Setbacks & Loss: Anivair Edition

I don't know what I can say that wasn't already said better, but I'll try to cover my part of this.

When your wife tells you she's pregnant, the last thing you expect is for her to come out of a Shell Station bathroom ten hours from home saying she's bleeding. It turns you inside out.

But I dealt with it. I made her call the OB, because I knew she couldn't think about it. I took her to the hospital and tried to keep her in good spirits. Some of that felt like a betrayal. Our omens in ritual had not been great, won't lie. I thought they were cautioning us against talking to people about it.

Which is a lie. I thought they were telling us that we weren't going to have a baby. But I didn't want to believe that. I second guessed my own divination, which probably happens a lot.

A lot of people will say that the waiting is the worst part. It wasn't. The worst part was watching them wheel my wife away. Waiting was just me eating seaweed salad. Me reading. Me drinking complimentary hot cocoa. Big deal. Traci was the one going into surgery.

I know that most people won't care about this, but the recovery has also been hell on our diets. We ate crap for almost 2 weeks and getting back on the bandwagon is hard (though the crap I've been feeling like for the last week is helping there).

Mostly I just want to put this past us and get our lives back. If nothing else it taught us that we both really want to have a baby. A lot. And we'll keep posting here because this journey is not over by a long shot.

Setbacks & Loss

So, I'm not going to mince words, it has been a rough month. I have debated posting this or not, to delete the previous entries or not. And I have come to the decision that we wanted this blog to be about our journey. The good, the bad, the whole process.

So, post this I will. Though, it is our intent not to publish this blog until we are through the first trimester of a pregnancy and ready to share it with the world. So, by the time the public has a chance to read this, some time will thankfully have passed.

The condensed version of the story is that we lost the baby. For those that are not interested in the details, feel free to skip below the purple text. (I do sort of miss having cut tags in livejournal for this reason.)

I'm just gonna throw this all out there. Warning, this is a little TMI.

Almost from the beginning of the pregnancy, I was very ill. Nauseous 24/7 and losing weight fast. we decided to still try to go on our honeymoon to New Orleans, and about 10 hours into the drive, I had terrible cramping and I started bleeding a little. So, in Decatur Alabama, we spent almost 4 hours in the ER there. They sent us home and put me on bed rest...giving me a shot that would go on to compound the chronic constipation I was already suffering from. I was told that these things happen and it looks like things were still alright, but if I wanted to keep the baby I needed to stay off my feet.

For the next week, I was lying in bed, wracked with pain caused by the nausea and constipation the ER shot gave me. But I felt it was what I had to do to keep the baby. So I went to my first ob appointment, where they also did bloodwork and ultrasounds (u/s). The embryo was really small on the u/s, but they guessed we just misjudged my conception date. I had to wait two more days to get the bloodwork back and they said my hcg levels looked normal and my body was reacting well to the pregnancy.

So I'd go back in another week to do it all over again and make sure things were progressing alright. Another agonizing week passed with me being really ill and terribly anxious as to the future of the pregnancy.

So I went in again, having been struggling to eat more than a few spoons of yogurt and a couple of crackers for meals. So, I went in, Wednesday Sept 28th, and though my body was doing a great job of getting ready, the embryo had not grown in three weeks and was not viable at this stage. I was informed that the next morning (Thursday Sept 29th) for my own health, I needed to have a d&c procedure to remove the embryo.

I went from 3pm, anxiously hoping to hear a fetal heartbeat, to 9am...prepping in an O.R. for them to remove it.

Our lives just changed so fast.

While I had mentally prepared for this as an option, I must admit, it is a pretty crushing blow. We managed to tell a few close friends and family and they helped us through this. But all told, I'm still reeling from the loss. Frankly, I was pretty numb all weekend and it wasn't until yesterday that I really had the chance to let it sink in.

I suppose this gives me an opportunity to start fresh and try to be conscious about my pre-pregnancy health for a few months before trying again.

I hope that this situation will be an example of how common this kind of situation is. And maybe by sharing this, it will give someone hope after loss like this.

Be well.