Concentration, concentration, concentration

It is now Thursday.

I have achieved, in financial terms, in personal terms, in workload terms:

Nothing.

I have, this week, attended a few meetings and workshops, written a proposal in about the amount of time I would possibly have normally completed the work outlined in the proposal, and generalyl failed to do a lot of my assigned tasks.

My sickness, close to sea sickness or motion sickness, rides with me constantly. Coupled with a constant, overbearing headache, resting on my temples like a slovenly, awkward cat, I feel like I have PMT, a nasty stomach bug and a gin hangover day after day.

There is no cure, there is seemingly no end.

Working on a site build, as I was hoping to, would have been okay. Structure, completion. Beginning, middle, end. Creativity aside, just function, methodology, no conception, just conclusion of someone else's designs. Replication. I was always good at that.

But instead I am lumbered with vague, unfocussed, never ending research.

My sister comforted me today telling me not to panic, that it was like sleep, you can't force it. Worrying about it will just make it worse. "This is probably what it feels like to be a man who can't get an erection."

I am hoping that through writing I will be able to purge the sickness and the worry that circulates endlessly, encasing any strands of productivity and suffocating them with overbearing thoughts of panic and dispair.

I am scared.

Last week I worked long hours, 13 hour days, tears streaming down my puffy cheeks, tracksuit bottoms stretching uncomfortably around my swollen belly. The sickness came and went, I drank tea, I worried, I stressed, I earned money, I paid the mortgage.

Now the deadlines for that start, that middle, that end, that structured work, have passed. I am waiting for work, I have been all week. The sickness swells but doesn't rest anymore, constantly plaguing me, rising in my throat, filling my stomach, an acid-ridden balloon.

I am not without tasks to complete, deadlines to meet, but the work I have is vague, unstructured, and I can't apply myself. And with lack of application comes self-loathing, a twisted, gnarled hatred, distraction tinged with anger, naps full of worry, walks plagued with unfinished tasks, delayed deadlines.

I shouldn't punish myself, I know. But I imagine those other secretly pregnant women across the country, the world now, and how they are coping. Stories of women discreetly, or not-so-discreetly, vomiting in bushes waiting for buses, or stopping to be sick cycling to work. Women who take power naps propped up in public toilets. Women who manage to steer their other offspring through morning rituals and off to school, while their stomachs are goading them to the basin. And what am I sacrificing, what am I suffering?

Sat at my desk, with an attentive partner, a depressed Newfie (in a cruel irony, this week she was spade and is now battling with an oversized cone and an unbearable itching - she is lying now, exposing her scar to me, as proof of our crime, our theft). I would be brought cups of tea, could I stomach them. I am able to take precious cat-naps, in my own bed, if I need to (so far I have succumbed to two this week) while the rest of those women bearing their pregnancies silently battle through their jobs, physicially challenging, mentally draining, emotionally exhausting.

I am angry with myself, not just in my lack of application and concentration. But for those other women who have no choice that are suffering in silence.

I do, on the plus side, have some (minor) boob growthage.