The discovery was entirely accidental. I’d taken Hal in on Monday for hairball issues and his ‘senior’ cat follow-up. He’s 10 now, and I’ve been telling myself that’s middle age, no matter what the vet says. Anyway, it was accidental. Happenstance. They happened to have a difficult time getting a urine sample, so they happened to use an ultrasound to guide the procedure and the clinic’s feline internal medicine specialist just happened to be walking through the room when they did.

“Back up,” she said. “Right there in the intestines.”

We came in with hairballs and left with lymphoma — or very likely lymphoma. I declined the through-and-through biopsy for 100% confirmation. It would have required him to be put under and have pieces of his intestines cut out, a trauma that neither of us needed. And for what? I would not be putting him through chemotherapy. He wouldn’t understand and the time it would buy would only be for me and my guilt. Although in the last several days I’ve agonized over that decision plenty.

Without the biopsy, there’s no real prognosis. No window of time. Though my research has turned up a sorry statistic that cats treated on prednisone alone (the route we’ve taken, to make him comfortable) live an average of 45-60 days, I tell myself we have longer; he doesn’t act sick.

Hal and I met when he was five months old in the front window of the SPCA on the Upper East Side. When I had nobody, I had him. Sometimes I am so heartsick, I think I might retch because the hurt just runs so deep. Forty-five to sixty days. Charlie is due in 55 days. You see why I pretend it’s not true. Inaccurate. A stat I can stubborn my way out of, like I usually do. Dying kittens? Pfft! We can beat that. We’ll stay up all night! For days! But cancer? Cancer sees me coming and is not at all impressed with my tenacity. Being awake, being at work feels like a punishment, when all I want to do is curl up with him on the couch and maybe watch some Pretty Little Liars reruns and pretend that this is just not happening.

Well, this is long overdue. But I assume you’ll forgive a lady who is working full time and pregnant full time for having very little extra energy to expend. Just rolling over in bed takes so much damn work these days! See also: being alive. If not all pregnant women start to resent life in general by the end of the process, don’t let on. I’m going to assume this semi-constant state of hate is normal.

Not that there isn’t also a lot to love. It’s just… mama’s tired and sometimes forgets this is a temporary state.

By way of guppy updates, Charlie is a very wiggly young man with a special affinity for the right side of my rib cage. If you see me sitting very still, eyes closed, breathing slowly and deliberately, all is well, my son is just trying to break free via my skeleton. I worry much less about his… viability these days. Mostly because I don’t have to wonder if he’s okay in there. He keeps in touch. Often with my bladder.

It is endlessly delightful (in a Tremors sort of way) to watch him squirm around in there, turning the taught surface of my belly into a map of elbows and knees. Sometimes my coworker Kelsey and I watch the show and make wide eyes at each other like, “This is so weird.” Weird and awesome.

Up there with heartburn, one of the least lovely things about pregnancy are the people, mostly other mothers,who say horrid shit to you. Which is something I’ve still not gotten at all accustomed to. I’ve had people point out how swollen my feet are (because I’m not self conscious enough as it is), compare their current state of weight gain/bloat with my pregnant body (flattering), and declare that the genetic testing we had done was pointless because their friend had the same results and their baby came out with {insert horrible malady here}. Some women just like to tell you how traumatic their labor was, as though you have some say in how this kid eventually makes his way to the outside world. I’ve even been told that bouncing Charlie around in my womb to persuade him out of my rib cage area will adversely affect the shape of his head. Um, yeah, and if that doesn’t, THE BIRTH CANAL WILL FINISH THE JOB.

The heartburn I got a prescription for, but the comments, man, there does not seem to be anything preventative I can do short of declaring, “Seriously, unless you’re going to tell me how radiant I look, do not speak.”

Back in the Things Which are Awesome category, people have also been extraordinarily kind. The owner of a mom n’ pop coffee shop in San Francisco fixed a broken toilet so I wouldn’t have to walk two block to the park to find a restroom. People carry things and hold doors and strangers smile for no other reason than the world loves babies and also, they quite possibly know how totally overwhelmed and awkward I feel.

