Morning Wake-Up Call

After a week, Scott still reaches over when he's just waking up to rub my belly. You can tell he's still surprised when he realizes there's nothing there, and he moves his hand to my breast or arm, trying to pretend he wasn't saying good morning to our dead baby. I can't bring myself to tell him to stop, it's also my own little morning reminder - you're no longer pregnant, now put on a brave face, get up and face the day.

I can't watch TV anymore. I never realized how often babies and pregnant women are featured in commercials. If I try to watch TV to zone out for a while, an image of a preggo or a baby snaps me right back into myself, where I actually have to think about what happened and try not to cry about it. Reading's marginally better, but I can't read any new books - what if there's a baby in the book? I've been re-reading all the books I know for sure don't have any mention of the things I'm cowardly avoiding. I get bored with re-reading, so I try to work more on painting the house (we're on second coat of primer), but my leg still hurts from surgery, and every time I have to step up onto a chair to paint near the ceiling it twinges, and my mind goes right to the reason.

This is impossible to avoid, when all I want to do is get on with my life, stop being such a wreck. I wish I could force myself not to think about it most of the time, and allow myself grieving time in the shower, where no one can hear me cry.

Two Strikes, I'm Out

This seemed to help the last time, so I guess it's time to start writing again. Six months and 3 days after I delivered my stillborn baby girl, a baby boy followed. He only made it to 19 weeks, but his growth was at 17 weeks, so it seems to be a recurring problem. Scott and I decided a while ago that this would be our last try - I'm not strong enough to do this again. So now in addition to grieving for my baby, I'm grieving because I know I will never have a biological child. I think the pain is worse this time. Which is weird - I didn't think it was possible to be more sad than I was last June. I wish someone had told me it was - I wouldn't have tried to get pregnant again. At least if I had never gotten pregnant again, I could have deluded myself into thinking I could potentially bring a baby to term. Now I have to realize - my body is broken, defective, rotten.

I don't understand why this happened - no one in Scott's or my family seems to have trouble having children. Why do my babies die? Why is my body not good enough, not nurturing enough? I feel guilty I ever tried to get pregnant in the first place - I think all the time about whether or not my babies were in pain when they were dying, and I can't bear the thought that they were.

I keep thinking of the things I was looking forward to - Scott painting my pregnancy silhouette portrait, breastfeeding, even labor and giving birth - I'll never have these things. Adoption can give me a baby, but it can't give me back what I've lost, and it can't make me feel like a real woman, a woman capable of bringing life into the world.

Guilty Conscience

I go to see a therapist – not really sure why I decided this will be helpful, but it seems like it might be a good idea and insurance pays for it so what the hell. The therapist is interesting (read: weirdish), until she tells me all about the stages of grief. How cliché. Yes, I know, anger, denial, bargaining, all that shit. I get it, I’m going through them all, trying to make my way to that acceptance finish line. One question though – where does "guilt" fit into all this? It’s not a part of the grieving cheat sheet she gives me. That’s a whole different area of fucked up apparently. Not that I think I’m the only person ever to feel guilty over a loss, but it’s becoming a burden I have to work constantly to shed myself of.

I have to force myself to recognize that guilt is not applicable to my situation. Yeah, like that’s supposed to keep me from feeling guilty – fault needs to be assigned somewhere (don't ask me why, it just does), so naturally I blame myself. I blame the couple of cigarettes I had before I knew I was pregnant; I blame the paint fumes I breathed on a job; I blame the vending machine food I ate during thesis; the construction adhesive I got on my fingers by accident; the massive quantities of peanut butter I consumed; the caffiene habit I couldn't quite kick; the myriad of other things I did wrong that probably didn’t mean shit but that I wish I could take back anyway.

You wouldn’t believe the idiotic rationale I find floating around in my brain – like this gem I thought up today: I’ve broken a lot of hearts in my life, never really had my heart broken by anyone. I was always the relationship-ender, always the one to make the boy cry. So I’ve racked up a truckload of bad karma in the past 14 years, and my account finally got audited. Certainly I’ve never had a broken heart like this.

