Christmas 2014 - A new child doesn't replace a lost child.

I was chopping root vegetables this evening when it hit me that a year ago I was doing the same exact thing prior to leaving for my in-laws.

But everything was different then.

In 2013 with every slice of sweet potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and the like, the knife made a loud thud on the carving board.  I barely heard the loud noise, even though it echoed throughout the kitchen.  A stiff glass of apple brandy with an ice cube sat next to the cutting board, and I struggled to look through red, swollen eyes.  The bottle of apple brandy was my best friend Christmas Eve & Christmas.

Everything hurt and at the same time nothing hurt.  Occasionally my brain reminded me that I was supposed to become a mother the next day, and at those it took all my strength to fight back tears and keep my hand from wandering to my stomach.

I tried so hard to forget, to forget the baby boy that was supposed to grace my household at that time. Tried so hard to stop reliving that day at the perinatologist where one by one our dreams crumbled.  My husband having to leave the room to cry because he didn't want me to see the tears running down his cheeks, because he thought he had to be strong for me.  The single man in my life who never cried, who grieved the loss of olive for far longer than I, who was afraid to touch me for months because the pain was still so strong, and who spent every single day of my subsequent pregnancy in a pit of silent fear that history would repeat itself.  Attempting to comfort himself in statistics that had already worked against us.

December 1 2013 I went to my psychiatrist and told him I wanted to try getting pregnant again in the new year, and I had to wean off my meds.  Christmas without the meds that helped numb the pain of Olive's departure was difficult, hence the brandy.  Hence the hiding alone in the basement, or bathroom, to stifle my sobs so no one would hear them.  I surrounded myself with family that year, hosting my family and my in-laws, figuring that misery loves company.  We could all be miserable together. 

But this Christmas is different.  In January, in a drunken haze, I decided to "try" for a baby again.  One month later, after visiting a medium whose last words to me were, "Your grandfather wants you to know you should stop drinking coffee.", I took a pregnancy test; a second line glared back at me.

I sobbed.  and I sobbed. and I sobbed some more.

I won't detail the pregnancy here, I'll save that for another post, but it took me a week to tell C that I was pregnant.  I just couldn't do it.

So, this Christmas is different because as I was writing this, this face was staring at me.

There is no bottle of brandy this year.  There is no sobbing behind locked doors, or stiff embraces between me and Chris.  There's no numbness.  

A year ago today I was convinced we were doomed to spend Christmas alone.  I never would have dreamed that only a year later, our hearts would be swollen with a love that we never knew was imaginable.  I never dreamed the following Christmas would be full of baby snuggles, smiles, and love radiating from everyone.  

I never dreamed I would actually be a mother.

But I am.  And I was a mother last year also.  A mother who had been faced with one of the most difficult decisions in circumstances that no one should face.  

I type this with tears running down my cheeks.  I still cry for the son that I never got to hold.  That never got to feel the love of his mother.  Having S didn't eradicate that pain, and it never will.  The first few days after I brought S home I cried for the son I didn't bring home 10 months ago.  S doesn't replace Olive.  Nothing and no one will ever replace Olive.  He will always have a piece of me, and he will always be a piece of me.  He changed my life in ways much different than S did and ever will.  

And, since I'm hysterical now, I will end this here, to go and hold my son on his first Christmas morning. 

First period after D&E

32 days after my D&E my period returned.  I started feeling crampy around day 31 and knew that it was around the corner.  I also had tons of bright red cervical mucus on 8/20, so I assumed ovulation would be 8/21 or 8/22, which means that my period is here, pretty much 14 days exactly after I ovulated.  

I don't know what to feel.  I was recently pregnant; I thought it would be a year before I saw a period again considering I would be breast feeding.  I never thought I'd see my period in September 2013.  

I also can't believe how quickly the body moves on from the pregnancy. With an empty uterus my body just moved on, reset its program and once again started ovulated, preparing for another pregnancy.  How quickly the body forgets, while the heart and mind hold on, desperately hold on.  My period feels like it officially closes that physical chapter of my life, the chapter that will forever be known as the "olive chapter".  But my mind and heart will keep the chapter open, continuously writing and adding chapter after chapter, composing a book. 

I also find some solace in my period, in my body so easily returning to normal.  I know that there are some women who would kill for their period to come regularly, and those who required medical intervention in order for their period to return post D&C or D&E; so I should be thankful.  Part of me is, believe me, some of the tears I cried when I ovulated, and when I got my period were for the fact that my body seems to desperately want to regulate itself.  It seems to be returning to its "before" cycle - and that's more than I could have asked or expected.  I'll be thankful for that gift.

Ten perfect fingers & ten little toes (a poem)

You had ten perfect fingers,
Five on each hand.
I'm reminded of them each time I look at my hand.
And when I hold your father's hand,
I'm reminded that those ten perfect fingers,
Were a combination of ours.

