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~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: pregnancy

Thank You, 2015

01 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by IfByYes in Fritter Away, From The Owlery, Life and Love, Me vs The Sad, Perfect Husband

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

depression, family, life, maternity leave, new years, parenthood, parents, pregnancy

I have mixed feelings about the passing of 2015.

Some parts of 2015 really sucked. My husband nearly killed himself, I ended up heavily pregnant, with a bacterial infection, working and caring for our four year old who also had a bacterial infection, while he was stuck in the hospital and unable to help.

My father broke his hip and overall has deteriorated markedly in his health.

My relationship with my son deteriorated, as my capacity to tolerate his extroverted highjinks hit a new low.

I spent a significant amount of this year coughing, exhausted, diabetic, extremely stressed, half-expecting to become a widow at any moment, researching the potential cost of burying my husband, and wearing Depends because I kept wetting myself.

On the other hand…

This year also brought me the generosity and love of the friends and relations who came streaming in to help during these difficult times. There were friends who picked Owl up at daycare when I was stuck at the hospital, and friends who brought Chinese food so that I wouldn’t have to cook, or took Owl for play dates so I could nap.img_1840

There was my mother in law, who is terrified of flying and financially limited, flying in TWICE to spend a grand total of three months sleeping on our couch, just to help.

On the first visit she made me diabetes-friendly meals and arranged snacks for me at a time when I was working and exhausted and could never have kept up the dietary management that was expected of me on my own. She put my son to bed at night and made him breakfast in the morning, she read to him and joked with him and brought some humor and pleasantry to a home that was seething in stress.

On her return she cooked and cleaned, entertained Owl and then held the baby so I could shower, get dressed, eat meals, and spend some quality time with my son.

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And in between those visits, my parents flew in for four months. They took money from their nest egg to rent a place nearby, and my mother drove back and forth making meals and snacks, cleaning, and reading Owl bedtime stories.

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Not only did it bring me much needed aid, but I got to spend time with my father while he still knows who I am.

And this year brought me Fritter, who made a safe landing on the shores of time and gave us the gift of a colic-free fourth trimester. She brings me joy every day with her grins and chortles, and I wouldn’t change a thing about her.

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And with all of those months of support from our family, PH was able to retreat and rest and begin healing. While he is still very ill, I have seen more of the old Perfect Husband in the last three months than I have in the past two years. There are mornings when I come downstairs to find breakfast laid out for me, afternoons when he greets me at the door to take my coat and offer me a drink, and evenings when he rubs my feet and offers to run me a bath.

Whenever he has a good day, I feel like I could suffer another two years just for a chance at more days like that.

I feel like I could kiss 2015 for bringing me even one day like that, let alone as many as I have been gifted with these last few months.

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2015 also brought me maternity leave, which I love because I am a lazy slob. I love being home with my baby and watching The Walking Dead or writing during her naps. It’s way better than working. I’m sad that there are only a few more months left. I have a lot of writing to get down in that time.

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Yes, over all I am very grateful to 2015. I feel like it got handed a terrible set of cards but it played them all right.

2015 for me was a year of defeat and renewal, of family and love.

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We survived it, and maybe it has made us stronger.

If 2016 can keep up with this upward trend, I think I can look forward to the coming year.

And if it can’t… well… Bring it, 2016.

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Because “Call the Maternity Admitting Office” Doesn’t Have The Same Cachet

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

39 weeks, birth, labour, midwife, ob, pregnancy

In case you’ve been wondering, I’m still thoroughly dissatisfied with my prenatal care situation.

I really, really wanted a midwife.

But I let fear stop me.

Because the wooshing noise was back and I was getting mysterious itchy rashes and I had internists talking to me about brain surgery.

But the itching has gone away and so has the wooshing noise, my optic nerves are back to normal, and it is way too late to find a midwife.

So I’m stuck with the OB who clearly wonders why she’s stuck with me, too. I can tell she is pretty uninterested in my case. She glanced over my history, asked me to make sure with the opthamologist that my intracranial pressure was low enough that it would be safe enough to push, and that was it.

My OB appointments don’t feel… like real prenatal appointments somehow.

Part of that is because the OB shares an office with several other specialists all of whom do completely different things. One is an oncologist, and she’s the only one whose specialty is actually listed on the door, so basically I attend my prenatals in a clinic which advertises ONCOLOGY.

