Introduction

15 May

I was leaving tomorrow. Today I was still struggling to finish packing that I'd started on Sunday. It wasn't going very well. I was just too tired to do much of anything. Oh, I was sleeping, but it wasn't restful because I was waking up in a total state of lethargy. I'd been feeling down in the dumps physically for about a month now. Thom had insisted I see a doctor. I had insisted it would pass. I had my Promethazine for the almost daily nausea I was experiencing, but it didn't help with the occasional vomiting. That had settled down to only once or twice a week the past two weeks. The generic Phenergan was really to help me sleep and was on refills as long as I needed them. I'd had it for nearly two years now because of my oft times odd schedule and having to recover from jet lag and sleep schedules so much. The main reason a doctor prescribed it, though, was for nausea. I knew this and was using it for that now and the one side effect was, naturally, that it caused drowsiness. It was an endless cycle of tired. Between that and feeling so under the weather, having other symptoms, I could barely think, let alone remember what I had already packed and what still needed to be.

Other symptoms? I wasn't able to eat much. Things were just not appealing to me, or turned my stomach. I'd lost weight, three or four pounds, but when I was able to eat I was like a house on fire. I consumed everything in sight and then some. So I'd actually now gained back those four pounds, plus several more for good measure. I couldn't drink cokes, they made me gag and smoking, well, that had stopped abruptly, hadn't it? I could no longer stand the smoke, let alone the aroma of tobacco. That was a good thing, wasn't it?

I sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf that I was attempting to polish for the third time in less than ten days. It didn't need it. Nothing in the house needed cleaning. I'd done my spring cleaning to the point of overkill. I reasoned I wanted the house to look nice and clean while I was away. I was only going for ten days and I'd never taken this much care in doing so before; before any of my business, or pleasure, trips. So there I sat, falling asleep on my hand and skimming my fingers across the meticulously clean books on the bottom shelf. Yearbooks mostly. Thom's, mine, his Army boot camp book, Who's Who from when Adele was in High School, the My Family Registry that I'd bought and filled in when Jason was a toddler and.... their baby books.

I grabbed Jason's on a whim and opened it, flipping nonchalantly through it's yellowing pages until I got to where I'd made notations I had found out I was pregnant again. Again? It was for Adele. I was... nauseous, lethargic, had hurling issues... I lost weight first before putting on the pounds. Then it hit me.

"Oh Fuck!"

Just as quickly I dismissed it. I couldn't be. I had been irregular the past year after years of "every twenty-eight days like clockwork." Then I pressed my hands to my head to think back. Yes, I'd become irregular. Not that I was way old, but it was the onset of menopause per my ObGyn. I had gone from clockwork to every five to seven weeks and only short term, not the seven days it had always been. Then I got even more panicked when I realized it had been four weeks, easy, before Malaysia and now? Now it had been, at the very least... I jumped up, went to the kitchen, snatched the calendar off the wall and counted. Almost fourteen weeks!! I slumped and slid down the dishwasher to the floor. Surely not. There had to be some other reason for how I was feeling, didn't there?

I was too old for this nonsense and so gullible in my thinking. Fine, if it continued I could make an appointment to my doctors when I got back. And what of that? What if I was? Christ, the whole staff knew Thom had a vasectomy two months after Adele was born. How would I explain that one to them, to Thom? He had to know we didn't use anything, Colin and I. I saw no need. As I said, I was beyond that. Maybe I'd been foolish to think so.

I peered around the doorway to the kitchen and saw my luggage strewn everywhere, waiting to be zipped up and zipped off to jolly old England. Somehow I got the feeling this trip was going to be anything but.