You Can Get Pregnant With One Fallopian Tube!
March 23, 2018 – Surprise! It’s a heartbeat! And another surprise…
March 23, 2018
So, I was surprised once again, we saw a heartbeat tonight. It took forever to be seen because I wasn’t checked in all the way and I had to pee SO BAD I was in tears.
I had just told her I was at peace with whatever she found and right away she said there was a heart. Lord, you do surprise me. I am in a state of shock. I told her, “No way!” But she took pictures and I saw the four chambers beating away.
Then before we left the tech said it was an egg from my right ovary – the one side with the missing tube that was taken out for my ectopic pregnancy. She said she didn’t understand how that could happen. I told her my doctor had told me (back when I lost the right tube) that the one good tube I have can catch an egg from either side (from either ovary), left or right.
And my instant thought as this conversation is happening is that this baby is a miracle. I was so fine with my three great kids, I don’t need or want any more currently. But then this fourth surprise comes along.
What a story: my first baby lost at Easter, my second baby conceived at Easter and born at Christmas, my last baby I see alive for the first time at Easter time once again. A full circle. Now a new one born at Thanksgiving. I have so much to be thankful for. All glory to God! All praises and awe. What an adventure!
Up and down this carousel ride went. Around and around, until this good news put me into shock once again. It’s when I see that heartbeat for the first time that I accept my baby is really real. I still may not feel him or her yet, but seeing that cardiac muscle thumping away involuntarily, a separate being from me, a human in the making, is miraculous. Every time.
And I will never forget that visit because it was the worst pee pain I had ever had in my life. I hate that they tell you to drink so much water and then hold it until you get to the appointment so they can look at your uterus with a full bladder. There is so much torture men will never understand about being pregnant. I think my husband saw my tears as we waited and at least felt bad for me even if he had no idea the actual pain I was in.
When I did go back with the technician, she let me pee before we even started, thank God! I could barely walk – I was holding my knees together, crookedly limping, and the tears were still wet on my cheeks when she got me. After that experience, let’s just say I didn’t take those directions so seriously and let up a little on the quantity I drank and the timing of my last pee before heading to the appointment. I was not going through that ever again!
But I digress.
What was almost even more shocking than seeing the heartbeat, was finding out that she could tell which ovary the egg had come from. I had no idea that it could be seen on an ultrasound. No one had ever volunteered that information before, during any of my three other pregnancies. I was seriously awestruck.
The gift that technician gave me by telling me, is something I will always be thankful for. After dealing with all the ambivalence, then accepting a miscarriage, and finally seeing a heartbeat, this information was like a shot of warm love all over my whole body and I knew instantly as she spoke I was holding a miracle child. What are the odds of all this happening?
I decided to look it up to see if anyone had ever put odds on this kind of conception and I can’t find any numbers. But I did find this tidbit at Northern California Fertility Center,
” Can I Get Pregnant With One Fallopian Tube?
While most women are born with two healthy and functioning fallopian tubes, it is possible to get pregnant with only one fallopian tube, assuming:
- You have at least one healthy, functioning ovary (fallopian tubes are mobile and healthy tubes sometimes migrate to pick up a mature egg from opposite ovary, (with a bit of luck).
With the additional fact that I was almost 40, my chances needed more than just a little luck according to this site. Our chances were close to nil, yet somehow it worked. Just one more example of how, try as we might, humans have no control over conception and the creation of life.
And truthfully, I don’t like even talking about luck anymore because I have seen coincidences and plans work out way too many times to believe it was just luck. There has to be a master planner orchestrating, guiding, leading the way.
And this IS what happened. I was blessed to have gone from infertility, to an ectopic pregnancy, to now beating all the odds and having a fourth child via a migrating tube as an elderly woman, haha.
I love a good story. My babies and I had a good story to tell about their timing all tied up with Easter, Christmas and now Thanksgiving. This last baby truly was the bookend and completion to my child-bearing journey. A womb that had become a tomb, then opened to give life, and the final egg from a place that shouldn’t have produced life but did.
Our marriage, our family, has this vein of redemption running through it. Things I thought were dead, I have seen God revive and bring life out of them. I had given slim odds to our dating relationship itself, maybe 1-5% chance, that we would ever get back together after our last break-up. And yet when the timing was right, when we were finally ready, we unexpectedly came back together and made a family that God could keep working in to show His power in bringing beauty from ashes.
Again, and again, and again, I have seen God show up and make us better than we deserve. He has given us gifts we certainly did not earn by our works or prayers. Each gift of a child is a reminder of His grace, and the miracle of life that no one but God can understand.
