Easy for him to say...

I blocked the whole idea of going back to the clinic to talk to my OB about what the hell happened and where to go from here out of my head, until I couldn't make the little voice inside my head stop screaming at me to just get it over with.

"Go in", it told me, "find out exactly how broken you are and how ridiculous it is to even consider thinking about trying again, let alone actually doing it."

So in we went.

But first, two weeks of stress dreams and nightmares that had my jaw in a permanent state of clench.

Thank God for an OB with compassion - or at least the good sense to fake it. He was very good to us, two weary travelers with worry lines etched into our tired faces and a lot more gray hair than we had when we started this process a thousand years ago.

One of the first thing he said was how horrendous these past few years must have been for us.

"You must have had some very dark days", he said softly.

"No kidding", I wanted to reply, but didn't.

Then we asked a million questions while he looked pained and admitted he didn't know - and couldn't know - the answer to most of them (you know, ones like "what are the odds of my dying if we try this again - and fail?").

He doesn't know why I bled. He doesn't believe he perforated my uterus during the D&C so his only explanation is that one or both of the placentas were very deeply embedded and the bleeding originated from the site where they came away from the uterine wall during the procedure.

He doesn't know if this could happen again, although he suspects it was a fluke (kind of like that pesky fluke-y abruption that killed Thomas and nearly me) and most likely won't happen again.

He doesn't think I have a luteal phase defect (and was reluctant to subject me to testing because the results tend to be somewhat inconclusive) but will treat me as though I do if I ever get pregnant again, just in case.

He doesn't think I have a clotting disorder, but ordered a ton of blood work just in case.

In place of concrete answers and assurances, there were a lot of "I don't knows" and "just in cases" - which is exactly what we were expecting.

People like to think that doctors have all the answers - that they can and should be able to stop babies from dying and miscarriages from happening. But the truth is they can't. Not all the time. And in my case, never.

We knew there would be a lot of shoulder shrugging and unanswered questions. We're used to that. Too used to that.

But still, it was good. It was good to talk to someone who cared, who understood our concerns, who sympathized with the fear and frustration we're feeling, who tried so hard to tell us everything we needed to hear, and who seems to want us to have a take-home baby almost as much as we do.

And in the end, even though we haven't made any decisions one way or another, it was good to hear that even though he's not sure why our little tigers didn't make it or why I bled like a stuck pig during the D&C, he doesn't think there's any reason for us not to consider trying again.

Easy for him to say.