parties

Today I have two barbeques to go to, and tomorrow I am having lunch with most of my family on my dad’s side.  These opportunities feel like mixed blessings.  On one hand, I get to go out, drink, socialize, and pretend that I am a normal human being.  I will get dressed up, be careful with my makeup.  I will make stupid jokes, see people I haven’t seen in a long time, maybe there will even be some dancing involved.  I will laugh.  I will have fun.

On the other hand, I will lie.  Lie, lie, and lie some more.  Because when people you haven’t seen for a long time see you, they want to catch up.  They ask you how you are doing, and they want to know what you are up to.  When you are pregnant and not telling anyone yet, this is especially fun.  First of all, why are you not drinking?  My favorite lie for that used to be that I was on antibiotics, and alcohol makes me sick (this is a double lie, because antibiotics never make me sick.  I still think it’s a good lie.).  And what have you been up to?  I HAVE BEEN MAKING AND GROWING A BABY!!! OMG!!!  is what you want to scream, because what you “have been doing lately” is fucking amazing and you should get some goddamn credit for it.  But you smile with your secret and say, oh, you know, just the regular-old-stuff – work and family and all that.  And in your mind you fantasize about the day you will be able to post on Facebook, in some very cute and wholly original way, that you are expecting.

After a miscarriage, the lies are still necessary, because what kind of party-pooper says “Well, I just had my 4th miscarriage 3 1/2 weeks ago, and I have been extremely depressed and feeling very hopeless” in response to a benign inquiry into what you’ve been doing lately?  WAAH WAAAAH…talk about Debbie Downer.  So I will talk about being so busy with the end of the school year and now finally I am on summer break, and how I am looking forward to our trip to Mexico in 3 weeks.  Hey, those things are actually all true, now that I think about it.  But they’re not the whole truth.  I will leave out the crying fits, the weird Chinese fertility doctor I have been seeing and the strange teas I have been drinking, the consultation with the RE, the struggle to sleep on my own without drugging myself, the new psychiatrist I’ve been seeing, and the fact that I started a blog I will never give them the link to.  I will just smile.  I will laugh.  I will have fun.

crow

One morning a few weeks ago I discovered what appeared to be a juvenile crow acting strangely in my front yard.  It was sitting on a low stump, and not moving from it, even though I came relatively close.  I could not tell that it was injured – its wings and feet looked fine to me, but there was obviously something wrong. There was lots of cawing high from the trees branches above; it was apparent that this baby crow’s family was watching.  I went into the house and got some tortilla chips, crushed them up, and put them near the crow, thinking that the least I could do was feed it.

By the time I got home from work that evening, the crow was nowhere to be seen.  I hoped it had figured out how to fly away, and that it was with his or her crow family.

Yesterday I was weeding and I looked under the Japanese maple (one of those weeping-willowy-type small trees).  There was a crow carcass, already quite decomposed.  I assume it was the baby crow I was worrying about.  I decided to leave it there, partly because it grossed me out to pick it up, and partly because no one could see it or smell it anyway.  And maybe a part of me just didn’t want to disturb its resting place.

I hope the crow went quickly and painlessly that day. I like to think that where it hid is a beautiful, safe place – sheltered from the rain that was falling, and surrounded by a bower of delicate, lacy leaves.  I like to think that it was a peaceful place to spend one’s last moments, under a crimson canopy with the sunlight filtering through. A good place to die.

Now I know that crows can be annoying – they will steal your lunch from your picnic table, dive-bomb you when you get too close to their nest, and caw so loudly they will wake you up when you would rather be sleeping.  But you have to respect crows because of their remarkable intelligence.  They make and use tools.  They recognize individual humans.  They solve problems.  They are monogamous.  There are some studies that suggest that they have an imagination – an ability to put themselves in other crows’ shoes, if you will.

I have read that when a crow dies, the other crows have a funeral.  They will gather in the dozens and make high pitched calls, and circle above their fallen friend or family member.  Some will return to a branch and watch over the deceased crow for hours.  So crows mourn, and they have a ritual for it.

I don’t know what this has to do with me or why I am feeling the need to tell this story.  Maybe it’s because I wish I knew what was wrong with that bird, just as I wish I know what was wrong with 3 out of 4 of my failed pregnancies (I am grateful for an answer to this most recent one (read first post)).  Maybe it’s because I wonder if the surviving crows are intelligent enough to remember their lost ones, and for how long, and if it hurts to remember, like it hurts me to think about all I have lost.  Or perhaps I am in awe that crows are sensitive enough to have a funeral ritual when one of the species dies, while we humans have no established rites for honoring babies who never made it to full term.  For me and my family, though we have all grieved and continue to do so, there is no closure in this way.