You had ten little toes,
On two itty bitty feet.
Every time I wiggle my toes,
I wonder if you wiggled yours,
When you were inside of me.

You had ten perfect fingers,
and ten little toes,
But you never would have known they were there.
You would have never been able to grab those toes,
Or count on those fingers,
Because the neural wiring
Just wasn't there.

I keep a picture,
Of five of those perfect fingers,
Faced down in my center console,
When I step in to the car I'm reminded of my little angel
watching over me.

I hope where you are,
that you're watching me,
and that you're able to use those ten perfect fingers,
to grab those ten little toes.

I'll never feel your hand in mine,
Those soft fingers will never graze my face.
They'll never grab at my finger,
and hold on for dear life.
My dear angel,
it just wasn't your life.
The millions of tears that I cry,
will never make it your life.

Perhaps one day,
When my time on earth is through,
I'll feel those ten perfect fingers
and I'll kiss those ten little toes.

Copyright 2013 VMHC @ http://myjadedinnocence.blogspot.com/

Quotes & Statistics

Whenever anyone quoted statistics to me, saying, "oh, the odds are 1:1,000,000".  All I could think about was that 1.  That regardless of the number on the right, there's still a number 1 on the left side.  And every time I met a pregnant woman, a successful pregnant woman, I thought to myself, well, you are one of the 1,000,000.  When I was a member of a pregnancy forum, I actually sat there and thought, "all of us will not make it.  at various points, people will begin to leave.".  Inevitably, I was one of those people.  I was the dreaded number of the left side of the statistic.  I can only happen that I can be that number only once.  I can come to term with the early miscarriages, where the chances are as high as 25% - perhaps I've just been unlucky.

But, just once, I only need it to be just ONCE, I'd like to be the number on the right.  I'm always the number on the right when it comes to the lottery, and contests, and everything fantastic; I'm never that 1, never when I want to be the 1.  Now I am the one, and I pray with all my might to a god I don't even know exists, that for once, I can be in the 'normal' distribution.  Why is that so much to ask?  Why is that seemingly so difficult?