The waiting room is very fancy. It doesn’t have that public-healthcare feel that other doctor offices have. But it’s also very generic so that all the specalists are equally accommodated. It’s the only doctor’s office I have ever been in that has NOTHING MEDICAL hanging on the walls. No informational posters, nothing.

Nor is there anything baby-related. My previous prenatal care clinic had corkboards filled with photos of babies they had delivered. Even my family doctor has black and white photos of Korean babies looking all artsy and charming.

Not this place.

This is what I see when I sit down to wait for my OB appointment:

IMG_1737

Does that seem normal to you?

There isn’t even a little corner for children to play at. You know, the obligatory pile of worn out Golden Books and that ubiquitous wooden bead maze that you find in every single doctor’s office EXCEPT THIS ONE.

The only, the ONLY THING in the entire place that suggests “prenatal care” is the key to the bathroom, which has a teething ring hanging off of it.

Even the receptionist is generic. While I sit waiting for my prenatal, she is busy calling patient after patient for one of the other doctors, advising them to get fleet enemas before their appointment the next day. When I called to ask if I should be concerned about my liver hurting or craving cardboard she had no advice for me and told me that if I was concerned I should see my family doctor.

The OB is only actually there two days a week and those days seem to fluctuate wildly.

Clearly there would be no point in calling with questions about contractions, etc.

As for the OB herself, she’s… fine.

She’s young, friendly, and she seems relatively caring. But she doesn’t seem particularly INTERESTED.

She puts me on a scale, takes my blood pressure (it seems weird not to have a nurse doing these things before she comes in, but she doesn’t seem to have a nurse), measures my fundal height, and puts the doppler on me, and then asks if I have any questions.

I have lots of questions but I don’t actually think there’s any point in asking them.

She’s made it clear to me that there’s a good chance she won’t be the one actually delivering the baby. I get whatever OB is on call that day in the hospital. Could be her, could be someone else. But hey, they’ll have access to her notes, so there’s that.

So is there any point in asking questions like, “can we delay cutting of the cord? Will I be allowed to have skin to skin right away when the baby is born? Would it be possible to attempt a breast crawl, because I think that would be really cool to see”?

I was also expecting her to check my cervix at my 38 week appointment, because I’m pretty sure my doctor did when I was pregnant with Owl. But maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, she didn’t. I guess she will this week at my 39 week?

This is all so not what I want.

After Owl’s heavily-interventioned birth, I want to experience something different. I want to go into a natural labour. I want my baby to be delivered by the person who provided my care, so I could have a sort of continuity. I want support during labour, because last time I just kept getting sent home to suffer through contractions with no real help. That being said, I also want to labour at home for as long as possible, because being in the hospital sucks.

Well, I can only have some of these things, if any.

I can still hope for a natural labour, although the OB likes to induce at 41 weeks, so I’m on the clock.

I can try to labour at home for as long as possible, and just kind of help myself through it (I mean, yes, PH and possibly my mother might be there to hold my hand but my mother only ever had one labour and that was in a hospital on a pitocin drip and that is still more labour than PH has ever experienced). I’ve been reading on recognizing signs of true labour, when to go to the hospital etc. My big goal is to only have to go ONCE. No more back-and-forth half hour drives over speed bumps while painfully contracting. NO MORE PLEASE.

That’s about all I can do, really.

I’m trying hard to focus on the positives.

For example, I’ve been having some mentrual-like cramping pains lately. I didn’t get that feeling until after the prostaglandin gel last time, so maybe my body might actually be preparing for a real labour?

I’m also negative for group B strep this time, which means I don’t have to get put on IV for penicillin the moment my waters break.

I’m also less scared of labour this time round. I’ve survived it before, and dangit, I’ll survive it again.

And, of course, most important of all, the baby seems ok. My diabetes is mostly under control, with insulin. She’s now only measuring two weeks too big instead of three, so that’s an improvement. She moves a lot still. All important things.

Cross your fingers for me. I have two weeks to get this thing going on my own, without an induction.

In Which We Risk Medical Emergency/Financial Ruin To Meet Firefly Stars

04 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by IfByYes in From The Owlery, How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love, We Are Family

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Andy Runton, comicon, emerald city comicon, Firefly, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, labour, Owly, pregnancy, seattle, star trek, travel

Everyone said we were crazy to do it, and we knew that they were right.

