You Want ‘Em? We Got ‘Em.

Tags

action figures, anime, anxiety, auctions, collectibles, D&C, depression, ebay, Marvel, selling, star trek, star wars, WoW

Perfect Husband’s depression still weighs him down, but I’m seeing signs of hope… like a vague interest in things.

A couple of weeks ago he started browsing auction items for an upcoming collectables auction.

He wore himself out obsessively researching every item on the auction, noting its average sale value online, and then figuring out the maximum he could pay if he wanted to make a 50% profit off of the item.

He used to work at Ebay a long time ago, and he knows the tips and tricks for figuring out what stuff is really worth, and not just what it is selling for.

His list had hundreds of items.

I figured it was pretty unlikely that many items would sell for half their value or less, given our prior experience with Vancouver auctions, but I was glad that he had a project, because it was the first sign of being interested in anything that he had shown in a long time, so I encouraged him.

This is our living room after he unloaded the car.When he came back from the auction, the car looked like this.

That was the first load.

He had to go back the next day for the second load.

The next morning when we woke up, he said, “I dreamed that I spent over $3,000 on toys and they filled our entire living room.”

“Yeah, that happened.”

We have Star Trek figurines, Star Wars, Muppets, DC Comics, Marvel, WoW, anime, and all kinds of other statues and models and action figures that I’ve never heard of.

Who the hell is Elongated Man?

Why is a Star Trek Salt Vampire worth money?

PH has catalogued, photographed, and stacked them all in our computer room, where he guards them jealously from pet fur and curious little boy fingers.

When he finally sells them all, we’ll make a significant profit. Plus I think it’s healthy for PH to have a project. I keep hoping it’ll help ease him out of his misery.

Unfortunately, PH is now suffering from severe anxiety that they won’t sell.

But I’m not worried.

And when I’m not worried, you can take that to the bank.

Baby-ectomy Complete

Tags

D&C, miscarriage, recovery, sedation

Well, it’s done.

I had my assessment first thing in the morning.

They offered to do a second ultrasound, which I accepted – not because I really hoped they’d find anything different, but just for peace of mind – and it was slightly healing because they did the things that didn’t happen in the first ultrasound.

They let PH come in. They let me see the screen. They showed me the still grey jelly bean, and the place where the heart should be beating. They showed my blood pulsing through the uterus and placenta – and not through the grey jelly bean.

Then they looked at my ovaries, and showed me the corpus luteum, the place where this baby started, still there, still producing hormones, supporting a baby that will never be. They also showed me other follicles, which they said were fresh ova, waiting to be released.

I looked at them. Maybe one of them would become my baby.

Then they re-presented my options to me – wait to miscarry naturally, get a suppository to induce miscarriage, or have a D&C. They said that the baby was far enough along that they didn’t recommend the suppository option, so really it was wait it out, or D&C.

We already knew what we wanted. We had already waited nearly a week, and who knows how long since the baby actually died.

My options were to do it with nothing but a whackload of ibuprofen, with sedation, or with full anesthesia in the O.R. The first seemed not medicated enough, the last seemed far too medicated. So I asked for sedation.

To get the sedation, I had to go upstairs to a “secure area” where women were having D&Cs for “all sorts of reasons”, so in other words, a shmashmortion clinic.

So they took me up there and PH sat in the waiting room and read the “Men please read” materials there about how to deal with your wife’s shmashmortion.

They ushered me in, told me to take off my bottoms and put on a wrap around skirt and stuff my undies, complete with a pad, in a front pocket for easy access. I hate situations like this because I never know whether they want me to take off my socks. This time I decided to, and they didn’t correct me the way they corrected another girl who took off her shirt. So I guess that was ok.

Then they put in an IV and gave me a bunch of pills to take.

They left me sitting in a little hospital bed for a while under woollen covers, then they took me into a room and had me lay down with my legs in stirrups.

They injected the sedation and inanimate objects began to move a little bit.

I was conscious through the whole procedure, but I wasn’t really aware of it. The nurse had found out through small talk that I work at a vet clinic and was full of questions about what that is like. I think we talked about it through the procedure but I don’t remember anything of the conversation.