And Charlie’s nursery. I love going in there. Sometimes I sit in the glider and read and yell at the cat to stop tearing at the rug all while picturing how many times Charlie will pee or puke on me in this very room. Ah, babies.

People also give you the sweetest, softest things for your baby. Which brings me to making some long overdue additions to the Fairy Godmother list:

Teak sent some deliciously soft swaddlers and an organic stuffed bunny and this note that made me a little teary. RzDrms sent a crazy generous package full of clothes and baby mittens and a thermometer that scans the forehead (so neat!). Fellow catlady Barbara E. sent this OMG outfit involving a hoodie with bunny ears. Seriously, I die. And Melanie sent the gift of Sandra Boynton and if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading those out loud to a young ‘un, get on that. Pure silliness.

I hope I have not missed anyone. I am so genuinely touched by the kindness and generosity.

Sixty-three days to go. Please let Charlie treasure punctuality, like his mother does. And also books. And animals. And gender/marriage equality. But I’ll take a love of punctuality to start.

Just a quick note to acknowledge the baby gifts that have arrived – bottles from Sarah S. and a baby bath tub, wash cloths, towel and sleepers from Jennifer. Thank you – you guys are just so awesome! I feel like I’m going to spend a great deal of time telling Charlie about his Internet Aunts one day. You didn’t have to bathe in the roasting pan because of a very nice lady who lives far, far away who didn’t even know you. It will be like his own personal fairy tale.

We were standing in the bathroom the other night, flossing or what have you, when the Dork Lord took a long look at my belly.

“There’s an actual baby in there. It’s going to be born and then we have to take care of it.”

“That’s sorta how this works,  yes.”

“I can barely take care of myself!”

I snickered. “Well, that’s why I’m here, yeah?”

It wasn’t the first minor freak out either of us has had. It’s sure not to be the last. We’re half-way through this pregnancy and it still doesn’t register all that often that it’s real. Our little guppy is a manchild. We’ve known this for weeks and weeks thanks to a relatively new blood test that identifies the baby’s genetic information floating around in my genetic information and BAM! reveals possible chromosomal abnormalities and the baby’s sex. Our 18-week check up was a while back (the Penis Unveiling, the Dork Lord calls it) and everything seems to be just as it should. Ten fingers, ten toes, four heart chambers and discernible stubbornness.

His name is Charlie. You can pretty much call him anything you want as long as that anything you want is not ‘Chuck.’

We’re at the point where I can sense the motion of him wiggling around in there quite a bit, though individual kicks and karate chops are just starting to catch my attention. It’s all very science fiction-y and very distracting. Then sometimes I don’t feel him and that’s even more distracting. So this weekend, I ordered one of those hand-held Doppler jobbies so I could listen to Charlie’s heartbeat at will. It arrived yesterday and is now my favorite battery operated device. It took a while, digging around on my belly, to find that heartbeat, but once I did, it was like getting a report card. A plus, plus, plus!

A few weeks ago, I had my very first full blown, I’m pregnant so I can’t take my meds migraine. It was 26 hours of unmitigated torture. I figure Charlie owes me. He’ll be pretty new to the job for the first Mother’s Day, so I’m gonna give him a year to figure out how best to say Thank You for Not Poisoning Me. I do love sapphires.

Thank you for all the well-wishing! We are so thrilled and terrified. But mostly thrilled.

… and then I got pregnant.

To say I was surprised would not be entirely accurate. In fact (when I tell people this, they immediately get this look on their faces that says, “Does not compute.”), for the first two days that I knew, I couldn’t get out of bed I was so depressed. My head was so full of information about my broken ovaries and inadequate eggs that I was absolutely sure I was going to lose it. It’s the ultimate inferiority complex. The infertility inferiority complex.

Fourth of July weekend, I slept on and off and bargained with the Universe as I peed on stick after stick. “Please let me keep it. Please let me keep it.”

That I’m married to an optimist eventually provided a very necessary counterpart to my world-class worry. Though, it wasn’t really until this week’s ultrasound that I started feeling like this was the real thing. I’d even started showing the week before. Still not real. But something about watching the little guppy bounce around in there convinced me that whatever odds were stacked against us, we really did beat ‘em.

I am forever grateful for all the messages of encouragement and all the hearts and thoughts and prayers that went out for us. I don’t know why we go so lucky – but I am so grateful we did.