There are a lot of little things that I don’t realize will cause me pain, and I have to wonder if they’ll ever not hurt anymore. Like how when I was pregnant and Phoenix was playing on the radio the baby seemed to kick me harder, and Scott and I would joke that baby had good taste in music already. Now I hear Phoenix and realize I’m not getting kicked, and it’s a fresh scratch on a healing wound.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

Autopsy results today – drove all the way down to Camden to wait for 2 hours for an appointment with the doctor. All morning long (as well as most of this last week) I’ve made a career out of being anxious. Scott thinks they’ll bring us all the way down to Camden to tell us they don’t know what happened, they don’t know what would happen if we tried again, so good luck. I think there’s gotta be something in the autopsy or pathology to tell us something about why everything happened.

Scott turns out to be right. Doctor doesn’t know what happened, but says the chances of our getting a healthy kid next time are “greater than 50%”, whatever that means. I mean, 51% is greater than 50%, but I don’t like them odds.

I’m flatter myself I’m under no delusions of imagining life to be full of meaning, but honestly, is that it? So there’s no reason this all happened? No reason that my first born child died in my toxic womb, no reason I went through being bedridden, no reason I have ashes instead of an infant? Really? It’s maddening, I expected to be ecstatic if the doctor told us our chances of bearing a healthy child the second time around were probably decent, but instead I’m just angry that there are no real answers. Also sad, for some reason I can’t put my finger on. Scott thinks I just don’t want to give up my grief yet, but that doesn’t ring true in my heart. I understand the anger, but the sadness? It almost feels like the meaninglessness of the loss translates into worthlessness, like my baby’s existence didn’t mean anything and so was worthless.

I want what happened to have some reason, some cause, if only so I can avoid future heartache. Doctor says there’s no way I could have prevented everything that happened, but I feel like I should have been able to. Shouldn’t a mother always be able to protect her child? I wish there had been a way I could have told my body to work better, keep that baby alive, screw the consequences. I’m starting to realize that one of the most horrible things about this whole situation was the feeling of helplessness, the knowing what parts of my body needed to work better, and yet not being able to force them to do so.

So I get to try again anyway. That’s good news, even if I know I’ll be terrified all through the next pregnancy (assuming I’m still as fertile as ever, and Scott’s still shooting live rounds). Even through the anger and sadness I’m still completely sure I want to try again, and soon. I’m going for a gynocology appointment on Tuesday, and if I get the ok from him I’m flushing my birth control pills that night.

Afraid to Try Again

I’m getting a little more worked up about returning to work than I thought I would. Been so anxious to get back in the game, to do something meaningful, to make money to ease the burden off Scott as sole breadwinner. Now, the day before I go back, I’m sad about it. I should have missed work because of maternity leave, and should be going back to work with pictures of a baby. This is all so fucked up, it shouldn’t have fucking happened like this! It’s so not fair. Like fairness matters, I know. But still, I can’t help thinking that. I did everything I could, I tried so hard to be healthy and not stressed out, and it all amounts to shit.

I realize today that I am breathlessly afraid of getting pregnant again (guess why), and also desperately wanting to get pregnant. The conflict is annoying. Wanting to get pregnant again wins hands down, but that landslide vote doesn’t abate the fear in the least. I understand the risks of trying again, more than I did the first time around. I know in my heart I can deal with another loss, it wouldn’t kill me. It would hurt like hell but it wouldn’t kill me.

My Fingernails

Dammit dammit dammit! All these tragic little tidbits keep occurring to me at random times. Today’s sad thought: looking at my fingernails. Remembering how I was taking such good care of them when I was pregnant. Pregnancy made my nails strong and thick for the first time ever. I had them filed and painted professionally. Never before was I into such a feminine thing. I figured after the delivery I would have to cut them short so I wouldn’t scratch the baby. Didn’t care, just was happy to be expecting to hold a baby. Who gives a shit about perfectly manicured nails when you can cuddle with your very own baby?

Tomorrow the doctor is supposed to call to tell us when to come in to hear the autopsy results. Scott and I go for a long walk in the park tonight, discuss what our response will be to each possible scenario. It feels pointless to prepare – I thought I was prepared for any outcome of pregnancy – turns out losing this baby hurts me more than I could ever have imagined.

