Crash

Monday was not a good day. I should have known the moment I woke up. In fact, i did toy with the idea of staying home. I was sore and sunburned from our yard sale on Sunday, and even more tired than I usually am on a Monday morning. Sign #1.

But I dragged myself out of bed, showered, and geared up for my 1.5-hour commute to the office, an 8-hour workday, and another 1.5-hour commute home. When I let Ollie out for his morning constitutional, I noticed he was fixated on something on the ground. I went to investigate only to find 5 naked little baby birds, along with one egg, scattered about the base of our birdhouse. Very sad. Poor little shavers. Who knows what happened to them - there was no sign of trauma. But it was definitely Sign #2 for me.

Sign #3 was the ridiculous traffic. Having left home at the much-later-than-usual time of 8:00, I thought perhaps I'd miss a good deal of morning rush hour traffic. I was wrong. It was taking forever. At 9:00 I was pulling off the highway off-ramp, and when I finally made it to the top of the off-ramp, the driver in front of me started, then stopped. Unfortunately, I had also started. And when I stopped, I was cheek-to-cheek with her rear bumper. Sigh.

Fortunately, the lady I hit was nice about it. But I was a mess. Couldn't think straight, couldn't function properly. Barely knew my own name well enough to give it to her. But finally, we finished the information exchange and I headed back to my car for the last half-hour of my ride to work. I was in tears before I even closed the door. I cried like a little girl the entire way to work. Not sniffles, not occasional sobs. Outright inconsolable weeping, torrential downpours of tears. It wasn't just that I had hit the girl and done actual damage to both our cars. It was that I've gone nearly 20 years of driving with only one other (very small) fender bender where my insurance company let me off clean, and one speeding ticket (for a mere $5 - those were the golden years in Montana, my friends). I've been pulled over two other times, but got away with written warnings. So this little fender bender was something of a legitimate accident that was my fault. Dammit - such a clean record for so long. Combine this despair with pregnancy hormones... bad news.

When I got to the parking garage, I decided it was time to call M and tell him what had happened. True to form, he was lovely about it. So long as I was OK and the Weeble was OK, then it was no big thing. We'd deal with the increase to my auto insurance premium, and we'd be just fine. This made me feel better. And when my manager showed up in the garage looking for me (after I'd left him a voice mail that indicated I'd been in a car accident, but failed to mention that I was OK) to make sure I was, in fact, all in one piece, made me feel even better.

I lost all mental and emotional stability progress I made in the first hour at my desk, however, when I called my OB's office and they told me they wanted to see me. This should have made me feel better, but it just made me nervous. If I didn't go to the doctor, nothing could possibly be wrong with Weeble. But if I did go... there was the possibility they'd find something they didn't like. I didn't want them to find any such thing. I like denial. Still, I went in. I was immediately hooked up for a "non-stress test," which just involved two monitors that were belted around my middle - one to listen to Weeble's heartbeat, and one to hear what was going on in her domain. I was hooked up for nearly an hour and-a-half while they waited for her to do what they wanted her to do: namely, maintain a baseline HR for a bit, then shoot up 10-15 BPM for a minute, and go back down. Little bugger is already stubborn, which is why it took so long.

Everything is fine, of course. My mental state has improved significantly. Weeble checked out normally. And my car, while a little worse for the wear, is still perfectly serviceable. Still, from now on, I'll be watching the signs and actually heeding them.