One Of Life's Downs

I’ve been deliberating for days if I should actually post this or not, after all it is a very personal story an at first not one that I wanted the entire world to know about. It will however explain my absence over the past few weeks and I also think that putting pen to paper (even if I never hit the publish button) will aid in my healing process.

However if getting up close and personal on blogs is not your thing then I suggest you click the little red button up in the corner there and go find another blog to read. This is a very long winded, rambling type post (my head still isn’t in the best of places) that does include plenty of hospital ‘goriness’ if you continue, please don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyhow, a couple of weeks before Christmas (during an extremely hot week) I fell ill, blaming it on the extreme heat. It took me until the end of the week before the penny dropped………I was pregnant. Since this was a totally unexpected surprise, but considering that I had already had at least a week of morning sickness I figured that I was roughly 6 weeks along.

This certainly was not in our plans. After all our baby ( C ) is only 17 months and is still actively breastfeeding. Not to mention that I’ve always had a generous gap between having my babies (B is 8 and K is 5) so I was somewhat concerned to say the least with having a just 2 year old and a newborn (but plenty of others have walked that path before me).

After the initial shock wore off I was pleasantly happy. We had after all talked a few times about having 4 children. So we certainly weren’t disappointed or unhappy in anyway. How could you be with a little miracle on it’s way to be a part of our family. It was just the timing that I was most concerned about.

So off we headed on our family holiday and we had a lovely time together. The morning sickness began to subside, we told the rest of the family - they were understandably shocked with our unexpected Christmas gift to them. But plans were in motion for us to become a family of 6.

We headed home just a couple of days after Christmas when I had a slight gush of blood. Having had 3 trouble free pregnancies I knew instantly that that was not a good sign. I did however know that many women bleed during pregnancy and go on to have a healthy baby and since it was over as quickly as it began I did my best to put it out of mind.

During this time we’d also made the decision to night wean C. So he was to be now spending his nights with dad. After all I was heading off to hospital in a few months time and C needed to be able to get through the night with out me. That was sad, the first night I put him down and walked away knowing that I wouldn’t see him until the morning. Don’t get me wrong I longed for a full nights sleep (I hadn’t had one in over 20 months) but I wasn’t ready to give him up as my ‘baby’ just yet and night weaning was the 1st step in that process. It wasn’t in my plans, C was supposed to be ‘my baby’ forever. A few tears fell that night.

I woke the next morning having found that I’d had another gush of blood during the night at some stage. That was New Year’s Day. I hadn’t even been able to get to the GP for my dating scan due to the crazy time of year and doctor’s offices being closed. I thought it best that I phone the hospital and explain what was going on, they’d then point me in the right direction.

As I guessed they asked me to come straight in for a check and a scan. That was the beginning of the end. Part of me didn’t want to go the hospital because I think I already knew what was taking place and I really did not want to have to deal with it. But as you do, I kept my hopes up that all was fine.

The scan showed the ‘sack’ was an irregular shape (they are supposed to be pretty much perfectly round) and by this time I had guessed I was anywhere between 8 and 12 weeks, however the embryo didn’t appear to be much further along than about 6 weeks (if that). The sonographer basically confirmed what I already knew – a non viable pregnancy - and I was in the throws of miscarrying.

I had my bloods taken (my hormones were still quite high) as the morning sickness had returned and it was quite bad, my sense of smell was through the roof, I had never experienced that before. So according to the docs it was too soon to make a call either way ; especially since I had no idea on my dates either. So after sitting around the hospital for about 4 hours, they sent me home to rest and to return in 2 days time for more blood tests.

I was kind of numb, I knew as soon as I looked at the screen that there was nothing, there was no baby, we were not going to have this baby. What will be will be is all I kept telling myself. There’s a reason for everything, a blessing in disguise and all of that jazz. You know, all stuff that well meaning others say to you to try and make you feel better. I didn’t want to cry so I didn’t talk, didn’t really talk about it all, as I knew if I talked about it I would cry. You know before this experience I always felt that miscarrying so early in a pregnancy really wasn’t that big of a deal.

So we left the hospital to be greeted at home by B asking, “So are we having a boy or a girl?”. How do you explain this stuff to an 8 and a 5 year old. They really didn’t understand how just yesterday we were having baby and now today we weren’t. I was drained, tired and just wanted to curl up in a ball and hope that all of this was a just a bad dream. I’m sure as every woman does that has been through this there was that part of me that held a glimmer hope on what the doctor had said – it is still to early to make a call either way.

Two days passed, and light bleeding began on the day of my hospital visit, I still had lots of morning (all day) sickness. This time I waited for hours at the hospital for the blood test and the results to come back. The results were a definite answer and one that I knew was coming. The hormones had dropped considerably, we were absolutely unmistakably not having this baby. As I had already begun bleeding the doctor recommended that I just continue along that path and let things happen naturally, no need to have unnecessary surgery; I agreed. I was to come back if the bleeding got really bad or if I experienced any strong pain. That was Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning, more light bleeding and light period type pain. I’d had enough and I wanted this to be over, maybe getting out of the house for awhile was a good idea. We took a drive into the Gallery of Modern Art and the State Library, where they always have loads of fun things for the kids during school holidays. We had a really nice time, there was so much to do and see. By the time we got home that afternoon I was exhausted, that was probably around 3pm and the pain I was experiencing had begun to worsen. By 4pm I was on the lounge and not going anywhere in a hurry. By 5pm I was beginning to curl up in a ball with each cramping ‘contraction’ that was beginning to hit me every few minutes. I’d also begun passing huge amounts of blood clots but I guessed this was mostly normal. By 6pm I was experiencing unbearable pain and the blood loss was causing me great concern. I’d never heard of anything quite like the amount of blood I was losing, how could such a tiny thing (the sack was about 2.5cm across) be causing me to lose so much blood.