Why does it hurt so much? I never got to know her, or even hold her once. I have no idea what color her eyes were, let alone how she liked to be held or when she liked to be fed. The only things I knew about her were sleep patterns, because of the frequency of her kicks. I know nothing about whether she had birthmarks or any resemblance to me or Scott. I don’t know what it would have felt like to kiss her. How am I hurting so much over a baby I never even saw?

Phantom Kicks

I notice I’ve been using Scott as my shield to protect me from anything to do with babies. He screens telephone calls for me, and tells me when to leave the room so he can make cremation arrangements. If he sees something on TV that he knows will bother me, he quickly changes the channel. In the store today, a baby being held by his mother in line in front of us was smiling and gesturing at us; Scott made sure I had room to stand behind him, where he became a literal shield so I didn’t have to look at the baby. In accepting his help, I wonder if I’m sacrificing a part of my independent nature. I no longer feel the need to handle everything, to be in control of everything. I want to hide from responsibility – who is this person I’ve become?

That weird thing has still been happening – I’ve been getting phantom kicks. I know they must be just little twinges in my uterus, but they feel like a baby kicking me. I look it up online, and sure enough, other women who have had stillbirths report feeling the phantom kicks, too. Of course, after feeling one, there is the conflicting feelings – the flutter of joy that must just be a Pavlovian response, and the subsequent sadness at remembering that there’s nothing inside to kick me.

Belly Fat

I’ve been having conflicting thoughts about whether to try to lose that last bit of belly fat, or just leave my body alone. Looking down at even that slight bulge hurts my heart, but I don’t want to lose that hurt to what seems to be vanity. Same old same old with me – vanity and body issues versus real life. I’ve avoided and kicked addictions – pot, cigarettes, alcohol – and pregnancy actually cured the one addiction I thought would be with me forever – my eating disorder. There was no room in my brain to worry about caloric intake versus energy expenditure, all my thoughts were about being healthy and eating enough for baby. So it’s mildly surprising to me to have a vague desire to lose weight. Like, who the hell am I to worry about a little belly fat? I need to be concentrating on not getting depressed, or on making sure my marriage is still good, or on staying healthy so that we can try for another baby.

I’ve always had addictive behaviors, even when I was little. What do I do now? I’ve got nothing, no cigs, no bulimia, no obsessive reading of pregnancy books. Is this what most people feel like most of the time? I just feel kind of bored. I need an addiction, but I don’t want it to be a bad one, I’ve worked too hard to get rid of the bad ones. Maybe obsessive behavior is a better term than addiction. I need to be obsessive about something, but something constructive, maybe like throwing clay or organizing my photo collection. Trouble is, everything seems kind of meaningless right now. I should be fighting that feeling. I know I should believe that being pregnant didn’t give my life meaning, my talents and achievements and goals did. My brain says, that’s the right way to think, but my heart says bullshit, you amount to nothing until you prove you can have a baby like a normal woman. Continuing to stuggle with irrational thoughts.

Back From Vacation

I’m just back from two weeks vacation; I had to get away from all the sympathetic looks. I’m too much of a loner to be able to appreciate all this attention – if it had been attention given to a healthy baby I had just given birth to, I could tolerate it because I would be joining in on it, but the distance from my friends and the sympathetic looks from neighbors are grating on me. I pretend to read the cards sent to me, and throw them away as soon as the person is gone. The flowers go right in the trash – they’re dead to begin with anyway.

So during vacation I did a lot of shower crying. The mentality behind that being that I don’t have to control my sobs for another person’s sake. I can just cry myself out and go on with my day. When I stop crying too early, all the uncried tears build up into this unbearably heavy thing that gets carried around with me for the rest of the day, provoking tears when I least want them.

Some of my sporatic writings during vacation:

It’s the fact that I feel inadequate as a woman that pisses me off the most. I’m a rational person, but there’s still that part of me that thinks I suck as a woman. Don’t even take into account the fact that I totally respect women who never have children, as much as stay-at-home moms and working mothers. In my crazy brain, I’m not a real woman because my body rejected a baby. I guess anger is a legitimate emotion, but it just adds to the bi-polar-esque past few weeks. I’d just really like to even out right now.