You do not travel two weeks away from your due date.

You especially do not travel close to your due date IN THE UNITED STATES.

The cost of American health care is infamous. BC radio is filled with Pacific Blue Cross commercials featuring John Cleese, in which he plays a greedy American (?) doctor called Nigel Bilkington who does x-rays on you just to make sure you have your wallet on you before you even receive care.

(Want to hear? I found one here.)

On the way to the border there are big signs reminding you that even a day trip can result in a broken bone and thousands of dollars of debt.

It’s important to remind Canadians of this because we take free health care for granted.

PH and I have cross-border insurance.

But no insurance will cover you if you wander into the states while totally full-term and end up having a baby there. I can’t even imagine what an emergency C-section or something would cost.

So why would we go?

comiconlogo.jpgWe go to Emerald City Comicon in Seattle every year. It has become a family tradition. Every year we get a new family portrait with some geeky-famous person. The first year was George Takei.

can you come up with a caption awesome enough to go with this photo?

The next year was Patrick Stewart.

My new favourite family photo

My new favourite family photo

I didn’t get around to posting about it last year, but we went again and got our photos taken with Alan Tudyk, otherwise known as Wash from Firefly as well as about a million other characters.

alan tudyk comicon

He put his arm around me. It was awesome.

This year, Levar Burton was scheduled to be there, and I couldn’t miss my chance at getting a photo with Geordie LaForge/The Reading Rainbow guy.

So we bought tickets. I bought a maternity shirt that read “The Next Generation” right over my belly.

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We also packed a hospital bag.

We figured that if we drove like hell, we could probably get back to the border within a couple of hours, and there was a hospital just across the border. All I had to do was hold the baby in ’til we got there.

Everyone told us it was a bad idea.

They were right.

Continue reading →

General Life Update Featuring A Lot of Urine, Some Unfounded Fretting, and Wood Pulp

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone..., Life and Love

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

cardboard, cravings, depression, help, incontinence, liver pain, parents, pica, pregnancy, third trimester

Well, it’s been long enough since I posted about my life that I’m now in an awkward position because I can’t post about my current life because you wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about. So I need to clear up some of the backlog.

I know some of you are wondering how PH is doing.

He’s alive.

Generally, he is closer to staying alive than he was a couple of months ago.

But we aren’t out of the woods yet. No miracles.

If you asked me how I was doing, I could say “that DEPENDS”.

Depends, get it? No of course you don’t.

But you will.

Continue reading →

In Which I Find Everything Unnecessarily Difficult And Fight Hormonal Reactions To It

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

anxiety, doctor, hormones, ob-gyn, pregnancy, prenatal care, stress, work

My friend Hannah from Hodgepodge and Strawberries recently said to me that ‘pregnancy is like 9 months of non-stop PMS’ and I thoroughly agree. Life is hard enough on general principle, but when you’re trying to do it while surfing on a wave of irritation and overreaction it becomes just that much more difficult to navigate.

Picture trying to hold sixteen different items in your arms at once, while sobbing.

I have become a ball of horrible crippling anxiety and tears.

On top of the two jobs not to mention the “gee I haven’t bought any presents and now there’s no time to mail them back to Nova Scotia in time for Christmas” stress, I’ve been trying to deal with my medical situation.

So, you won’t have forgotten the mysterious disease of May/June. Well, a month or more ago I went back to the specialist because the itchy rash kept coming back. It usually starts on my chest and neck, burning and red, and then fades away while the itchiness spreads over my whole body and causes me to scratch my skin off for days. Antihistamines don’t help. Cortisone cream doesn’t help. So I went back to the internist. I was thinking that maybe this thing was autoimmune after all.

The internist listened carefully, and narrowed her eyes. “I think you should go back to the opthamologist and see if your optic nerve swelling is back,” she said. “If it is, we should probably do a lumber puncture, and you might need to talk to a neurosurgeon.”

I’m sorry, what now?

Yeah, it turns out that itching which isn’t soothed by cortisone or antihistamines can sometimes be NEUROLOGICAL.

I hadn’t mentioned it to her, but the wooshing noise in my left ear had returned a few times, too.

