It's not a tumor!

There I was. Laying spread eagle on the exam table with a stranger giving me a death warrant. Or so I thought. Boy, (or should I say girl) was I wrong. Honestly, I just wanted Joel and my Mommy to magically appear and tell me everything was going to be OK. All of those terrible thoughts that had been racing through my mind came spilling out of me like the water over Niagara Falls. My doctor, bless her soul, seemed to switch from the role of a doctor to a mother almost instantly. She took my legs out of the stirrups, helped me sit up and put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and told me to simply, breathe.

OK, if you say so. I breathed. I managed to calm myself down enough to stop sobbing and we continued. I'm sure I was acting as if I was going to die on the table that very second. At that moment, the nurse comes back with the results of the pregnancy test I'd taken at the beginning of the appointment. Negative. Duh. I barely gave that any thought because I obviously knew I wasn't pregnant and I had MUCH bigger problems as of now. My doctor asks the nurse to wheel in the ultrasound machine so we can "see whats going on with this thing." Thing. She called it a thing. For some reason that made me laugh. I lay back down, she squirts the freezing cold jelly onto my skin and starts exploring my abdomen with the wand. I couldn't bring myself to look at the screen because that would make everything real. All the sudden I hear a heartbeat, racing. It was so fast. I immediately think its my own heartbeat that we are hearing because I am obviously in a state of panic.

"OH MY GOD!" she exclaims. Well, that's not good. You never want to hear a doctor say those three words. I'm convinced that at any moment the life will drain out of me and I will die right then and there. "Your mass has a heartbeat!". It was almost as if I hadn't processed the actual words she'd said. I was only focused on how happy she sounded and I couldn't comprehend why she was so happy that I was basically dying.

I yelled, "WAIT, WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

She repeated herself. "Your mass has a heartbeat! You're pregnant!". Liar. Liarpants. She's totally lying. What kind if sick joke is she trying to play? The nurse literally just told us both I was definitely NOT pregnant. I finally bring myself to look at the screen on the ultrasound.

"Change the channel, that is NOT my uterus" I say as if I was watching some sort of TV show. She bursts out laughing. She does her best to measure the "baby" that has secretly taken up shop inside my uterus and determines I'm somewhere between 34 and 35 weeks. That means this "baby" is viable outside the womb. Full Term. Its a person. I could deliver at any moment.

This has to all be a dream and I'm going to wake up soon, right? Obviously not. This is real life and I'm living it. The remainder of that appointment is a total blur. So. Much. Information. I guess I'm not leaving this appointment with a refill of my birth control anymore. The only information I did retain is that I need to return weekly until my delivery and get a sonogram and blood work done ASAP. I left that appointment with a million questions I hadn't thought to ask, a pile of pamphlets on pregnancy, labor and delivery, lab slips and referrals.

Clearly, I can't call my boyfriend of less than a year and tell him this life altering news over the phone. So, I call my Mommy. As calm as possible I tell her she needs to get in the car right now and come pick me up. She's my Mommy. She can hear it in my voice that something is very wrong. I was supposed to take an Uber back to our shared workplace after my "routine" appointment. She probably asked me "whats wrong" ten times over the phone but there was no way in hell I was telling her like that. I need to see her face, and more importantly, I needed a damn hug, I needed my Mommy.

From what I'm told, she literally jumped up from her desk and runs out of the office into her car and at warp speed comes to my rescue. Seriously, she must have made that 25 minute drive in 15 flat. You see, a couple years prior I'd tested positive for the BRCA gene, the gene that gives you a predisposition for ovarian cancer and breast cancer. So my poor Mom was thinking that I was dying much like I thought when I was told about my "mass" turned baby.

That was the longest 15 minutes of my life. I'd never felt so alone and scared. I was the only person that knew about my baby. The baby that I'd unknowingly carried for nearly 8 months. I was terrified I'd broken the baby. Read: Coors Light. I loved me some Coors Light. At that moment I'd regretted every single Coors Light I'd ever consumed more than I did the day I woke up with my first hangover. There I sat on the steps, tears streaming down my face, waiting for my ride, waiting for my Mommy to save me. She pulls up, flashers on, doesn't even wait for me to grab the door handle, rolls down the window and yells at me again asking "whats wrong!?".

I get in the car. I look at her, sobbing. I can't stop. I have never seen my mother look so concerned in her entire life. "IS IT CANCER?" she asks.

"No Mom, IT'S WORSE! I'm pregnant!" I reply.

A look of relief washes over her face and she LAUGHS.
Hysterically.
The entire 25 minute drive home.

Me. August 3, 2017. In labor at the Hospital