Life: a thing you never expect

After my cancer treatments, I couldn’t have periods naturally. I started on hormone shortly after I recovered, and took it for a few months. With the artificial boost, I was able to have periods. Transitioning on and off the hormone gave me horrible mood swings, and I didn’t like having to pay $10 a month or whatever it was to get the pills. So I finally just decided not to take them. I didn’t go back to the GYN who’d prescribed them, either; not because he wasn’t good, but because I thought I knew everything I needed to know already. He’d performed a blood test, twice, that showed that my brain was sending too many signals to my ovaries. This told him that my ovaries weren’t functioning properly–they weren’t responding to the brain by releasing the proper hormones. He said that he’d never seen someone with that result get pregnant.

For the past five years, I’ve been trying to deal with that prognosis. I’ve failed, pretty much; if anything, it’s been even worse lately. Seeing mothers and their children has filled me with such bitter longing that I’ve had to force myself not to cry.

And then, on Sunday night, I started having a period.

It went strong, very strong, just like a normal period. The cramping and moodiness was the same as I remember. It seems as of this morning to have died down…meaning the length was pretty much normal, too.

I don’t know what this means, and for these four and a half days I have struggled to hold back my joy. Everyone except Sean seems to assume upon hearing this that I can have children. Sean is more skeptical; he doesn’t understand why I would suddenly have a period out of the blue…and why it would happen now, after so much time.

He doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. I don’t want me to get my hopes up either. I think it has already happened, though, subconsciously. I think that my natural state of being has been to not give up hope. Somewhere inside, I always felt there was a chance, even as my conscious mind tried to stay logical. It was probably those two dueling sides that kept tearing me apart emotionally.

I’m going to try to stay as neutral as I can until my doctor’s appointment next Wednesday. If we run the same test as I had before, that should tell us something. Either things are the same as they were, or they’ve changed somehow. Maybe there’s another test they can do, too; I don’t know.

Right now I am just a prickly ball of barely-contained emotions.

I don’t want congratulations at this point…you’re free to give them anyway if you wish, but I’d rather not celebrate anything until I know for sure. That, and just letting the whole thing sink in, is why I haven’t written anything about it until now.