I've had my HCG quants done twice: once at 4 weeks past miscarriage (404) and again at 5 weeks post miscarriage (105). That's a drop of 299 in a week. Sweet, I thought. Excellent. At this rate, I should be HCG free inside of a week. LOL FUCKING NOPE! I'm now at nearly 7 weeks post miscarriage, and still getting very faint positives on pregnancy tests. MAKE. IT. STOP.
And guess what? Meanwhile, everyone everywhere in the history of
everything is pregnant. Women on my favorite non-pregnancy related
message board are pregnant. My cousins are pregnant. Women in every
other commercial on TV are either pregnant or carrying a baby around.
Acquaintances who probably shouldn't be pregnant? Pregnant!!!11!1!!1 Oprah.
Lindsay Lohan. Richard Simmons. Eleanor Roosevelt. All pregnant. Hell,
I'm pretty sure my own grandmother is pregnant at this point. (The dead one. Also the live one.)
WHY WHY WHYYYYY. If I can't be pregnant, can I just not be pregnant now? Is that so much to ask? I had to have the awful, shitty luck to land with a miscarriage-- could not the universe or Shiva or Baby Jesus or Oprah or someone have mercy upon me and get these mother fucking hormones out of my system?!
I'm 29 (getting very close to 30), and when I told some family members about the-baby-that-wasn't, there were some murmurs of "hur hur, about time," and so on. I am just fucking WAITING for someone, anyone, to make a comment along the lines of, "when are you going to have babies already," or maybe make some "hur hur, about time" type comments when we have a "rainbow baby" to announce, because I WILL TEAR THEM THE FUCK DOWN.
I feel like an angry two year old, full of impotent rage, unable to stand it any more, screaming from the hideous injustice, fully aware I'm unable to do anything about it. It's tearing me to pieces. The loss isn't enough, apparently; I also need to sit through a prolonged getting-back-to-normal period. I feel like somebody wiped their ass with the fabric of my soul. I just feel worn and shitty and ragged, with an ugly, gaping hole in the middle left by my baby.
Fuck.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Say my name, say my name
Hi. I'm not okay.
It's coming in waves, I think. The grief. The waves were so far apart this time I actually thought I was kind of okay. I was wrong. Actually, I think what is happening is my brain kind of shuts parts of itself down for a while. Like, you know, the grief processing part. I think it ceases operations for a little bit to give me a break, and starts up again when I'm ready to process it some more.
I find myself sitting at work thinking about her. Little by little, this image of who she was, or would have been, is forming. Image isn't the right word, it's more of a sense. Probably this is a psychotic delusion of some kind, in which my imagination runs away with me. Either that, or her little spirit is somehow sending me subconscious messages. (I am spiritual, but not religious.) Who knows? Maybe she is. She is/was/would've been the kind of person I'd want to be friends with, for sure. I try to stop this kind of thing, but I can't really. It's not conscious. I don't go, "Gee, I bet she'd be xyz," I just know. I feel like I know her the way my body knows it needs to breathe, or remembers to pump blood even when I'm asleep. It just...Is.
Sometimes I sit and write her name. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne Clara. Write it fast and sloppy, like I write most things. Write it neatly. Write as if she'd lived and borne this name and writing it had become habit. Write it in cursive. Daphne C Lastname, attorney at law. Dr. Daphne Lastname, DDS. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Kat and Mr. Kat invite you to share in their joy at the wedding of their daughter, Ms Daphne Clara Lastname, to Mr/Ms Blah Blah... Daphne.
That is probably weird. I don't care. Okay, I did not write out the wedding thing, or any titles. I thought it, though. Just her name, again and again, all over the sheet of paper. You want to know the best part? For all that I'm so attached to it, that would not have been her name had she lived. Mr. Wise doesn't really care for the name Daphne. It was one of my favorites. I told him I felt she had been a girl and asked if I could call her that, and he said yes. He chose her middle name after one of his grandmothers. He would never have let me have it for a living child, though. For all my "XXth president of the United States of America, Daphne Clara Lastname" daydreams, that wouldn't even have been her name.
I would have been 14 weeks today. This is about the time we would have been announcing on Facebook and so on. Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
It's coming in waves, I think. The grief. The waves were so far apart this time I actually thought I was kind of okay. I was wrong. Actually, I think what is happening is my brain kind of shuts parts of itself down for a while. Like, you know, the grief processing part. I think it ceases operations for a little bit to give me a break, and starts up again when I'm ready to process it some more.
