False Positives: Lockdown pregnancy scares.

On one of the sunnier lockdown days, I took myself out for a run to relieve some stress and tension. This was back in the day when we were only allowed out once and you had to really make it count. I came back feeling nicely distant from the world and as I was doing my stretches I opened the app I love to hate: Tik Tok. Full of people learning dances with their dads, an alarming number of videos of people listing what they have to eat in a day and the occasional video of someone’s pet. I hate it. I really do. But every day I would open the door to see how insane everyone was also going. Turns out pretty insane. There’s a trend on Tik Tok where people hold their hands up and say, “put a finger down if you’ve ever” and tell a strange story about something that happened to them once. I watched one of these videos where a girl describes getting her period, then days later, starts bleeding so much that she is taken to the hospital. It turns out, she had been pregnant for the last 9 months and was a part of the tiny minority of women that can be pregnant without any signs. 

 

Now, any other time or any other normal person, would think “wow, that’s awful, I really hope that would never happen to me” and get on with their day. But during super COVID Sundays that doesn’t happen. Suddenly I was consumed with an enormous and overwhelming fear that this awful story was happening to me right now. Despite not having sex in what, 8, 9 weeks? And having had the Mirena Coil for the past year, I suddenly believed I was in fact pregnant with no signs. I immediately ordered two pregnancy tests online and spent the rest of the day spiralling into a hole thinking my life was over, it would be too late for a possible abortion and then I’d have to have a child. There was no way I could do a (SPOILER) Peggy-from-Mad-Men and give the baby away post-birth. I ate an enormous amount of pasta, listened to Boris Johnson address the country and tried to calm down until the test arrived. I took the test. It was negative. But still, I couldn’t rest. 

 

My mind kept thinking about the test. It was something I could cling onto, something I could worry about and then solve. Something that I could put an end to and have some small control over. But the result didn’t seem to give me the satisfaction that I needed, it felt like it was still unsolved. Once the test was done I just kept staring at if it would go “Ha! Fooled you, you’re pregnant and it’s your fault.” It didn’t, because that’s not what inanimate objects do. I realised that it wasn’t the pregnancy test that I wanted an answer to. I wanted knowledge and control over what was happening right now, what was going to happen in the future. Something that none of us have had since the beginning of the pandemic. The test wasn’t solving the fears everyone currently faces every day; the fear and reality that we have absolutely no control over what’s currently going on or any knowledge of what could happen to ourselves and our loved ones in the future. What it really is, is the fact that none of us can have any certainty in our lives anymore. We can’t trust the information that’s right in front of us. We are stressed and worried about so many things caused by the storm of COVID-19, a Tory government and the climate crisis. 

 

Currently everything is so uncertain and we can’t even put our trust in the government to protect us. Because if it wasn’t apparent over the last 10 years of austerity, it’s clear now that they value the wealth of the richest, the country and those in the party, over the lives of the people. We are constantly waiting for something truly awful to happen and to lots of people it already has. The foundations of what we thought we knew and trusted have shifted beneath us, revealing the true jaws of the Tory party. So, no wonder we’re going mad and feeling extremely stressed. “We’re beating the virus”, “we’ve avoided a catastrophe.” These are false positives, they aren’t true. We’re not and we haven’t. We’re still in the midst of a pandemic, have entered one of the greatest recessions we will ever see and have the highest death rate in Europe. And yet these horrific facts have been twisted and turned into positives by our leaders. They’re playing their favourite trick card of never taking responsibility, shifting blame to the public and trying to dress up cold facts as rays of sunlight breaking the storm. 

 

My point here is that, everyone is feeling this anxiety and stress. Just because we have emerged from the very strict lockdown, doesn’t mean it’s that much easier to navigate just living your life right now. This anxiety is coming out in different ways for everyone and for me it’s being so confused by the facts and lies that the government is twisting around that I’m starting to lose trust in very simple things I thought to be true. I’m paranoid. We’re being thrown around by constant rule changes and things we should and shouldn’t be doing. Back to work! Don’t go to work! Eat at Nandos! Eat Healthily! Don’t you dare see your family for Eid! Support the economy! These messages become another source of stress and I’m not alone in feeling confused as to how I should be living. 

 

 

The only way we can get through this, is, indeed eat enormous amounts of pasta, trust yourself and take each day as best you can. The world seems very hard to navigate at the moment and everything carries much more stress than it ever used to. Go easy on yourself, everything is temporary.