My feelings on abortion are complicated. My feelings on choice and access to care are not. Sent this morning via United States Mail:

Dear Senator Davis,

I often have a feeling of despair in regard to the political process, the lack of a real voice many of us have in it, and the increasing fervor to remove rational discourse from it. I do not feel that way today. Thank you for what you did last night. Thank you for standing up for us – both literally and philosophically – and for giving us a reason to hope.

Most sincerely,

Heather L. Hunter

If one day we are actually successful at spawning (I remain at the There’s Still Hope stage of this endeavor for now), I will likely begin every telling of that child’s birth story with, “I peed in a cup eighteen thousand times to get you.”

A brief note: If you were happy to see words on this page again, you’ll be less happy to discover that, for the foreseeable future, they’re likely be about bodily fluids and disappointment. But hey, if you stuck with me through douche-bags and disappointment phase, this won’t be nearly so head/desk. So there’s that!

And, back to peeing in a cup. Over the last handful of months, I have learned a number of things. Among them:

1. Fertility treatments are very expensive.
2. None of them are covered by insurance.

These things being true, my doctor and I talked about not talking about fertility treatments for a while. The Dork Lord and I are actually pretty lucky that we didn’t try and try the old fashioned way only to realize a year or two down the road that my parts were defective. Lucky, because the up and down of the monthly Did it Take? is really emotionally taxing. I paid that tax a handful of times before pain became a factor, the doctors got crackin’, and we had our answer even before we’d even asked the question.

Where do babies come from?

Not from you. Your ovaries don’t work.

That we can’t afford to pursue something more aggressive until next year, well, right now it’s really only taxing on my patience. It’s almost a relief compared to the pain of wondering. Almost. In the meantime, we’re keeping at the old fashioned approach – after all, what have we got to lose?  The Dork Lord’s getting laid a whole lot, so he can’t complain. But he’s not the one peeing in a cup twice a day hoping that a little strip of paper will reveal that, contrary to all indications and doctorly predictions, your ovary came back from the dead and RELEASE THE HOUNDS! HERE COMES AN EGG!

Like I said, I’m still hoping, in a detached sort of way. And peeing. Always peeing.

I suppose it was to be expected.  I mean, I did and I didn’t… expect it. If anything, I thought my age might be a complication. If anything. The women in my family line seem to get themselves in the family way just by thinking about it. Honeymoon babies, whoops babies, accidents and surprises (never mistakes. No, never).  A sister with an eating disorder and no period to speak of? Babies! Just like that! And because my own inner lady workings always seemed to work with boring predictability, I took it for granted that I would do the same.

So much for granted, in fact, that during our house renovations this spring, we converted the guest room into a nursery. The door to that room stays closed. I don’t need to see the giraffe wall sconces to know that they are there, dimmed to off, while we make very vague plans about what to do next. While I silently contemplate how many of those ‘next steps’ we’ll take before I’ve had enough.

The Dork Lord wants a kid more than he does a new car, he says. Meaning, whatever it takes financially, is what it takes. In for a penny, in for a pound! What he doesn’t fully understand is that I may not be willing to go to those lengths. To be excavated and augmented for the off-est of off chances it will take. I am not one of those women who will suffer infertility for years and years because I will stop hoping long before that. Because my insides are not made of rainbows and unicorns and optimism. And I am not going to arrive at rainbows and unicorns after I cycle through the requisite stages of grief. I know me better than that.

The diagnosis itself came from a nurse – not even my doctor – over the phone one afternoon while I was at work. The doctor won’t answer when I call back with questions about my condition, either; I’ve landed on a list of the childless and desperate and those calls get triaged. Leave a message. Someone will call you back. That someone will probably be a nurse so you’d better not expect to speak with the person who’s been forearm-deep in your lady parts.

Having thanked the nurse (for what now, I wonder), I sat there for a minute, blinking at the gray wall of my cubicle before sending a text to my husband, who called back immediately, wanting to talk about it. I did not want to; I didn’t answer.