There’s the guilt, too. Before I knew there was a problem with the baby, I kept getting comments on what a tiny pregnant belly I had. People commented that I looked four months pregnant, not six. Most people said it in a complimentary way, and I wavered back and forth between admiring my little pregnant belly and wishing for a huge belly. I feel so stupid. If I ever get pregnant again, I hope I gain 50 pounds, my belly sticks out so far it becomes one giant stretch mark, if it means I have a big fat healthy baby at 40 weeks.

Before I married Scott, I didn’t even want children. I was never good with kids, babies scared the crap out of me, couldn’t even imagine dealing with a bratty teenager without resorting to violence. Scott told me he would stay with me either way, but I knew how much he wanted to be a dad, so I told him we could be parents. When we were first trying to get pregnant (which took all of 12 seconds), I remember feeling completely indifferent to whether or not I got knocked up. Then I get the positive pregnancy test. After that came the hormones, the mom fantasies, the sudden and surprising love for the baby growing inside me. Wasn’t exoecting that at all. Now I feel like a total shit for not caring enough in the beginning, as if the baby could somehow sense my indifference and decided not to be born to a mother didn’t used to want kids. That’s so crazy to type, to read back, but so are a lot of emotions so fuck it.

And now, after all that indifference, then ambivalence, now I have this visceral desire to have a baby. Like, right now. I want a baby right now, but not just any baby. I want my baby, the baby that shouldn’t have died, the baby that kicked me, the baby whose ultrasound picture is still in my purse. That one was MY baby girl, my daughter. I should still be fucking pregnant, painting the nursery and nesting in general. August is going to be so hard, passing my due date with a flat belly.

I buy sleeping pills for the first time in years. I don’t know if I’m going to take them or not, I’m afraid if I do I won’t be able to wake up from the nightmares. The lure is that maybe I won’t dream at all, or I won’t remember my dreams. I resist buying them as long as I can, but Scott notices how little sleep I’ve been getting, so finally I give in. It’s the nightmares; falling asleep is the easy part. Then an hour later I wake up crying, or sweating, or – this is the worst – thinking I’m still pregnant and rubbing my stomach, and then realizing all over again that I’m not.

Not Used to Being Delicate

It’s a frustrating conundrum – the wanting to talk to someone about my feelings, mixed with the need to keep it a private hurt. I can’t tell my girlfriends or my mother, can’t share with them the constant longing for my baby girl. How do you talk about something like this with someone who’s never been through it? They can’t care as much as I want them to, their lives don’t revolve around this loss, their minds don’t constantly harp on what happened. I tried to talk to online support groups, but I’m too private of a person. Who the hell knows who I’m talking to online, could be some psycho pretending to be an almost-mom like me.

Almost-mom. I spent 6 months of my life preparing to be a mother, reading every book I could get my hands on, talking to my own mama, looking up various mom-related topics online. Scott bought me a Mother’s Day present, and I felt like I deserved it. I was so looking forward to seeing what it felt like to breastfeed, rock a crying baby to sleep, kiss and cuddle the child Scott and I made. I wanted to see what our combined genetic makeup produced – would the child be artistic? Would she love nature? Would she hate math? It feels like I went back in time somehow, after all that preparation and dreaming, I’m just a woman with no baby and no pregnancy, just a plain woman.

Another thing - I’m not used to being delicate. Usually I cry maybe once or twice a year, I dole out practical advice to my emotional friends and family. Physical pain is no problem; I've been paintballing, been hit with a line drive in softball, I’ve had arthritis for 9 years, never took any serious pain meds. I’m self-sufficient to a fault; Scott has a lot of patience to deal with my constant need for independence. Now, I start to worry if he’s 15 minutes late from work (what would I do without him?). How do I reconcile my previously tough personality with this ruined little girl I am now? Tears flow at the least provocation, this isn’t me at all. I don’t know how to fix myself.

Someday-Baby

I have a doctor appointment, have to get checked to make sure everything’s ok physically. The waiting room of course is filled with pregnant women, newborn babies, and I’m especially happy I remembered my sunglasses. I put them on, and turn my face in the direction of my book, pretending to read. My oversize sunglasses catch the tears so no one sees them. My name is called, and when I’m in the exam room I can wipe them away.