So I went back to the opthamologist, having spent the last three days at work saying “I MIGHT NEED A BRAIN SURGEON” whenever someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer.

The opthamologist looked in my eyes and said, “Yeah, the swelling is back again. Not nearly as bad as the first time I saw you, but definitely worse than the last time I saw you.”

Then, when I went in to my family doctor, she said that the bloodwork that the internist had done showed that my CRP (inflammation) values were up again, too.

So… what does this mean? Lumbar puncture? BRAIN SURGEON (FUCKING  BRAIN SURGEON OH MY GOD)?

Well, I don’t know! Because NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW.

I called the internist’s office on Monday and was like “Uh, what do I do now?”

And they said “We don’t know… doesn’t say in your file… we’ll ask the doctor tomorrow.”

Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t heard back. So I called and left ANOTHER message asking what the hell I do now.

And that ain’t all.

The internist also apologetically told me that I should be considered a high risk pregnancy because they have no idea what’s wrong with me. Better safe than sorry.

That means that I need an OB, not a midwife.

I decided the last time I was pregnant that I wanted a midwife this time around. Midwives are covered in British Columbia, and you can still have a hospital birth and epidural and all that wonderful stuff. The big benefit to a midwife, as I saw it, was that she will come to your house and check your dilation so you don’t need to go back and forth to the hospital UMPTEEN TIMES and wait for two hours just to be told that you haven’t dilated in the slightest EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE BEEN HAVING CONTRACTIONS EVERY 3 MINUTES FOR THE LAST 18 HOURS.

Not that that wasn’t wonderful and all.

Besides, it sucked that I saw one or two doctors throughout my prenatal care and then my baby ended up being delivered by a stranger who didn’t even remember me when I went in for my 6 week post delivery checkup.

So I got a midwife for my last pregnancy and had all of one appointment with her before the baby died in the womb and all that stuff happened. 

This time I held off for a while – partly because I was half-convinced that the baby would die again so I didn’t want to jump the gun and partly because my doctor was like “let’s make sure your weird disease doesn’t cause any problems.”

So I’ve been seeing my family doctor for prenatals which she said she could do through 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Then the rashes and the head wooshing started and now the internist has officially said that I should be considered high risk.

Which means that I need to have an OB.

Which sucks.

So I asked my family doctor to refer me to my previous OB clinic. After all, if I have to have an OB again, it might as well be the place that gave me a healthy baby last time, somewhere I am familiar with and with some faces that I’ll recognize.

Does that seem too much to ask? DOES IT?

APPARENTLY IT IS.

Continue reading →

In Which I Try To Use Worry As A Weapon To Fight Off A Bad Ultrasound Outcome…

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

20 week ultrasound, anxiety, baby, defects, fear, miscarriage, pregnancy, worries

My 20 week ultrasound is tomorrow, and I’m doing my Anxiety Girl thing.

Back when I was in my Generalized Anxiety CBT group, they talked about how pathological worriers will often suffer from the superstitious belief that  their worrying is actually productive.

Then I raised my hand and told them my own personal theory of worrying, which stunned them for a moment, and then the leader said,

“That is the most COMPLEX rationalization of anxiety I have EVER heard.”

Wanna hear it?

Of course you do.

Okay, as you may know, one of the many bizarre and perplexing things suggested by Quantum Mechanics is that we could very well exist as one universe in a vast multiverse – that there are alternate universes created on a quantum level for every possible outcome. There could be thousands of YOUs out there, all living similar but slightly different realities.

And yet we only experience it as one lifetime, right? My particular consciousness is separate from the consciousnesses of all the other Carols out there – thousands of things could happen to various Carols throughout the multiverse but I will only experience one of those.

Maybe in another universe, my last pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage.

Maybe in another universe, I stayed with my first boyfriend and never married PH.

Maybe in another universe, I didn’t contract that weird disease (I went back to the internist the other day, by the way. The rash keeps coming back, so I spend half my time scratching off my own skin, and lately I’ve been hearing wooshes in my ears…).

Anyway, here is my theory: if I concentrated hard enough, maybe I can CHOOSE which reality my consciousness stays in. Maybe by WORRYING that a certain bad thing will happen, I can consciously AVOID it happening to THIS PARTICULAR iteration of my consciousness. Of course bad things still happen, but aren’t they always different bad things from what we expect? Aren’t we always blindsided by the one thing that DIDN’T worry us?