I just remember the OB-GYN announcing that it was done after a very short period of time, and he carried a metal bowl out of the room. The sedation made me less afraid to ask the question I thought might horrify them:

“Can I… see it?”

And to my surprise, a casual “sure,” came out of the next room. A few minutes later they brought me a sort of tray or bowl filled with water, with little pinkish bits of stuff floating in it.

They pointed to one strand that looked like all the other strands and said “we think that’s it.”

It didn’t look like anything. Certainly not a baby, not even an embryo. I felt better about the fact that it was being thrown away.

They must have put my underwear on me, or had me put it on myself, but I don’t remember that. I do remember them asking if I needed a wheelchair, but I said I could walk. They led me to my hospital bed, and I lay down and closed my eyes, and tears squeezed out from under my eyelids.

I was comfortable in that sedated space. The fentanyl kept me from feeling any pain. The sedative made me feel pleasantly drifty. I kept drifting off into a sleepy land of no pain, occasionally weeping quietly, and the nurses would stop by now and then to take out my catheter, hand me some crackers and water, check my bleeding and so on.

After about a half an hour they said I could go. I put on my pants and shoes, and shuffled out to the waiting room where PH was waiting. He helped me to the car and took me home.

The pain started in the car as the fentanyl wore off. I wished I had more of that, and more of the sedation, so I could keep drifting in that fuzzy place where sleep seemed to accessible.

Instead I took a bunch of Tylenol 3 (of which we have a lot at home because PH has health issues) and zoned out watching Firefly, trying to keep myself distracted, while PH reheated my magic bag for me occasionally.

It hurt. Not like menstrual cramping, but not as bad as labour either – more like very early labour where you have a dull discomfort interrupted by sudden sharp pains.

The T3s would kick in for a while and then they’d start to wear off and the pain would come back. At one point I actually got up and walked away, half expecting to walk away from the pain, as if it were just an uncomfortable chair or something.

I don’t know whether the pain was really that bad or if there was a psychosomatic component as well. Maybe knowing that it was the ache of my empty womb, the feeling of my body going “wheredafuck did you put my babby?” or “whatthehell just scraped my uterus?” made it worse.

I don’t know.

But I spent the day in front of the TV, which I never really do. When PH finally took over the remote and switched to stuff I didn’t care about, I went to bed. I slept until 8:30 this morning, and I felt better when I woke up.

The pain is mild today. More slight cramping and psychic discomfort. But I’m feeling angry, too.

My baby is gone.

Really, my baby never really was – doomed by bad chromosomes never to have a future: a mistake of mother nature that never had real potential… but I thought I had a baby, I thought it had a future, and god damnit, I want that back.

Stages Of Depregnanting

Tags

D&C, dark humor, miscarriage, missed miscarriage, silent miscarriage, stages of grief

(Warning: Morbid humour and dark imagery ahead)

So, you may want to ask me, Carol, what’s it like having a dead baby inside you?

It’s a little weird, folks, it’s a little weird.

I’ve never had a standard miscarriage, which I am sure is much more traumatic in many ways.

Our baby loss has come gradually.

On the one hand, I hate having it be drawn out.  Our dreams and plans for Christmas have already been dashed, but I can’t put it behind me and move on, because that actual loss of the baby hasn’t happened yet.

On the other hand, it’s helping me draw out the denial stage of grief, which is my favourite stage.

Nor have I been following the stages in a classical manner. This seems to be my progression thus far:

1. Grief

The moment the radiologist left the room, I starting sobbing.

That night, I clutched the little Christmas footie pyjamas I had bought for 0-3 month size and wept into them. PH ended up slipping it from my hands when he came to bed and found me clutching it, and discreetly put it away.

2. That River in Egypt

We left Owl with our neighbours for the first hour and a half after we got the news, while we digested it, and cried, and called people. Then, when we went to go get him, I almost talked to them about “when I am on mat leave” before remembering that I won’t be going on mat leave this year.

I went out and bought myself icewine, because if I was going to be sad, I might as well be sad with wine. If I liked raw fish or blue cheese I probably would have picked those up, too.

But it took some mental strength to actually DRINK it. I still felt pregnant (because I WAS still pregnant. With a dead baby) and it took some fortitude to actually take a sip because a part of me was still screaming “No, it could hurt the baby!”