This is, actually, as close as I have come to talking about it. I will avoid discussing the actual diagnosis, though, so do not ask about it. Because it feels so personal – and so personally devastating. If you know me at all, you understand why we won’t talk about it. Why it’s such sacred territory we just won’t go there. One of the first reactions to the news was from my sister who asked, “Are you going to adopt then?”  I’d been officially barren for all of ten minutes and already I knew everything I needed to know about my predicament:  Keep it to yourself. Because no one will know what to say. Even those who should know better.

I know I should, but I take no comfort in the shared experience of infertility – the message boards and support groups of other women who’ve gone down this same road. I spent only a few minutes on one of those message boards and felt nothing but disdain at the weight of this unbearable disappointment being condensed into pithy acronyms by women whose hopes were made and dashed by the indeterminate differences in the firmness of their cervices or the soreness of their boobs. I have nothing to say to women whose periods they still call Aunt Flo or refer to sex as a Baby Dance. Grow the fuck up.

“You’re all fucking idiots,” I whisper back at my iPad and switch over to the news (also replete with idiocy) before landing an episode of Veep. There’s an odd sort of comfort in foul language.

The disdain is directed inwardly, too, and so much more malicious. I’ve been filled, until there is no space left for much else, with a self-loathing that words cannot form an adequate description of.  It’s hate, raw and ugly. And no one can understand it. Not my husband. Not my sisters (two of whom are pregnant, incidentally). And the silence makes the hate run even deeper and colder. You have to hide it, you know. There’s not really room in the world for people who feel so much ugliness.

Some days, though, there’s an odd sort of perkiness to this new reality of mine. I think about all the vacations we can take without a bit of guilt.  About all the things I can have and the temper tantrums I won’t have to endure. But that’s false and fleeting. Mostly what I am is numb.

If you sent in a donation to help with the sick kittens a couple months ago and you did not get a thank you note – I’m sorry! I sent them! Perhaps without stamps on them (or something similarly stupid), because some people aren’t getting thank you notes and they haven’t come back to me, so it’s the only thing I can think happened. Plus, it’s totally something I would do when dumb from sleep deprivation.

Please don’t think I forgot you or I was being rude. I’m going to send out a new batch this weekend (I’ve already put stamps on the envelopes!) and make it right.

Meet Dick and Jane.

See Jane sleep. Sleep, Jane, sleep.

Dick and Jane are my tenth and eleventh rescues since moving into our house last May. Each time I say, “I’m done! NO MORE KITTENS!” – when my heart feels worn out and my shoulders ache with the tension of worrying over the well-being of these tiny creatures, over whether I’m doing it right – the neighborhood delivers another wayfaring furkid. Surprise! The feral population on our street alone is a tremendous and heartbreaking problem. An epidemic. And sometimes, I feel so overwhelmed by this fierce personal responsibility I feel to each and every abandoned, mistreated, deserving animal. And that’s why “NO MORE KITTENS!” turned into “OKAY, JUST THESE TWO KITTENS.” Because someone has to do the right thing.

Dick and Jane came running down the sidewalk on Sunday night. I was on the front lawn, waving to a neighbor when they came sprinting, darting into the road.  Their story is particularly sad. Two weeks ago, at ten weeks old, they were thrown out of a neighbor’s house to fend for themselves – because one of them was having problems with the litter box. I have since come to realize that he is terrified of it. My mind reels with images of possible abuses. What’s more, they hadn’t eaten in days. The abandoner didn’t want to leave food on the front porch, “because [she] didn’t want all the other stray cats to eat it.”

I know all this BECAUSE SHE TOLD ME.

Nonchalantly. Like animal abuse and abandonment is totally understandable.

It’s sickening.

So, now they’ve been to the vet, gotten their first vaccinations, tested negative for diseases and parasites, and our litterbox-shy friend is improving drastically in that area. The most devastating part of this just might be how much they simply want to be loved. They can be in the middle of the craziest kitten romp (pounce! tumble! chase!), but the minute I sit down, they climb into my lap and purr themselves to sleep.

Please share this post with anyone you think may be able to open their home to Dick and Jane.

These beauties come in a matching set (I am most firmly set against separating them, considering the trauma they have gone through) and come in a fashionable silvery gray – a complement to even the most sophisticated fall wardrobe!

They really are beautiful, aren’t they?