I don't have much energy to type much more tonight, so a few of my favorite quotes about loss...
~~~~~~~

I carry you with me into the world, into the smell of rain & the words that dance between people & for me, it will always be this way, walking in the light, remembering being alive together. - Brian Andreas

I never knew emptiness could weigh so much, she said.  I can barely hold it.  So he sat beside her & reached for her hand, and they held it together. - Brian Andreas

♥ “Each new life,no matter how brief, forever changes the world.”

♥ ‎”There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms.” -Charlotte Bronte

♥ “There is no foot too small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world.”

♥ “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” W.S. Merwin

♥ “I held you every second of your life.” -Stephanie Paige Cole

♥ “We are grieving, We are not contagious, We are not sad all the time, We laugh, We smile, We cry, We weep for being happy, We live, We talk, We feel, We come from every background, We are sad, we lost a baby, We are…” -Jennifer Davis

♥ “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” -Gandhi

♥ ‎”It has been said time heals all wounds… I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind protecting it’s sanity covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it’s never gone…” -Rose Kennedy

♥ “How very quietly you tiptoed into our world, silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint your footprints have left upon our hearts.’” -Unknown

♥ “If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was ‘over’ it. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breath and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.” -Elizabeth Edwards

♥ “It’s a happy life, but someone is missing. It’s a happy life, and someone is missing.” -Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination

♥  “Do not judge the bereaved mother.
She comes in many forms.
She is breathing, but she is dying.
She may look young, but inside she has become ancient.
She smiles, but her heart sobs.
She walks, she talks, she cooks, she cleans, she works, she IS,
but she IS NOT, all at once.
She is here, but part of her is elsewhere for eternity.”

♥ “Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.” -Jean Kerr

♥ “Hope is all I have left; if I lose hope, I lose everything.  I refuse to go there just yet.  I'll hope for the future, because without that, there is no future." VMHC

Most of the above are from http://facesofloss.com/resources/quotes - credit given to the author when the name was available.

Can you see us? (A Poem)

Can you see me
Curled up in a fetal position
Sobbing
uncontrollable guttural cries
that come from so deep within
few of us know such crevices even exist.

When we saw you
When we spied on you
thanks to the technology that liberated and confined all of us
us - our family
We learned you loved that position

We watched you punch and kick
when the tech tried to unfurl you
from the fetal position
that you knew so well
but you refused
we called you stubborn, like your dad.

We saw you
But you never saw us.

Can you see us now?
See the people who made you from love
Who created the little you
and loved you from the moment
you presented yourself
as a mere hormone
via a pink line

We made you
and we love you
unconditionally.

Can you see our pain?
How we ache everyday that you are no longer here
that every where there are reminders of the you
even though you no longer exist
outside of your hearts, our minds,
our souls.

You were a piece of us.
The first true piece of us.
An amalgamation of your mother and father
our strengths
our weaknesses
our faults
our visions
And we couldn't wait to watch them transform
into you.

Can you hear us now?
I used to hear your heart beat.
Every morning and every night.
Your father could hear it.
But sometimes you preferred when it was just me.
Our special moment
my spying on you
You with little space to retreat.
It was truly the most beautiful sound
Such a strong sound,
the doctors said,
as they assured me you were right where you should be.

Could you hear us before you left?
Could you hear our voices?
If so I hope you heard our laughs
Our giggles
Our joy
The sound of my heartbeat,
did it lull you to sleep?
Would you recognize it,
if you heard it now?

If you can see us,
and you can hear us,
you hold a precious, precious gift,
and I wish it was through a two way lens
So that we could see you
and know
that you made it alright
That there's no pain anymore
That there's peace where are you are
and that you've come to call it home.

I feel so hollow without you.
But if you can see me,
and you can hear me,
I know that you can also feel me.

When you feel me
You know that without you
Such a vital piece of me is gone.
Which is why you hear the guttural sobs
and see the constant embraces between your father and I
that leave me weak in the knees
is because I can no longer feel you.

The next time you look at us,
The next time you touch us,
I hope to feel the warmth of your little hands radiate from within
telling me
that you will always
see us
hear us
and fill me with your warmth.

Anger

I'm so angry right now.

I'm so mad that we have to start all over again.  That (hopefully) we will have the opportunity to once more go through 18 weeks of hell, with hope and prayers for a better outcome.

I'm so angry that it will literally be hell, that so much was taken from us, and that so much of the future has been taken from us unjustly.

I'm so angry at myself for feeling like I gave up on my little boy.  What if he just needed more time?  What if all the experts were wrong, and everything would have righted itself if we just gave it more time?

I'm so angry that at this time yesterday my uterus was full of life, and right now it's hollow.

I'm so angry that my husband now has to tell people that he's not going to be a dad.  That I now cringe whenever I see a father with his son.  I'm so angry that he has been robbed of this opportunity, that his son had to die.

I'm so angry that nothing will ever make this better.

Lots of blogging today

Today I'm vacillating between anger and depression.  I'm also feeling a ton of resentment.  I'm jealous of women who post their positive pregnancy test on Facebook immediately.  I wound never, EVER wish any pain or ill will on them, but I'm jealous that I will never and could never have that experience.  That any future excitement C and I feel will be tempered and pushed down by fear and anxiety.  I have absolutely no idea when I would think the next pregnancy is "okay" - probably once the apgar results are in and little one is in my arms.  Right now everything that just feels tainted.  I feel like we have lost so much innocence in this process and it makes me so, so angry.  I was so relieved that we were almost halfway through this pregnancy; I was starting to quiet down the scientist/geneticist in me, but now, she's thriving, she's taking control, and she's so angry.  I never expected to inhabit the tail ends of a normal distribution (does anyone?); yet here we are, trying desperately to learn to cope with it and to figure out where we go from here.

This pregnancy I was never calm; I was never confident that things were all well down in fetus land.  I refused to announce, and believed that announcing before the anatomy scan would be premature.  At the end of the day, I am at peace with this choice.  This means there are few people that we have to tell that our little man is not one for this world.  

