Yesterday morning, I went to get my monthly negative blood pregnancy test drawn. I knew it would be negative because I had already started spotting and I could just feel that I wasn’t pregnant. And also because the Dragon Lady had felt my pulse on Monday and said “you start period soon.” And if the Dragon Lady says you’re getting your period, you’re getting your period. Like she ordered it up special for you.

Still, my doctor ordered a blood pregnancy test in order to start letrozole again this cycle, since crazily, letrozole will help get you get pregnant but if you take it while you’re pregnant your baby is guaranteed to come out with four eyes and eight knee caps.

As the new, cheery phlebotomist at my local Quest Diagnostics lab removed the needle from my arm and slapped the bandage on, she innocently wished me a cheery “Good luck!”

“Oh honey,” I wanted to say. “There is no luck here. Just a body that can’t keep a pregnancy going and has now decided it won’t allow a pregnancy to even begin. And there’s the knowledge that this month was yet another failed month. And there’s despair. But luck, there is none of that here.”

I didn’t of course. I politely thanked her and went on my way. But as I drove to work, I allowed myself to wonder what it would be like to be a woman with possible luck in her near future. To just be a woman who missed a period and needed a blood test as she came to wonder, “could I be pregnant?” To be still curiously, optimistically unsure, waiting for my doctor’s office to call that day with possibly life-changing results. I let myself imagine what it would be like…

At 2:30, my phone rings. It’s the nurse practitioner from the fertility clinic, asking how I am feeling. I tell her I feel fine. And she tells me she only asked because my blood pregnancy test came back positive. I tell her she has to be fucking shitting me. And then I apologize for just saying “fuck” and “shit”, but then proceed to say both three more times before hanging up.

I tell my co-workers that something has come up and I have to leave on a personal matter. They assume I have diarrhea. But I don’t even mind as I run home to immediately down the progesterone I stopped taking on Monday and shoot myself up with the blood thinners I also suspended back when I was sure I wasn’t pregnant.

But none of that happened. Not outside my head at least. As expected, the call came through with the negative results. And I sent it to voicemail, knowing it’d be easier on both me and the nurse practitioner if we didn’t have to have another conversation that started with the word “unfortunately.”

I stayed at work that day, a non-cussing, non-diarrhea-having, secretly heartbroken unpregnant worker. To everyone else it looked like any other day. But to me, it was a day where in some alternate universe, some other unlucky version of me was for once getting a little long-awaited luck.