I find myself sitting at work thinking about her. Little by little, this image of who she was, or would have been, is forming. Image isn't the right word, it's more of a sense. Probably this is a psychotic delusion of some kind, in which my imagination runs away with me. Either that, or her little spirit is somehow sending me subconscious messages. (I am spiritual, but not religious.) Who knows? Maybe she is. She is/was/would've been the kind of person I'd want to be friends with, for sure. I try to stop this kind of thing, but I can't really. It's not conscious. I don't go, "Gee, I bet she'd be xyz," I just know. I feel like I know her the way my body knows it needs to breathe, or remembers to pump blood even when I'm asleep. It just...Is.
Sometimes I sit and write her name. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne Clara. Write it fast and sloppy, like I write most things. Write it neatly. Write as if she'd lived and borne this name and writing it had become habit. Write it in cursive. Daphne C Lastname, attorney at law. Dr. Daphne Lastname, DDS. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Kat and Mr. Kat invite you to share in their joy at the wedding of their daughter, Ms Daphne Clara Lastname, to Mr/Ms Blah Blah... Daphne.
That is probably weird. I don't care. Okay, I did not write out the wedding thing, or any titles. I thought it, though. Just her name, again and again, all over the sheet of paper. You want to know the best part? For all that I'm so attached to it, that would not have been her name had she lived. Mr. Wise doesn't really care for the name Daphne. It was one of my favorites. I told him I felt she had been a girl and asked if I could call her that, and he said yes. He chose her middle name after one of his grandmothers. He would never have let me have it for a living child, though. For all my "XXth president of the United States of America, Daphne Clara Lastname" daydreams, that wouldn't even have been her name.
I would have been 14 weeks today. This is about the time we would have been announcing on Facebook and so on. Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
in memory
I'm pretty sure no one has even seen any of this, but never the less I
thought I'd share a couple of little things I've acquired to kind of
memorialize my baby.
I ordered a heart from A Heart To Hold about a month ago. AHTH is a non profit that makes weighted hearts for families who have lost a baby or a pregnancy, hence "a heart to hold." The hearts are provided free of charge. When ordering you can put in the exact weight (or estimated weight, as in my case) of the child lost. Obviously the baby I lost weighed almost nothing. Mine is in effect just a small heart pillow, but it is sweet, and I'm going to sleep with it. It's a bubblegum pink fleece and they included a card with my baby's name on it.
I ordered a heart from A Heart To Hold about a month ago. AHTH is a non profit that makes weighted hearts for families who have lost a baby or a pregnancy, hence "a heart to hold." The hearts are provided free of charge. When ordering you can put in the exact weight (or estimated weight, as in my case) of the child lost. Obviously the baby I lost weighed almost nothing. Mine is in effect just a small heart pillow, but it is sweet, and I'm going to sleep with it. It's a bubblegum pink fleece and they included a card with my baby's name on it.
Okay, this one is kind of cheesy, I admit it. This kind of thing is not at all my usual style, and I have no desire to begin a collection of such things. (My husband describes them as "modern-day Precious Moments for grown-ups.") But...I don't know. I saw it somewhere on the interwebs within days of my loss, and it just struck a chord. If it does the same for you-- or if it doesn't, but reading about other women's experiences helps you-- you might be interested in reading the Amazon reviews on it. This sits next to my bed now.
I also bought a handmade ring on etsy. It was very inexpensive, just about $30. On one side, it bears my baby's name. On the other, it has a heart. I can turn it so her name shows, if I want it to, or keep the name on the inside and let the heart show. On the inside it is stamped with the date of my loss.
It's something tangible, something I can see and wear and touch and have
on me at all times, but it's so extremely simple and understated that
it may very well escape notice 99% of the time. I love that it is so simple, both stylistically, and because it will be easy and inexpensive to replace when I hopefully have a rainbow baby's (or babies!) name to add to it. I'm
really, really glad I bought it.
I also have a kind of decorative wooden craft box I bought with intent to paint it, so I had something better (and prettier) than an old shoebox to keep my few Daphne-specific baby items in. A memory box, I guess. Unfortunately I have been unable to get the sticker off the top of the box to paint it! I am working on it, though.
And this blog. I guess this counts.
To some, all that might seem like overkill; but to me all these little things to help me memorialize my baby. So many remembrances help me deal with my grief and process it, rather than trying to stuff it down into a dark corner of my mind somewhere to fester.
So here's what happened: Adventures with Miss Oprostol
This is part two of the miscarriage experience, detailing the physical stuff and my experience specifically with cytotec/misoprostol. Here's a handy link back to part one, if you need it. Before I continue, let me warn you there is some major, bloody TMI ahead and may be too triggery for some. Read at your own risk.
**************************************
When I left my OB office, I received a lot of condolences, but no information. No one gave me any information about miscarriage. No one told me what to expect with the drugs. No one told me anything. At the time, I was too shocked to care; I just needed to get the fuck out of there and get to the car. I could barely hold the tears in as we walked through the parking garage. It wasn't until later that I realized something was missing!
