Over the weekend, we accepted the idea that we may have lost the baby. Thursday was really hard – it’s when the bleeding got heavy and when it was at its worst. Jeremy was at work all day of course, so I kept it to myself. It didn’t help that he was also applying to Google again, and I know that in itself can be so stressful… so I didn’t want to burden him until he was home and we could really talk about it.
By the time he made it home… I was in tears. I didn’t feel pregnant. All of my symptoms had completely stopped – no nausea, tender breasts, etc. I don’t know if it’s because I was scared and convinced myself that I was losing the baby, or what. I just didn’t feel pregnant.
I barely remember Thursday night. I know that there was a lot of crying. I don’t think we really talked about anything. I remember Jeremy crying… me curled up to him on the couch sobbing into his shirt. But I don’t really remember much else.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I have apologized to him. I know that’s dumb. The logic section of my brain knows I didn’t do anything wrong… it knows I did the best that I could. But that hasn’t stopped me from feeling like a failure… like I somehow didn’t do enough.
Jeremy had to work Friday. It’s different for him because he gets a forced distraction. He came home to me as soon as he could, but I had already spent most of the day in the same spot on the couch… hydrating, watching TV, crying, and sleeping. We cried more together when he got home and started talking about what would come next.
I think it’s at that point that we accepted the loss. Don’t get me wrong… that doesn’t mean it hurt any less to hear it from a Doctor (stupid as I think he is). But we accepted that this pregnancy might be failing and talked about whether or not we wanted to try again if we found we’d lost the baby.
Over the last 4 years, I have been very ho hum about having more children. I wasn’t sure if I deserved to have another child, if it was something I even wanted because I was admittedly enjoying where our lives are right now in regards to physical and financial freedom. But this pregnancy… it’s made me more sure than ever and reminded me of what it feels like to be a Mommy.
I know not everyone reading this experienced me as a Mommy, so it might seem like such a foreign concept. In fact, I’m pretty sure a large portion of people actually think I hate kids. 😀 But the truth is, I was made for being a Mommy. It’s just that over the last decade, I’ve had to learn to live with the pain of loving my daughter at a distance and figuring out how to detach myself from those instincts so that I could allow myself the space to heal and otherwise grow as a person – even if it meant becoming someone who identified as “not a Mommy”. Sometimes I’m just really weird around kids… because deep down, it still hurts. It always will.
This baby tore that wound wide open and all of the love I could possibly muster came pouring out of me for this baby. I can’t even describe it. The second I knew… that was it.
I’ve accepted that we may have lost Little Red. What I cannot accept is the uncertainty. I cannot just let someone dig around and take away a baby that might be perfectly fine. I can’t live my life that way. I probably sound like I’m just in denial by wanting a second opinion… but I need to be sure, really sure.
Jeremy is angry. No… you don’t understand. Jeremy doesn’t get angry. In 4 years, I think I have seen him otherwise genuinely mad once. He’s so angry about the doctor… angry because he doesn’t even know a whole lot about pregnancy, but it isn’t all adding up for him either… angry because based on what he was there to experience with me from this doctor, it all sounds like one gigantic guess.
He wants a second opinion and I trust him on that. He supports my decision to switch doctors and to do whatever we need to do to get all of the information we can before we make any drastic decisions.
As of right now, the plan is to contact the ER at Trident Hospital where I went on Saturday, June 9th for the increased spotting… to see if they have any information to give me or if they can tell me anything at all about what tests my blood was put through. I’ll also be contacting MUSC Women’s Health and getting an appointment with them as soon as possible. I know it might make better sense to wait until I’m at least 8 weeks… heck, that might even be as long as we need to wait. But honestly, I think the sooner the better for sake of getting the second opinion and figuring out where we’re at based on what information we have.
If I miscarry between now and that appointment, so be it. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it at this point. I believe that if my current doctor had done the damn blood work, maybe there was something we could have caught and figured out. But what’s done is done. And should I miscarry, I want to go through the D&C anyways. It was always my plan that after the gruesome events of March and April that I would have everything tidied up in there – because clearly there was already something crazy going on in there.
We agreed that we would actually actively try to have a baby. We’ve never paid attention to when the best time would be and admittedly over the last 4 years, we’ve spent enough time apart that there was always a slim chance on us having sex at the right time anyways. Jeremy said we’d go to Colorado next year if we had to 😀
But honestly… I am not in any pain. I am not a doctor, but I don’t understand where my baby went. The tech seemed to think that a baby never formed there, but I know it did – two different techs saw and measured the baby. I want a more thorough ultrasound. I think there may have been 2 sacs and only 1 baby formed… and they were looking at the wrong sac. Maybe that’s a long shot, but it sounds more realistic to me than my baby vanishing. I just don’t see how I could have miscarried.
I spent a lot of Saturday talking in a few different groups… a lot of women reached out to me to offer their support and knowledge. Dozens of women spoke of the horrible pain they experienced when they miscarried at 5 and 6 weeks along. I have an incredibly high pain tolerance thanks to years of dealing with PCOS… but even I buckle over for laboring contractions. I realize these would be more mild, but I’m in absolutely zero pain.
I have completely shut down my business. I’m not proud of it… but I owe people my time and work, but I just can’t. I can’t think about that right now. I sit down at my desk to try and I just fall apart. I spent all week on the couch resting, hydrating, watching TV, napping, trying to just take it easy because I wanted to do everything I possibly could in the 6 days between the appointments.
I need this to be my focus right now. It has to come first. My health and our unborn baby are more important to me than anything going on with my business. Let it fall apart… let people be mad. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. I’ll just rebuild it. I can always rebuild it. I won’t get a second shot at this baby… at doing my best for it right now.
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