My GAD group used that as proof that worrying doesn’t help. I suggested that maybe it means that our worrying needs a broader spectrum.

Of course, it’s crazy, and the CBT stuff helped me drop a LOT of that. I don’t worry nearly as much as I used to and look what happened! I had a silent miscarriage and walked around with a dead baby inside me for weeks.

So, this time of course I was terrified of a bad outcome and my 8 week ultrasound was clear. The baby is still alive – I can feel little kicks and twitches at night and sometimes around noon. But all kinds of bad things could happen at tomorrow’s ultrasound. The baby could be hideously malformed. It could have soft markers indicating Down’s Syndrome, or worse, another Trisomy that is seriously deadly. Heart defects, spinal defects…

So far I have googled Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, and have read over 20 personal stories from people who had horrible news from their 20 week ultrasound and either ended up deciding to terminate or carrying to term and then taking photographs of their dead/deformed and dying baby. For some reason, ALL OF THESE people are deeply religious and use the word “sweet” and “angel” multiple times.

Not sure if seriously defective babies are some kind of Trojan that Jesus uses to infect people or if only religious people have the strength to document their experiences. Could be both.

I’m also wondering what we’re going to do with Owl if the news is bad. We haven’t out-and-out told him that I’m pregnant. He has noticed that my stomach is getting bigger and has asked several times if I have a baby in there. PH finally  told him that my body is TRYING to grow a baby but we don’t know if it has been successful yet. This prompted him to say loudly “You can’t be making a baby, Mommy! Daddy’s PENIS isn’t in you VAGINA!”

We were in Cost Co at the time. Several people looked around. Kids are great.

Anyway. We told him that tomorrow we will go see a special doctor who can look in my belly and tell us if there is a baby in there. In an ideal world we will be able to bring him in, tell him he is going to have a little brother/sister, and show him the baby on the screen.

But if it’s terrible news, how do we keep his infernal curiosity silent long enough to receive the bad news, discuss the options and digest it all? How do we explain to him that yes, there is a baby in there, but it may not be okay? What do we say to him when we’re told that it’s a boy/girl but it has a hole in the heart/no brain/appears to be an octopus?

 

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Now if you excuse me, I need to google more weird things that can be found on a 20 week ultrasound so I can ensure that our baby doesn’t have them.

Not Dead Yet

19 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

eight weeks, heart beat, miscarriage, pregnancy, ultrasound

We haven’t really been taking my pregnancy seriously yet. After last time, we are a bit more guarded in our hopes and expectations. By which I mean that we make constant dead baby jokes and PH’s repeated imitation of our embryo is basicly an elaborate death pose.

But, that being said, we went in for an eight week ultrasound and the ultrasound technician told me right away that he had found a heart beat.

At eight weeks, there’s not really much else to say about a little gray jelly bean on the screen. It measured eight weeks two days, which means that my estimated due date is spot on, which is pretty unusual, and its tiny heart is beating.

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Or it was, as of that particular day.

In our minds, it could have stopped the next day, or the day after that. So we weren’t super excited, and we still haven’t talked much about our plans for April, when our still-considered-hypothetical baby should be born.

I have lost all trust in my body. When I was pregnant with Owl, and again in my second pregnancy, I assumed that if I was experiencing pregnancy symptoms and not having cramping or bleeding, that the baby was probably okay. When we had that brief no-heartbeat-on-doppler scare we acknowledged the possibility that the baby might NOT be okay, but a reassuring ultrasound was all we needed to get us expecting a baby again.

This ultrasound was reassuring, sure. We were definitely relieved to hear that our baby wasn’t dead…. yet. But we can’t get that “yet” our of our psyches.

Sure, my abdomen is already starting to expand, even though the scale reads the same as it did a month ago, so clearly my uterus is growing.

Sure, I am experiencing that terrible first trimester exhaustion that is not really describable to people who haven’t experienced it. My doctor even said to me, “you know, my patients always talked about that first trimester fatigue, but I didn’t really understand how deep it goes until I experienced it for myself.”

And while I’m not having much morning sickness, I do experience low grade nausea at several points in the day.