I got myself to the phone and called the hospital, with the doctor basically saying that it was fairly normally (well not abnormal anyway for a miscarriage, granted not everyone goes through what I was going through but it wasn’t abnormal). I was having a labour, an awful, painful, gut wrenching labour all for nothing. The doctor asked me to wait for an hour, if the bleeding and/or the pain hadn’t subsided to go in.

By 10 minutes to 7 I couldn’t take the pain anymore. Hubby phoned mum to come take care of the kids (they were becoming increasingly distressed at having to sit and watch me) and we were at the hospital by just after 7:30pm. (roughly 4.5 hours after it started) The drive was nearly unbearable, the cramps were coming every 2 – 3 minutes. I felt as though I was probably near 8cm dilated if I was full term, so totally not fun.

It took the hospital about 15 minutes to get a drip and some morphine into me but it certainly hit straight away and although the pain was still there it was bearable. Why, oh why did someone not warn me that this could happen? Never would I have opted to go through such an experience. Even at the hospital waiting for a doctor I was still passing large amounts of blood clots. Eventually that seemed to stop, the doctor felt as though I should be over ‘the worst of it’ and he did his best to ‘remove’ any of the excess clots that were still there waiting to be passed. I think we left the hospital somewhere around 10:30pm. And thought I was tired yesterday, I think I’d just lost about ½ of the blood in my body (or at least it felt that way), I could barely walk. I crawled into bed sometime after 11 and cried myself to sleep.

When I woke the following morning, all the pain had gone and the bleeding had subsided to a steady flow. My morning sickness was still as strong as ever though. I was due back at the hospital at 2pm for another scan to make sure that it really was all over. I basically spent the day on the lounge, I was ghostly white and was unable to do anything at all really.

Thank goodness dear hubby was at home on holidays, he was totally and utterly amazing through all of this and kept up with not only looking after me and the kids but also the house as well (in fact he probably did a better job than I normally do, but don’t tell him that). He’d certainly had his fair share of sitting for hours on those rock hard hospital waiting room chairs so I left him at home with the kids and mum took me for what I thought would be my final visit to the hospital and the last scan of this horrendous ordeal.

It was all still there though! Yep even after what I had gone through the afternoon/evening before my body still wouldn’t let go, after all of this I was going to have to need surgery after all. Really could anything else possibly go wrong? We waited for 3 hours in our little cubicle for the doctor to tell me to come back in the morning to have the ‘product’ surgically removed. I was absolutely petrified of going home and having another night like the last. But thankfully it was all smooth sailing, not that I really got much sleep.

I was up and at the hospital at 8am and waited until about 10:45 for my turn in the operating theatre. Even though I knew that this was all over it just didn’t feel right having the ‘baby’ removed surgically, but I knew there was no other way. The last time I was in that operating room was when I was having my c-section to bring C into this world, what a difference 18 months makes. I was in and out of the operating room in under 30 minutes all up, so a very quick procedure. The recovery room was the longest part and as I lay there, 2 beds down from where I was with C I remembered that experience. When I first held him in my arms and we all watched him make his own way from my tummy to the breast, an experience I will never forget. An experience I will never have with this baby.

And after about 90 minutes that was it, it was finally over, I could go home. Go home and get back to normal. Get back to living, move on and trudge ahead with our life all back to how it was 6 weeks ago. After all it is a blessing in disguise right, better this end than the other and there were many more responses that I heard, you know, well you never really wanted another baby anyway did you. God dammit doesn’t mean that I didn’t instantly fall in love with the little being that was growing inside me. It doesn’t mean that I had already altered all of our plans to include this child, just because we didn’t plan it this way, it doesn’t mean we didn’t want the baby.

Today is the first day (exactly one week after the awful labour experience) that I have actually done anything around the house. The first day that I have even felt remotely human. I am still very tired and I am guessing that may take some time and I am not sleeping so great either. As hard as I try every night the entire week long saga just plays over and over in my head. My heart just keeps saying you can have another baby, but I know in my head that that is not a decision to make lightly. I am grieving, I still have pregnancy hormones raging through my body, that could last another 3 weeks. Making that kind of decision any time soon would just be plain silly.

Plus I am so so scared of going through that again. Do I just count my blessings and move on? Sitting here at the moment I’m not sure I can do that. Oh yeah I am fine during the day, life happens but right now I can’t seem to remove the images from head at night. I just keep asking why, why now, why did this happen after all of this time and why if there was something wrong with the baby why did it take so long for me to miscarry, why why why???

Was it a sign just to make sure that I wouldn’t decide to have anymore children or was it telling me that I really should be having another child. How does one know what is the right decision to make. All I do know that now is not the time to making that decision.

Out of all of this god awful experience, that I would never ever wish upon anyone (and I know that many women have gone through and have never been able to have a child; I believe would be truly unbearable). Is that I have 3 gorgeous perfectly healthy children and every day I wake up to see their smiles and have their cuddles and it reminds me of how very blessed I really am.