Soccer. Soccer, soccer and more soccer with 4 kids on 3 different teams and my oldest kid reffing games and picking up extra games at an exhausting pace. By last Friday after a week of driving everyone everywhere I was exhausted. And sore too. I kept having this nagging ache in my left side. Of course I’m a glass-half-empty type of person and the hoof beats I hear are always from zebras… but there’s a reason for that… when you fall on the slim side of a statistic on a regular basis it starts doing something to your mind.
So I started trying to convince myself that this pain I was feeling was in the pectoral muscle. I simply overstrained myself at Jazzercise with my 8 pound hand-held weights. But, I couldn’t quite convince myself that it was all muscle pain. The other likely cause was just poorly fitting bras. I’ll admit it that I haven’t bought any really expensive, nice underwear since 1989. I wore those nursing bras until the last hooks and eyes fell off and there was no more stretch in the elastic. Basically I’ve been throwing those away and wearing my sports bras on a more daily basis so, I thought to myself that’s probably what’s wrong. I’m either squeezing myself too tight for too long, or there’s not as much support and now my body is simply letting me know I can’t put off the trip to the lingerie department for much longer.
But there was something else too and a simple check of the calendar showed me I was due for my monthly visitor. I’m was guessing that this was going to be a doozy if I was getting this much pre-menstrual breast pain.
Saturday came… no period. Hmmm. At my age irregularities aren’t unusual. Even though you could usually plot a solid itinerary around my cycles I just guessed the rest of my reproductive years were just going to be unpredictable… my price to pay for having 30 years of regularity and not appreciating them. I shrugged it off, but just to be on the safe side, I tried an old pregnancy test that I had sitting around in the bathroom. The instructions were lost, I wasn’t even sure how old this thing was, but I gave it a go and it didn’t appear to have any lines, blinking lights or audible messages one way or the other. So I just forgot about it.
That night I went out with my sister and this all came up and she wanted me to go to Target to buy a pregnancy test. My past experience has been that if you need to make your period show up, simply go out and buy the $15.00 pregnancy test and it will start before you even get home!! So I did. Nothing happened Took one that night – nothing, but then I had had a liter of fluids that night… maybe I diluted the test? So I used the test on Sunday morning. Still no result.
Monday night came and I went to a 2 hour meeting with my home school group that turned into a 3 hour + meeting. This was actually a “war”meeting as some of the group has become disgrunted. There was even a professional moderator there. It had a little something for everyone, tears, accusations, humor. Everybody got to say their piece and nothing got solved really. My back was killing me by the time it was over.
The next day I took my little kids to their art class and loitered in the library to pass the time. I’ve been avoiding the Menopause books in the women’s section, but I thought no matter how much I ignore it, this is going to happen to me sooner or later… I might as well read up a bit on what to expect. Basically it said that while pregnancy is very unlikely at my age, you should still protect yourself (contraceptively speaking) as rigorously as the gold at Ft. Knox! It also said that if you miss a period it’s no big deal but you should let your doctor know because s/he might want to draw some blood and maybe do an endometrial biopsy. Uh… OK it’s no big deal but just to be safe they’ll do $500 worth of lab work and put metal objects inside your body? I put the book down.
Gee whiz I should have been born 100 years ago. My great grandmother had 10 kids with a midwife at home, never had a mammogram, never had an “endometrial biopsy” sailed through menopause and lived to 98!! I think worrying about this stuff and certainly covering the cost of all this stuff probably subtracts time from my remaining life span!
Wednesday was the feast of the Arch angels, and so Sam and I stayed up late on Tuesday making deviled eggs and Devils food cake for our celebration. I feel asleep before my head hit the pillow Tuesday night.
Wednesday I heard from some old cyber friends and they told me where some of the old gang was hanging out over at LiveJournals. It turns out one of the ladies I use to debate on a regular basis, a gal who was pretty, smart, popular, good job, great kids etc. etc. was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last year. Talk about falling on the slim side of a statistic!
So what was going on with me? I decided not to be such a whimp. I went down to the drug store and bought the expensive, household name kind of pregnancy test that cost almost double what the others were. I think that’s because they have really clear packages and instructions. Kind of a “Pregnancy testing for Dummies” kind of approach.
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