But you know what? My pants got tight last time, too. I had morning sickness last time. I went through all of the sucky aspects of the first trimester, and experienced them for weeks AFTER my baby had already died.

I don’t think I’ll really believe it until I can feel the baby move and KNOW it’s alive.

 

Well, That Explains A Lot, Actually

28 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

crankiness, hormones, pregnancy, pregnancy after miscarriage, ttc

So, the day after my stressed-out freak-out (yes, I did thoroughly apologize to the staff member in question) I was back to my normal self. Several people needed me, and I had no complaints about helping them. I even drove over to a friend’s house with husband and son in tow to do some first aid on her pug dog.

The day after that, I learned this:

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So, hormones.

That’s good.

 

Welcome To Miscarriage Club – It’s Bigger Than You Think

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

baby loss, community, grief, miscarriage, pregnancy, silence, social mores, speaking out, stigma, support, taboos, talking

Miscarriage is like a secret club – you aren’t supposed to talk about it to anyone who isn’t a member.

There’s a slight problem with that.

If no one talks about their miscarriage, how do you know who you can talk about your miscarriage?

The stigma about talking about miscarriage goes so deep that you aren’t even supposed to tell people that you’re pregnant until the highest risk of miscarriage passes because otherwise you might have to tell them that you had a miscarriage.

And you don’t want to do that… for… some… reason…

Once that dangerous first trimester, which I hate so much, is passed, and your chance of miscarrying goes down drastically, well, then you can risk it.

Here’s the thing – why don’t we want to tell people that we miscarried?

Why should we walk around keeping pregnancy a secret lest we end up having to talk about miscarriage with our neighbours and coworkers?

But the social pressure is strong.

In fact, if you tell a lot of people that you are pregnant before 12 weeks along, people raise their eyebrows. “She’s feeling pretty confident,” they think.

Well, I told a bunch of people. And it wasn’t because I was feeling confident. I knew the risks, and I had my reasons.

First of all, there’s the nature of my work.

I work with xrays and pesticides and vaccines and all kinds of things that are bad news for a developing baby. I could go around making excuses for not helping people with xrays and suddenly pretending to be too busy to help with anesthesia, or I could tell the damn truth.

So I did.

Then there’s the basic rule of “only tell the people who you would also tell if you miscarried.”

Well, hell, that’s a lot of people. After all, I knew that if I miscarried, I would blog about it, so I might as well tell you guys I was pregnant. And since I get, like, 500 hits a day, that’s a lot of people.

And then, of course, I would never hide something as important as a miscarriage from my family, or my friends, so I told all of them, too.

And my daycare ladies, well, they nagged me constantly about giving Owl a sibling, and I knew that if I DID miscarry, I would find that nagging very painful, and I knew that they would never knowingly cause me pain… so I told them I was pregnant, and then I told them when I miscarried.

They won’t tease me about giving Owl a sibling now, and that’s for the best for all of us, I think.

Really, the only people who didn’t know that I was pregnant, or that I had miscarried, were my dog training clients, the clients at my work, and my more distant Facebook friends.

And lately, I’ve been wondering about why I even bothered hiding it from them.

Because now I have to make excuses, and put on a pretence, and I hate it.

I hate getting cheery facebook updates from people who don’t know what I’m going through. I hate having to tell clients that I can’t make their appointment and need to reschedule because I’m going through a “minor surgical procedure”, and do they mind rebooking for next week.

And for what?

Why am I shielding them from my loss? Why is my loss a kind of taboo that one is supposed to consider too private for discussion? Why should I act like everything is fine when it isn’t? Why is their discomfort more important than my grief?

And there’s something else –

If I hadn’t told so many people, then I wouldn’t have received this immense amount of support.

If I hadn’t told the people at my work, I wouldn’t have gotten flowers, and I wouldn’t have been told “take all the time you need!”

In fact, one of my friends got fired for missing so many days after her miscarriage. They didn’t know she miscarried. They just knew she disappeared for a week while still on her first three months probation. So they told her not to come back in.

If I hadn’t blogged about it, my neighbour who reads my blog wouldn’t have known I was pregnant, and we wouldn’t have been able to go knock on the door and hand Owl over so we could go home and cry the day we were told that our baby had died.

If my friends didn’t know, they wouldn’t be texting me offering help, or bringing me baked goods.

