It's sad, but true: I am addicted to peeing on a stick. Each month, like clockwork, five days before my expected period, I fetch the rectangular pink box hidden beneath the toilet paper in my bathroom closet. I'm sure that I'm pregnant. And each time the result is the same — negative. Except for the time I mistakenly became ecstatic to see two pink lines, only to learn two days later that it was just a chemical pregnancy (a very early miscarriage).
It all started last year when I needed surgery to remove an ectopic pregnancy, which also resulted in the loss of my left fallopian tube. It was quite a blow for me both physically and emotionally. At thirty-eight, I knew that I didn't have many more years to have a baby naturally and knew that it would now be even more difficult to become pregnant. But I didn't let the odds stop me. My husband and I waited three months after surgery, as my obstetrician advised, and then started trying again to conceive.The first month of trying, a mere two and a half weeks into my menstrual cycle and just days after ovulation, I was absolutely convinced I was pregnant. I had all the symptoms — sore, enlarged breasts, frequent trips to the bathroom, and morning nausea. I've been pregnant twice before, so I'm more than familiar with the symptoms. Five days prior to my expected period, I began to take home pregnancy tests. The first one was negative. I waited another two days. Still negative. I couldn't imagine what the problem could be. How could I not be pregnant?
The tests were negative (all seven of them!) because I was not, in fact, pregnant. After being five days late, my period finally arrived. I was disappointed, of course, but mostly, I was in shock. I went online to research such a thing, an imaginary pregnancy, and found that it is actually a rare condition called pseudocyesis — a condition that I've endured every month in varying degrees for the past year.
Of course, pseudocyesis is my own self-diagnosis. I haven't actually addressed the situation with my doctor, because on some level, I refuse to admit my obsessive behavior. Is it possible that I could really have such a rare condition that occurs in just one to six of every 22,000 births in the United States? Sure, I have almost all the symptoms, which mimic those of early pregnancy, but I'm not an extreme case. I don't have a distended belly or experience labor pains as do some women who suffer from this condition. I'm not that crazy.