The nurses and doctor are “very sorry for my loss”. Yeah, me too. I have to go through the whole scenario, tell them exactly what happened. Somehow I get through the story with only a few sobs. Physically, I get checked and everything’s fine. I get a prescription for birth control, which will help get my body back in shape quicker. Scott and I have a plan to buy a house before we try again, or adopt, or whatever. Rationally, I’m sure this is the right course of action, the mature way to go about having a baby. Emotionally, I want to toss the birth control in the trash and get pregnant as soon as possible.

I need to get a job. This recession is hell on the arts – interior design firms are laying off people; no one is hiring. I’m looking everywhere I can, freelance, construction, anything. In the meantime, I’m redesigning my father-in-law’s house for free, just to stay in the game, and have something to put in my portfolio. All I can think is, the sooner I get a job, the more money we can save, the sooner we can buy a house, the sooner I can get pregnant again. It’s all the motivation I need to find a job. I’m working my ass off for a baby that isn’t even close to existing yet. My whole life revolves around this someday-baby.

Physically Healing

Within a week, I’m physically much better. I can go up and down stairs, and Scott and I take walks every day to try and get me back into shape. I try to do physical things – painting the spare room seems like a good idea; I was in the middle of priming it when I went into the hospital. Of course, as soon as I start painting all I can think about is how I was going to arrange baby furniture in this room. I was going to have it perfect, I took everything into account as I designed it in my head. I used to lay awake at night staring up into darkness and smiling as I decorated the nursery in my head. I was going to put the crib so that as soon as I opened the door I could see my baby. I was going to put the rocker-glider next to the window that looked out onto the backyard, so I could have a nice view while I breastfed. I was going to sew the curtains myself, and use organic fabrics, VOC-free paints, make it as healthy and safe for baby as possible. Now I’m painting a room destined to be an office or spare bedroom. Not fair. I stop painting.

Scott talks to me a lot, tells me the things I need to hear. I know how much he loves me, and that helps a little. We have to wait for the autopsy results to determine, if they can, why the baby died. If it’s likely I could have a successful pregnancy in the future, we’ll try again. If not, we’ll adopt. Either way, we know we will be parents someday, we just have to be patient. This is easy to say, not so easy to feel. I want a baby so bad it hurts. I want to be pregnant again, I want to feel baby kicks inside me, I want to rub my stomach and not feel empty. I get phantom kicks sometimes, and I start to rub my belly in response, until I remember. Patience is not something I’m good at in normal situations, this situation is fucking torture.

Sometimes it’s easy to be happy, normal. I lose myself in books like always, I play Zelda, I cook and eat and laugh with Scott over silly things. I think to myself, it’s going to be ok. I’m not depressed, I’m just grieving, and grieving doesn’t last forever. Then I pass a pregnant woman, or a lady with a stroller, and all I can think is, it’s not fucking fair, why do you get a baby and I don’t? What did I do wrong? Why did my body not do a good enough job, and yours did? I’m so impatient for this hurting to be over, but I don’t want to lose it, either. It’s confusing.

Baby Footprints

Scott and I decline to see the baby’s body. I accept a card with baby’s footprints on it, and immediately regret it. They’re so tiny, but perfect at the same time. Ten little toes, my dead baby girl’s toes. It’s too sad.

24 hours pass – friends and family visit – I look and feel drugged, but I’m not in any physical pain. I still can’t allow myself to feel emotions – my lungs have enough to do to take in adequate oxygen just laying still, crying would kill me, I’m sure. I smile at people, who probably think I’m not completely wrecked inside, and maybe don’t understand that I can’t cry until they take me off this damn magnesium drip.

24 hours, then they take out the IV, the catheter, and I get to eat, drink, stumble to the bathroom with help, and shower sitting down. Finally, I’m alone, and finally I can cry. I sob as quietly as I can in the shower, so no one interrupts me. I want to cry forever, I feel like I will cry forever, how could I ever stop?

Of course, I do stop eventually, and I get my stuff ready and Scott takes me home. I leave the hospital, with an empty belly and no baby in my arms. It’s not fair.

