Passing time

It's amazing what a little trauma can do to a girl. I've spent the last 8 days panicked that I'm going to start bleeding heavily again - simply because no one adequately reassured me that I wouldn't. Not the OB, not the discharge nurse, not the nurse who called on Monday to do a cursory check-in (and I do mean cursory - I could tell she was barely listening to my frenzied requests for reassurance).

I'm sure that I'm fine. I'm sure the light bleeding/spotting that's still going on is totally normal (I bled/spotted for a total of 18 days after my first miscarriage and D&C) and won't turn into anything more than this. Not at this point.

But the thing is, I've hemorrhaged twice since that first D&C four years ago. I'm no longer blissfully ignorant. About anything at all.

I suppose the good part of all of this is that I've been far too preoccupied with my uterus and what's coming out of it to think too much about what I've lost.

It comes in waves. But I push the waves back with my persistent preoccupation with my own health. I can't think about the babies that are no longer inside me because I have me to worry about now. I don't have to wonder and worry about them anymore. I know where they are. And I know where they aren't. It's me I'm not so sure about.

Friday was a bad day. I zombied my way through the morning and crashed spectacularly in a heap of sobs around noon. I cried like I haven't cried since Thomas died. Maybe even before that. I have 5 babies to mourn for now, and that kind of sorrow requires a flood of tears I was shocked by. I didn't know I could cry like that and still survive.

I don't know how we do it, we parents who have lost children. I could have kept crying until I died, so intense was the sorrow and rage. But I didn't. I cried until I felt I could stop, then I did. I ate lunch, showered and carried on with my day.

Since then I've managed to keep the focus on me. I'm sure it's a defense mechanism. I'm not stupid. I know I'm just fooling myself with this pathological preoccupation with spot watching.

But this is just the way it is right now. Grief is a weird and messy thing, and the one thing I've learned is that you just have to let it play out the way it wants to. Putting parameters on it and trying to make it something other than what it is never works.

So I'm spot watching until my heart can bear to think about our two little tigers again.