Our honeymoon was not one that a young virgin would dream about. My husband had been very sweet and gentle, but my first experience with sex had left me swollen, in pain, and covered with hives. The doctor's snickering diagnosis of "You might be allergic to your husband's sperm" was like throwing ice water on a fire. The doctor handed me a vial of a healing salve that contained a numbing agent and a prescription for antihistamine. We only had two weeks and I had to take an antihistamine. Our honeymoom was spent holding hands, when I could stay awake. Not a great beginning, but I had a secret. Beyond the pain I had experienced something so amazing and wonderful. It was just a hint, but it was enough to convince me that I wanted to investigate this wonderful thing called sex.
The hives still hadn't disappeared two weeks later when he had to ship out to the Orient and I had to report back to classes. I spent the greater part of the months that he was gone going back to the doctor to control hives when there was no husband sharing sperm. Then one day the hives disappeared as mysteriously as they had appeared. I never got a real answer as to why they had plagued me. But, I have never had hives since.
When he came home we rushed to be alone and although I tensed, fearful there would be pain again, I found nothing but that wonderful, magnificent sensation taking over my body. The more that I became an active participant, the less that he wanted to participate at all. And although I didn't know it at the time, the tone of our sexual union had been set in stone. Except for one small week in the sixth year of our marriage.
Much to our distress I had had several doctors tell me that I would never be able to become pregnant. My internal female organs had not fully developed to adult maturity. I was told at the time that it had something to do with the polio affecting my whole body, etc, etc. Old story! Polio seemed to affect everything I tried to achieve, but I inwardly shrugged; we didn't have sex often enough to warrant a pregnancy anyway.
Then for some unexplained reason I stopped having my menstrual cycles. I waited a few months before I submitted myself to a doctor. My periods had never been on a regular cycle, but I had been told that was polio too. The same old blah and blah. The doctor did all the tests that doctors do and declared that my youthful body had gone into a very early menopause. He said that there was a wonderful new pill called the "Birth Control" pill and it regulated a woman's cycles.
"Take it for 3 months. The fourth month your body should start menstruating without the need of the pill, and if you were an ordinary woman I would tell you to be careful. It'll be very easy for you to get pregnant" All this was said very seriously as doctors are when they are delivering their dispensations ............ until the very last statement and then he laughed out loud. He obviously considered a pregnancy involving this particular patient utterly laughable.
I went home with my new pills in their convienent container and repeated the whole conversation to my husband word for word. The next morning I started taking birth control pills and life continued with very little sex. The few times that I tried to initiate intimacy between us he wanted me to lie still, and I tried, I really tried, but the fun wasn't fun and I stopped doing much initiating. THEN the fourth month arrived. My husband was all over me. He even came home for lunch during that first week. I could be as enthusiastic and involved as I wanted. He kept initiating more. That week was the honeymoon that we had never had. I was overjoyed! and then the week was over. My husband had taken what the doctor had said very seriously. He wanted a baby.
My body never automatically started a menstrual cycle because I was pregnant. It took the doctor three months to confirm the pregnany; the rabbit test kept coming back negative. But eventually the doctor said, "You look pregnant, no matter what the rabbits say."
Providing that you want to be pregnant, isn't a first pregnancy wonderous. It's so new, so amazing that there is a human being developing inside YOUR body. I loved every minute of those nine months. My growning belly, the nausea, the desire for cold hot dogs (I normally dislike hot dogs intensely), the feel of the baby moving, and even toward the last when the baby got so big I found it difficult to breath.
My nine months pregnancy went on and on and the baby never dropped so my case went to a panel of doctors that decided that my doctor and I had made a miscalculation and I wasn't really nine months pregnant. I was told to go home and wait; I did until I got toxemia. My baby was delivered, by C-section, exactly one week before Christmas. He weighed 10 lbs, 6 ozs. and was 23 inches long. He was a giant! The biggest baby that had ever been born in the little hospital that was our home until Christmas Eve. It was a wonderful event in our family. We hadn't had a baby born in our family for 24 years. Everybody was overjoyed. It wasn't until 4 years later that I learned that when told that his wife and son were fine my husband became so weak in the legs that he had to be supported or he would have fallen to the floor.
We never had sex again.
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