That’s right, we are expecting a little one on August 4th! It is still a little early for me to go public, but as this blog is anonymous, I figure it’s ok to announce it at week 11, even though most friends and extended family won’t find out til week 13.
My main reason for announcing this is that I have a story to share. I know I have been MIA for a few months and I apologize. Between the exhaustion and the nausea, the holidays, and work, it’s just been a little too much for me. Things kind of reached their peak last night.
So yesterday, I had a huge scare at work. I work for an academic institution, and I was doing a routine upload of course information to an online course management system, when I realized I had made an error and it looked like the current semester’s courses were listed 2x. I quickly “rectified” this error by deleting (what I thought was) the duplicate set of courses. Crisis averted, no harm done.
Last night, I’m at home by myself. C had to work late, and I foolishly decided to check my work blackberry at about 8 p.m. I got an email from one of the users of the online course system, stating that the previous semester’s data had completely disappeared! I quickly double checked my steps from earlier in the day and realized that when I thought I was “correcting” a mistake, I was actually deleting the entire previous semester’s worth of data!!! I went into a full-fledged panic attack. Though I knew I was at home, and couldn’t take any action til the next morning, I started to hyperventilate and shake. What if I had destroyed an entire semester’s worth of work for the faculty of an entire college?!?
I called my mom, as I was home alone. She calmed me down a bit — “they must have a back up,” “I’m sure it’s fixable,” “people make mistakes,” “don’t worry til tomorrow,” etc. Finally my husband, C came home and basically said the same thing. I was able to calm down and go to bed. At 1 a.m. I woke up in a sweat, seized with panic over the situation yet again. The WORST part was that as I began to panic, I started to panic about panicking. What if my panic attack somehow harmed the fetus? I had read that anxiety was common, especially among first time moms, and that too much could be harmful. So in the middle of the night with hormones-a-raging, my anxiety took on a life of its own. Finally C woke up, and again calmed me down, and around 3:30, I finally went back to sleep. Of course in the morning things looked brighter, but by that point my lack of sleep and nausea from the anxiety had brough my morning sickness to a whole new level of hell. Finally, I ended up calling in sick to work (they do not yet know I’m expecting), and went back to sleep. Once I had slept, and eaten, I called the tech support for the online course system, and they gave me a perfectly simple fix for my problem. I hadn’t actually deleted it, it was just “marked” in their system as deleted so it was no longer displayed to the user. I simply had do a new upload to “unmark” it as deleted and everything went back to normal. I logged into work remotely, ran the upload, and all the data came back good as new. After 16 hours of heart-pounding, nauseating anxiety, my little problem was handled in less than 5 minutes.
Yep. Gotta love the hormones.