My D&E is scheduled for Friday.  I've consulted my OB, my local peri, and had a day of testing at Columbia-NY Presbyterian, and all are in agreement that there is an underlying syndrome at play here and little one will pass on his own, and that at this point, the D&E is the best path forward.  No one second guessed me; the medical professionals were in complete agreement with the decision.

I'm not scared of the surgery; well, I am in that I'm terrified of waking to find that something went tragically wrong and I am now sans uterus.  I'm more scared of tomorrow; the prep for the procedure.  I have a very difficult time with having things inserted there; it just makes me wildly uncomfortable, and so knowing that as of tomorrow I will begin dilating, does not make me feel any better.  I hope that after the next 48 hours I have a bit more peace and a bit more closure, but of course it's possible I have unrealistic expectations.  

I don't know what to expect right now.  I have no idea what emotions I'm going to go through over the next 48, 72, 96 hours, weeks, months, etc.  And I have no idea what C will go through either; I just know that no matter what, we will be going through them together, comforting each other every step of he way, and that together, we will find a path forward for us, and hopefully for a family.

8 days later

Whenever I heard stories of a couple losing their baby, or child, I always wondered how the family coped.  How did they find the energy, the strength, the fortitude to get up every.single.day and wash, rinse, repeat.  How does a couple found a way to wake up every.single.day knowing that their lives are never, ever going to be the same.  How they would be able to look at each other without getting lost in grief, remembering what they almost had, or what they could have had if only the stars had aligned differently.

But then, suddenly, it does happen to you.  You're sitting there one day, grasping the hand of your partner, hoping with every ounce of energy, that you are going to hear good news.  But it doesn't come. (In my case, the bad news just didn't stop coming, but that's for later in the story.) You find your grasp becoming firmer and firmer, until it suddenly goes limp, and your hand is hanging there.  You feel like all of you is hanging there.  That you're slowly, but perpetually falling and there's no bottom to this cliff; there's no valley; there's not even a hell.  This perpetual drop (which also proves that gravity is much stronger than 9.8m/s^2) is in fact endless.  You'll spend days, weeks, month, or some inordinate amount of time in this free fall.  People tell you not to mark time by the loss.  That when the leaves change you shouldn't say, "He would have been 'x" now." or, "We would have been preparing the nursery now.  The crib would be arriving any day." because it's unhealthy.  It's not part of moving on.  And, at the end of the day, we need to move on.  We need to find a way to function on a daily basis knowing that the future that we were led to expect, is no longer our future.  That with the flip of a switch, that has changed.

I'm new to this free fall this time around, but in the grand scheme of things, I have lost before.  I lost in February 2007 - it was the one time C and I forgot to use protection, and 2 weeks later I was staring at a positive line.  We were engaged at the time, and we had no idea how we would proceed.  Little did I know that we wouldn't even have to decide because I miscarried.  Honestly, it could have even been a CP; the only evidence the doctor had of my pregnancy was the positive urine test.  We never did a blood test as I wasn't sure how we were going to proceed with the pregnancy.

I miscarried again last July, but that was *sigh* by choice, and a choice that will now haunt me for the rest of my life.  My therapist continuously tells me that karma doesn't work that way, and that I am now not being punished for my decision, but it's still difficult to keep my mind from going there.  It wants to go there because it wants to place blame, it wants a reason, it wants answers for what happened this time around.  I chose to terminate because I was taking class x medications at the time of conception, and even for a week or two after as I wasn't expecting to be pregnant.  All of my doctors were in agreement with my decision to terminate.

My loss in January is documented earlier in this blog, and I don't want to rehash it here.  Perhaps I will at a later point, but I want to be able to delve into the grief that my husband and I are feeling now as it's paramount on my mind, and is our current hell.

Initial reaction 24 hours post amnio

So, the 24 hours results are back....

1. Chromosomally male - scrotum may not have dropped or differentiated itself at this point.
2. Negative for trisomy 13, 18 and 21 - full karyotype will be in by next Tuesday
3. Amniotic AFP level should be in on Thursday, but other information will be trickling in daily.

Appointments at Columbia are Friday at 8am - ultrasound, fetal echo and genetic counseling.  The genetic counseling is really for DH as he still needs to be karyotyped, mine was done in January and is normal. 

If Columbia confirms Dandy-Walker we will *sigh* be terminating next Thursday or Friday.  I don't advise researching Dandy-Walker; it's terrible.  It's estimated prevalence is 1:~30,000 live births, and if it is completely random and LO is genetically normal, I truly hope that lightening doesn't strike twice.  We will be doing exome sequencing of the fetus to add to the total amount of genetic information that is available for DW, and to see if we can pinpoint a genetic cause.  Hopefully one day that information will help other parents.  After all we have been through between previous pregnancies and this one, we are strongly considering IVF with genetic screening next time around.  My peri feels that it's a very realistic plan that she endorses, and will work with setting me up with a top RE.

It will obviously take us a long time to heal from this, and I think my DH is having a much more difficult time coming to terms with it.  What hurts the most is that there is no way to heal this pain.  There is no way to fix it.  There is literally no way to put the pieces of hope and dreams back together.  There's nothing to stop the pain, and there is nothing that will make future pregnancies any easier.  They already feel tainted.  I feel like we lost our innocence through all the miscarriages, and now, with this pregnancy, I'm left with anger.  I'm mourning a life that will never truly come to be, yet was already full of so much love.  I'm mourning DH and I's sense of innocence, our faith that things will be okay.  In the end we will come to terms with this and accept the fate, but it will never, ever be okay.

Once this is over DH and I are going to take a long trip to Italy and do our best to heal together.  I will drink copious amounts of espresso, red wine and questionable cheeses. We are likely going to spend Christmas abroad because it's going to be too difficult to be here on my EDD and plan to move (though we will stay in our current area) because it's time for a change of scenery. I'm going to have olive trees planted in our parents backyards, and hope that they grow big and strong.  We will find peace, even though it will be at the end of a very long road.

4 years ago I lost my best friend to cystic fibrosis.  if there is a heaven, I hope she finds my little man and takes him under her wing.