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.

Because God forbid anything should be easy

The simple "dust and clean", as the ever-so-amusing nurse called it, turned out to be a little more dramatic than that. Because it's me. And if something's going to go wrong, it will.

I hemorrhaged during the surgery (apparently the likes of which the good doctor hadn't seen before in a simple D&C) and my uterus wouldn't contract. I ended up staying the night in the hospital with a balloon catheter in my uterus and a steady supply of Oxytocin in my arm. It was lovely. Just lovely.

The heavy bleeding had stopped by the time they transferred me to the hospital I slept at (the hospital I had the surgery in was a day facility only, so I had a bumpy ambulance ride with a chatty medic who told me his whole life story without taking a breath while my stomach churned and my tummy cramped), so other than a slightly disturbing near fainting spell when I finally got up to go to the bathroom at around 10:00pm, and a night punctuated by code blue alerts, the beeping of my IV machine and vital checks every few hours, the hospital stay itself wasn't too terrible.

But the rest of it, yeah. That was unnecessarily cruel if you ask me. And I have no idea what the hell the gods are thinking anymore. It was bad enough that I was there to miscarry our babies. That it ended up a much more frightening experience than it should have been is just plain mean. But, I suppose, par for the course.

Just our shitty luck.

I'm feeling much better. The cramping eased off around 2:00am last night, and only briefly returned when the doctor took out the balloon catheter this morning. So now I'm just very, very tired. Drained, sad and a little weak. And I look like hell.

I just can't wait to see what happens next.