I asked before I left the pharmacy if there was anything I needed to know about this drug, and the pharmacist literally, and in quite an uncertain tone I might add, read information on the attached papers out loud. Well, fucking thank you; I think I could have done that much on my own, idiot. I called again once I was home to ask for more clarification, and had to insist that they look it up to be sure, since no one seemed to know.
I received four hexagonal pills. The directions on the bottle said to wet them and insert them into the vagina, and to then lie down for at least 30 minutes. (From inserting the pills to bleeding/passing anything, it was about three and a half hours.) I inserted them at about 5.30pm and we put on a movie. I laid down. After 40 to 60 minutes I developed some extreme chills. That's normal, just a side effect.
At about 7.00, I took an oxycodone and a giant ibuprofen in an effort to head off the pain before it began. At 7.30 or 8.00 I began to have some cramping, and I curled up in my chair with a heating pad. At 9.00 or so I got up to get in bed and felt a gush. I also kind of felt like...well, just like something needed to come out, I guess. I can't really think of any better way to describe it. I went to the toilet and passed a very large sort of tubular clot, which I believe contained my baby. There was a lot of blood--a LOT of blood. I stood up to look in the toilet after I passed whatever I passed, and after having done that...it took a few minutes to clean myself up, I'll put it that way.
And then I flushed. That will haunt me forever. I flushed my baby down the toilet like a goldfish. "What else would you have done [with the remains]?", my husband asked. Fuck, I don't know. I guess I would have buried it outside. That's certainly not the point.
After that, I crawled into bed and sent my husband to the drugstore a few blocks away for Depends. (If you ended up here because you googled to see what you're in for, let me just say this: do it, man. Just get the Depends and some cheap ass baby wipes. You'll feel a little silly, perhaps, but you'll be much more comfortable in the end. It's worth it.) Husband returned, I suited up, and he made me a hot water bottle. He read to me for an hour or so and went to sleep in the guest room. I slept from about 11.00 to 12.00 or a little after.
From 12.00 to 3.30, holy shit. Just Ho.ly. Shit. I said that my husband went to sleep in the guest room, which he did-- he also told me to wake him up if I needed him. I never did that. Why? I don't know. I think I felt like it was more important that he get some sleep.
On the one hand, looking back, I have no idea why I let him sleep! What the fuck?! It was his baby too, why shouldn't he have been there for what was, well, kind of a birth? It was also a death, sure, but that was all the birth his first child was ever going to get, so why didn't I wake him? Why did I go through it alone? I don't know.
On the other hand, I kind of don't mind. He couldn't have done much but sit there helplessly watching me wail and sob, and witness a good deal of bloody gore. So I really don't know. I guess if I had it to do over again, I'd wake him.
Where was I? Oh yeah. For those, once again, who are here because they're about to go through it, I have good news: physically, there was not much pain. I stayed on top of the pain killers, and it was a little worse than the worst period I've ever had. That was it. Having read other people's accounts, I expected horrifying pain, but it never came. A lot of women report having basically contractions and something resembling labor, even as early as 8 or 9 weeks. I didn't. Maybe that's because my baby had passed at 6 weeks? I don't know. My cramps were kind of rhythmic, and strong, like they were really doing something, if that makes sense. Like they had a purpose, unlike your garden variety period cramps. But as I said, for me, they were not a whole lot worse than the worst period cramps I have ever had, and I would not have described them as contractions. Physically, it wasn't so bad, which is a kind of a gift, I guess.
Emotionally, I don't know how I did it. I basically sat in bed howling, wailing, keening, sobbing. No hyperbole. I cried in way I didn't know I was capable of. My face was swollen. I bought a short kindle book on miscarriage and pregnancy loss and read it off and on, tears just streaming. For three plus hours I sat in bed alone sobbing and bleeding and cramping, occasionally getting up to go to the bathroom to pass something. I felt like my very soul was being ripped in two, torn away from me. I just fucking cried and cried, rocking back and forth in my bed. Cried and bled and cried and bled.
And that was it. About 3.30, it pretty much stopped. I managed to stop crying and calm down a bit. I was exhausted. I put on a movie and fell asleep.
That was it. After that I had a week or so of light bleeding and 4 weeks or so of spotting. Today I am 6 weeks out and I am still waiting for my hormone levels to return to normal (which they seem to be doing, albeit rather more slowly than I would like).
UPDATE: My HCG levels did not return to 0 until March 12, nine and a half weeks after the miscarriage.