And most importantly – if I hadn’t told all these people, none of them would have told me about their miscarriages.

When I went back to work last Friday, three women told me about their miscarriages (and there were only like 8 people there that day).

Even some friends who had never told me about their miscarriages suddenly came out and told me that they had had one, too. If I hadn’t told THEM, they would never have told me, and we would have gone through life neither knowing that the other shared a similar experience.

And I think about two friends of mine, who both miscarried within a short period of time. They both told me, but they didn’t tell each other. And so they both lost a chance to share their grief with a friend, to help each other through a hard time. To this day, they still don’t know that they have this pain in common, and I am bound to secrecy by both of them.

One of these same friends never told her own family. Her grandmother and her mother-in-law both nag her constantly about having children, and can’t understand why she’s touchy about it.

Why cause yourself that kind of pain, and why allow loving family members to unknowingly hurt you again and again? Isn’t that cruel to both yourself and them?

Why do we keep this kind of loss so private?

If someone’s parent dies, they post it on Facebook.

If someone’s cat dies, they post it on Facebook.

But when your baby dies – that’s not something for other people to know?

What are we afraid of?

Is it fear of hearing stupid remarks?

I don’t think so.

Anyone who has lost a pet can tell you that you WILL hear from idiots who have never had a pet saying things like “it was just a cat”, or “just get another one.” And those words are hurtful, because our bonds with our animals are real, and losing a pet can hurt more than losing a relative.

But people still post it on Facebook, even knowing what kind of idiot remarks they might hear.

Is it a feeling of failure?

A lot of women feel guilt after a miscarriage. I thought it too, you can’t help it – your first thought is “what did I do wrong”?

It’s not helped by the fact that assholes have tried to prosecute women for miscarrying.

But the fact is that miscarriage is not the woman’s fault.

The lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said something I will never forget:

“We see a lot of women here who are pregnant and don’t want to be. And you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff they have tried to make themselves not be pregnant… but they still are anyway. Trust me, nothing that happened at your work could have caused this.”

Miscarriage is almost always caused by chromosomal abnormalities, “a mistake of mother nature,” as they called it when I went in for my D&C, or sometimes a structural abnormality with the uterus or cervix or some other medical cause.

It is nothing the woman did wrong.

So why stigmatize it? Why turn it into a silent shame?

Does it sometimes hurt to talk about? Yes. But so does any loss. That’s why people will ask “do you want to talk about it?” when you are grieving. But this is the only one that you’re not supposed to tell people about.

The fact is, I can’t come up with a single reason that really makes miscarriage different from any other loss, except this:

People don’t talk about it.

Because we don’t talk about it, no one knows how to react to it.

Society isn’t set up for it. There are no “sorry for your miscarriage” hallmark cards. There is no accommodation in corporate culture for giving the father-not-to-be time off to grieve and help care for his wife. You can’t get compassionate leave: that only applies to the death of a family member who has already been born, and no one gives you a death certificate after your D&C.

And so we’re trapped in a circle of hurt – we don’t talk about it, so no one knows how much it hurts, so no one gives any accomodation for it, so no one talks about it.

Meanwhile women who work with each other every day may never know that they have both suffered a loss. May never have even spoken of their loss to anyone. May be grieving alone, thinking no one could understand.

Until one day, another woman comes in with the courage to say, “I lost my baby.”

And then the stories come out, and we hug each other, and we cry for our babies… together, as we should be.

I’m going to start using a twitter hashtag: #talkaboutmiscarriage.

Because we need to.

F*** Cheery Ultrasound Techs

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

first trimester, missed miscarriage, pregnancy, ultrasounds

I went in for a dating ultrasound yesterday because, without boring you with tmi details, we weren’t entirely sure when I conceived.

The ultrasound technician was a chirpy young thing who addressed me as “mom”. As always, she made PH wait outside while she did the scan. As she ran the probe over my belly, she asked me why I was there.

“Hmm, I do think your dates are a little off, it seems pretty small,” she said. “Have you ever had a vaginal ultrasound?”

“No.”

“Well, you did a great job of filling your bladder but I’m going to ask you to go empty it, because I need it completely empty for the vaginal scan. Just let me take what measurements I can here, and then I’ll ask you to run to the bathroom,” she said cheerily.