Then, when I went back to work, we had a patient with fleas. I went to grab the siphotrol to spray the hell out of that exam room afterwards, and for a moment I was like “I’ll have to ask someone to do this for me,” before I remembered and grimly surrounded myself with toxic fumes.

It’s just hard for part of me not to hope that twenty minutes of minute examination by trained professionals may have missed the fact that my baby really IS alive after all.

I don’t think this denial is all that unusual, because the woman at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said that we can request to repeat the ultrasound before going through with the D&C. I guess a lot of women ask “can you please double-check?” in the hopes that their baby might have risen from the dead.

I would take a zombie baby. I’d lovingly spoon-feed it brains and keep it out of the sun and name it Igor if it would just grow and be born.

3. Morbid Curiosity

There are two reasons why PH and I are going for a D&C tomorrow, rather than wait for me to miscarry naturally or take a suppository to try and help it along.

First, a D&C seems like a faster step towards getting it all over with. This lost pregnancy has derailed our plans significantly, and now the earliest we could humanly produce a sibling for Owl is like, March of next year.

Second, we had no idea what to do if I miscarried at home and actually found the embryo. We were both agreed on the fact that we didn’t want to flush it down the toilet like a dead goldfish (even though we know that after the D&C it’ll just get chucked in a bag of biowaste and incinerated).

But, since the D&C isn’t until Tuesday at the earliest, there is the chance that I could miscarry before then (although unlikely, since as we already know, my body takes a lot of coaxing to go into labour).

So then we had to talk about what to do.

PH rejected my suggestion of getting a jar of formalin from work and preserving it (perhaps to donate to a high school or something – we wouldn’t keep it. Uck).

Neither of us wanted to bury it in our backyard because our backyard is on a crumbling retaining wall and will probably have to be ripped up some time in the near future.

Nor did we like the idea (which we found on Google) of putting it in a nice pot and planting a pretty tree or shrub over it. Because we can’t keep plants alive, and then what do you do with a dead plant in your dead baby pot? I wouldn’t want to dig that up to replant something new, would you?

(Then again, maybe all our plants have been lacking in the past has been a couple ounces of human flesh…)

We eventually agreed on burying it under the kitchen window. IF it came out at home, IF we saw it, and IF it was in a remotely entire state.

But the whole thing freaks me out because I AM AFRAID OF DEAD BODIES and now I have one inside me.

Now, mind you, dead babies aren’t really scary, but the radiologist did say that it “looked a little unusual” and was “a little cystic” so I take that to mean that it’s a warped and monstrous thing with, like, two heads or something.

Oh, and according to the lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre, my baby died at 8 wks 4 days, so probably about a week or so ago (it’s hard to know since the whole reason I went in was because we weren’t sure if I was 9, 10, or 11 weeks pregnant at the time, so it may have died three days before the ultrasound, a week and a half before the ultrasound, or two and a half weeks before the ultrasound…).

So is it, just, like decomposing in there? Because as bonded as I was to the idea of my sweet little Christmas newborn, having a tiny little rotting mutant inside me doesn’t make me feel good at all.

So I may have started Googling aborted embryos at approximately 8 weeks gestation, just so I could get an idea of what I had going on in there.

Some of them were cute. Others were not so cute, usually the ones who had “already probably been dead for a couple of days”. Hell, mine has been dead for a week or more.

I really hope it stays in, because if it comes out I know I’ll examine it in minute detail and that might scar me for life but I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

5. False Acceptance

I think this is just another kind of denial, just a little deeper-down. You see, there are times when I think that I have accepted it. I haven’t cried about it in a couple of days, and I can drink wine or take Tylenol 3 (which I have been taking to help me sleep because f*** health, that’s why) without mentally wincing. Instead of forgetting that I am not having a baby, I am starting to forget that I was having a baby (if that makes sense).

But I don’t think the acceptance real.

For one thing, the whole thing has been very cerebral. I haven’t actually miscarried. I have changed from thinking of the contents of my uterus as  an alive and twitching future child into thinking of it as dead mutant tissue, but nothing has physically changed.

I think that having it physically ripped out of me on Tuesday is going to be a shock.