The first day home, I can barely walk up the stairs. I go one stair at a time, like an elderly lady. A week of bedrest and two days of muscle relaxers being pumped into my veins have left me weak, and with slightly atrophied muscles. I walk as much as I can, trying to build up muscle. I cry as much as I can, relieved to have an outlet for my pain. I talk to Scott, which helps immensely. We are closer than ever.

My breasts swell up, become rock hard as they fill with milk. I buy a size D bra (I was an A/B before I got pregnant). I cry with the pain of my swollen breasts, but I cry more when I try to relieve the pain by expressing some milk by hand. Milk that should be feeding my baby, being wasted into a wad a toilet paper, or dripping into my bra. I try cabbage leaves, drinking sage tea, and taking lukewarm showers. Within a week the swelling goes down, but I still leak milk. Useless milk, feeding no one.

Laboring for Nothing

The doctors in L&D start me on a Magnesium drip, to prevent me from having a seizure. It’s also a natural muscle relaxer. I HATE medicines. I always get strong reactions, and weird side effects. The magnesium makes me feel like I can barely breathe. They put a catheter in my uterus and fill it with water, making a balloon inside me. They tug on the catheter every four hours to open the cervix a little more – this is mildly annoying, but not nearly so bad as the urethra catheter they had to put in because I couldn’t walk to the bathroom. Wow. You don’t even realize you can feel things inside your bladder until you have something poking around in there. I would say “ouch”, but the real pain is yet to come.

Before they get a chance to start me on drugs to induce labor, they do an ultrasound to check if the baby is still breech. The technician looks around a while, says the baby must be positioned weird, she can’t find the heartbeat. She calls in the nurse, who tells me to hold on, she has to call a doctor. I already know what the doctor’s going to say when he gets there, but that same stupid part of my brain still continues to hope, right up until the doctor says “there’s no heartbeat, the baby’s passed”. I don’t go into denial, I don’t get angry, I don’t do anything except cry, and cry, and cry. My baby’s dead, that’s all I can think. I can’t cry for long though, the magnesium that makes it hard to breathe makes me feel like I’m suffocating if I cry. So I tell myself, you can cry as much as you want later, but right now is the time for courage, strength, and a lot of repression.

I decline a C-section – if they do one this early in the pregnancy, they have to do it the old-fashioned way, with a vertical cut instead of a horizontal cut (on the uterus; the skin cut is the same). This means I can never have a VBAC. Fuck that. There may be nothing but a dead baby to hope for at the end of this labor, but someday I might get another chance to give birth, and I don’t want to screw that up. I decline an epidural – I feel like I can stand the physical pain, and in fact it might give me some relief from all this pain in my heart that I can’t get out.

The doctors insert a pill in my cervix, which starts contractions. In the beginning, they’re not so bad, I can get through them with deep breathing, relaxation, and Fleet Foxes on my iPod. Four hours later, they insert a second pill, which really gets the contractions going. Now I feel it in my back, too, so I tell Scott to rub my back, hard, the way we were taught in the Bradley book. This helps more than I can say, but the contractions are coming less than a minute apart. I don’t realize it at the time, but Scott rubs my back with each contraction; he tells me later they last about a minute, and are 45 seconds apart, for 5 fucking hours.

Four hours later, they insert another pill, and tell me to call them if I start to feel pressure. The nurse leaves, and immediately I feel pressure. It’s like a dam opened inside me, and I feel the baby shoot down like a pinball. At the same time, I feel the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life, like a super-contraction that just won’t end, and I make noise for the first time. I scream. And scream and scream and scream. There are a bunch of people telling me to do things, but I can’t hear them over my own screams. Finally a doctor screams back at me, which gets through the pain and I listen and do what he tells me, move how he tells me, push when he tells me. I feel the baby coming, breech, which I knew beforehand but didn’t expect to feel. I feel every elbow, knee, instinctually knowing this is not how a baby should feel coming out, and it hurts worse than anything I’ve ever expected to experience.

With a final push that takes everything I have, the baby’s out. It’s a girl (we didn’t know beforehand). The doctors tell me it’s all over, the placenta came out right after the baby, there’s nothing to do but relax. I sleep.

