At 37 years old I was quite surprised and a little bewildered when I didn´t start my period. I´d only been trying to get pregnant for 1 month and had never expected to get pregnant so quickly. My partner thought that it was nerves so we waited a couple more weeks. By then I suspected that I could be pregant so decided it was time to do the pregnancy test.

Having always been very careful in the past I had never actually done a pregnancy test and didn´t even know what it was called in Spanish! In Spain you have to get a test kit from the chemist’s and ask for a ‘prueba de embarazo’ which costs 12 euros. Then you have to wait til the following morning to do the test. Needless to say I had a sleepless night but when I did manage to sleep I dreamt that I had done the test and could very clearly see the two pink lines (which means positive).

As soon as it was morning I did the test and although it says you have to wait 5 minutes the lines appeared immediately.

I went to tell my partner who was still asleep and we both looked at eachother both feeling a mixture of emotions shock, joy and also amazement. The next thing I did was to phone my family. The first person I spoke to was my middle sister whose reaction was to burst into sobs…a little disconcerting until she explained they were sobs of joy!

I made an appointment with my family doctor for the following day. That appointment was just a formality and all that happened was that I had to then go and make an appointment with the ‘tocologo’ (strange name) which means obstetrician in English. The doctor also advised me to only eat very well cooked meat. When I explained that I didn´t eat meat or fish either she was quite shocked and told me it was necessary for a balanced diet. I´ve been a vegetarian for 20 years now so her comments didn´t really worry me.

Luckily the tocologo in my health centre is a woman as in Spain you don´t get any choice of who you see and you just get the person who works in that health centre. That appointment was scheduled for 3 weeks time…