By Natasha Julius

On September 17, 2014, I went for a routine 8-week prenatal check-up. It was the only routine thing I would do for more than two months.
During this time, I e-mailed a small group of people. Some were aware of the pregnancy, some had plans with me that would need to be broken, and still others simply asked after my health on the wrong day. This is the last of 11 such messages. They have been edited to remove identifying information and inside references, but otherwise remain largely unchanged.
November 25, 2014
Dear Friends,
The decrease of hormones in the blood tends to follow a logarithmic progression, meaning that as time passes and the level approaches zero, the actual amount of reduction slows. My quantitative hCG levels over the past few weeks have moved from 78 to 26 to 13 to 7, so I went into Friday’s blood draw with closely guarded optimism that it might be my last. The results came in yesterday: 4.8. It is, by the slimmest margin, below the threshold for a negative pregnancy test. It is enough. By every definition, my pregnancy is now over.

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Posted on February 4, 2015

By Natasha Julius

On September 17, 2014, I went for a routine 8-week prenatal check-up. It was the only routine thing I would do for more than two months.
During this time, I e-mailed a small group of people. Some were aware of the pregnancy, some had plans with me that would need to be broken, and still others simply asked after my health on the wrong day. This is the 10th of 11 such messages. They have been edited to remove identifying information and inside references, but otherwise remain largely unchanged.
November 16, 2014
Dear Friends,
Some of you know about this already, but back in August, just as I was beginning to wonder if I might be pregnant, my cat died. She’d been sick most of the summer and I’d been spending my free time nursing her; sticking drops in her ears, feeding her special food, giving her shots of Pedialyte in one of those baby syringes used to dose kids’ ibuprofen. She rallied for a while and we decided to take a little weekend getaway. When we returned, there was Steve the cat, dead on the floor by our back deck.
It was the first time my daughter had seen me cry. She earnestly asked me, with more than a little worry in her eyes, “Mommy, what’s wrong with your face?”

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Posted on February 3, 2015

By Natasha Julius

On September 17, 2014, I went for a routine 8-week prenatal check-up. It was the only routine thing I would do for more than two months.
During this time, I e-mailed a small group of people. Some were aware of the pregnancy, some had plans with me that would need to be broken, and still others simply asked after my health on the wrong day. This is the ninth of 11 such messages. They have been edited to remove identifying information and inside references, but otherwise remain largely unchanged.
November 12, 2014
Dear Friends,
My last blood draw registered a quantitative hCG level of 13.9, which is considered “indeterminate” for a pregnancy diagnosis. As I noted last week, less than 5 is considered a negative result. I’ve been told, of course, that I’ll have to keep getting tested “down to zero.” I’ve also been told I’ll have to test until “the levels are negative,” which made me wonder if there was some magical way to have less than no hCG in my bloodstream, like, I’m so un-pregnant I could actually leach hormones out of my pregnant friends. Anyway, having come so very close to not being chemically pregnant anymore I finally felt brave enough to request a clarification.

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Posted on February 2, 2015