No crow funeral.

stuff that comes out of my uterus

Ok, first I need to let it be known that if you don’t want to hear about bodily functions, don’t read my blog.  They happen in real life, and they will be talked about here.

There’s another thing I can’t get out of my mind about Tuesday’s post-op appointment.  My doctor asked me if I had bleeding, and I said yes (and gave the details about what kind of blood, how much, and how often, which I will spare you here.  Lucky.).  I also very solemnly told her that I had passed some grey-ish fetal tissue a few days in a row.  She said, “Oh, that’s just from the cauterizing sticks we use.  Sometimes it gets discharged and will come out of the cervix.  It looks grey.”

This is wonderful information to have.  Before or right after the procedure, that is.  I experienced quite a bit of devastation when I discovered that grey stuff, and shed quite a few tears over it.  I would wipe, and there would be what I thought was fetal tissue that the doctor somehow left behind, and the waterworks would start all over again.  It just reminds me how much I feel so violated having this surgery (twice now) – you go into the OR, they put you on this table, you fall asleep, and then what?  Somehow they have to move your body around so your legs go into the stirrups.  (By the way, you place your butt right above a hole in the table, so I have great imaginary movies in my head of being scooped out and dumped through the hole into some sort of slop bucket.).  And then you’ve got like 10 people who get to look at your va-jay-jay and watch as the doctor somehow gets you to dilate and then it’s pumpkin-scooping time.  And when the hell do the cauterizing sticks come into play?  What are they burning down there? It’s just all very unnerving and upsetting.

What is the point of this post?  I just wish doctors would tell you more what to expect.  They could say, “Some women experience a greyish, semi-solid discharge, and that’s from cauterizing, so don’t go freaking out that it’s something else.  Also, if you happen to pass a shot glass and a few limes, don’t worry about that.  We were having a party all up in there.  It was awesome, but we’re missing some things”.

If found, please return to the Polyclinic

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“It” was a girl

My name is Jen and I am 39 years old.  I have had 4 first trimester miscarriages in the past 18 months.  There is way more to me as a person, but this is the best intro I think I can give right now, because these lost little ones seem to have defined me without my permission.  They have changed me as a person.  They’re all I can think about.  I suppose you’ll get the bigger picture of who I am as I go along here, wherever this takes me.

Yesterday was three weeks exactly since my d&c. I had lost the baby at 8 1/2 weeks (right after an amazing, hope-giving, joyous ultrasound), but didn’t find out until 11 weeks at what was supposed to be my anatomy scan.  No heartbeat, no further growth.  The doctor agreed to karyotyping the “products of conception” (lovely, right?) to see if a chromosomal abnormality was the cause of the miscarriage.  Anyway, yesterday I went to my post-op appointment and found out 2 things.  There was indeed a chromosomal problem – trisomy 15, which is a condition “incompatible with life”.  This to me is useful information – now I can stop blaming myself for something I might have done wrong during my short pregnancy – I have been flogging myself with questions, like could it be because I exercised too much?  Too little?  Was it the argument me and my boyfriend had?  Was it the deli sandwich I ate?  Was it because I changed the cat box before I found out I was pregnant?  And the list goes on and on.  At least now I can stop blaming lifestyle issues and move onto the more sophisticated worries about all my old eggs being genetically fucked up, and if I’ll ever catch a “good” one before I completely run out.

The other piece of information I probably could have gone without knowing the rest of my life.  The doctor didn’t tell me in the office, but she gave me a copy of the lab report, and it clearly states that my baby was a girl.  You can even see the two X chromosomes in the image that comes along with the report.

A girl.  Today I was gardening and everything seemed like it was going ok.  Then the word “daughter” popped itself into my head, and I had that familiar icy feeling that moved across my chest and set my heart and mind to racing.   That “product of conception” was my daughter.  She was only 8 1/2 weeks old.  I literally saw her when she hadn’t even come into being, when she was just an egg (I had my follicles counted, and saw on the ultrasound the egg that was about to be released that month.  We caught that egg).  She was never meant for this world.  But I loved her, and I was a mother to her.  I want to be grateful for that opportunity, but as I sit here with an empty womb and an empty heart, I am only filled with sadness and broken dreams of holding my daughter in my arms.