**************************************
When I left my OB office, I received a lot of condolences, but no information. No one gave me any information about miscarriage. No one told me what to expect with the drugs. No one told me anything. At the time, I was too shocked to care; I just needed to get the fuck out of there and get to the car. I could barely hold the tears in as we walked through the parking garage. It wasn't until later that I realized something was missing!
I asked before I left the pharmacy if there was anything I needed to know about this drug, and the pharmacist literally, and in quite an uncertain tone I might add, read information on the attached papers out loud. Well, fucking thank you; I think I could have done that much on my own, idiot. I called again once I was home to ask for more clarification, and had to insist that they look it up to be sure, since no one seemed to know.
I received four hexagonal pills. The directions on the bottle said to wet them and insert them into the vagina, and to then lie down for at least 30 minutes. (From inserting the pills to bleeding/passing anything, it was about three and a half hours.) I inserted them at about 5.30pm and we put on a movie. I laid down. After 40 to 60 minutes I developed some extreme chills. That's normal, just a side effect.
At about 7.00, I took an oxycodone and a giant ibuprofen in an effort to head off the pain before it began. At 7.30 or 8.00 I began to have some cramping, and I curled up in my chair with a heating pad. At 9.00 or so I got up to get in bed and felt a gush. I also kind of felt like...well, just like something needed to come out, I guess. I can't really think of any better way to describe it. I went to the toilet and passed a very large sort of tubular clot, which I believe contained my baby. There was a lot of blood--a LOT of blood. I stood up to look in the toilet after I passed whatever I passed, and after having done that...it took a few minutes to clean myself up, I'll put it that way.
And then I flushed. That will haunt me forever. I flushed my baby down the toilet like a goldfish. "What else would you have done [with the remains]?", my husband asked. Fuck, I don't know. I guess I would have buried it outside. That's certainly not the point.
After that, I crawled into bed and sent my husband to the drugstore a few blocks away for Depends. (If you ended up here because you googled to see what you're in for, let me just say this: do it, man. Just get the Depends and some cheap ass baby wipes. You'll feel a little silly, perhaps, but you'll be much more comfortable in the end. It's worth it.) Husband returned, I suited up, and he made me a hot water bottle. He read to me for an hour or so and went to sleep in the guest room. I slept from about 11.00 to 12.00 or a little after.
From 12.00 to 3.30, holy shit. Just Ho.ly. Shit. I said that my husband went to sleep in the guest room, which he did-- he also told me to wake him up if I needed him. I never did that. Why? I don't know. I think I felt like it was more important that he get some sleep.
On the one hand, looking back, I have no idea why I let him sleep! What the fuck?! It was his baby too, why shouldn't he have been there for what was, well, kind of a birth? It was also a death, sure, but that was all the birth his first child was ever going to get, so why didn't I wake him? Why did I go through it alone? I don't know.
On the other hand, I kind of don't mind. He couldn't have done much but sit there helplessly watching me wail and sob, and witness a good deal of bloody gore. So I really don't know. I guess if I had it to do over again, I'd wake him.
Where was I? Oh yeah. For those, once again, who are here because they're about to go through it, I have good news: physically, there was not much pain. I stayed on top of the pain killers, and it was a little worse than the worst period I've ever had. That was it. Having read other people's accounts, I expected horrifying pain, but it never came. A lot of women report having basically contractions and something resembling labor, even as early as 8 or 9 weeks. I didn't. Maybe that's because my baby had passed at 6 weeks? I don't know. My cramps were kind of rhythmic, and strong, like they were really doing something, if that makes sense. Like they had a purpose, unlike your garden variety period cramps. But as I said, for me, they were not a whole lot worse than the worst period cramps I have ever had, and I would not have described them as contractions. Physically, it wasn't so bad, which is a kind of a gift, I guess.
Emotionally, I don't know how I did it. I basically sat in bed howling, wailing, keening, sobbing. No hyperbole. I cried in way I didn't know I was capable of. My face was swollen. I bought a short kindle book on miscarriage and pregnancy loss and read it off and on, tears just streaming. For three plus hours I sat in bed alone sobbing and bleeding and cramping, occasionally getting up to go to the bathroom to pass something. I felt like my very soul was being ripped in two, torn away from me. I just fucking cried and cried, rocking back and forth in my bed. Cried and bled and cried and bled.
And that was it. About 3.30, it pretty much stopped. I managed to stop crying and calm down a bit. I was exhausted. I put on a movie and fell asleep.
That was it. After that I had a week or so of light bleeding and 4 weeks or so of spotting. Today I am 6 weeks out and I am still waiting for my hormone levels to return to normal (which they seem to be doing, albeit rather more slowly than I would like).
UPDATE: My HCG levels did not return to 0 until March 12, nine and a half weeks after the miscarriage.
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