Our beautiful baby was born two weeks ago and I have been suffering with anxiety ever since, as everything seems too good to be true.
One irrational fear I cannot let go was set into motion by the fact that our baby doesn’t really seem to look like either of us. We can’t have managed to take the wrong one home (I believe it has happened!) as there are distinctive birth marks and I don’t remember leaving the baby unattended.
This led me to cast my mind back to a function I attended which culminated in a party in a hotel room. I drunk too much (and haven’t drunk since) and don’t remember the end of the night but did wake up in the room with several others. I have no reason to believe that anything happened - in fact those present said it didn’t. At the time I had the fear so badly before asking anyone that I took Levonelle the next day. I was around cycle day 10 of a 30 day cycle.
Two weeks later my period arrived early, and I conceived that cycle. My due date was determined over the course of several early scans due to bleeding and remained consistent to within a couple of days from six weeks through to the twelve week scan. It was a week behind what would have been calculated from LMP but this was expected due to my slightly longer cycles. Our baby was born the day after due date at 40+1.
It’s therefore surely impossible that I had conceived five weeks earlier, BEFORE my period, EVEN if something had happened which I’m sure I would never have done and EVEN if it had and the MAP had failed.
But, I had read online that embryonic diapause (delayed development) is frequent in some mammal species and there is an article citing one possible anecdotal case in a human woman, whose egg seneed to implant five weeks after IVF transfer. It didn’t seem hugely scientifically sound to me though and is the only example I can fine, although researchers found that the same phenomenon can happen if fertilised eggs of species who do not exhibit diapause are placed in the wombs of species who do.
At around this time I began taking ubiquinol (co-enzyme Q10) and my paranoid fear is that somehow this combined with the artificial hormones in the MAP triggered a response from my uterus which led to the egg being frozen in development until it implanted six weeks later when the HCG showed on a pregnancy test.
Or - of course this is nonsense and I conceived five weeks later as normal during one of the many times partner and I DTD during my fertile window.
I KNOW rationally it’s impossible for anyone other than DP to be the father, EVEN if I’d slept with someone four weeks earlier, which I didn’t anyway!
But this thought is taking over to the point that I am in tears each day and feel like I will lose my wonderful DP. Everyone says babies look like their fathers and I can’t say our’s does - in fact I constantly analyse features against other people who were there that night previously.
If I ask for a DNA test it would of course upset my DP and I think totally unnecessarily, but I am in absolute despair not being able to lay this to rest.
Would it be worth me seeing my GP about the anxiety instead?
Thank you if anyone has managed to read all of this! Any advice gratefully received