Since he was born at 37 weeks, his lungs weren’t quite ready and he had to be taken to the NICU. I was in recovery for two days, and Sonny was in the hospital for a day longer.

My husband took the whole month off from work to help out. It’s been a learning process, but I think we’re doing well. Sonny is almost two months old now. He definitely has everyone wrapped around his little finger.

I’m going to try to get back into posting regularly again. I think when I was pregnant I got an extra dose of depression while also being exhausted from growing a human. I have motivation again. It’s just difficult to do things when Sonny needs to be held all the time. But I’m sure I’ll have plenty of new mom adventures to share.