It Wasn't Indegestion

A week in the hospital – extreme boredom like I’ve never experienced. I read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre (for the hundredth time), start Atlas Shrugged. Old book friends to keep me company when Scott can't be there. The hospital gets about 20 channels on TV, most of them news or sports, yawn. Most of the time I turn on the TV, there are babies and pregnant women everywhere, so off goes the TV. I play Zelda, look forward to my daily shower (how pathetic is that), talk to the nurses, sleep. I never use my nurse call button, which makes them like me. Scott takes me outside in a wheelchair once a day – it’s the highlight of the whole day, even if the view is of the murder capital of the country. I tell myself, I want this awful boredom to last for the next three months, if it means my baby lives. I’ll willingly spend all summer in a cold, sterile hospital room. I’ll give up the trips to Key West and Virginia. I’ll give up hiking trips, and beach trips, and beautiful lazy days spent reading out on the lawn. I’ll give it all up, happily, if it means my baby survives. I’m so fucking stupid, I keep hoping.

On Sunday night my chest starts to hurt. I think maybe it’s indigestion. Try to ignore it. Eventually, it’s pretty obvious it isn’t getting better, so I call the nurses, who give me some Maalox and tell me to wait it out. I wait for two hours, it’s even more painful than before. I tell the nurses again, who call the doctor, who takes blood and tells me my liver function is up. This is a bad thing, especially when your platelets are low, which mine are. They tell me I have to deliver the baby, and move me to L&D. I call Scott and tell him to come right away.

I know I’m not a horrible person, but there is a huge part of me that regrets thinking the way I did at the time: Scott and I agreed that we would not allow any intervention above-and-beyond what was traditionally done. We didn’t want a severely handicapped baby. Not only would it not have been fair to us, being such active people, it wouldn’t have been fair to the baby – Scott works every day with severely handicapped children, and sees the kinds of lives they live, which aren’t much to speak of. And they know it, these kids. They know they’re not “normal”, and that sucks. Of course, having ultimately lost the baby, I feel wretched for even thinking I wouldn’t want a baby, any baby, no matter the condition. I wish I had been given the opportunity to choose to keep my baby alive by cutting my own hand off; I’d be without a hand right now, but I’d still be holding my baby girl.

How it Started

So my aunt thinks it would be a good idea for me to write a bit to try to get the pain out of me. Haven’t written in years, don't know if I still have it in me. I guess the theraputic factor could be a good enough reason, who the hell knows? At this point, I’m not sure if getting my feelings down on "paper" would make me feel better or make me want to kill myself. Not really. I’m not the suicidal type. I figure, maybe to help me get into the typing groove I’ll start a blog or something. Never did that before. Mybabyjustdied.com or something. Bleak humor seems natural right now.

On June 1, 2009, my baby died in the womb. Pregnancy-wise, I was 29 weeks and change. Baby wasn’t growing right, was about a month behind schedule. They noticed it at a routine ultrasound, otherwise I never would have known. I had no symptoms to tip me off to my preeclampsia. I felt baby kicking regularly, real soccer-player kicks, made me almost pee my pants a few times. She was a great kicker.

So baby was a month behind growth, and they told me I had to go to Cooper hospital in Camden. Scott and I get there, and they say they have no idea what’s wrong with me, but that I’ll be there a few days for tests. The fear is unreal. Tests come back negative, but I’m dropping a gram of protein in my urine. That means probably preeclampsia. Which means bedrest until the baby’s born. Hospital says, you’re in here for the long haul.

Scott buys me a Nintendo DS and Zelda. Brings me clothes, books, food that doesn’t suck as hard as the hospital food. Buys me presents. I think he doesn’t know what to do, so he spends money. It’s more than sweet, how much he loves me. How much I love him.

The doctors were never hopeful – they sent a doctor up from the NICU to talk to me about the survival rate of 23 week old babies (gestationally, that’s what she measured, although I was 28 weeks). She was only 500 grams, which is the absolute minimum for a baby to survive. Emphasize survive – not thrive. Babies born that small usually have issues in life; reduced intelligence, blindness, lung and heart problems. That’s if baby even survived. The doctors said, expect to lose the baby. I was stupid and kept hoping.