Week 5: Even the Count would be confused… <insert thunder and lightning here>

Day 33.

You may be wondering how I can list this as Week 5 and when it’s only day 33; you may be thinking, “Jesus, where did she learn to multiply?”

But I can do math, you know… I can even make it look pretty:

See? I know you’re impressed with my abilities now. Math geeks will note that what’s actually happening is this:

Enough showing off WordPress’s functionality for no good reason.

For those with lesser levels of geekiness, the explanation follows. And then more ranting about counting. Very exciting.

It’s not that I’m on crack or anything. It’s just that it’s the 5th week I’ve been pregnant. Think about it – the first day of the first week you start doing something is day 1. Which makes the first day of the second week you’re doing it day 8. So in the second week, you’ve only been doing whatever it is for a little over a week, and it’s only at the end of the second week – the start of week 3 – when you’re at 2 weeks of whatever.

So I’m 33 days along, it’s my 5th week, and I’m about 4.5 weeks pregnant. I’ll be 5 weeks pregnant on day 36. Got it? Good.

But it gets weirder than that. That’s just a counting problem. Real life is much weirder.

Doctors, books, and various places on the Internets count pregnancy differently. In addition to the stupid example I provide (you can never tell whether a picture labelled “Week 5″ is “5 weeks” or “the 5th week” – the classic A Child Is Born (which I still remember from my mom’s pregnancy with my little brother) screwed my head up with that a lot at first), there’s the problem of how many weeks along you are. For example, I’m either 4.5 or 2.5 weeks along, depending on who’s counting. Doctors generally count from the last menstrual period, which may or may not make sense depending on the woman. The presumption when doing this is that the woman in question ovulated approximately 14 days after her period; however, stress, biology, hormonal disorders, etc., mean that this isn’t always true. So one person who is 4 months pregnant make be several days more or less pregnant than another person who is 4 months pregnant on the same day.

Now, I did happen to ovulate on day 15 this time, so it’s not really a big deal to me. But I’ve only really physically been pregnant for 2.5 weeks – and some other folks count weeks of gestation rather than weeks from the last period. This makes more sense, but since most people who aren’t trying to become pregnant/don’t pay attention to their cycles don’t have any idea when they ovulated/conceived for sure, it’s a hard metric to use. (There’s no real chance to estimate gestational age in these cases until the first ultrasound.)

Which makes it really hard to tell what an article or book is talking about unless they tell you which system they’re using.

And since 2 weeks does make a big difference here – especially early on, when one week you’ve got a ball of cells and two weeks later you have a primitive heart or something – it’s really damned annoying. And since this four weeks until the first ultrasound is a really tough wait – especially if you’re low on the symptoms like I’ve been and thus sometimes wonder if you really are still pregnant (I admit to having tested multiple times after knowing for sure – go ahead, sue me) – you do spend a lot of time looking at external sources telling you what’s supposedly going on in there.

But wait – there’s more!

Due dates are even more complicated. You can look at the last period, add 14 days to that, and then add the typical 266 days of gestation on top of that. Or add 266 days to a known conception date. Or use what’s called Naegle’s Rule and count back 3 months from the last period and add 7 days to that. And there are some other weird ways I’m sure, since I’ve gotten some interesting and freaky results from various due date calculators on the Internet. So I’m due on December 9th, or December 10th, or December 11th, or some other day, none of which mean I’m actually going to deliver on any of those days (or even am likely to). Fortunately, it’s all ballpark guesses anyway, but it’s sort of annoying

But all of this pales in comparison to when trimesters begin and how long they are. Is the first trimester 12 weeks long or 13? And is it 12-13 weeks gestation, or 12-13 weeks LMP? No one seems to agree. This date, most pregnant women will tell you, is particularly important, in that miscarriage is much less likely to occur after the first trimester. Many women avoid telling anyone but their partners until after the first trimester. So that date where women can start to relax into the idea of being pregnant and start telling friends and family is a big one, and the difference between May 27th and June 17th (the earliest and latest dates I’ve seen for the beginning of the 2nd trimester in my case) is huge. So annoying. I understand every baby grows differently, and mine will likely be smaller because I live a mile above sea-level, so these times are fairly arbitrary anyway, but seriously, some standardization just for the Hell of it would make me happy right now!

The worst part of all of this is how lazy pregnancy books and websites can be with their sources. They know women are desperate for any insight into what is going on in their wombs, especially before they are showing or can feel the baby, and so there’s a lot of stuff that is pretty clearly either sourced without reference (ahem, plagiarized), or sourced without paying attention to the week-scheme used by the book. So when one site/book says my uterus should be the size of a tennis ball, the other says it’s the size of a grapefruit. When one site says the baby is an inch long, the other says it’s the size of a coffee bean. And that’s pretty damned annoying.

So if my counting confuses you – 5th week or 5 weeks – don’t sweat it. It could be much worse. At least I can count. (!!!)