She clicked away while she asked me questions – date of my last period, how sure I was about that, etc.

Then the questions began to get weird.

“And you had a positive pregnancy test?”

“…Yes…”

“And what was that? Urine?”

“Yes, a stick at home. I took it the same day my period didn’t arrive and it went positive right away…”

“And have you had any cramping?”

“…A tiny bit, a few weeks ago, but no spotting.”

“Okay, Mom, you can go empty your bladder, and then we’ll do the vaginal scan,” she said cheerfully.

So I went pee. But on my way back, I sought out Perfect Husband in the waiting room and told him that I was scared, because she was asking weird questions.

“Am I allowed in NOW?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

“Nope.”

So I went back in, and she had me take my pants off and stick a wand up my hoo-ha.

“Now, this won’t hurt you or the baby,” she assured me.

She spent  good ten minutes wiggling the wand around and clicking measurements on the screen, which was pointed away from me. I love how they hide the results of your own frigging scan from you. It’s my body isn’t it?

When she was done she told me that I could clean up and get dressed, and she would go and fetch “Dad”.

She ushered him into the room a moment later, and told us that she would be right back.

It’s at that point that you start trying to talk yourself out of paranoia.

After all, we had had a scare about the baby in our last pregnancy. Having read Marley and Me makes you more aware of what can go wrong in a seemingly healthy pregnancy.

But on the other hand, why did she ask if I had had a positive pregnancy test? She was clearly measuring SOMETHING on the screen, so there must be something in there. What a weird question.

“If there is something wrong, I would hope they wouldn’t just put us in here and leave us hanging with no warning,” PH said. “If she was that cheerful at me and there is something wrong…”

“She probably isn’t allowed to tell us anything. She probably has to hunt down some doctor to say “yep, that’s a dead baby,”” I said.

But we were still dealing in hypotheticals. I have anxiety. I live in these hypothetical scenarios where terrible things happen.

I’m not used to them actually happening.

So when she returned, still chirpy, with a radiologist in a white coat, my heart sank but I still didn’t really believe he was going to tell us terrible news.

He would tell us the baby might have Down Syndrome. He was going to say that the baby was due on Christmas Day instead of the 4th. He was going to tell us it was quadruplets. He wasn’t going to tell us that…

“So, I’ve reviewed the scans and unfortunately, the embryo is not living,” he said calmly and briskly.

“Oh.” I said in a small voice.

We proceeded to nod calmly while he told us that these things happen, that it probably happened a while ago, and it is usually due to a chromosomal abnormality. The embryo looked a little malformed, a bit unusual, so that was probably why…

“In what way?” I asked.

“Sorry?”

“What’s different about it? It’s okay, I understand the big words.”

He looked uncertain. “There’s not really much to tell you, it’s very small, only about the size of a peanut. There just seems to be some cystic processes going on. Anyway, I’ve called your midwife, but unfortunately I had to leave a message…”

His cell phone rang. “Ah, that’s probably here now. I’ll be back in a moment.”

And he left.

PH held out his arms to me, and I began to cry.

The radiologist came in a few minutes later and we sat up and wiped our eyes and nodded some more as he told us that the midwife was making up a referral to BC Women’s hospital where we could go to discuss our options, which would likely involve either taking drugs to miscarry at home or having a D&C. He said she was going to call me. He told us to take our time and to leave when we were ready. He said he was sorry for our loss.

We dried our eyes and left immediately. The midwife called and told me that it was called a missed miscarriage, that the people at the Women’s hospital would go over the options in detail, that she had sent a referral and we would probably hear back from them the next day. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. PH squeezed my hand as if to say “LISTEN TO HER”.

We had to pick up Owl from daycare right away. We took him right to our friends and neighbours’ house and asked them to take him for an hour. Then we went inside, and cried, and made phone calls.

My Christmas Baby is gone, but my body still thinks it’s pregnant. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been going through nausea and exhaustion to build a placenta for a lump of tissue that isn’t going to use it.

It’s hard to accept that no one will ever wear the little newborn sized Baby’s First Christmas outfit that I picked up at a swap meet a few weeks ago.

It’s worse to think that I can’t even get pregnant again until I get the remains removed, because my body doesn’t want to let go.

I can’t blame it though.

We’re having some trouble letting go as it is.

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