chesneycat

... I was lying in a bed in the Hallamshire, just down the road from here.

Today, I'm a little over twelve weeks with number four, and I've got a hell of a lot to be thankful for aside from the obvious.  Looking back, a few things stand out.  How amazing everyone around me was, how compassionate and supportive.  My friends around the world who kept me in their thoughts, my family, and those I know who've been through the same thing and reached out to me, some of whom were in the middle of their own dark hours at the time.

This is Roo's legacy.  A helluva lot of love.  We were deepened by what we went through, Jez and I, and given such a great gift alongside the pain.  Everything wonderful in the world was thrown into bright relief, our selves included. It broke our lives apart, a crucible or a chrysalis, and it fucking hurt.  That's change, I guess.  Change and growth, and the fact that nothing truly worthwhile ever comes easy.  Growing and healing took time, and it was undeniably hard, and I won't pretend we're anywhere near finished with it.  I don't think I want to.  Coming of age, growing up... you set yourself all these landmarks as a child and as an adult, and they really mean nothing.  What use are they, except as walls to hem yourself in?  Life is a continuum, in every way. We're analogue, unquantised, the butterflies of chaos.

So.  I'm not just thankful for current little one, though that does take an immeasurably large part of it. Nor my own strengths, the parts that were lent or given and the parts I always had unfound within me, though they were certainly invaluable when we faced the same pain again and again, and through all the crises we've been through in the last three months.  I certainly don't pretend that it's all going to be plain sailing from here onwards either; it'd be nice if these experiences gave you a kind of get out of jail free card for life, but it doesn't work that way.  And it doesn't matter, because we've been gifted, all of us, with the scope to keep going and to keep living, to see those crumbs of hope, the lights in the darkness, the people we love or who love us that keep us living. I think Yoda said it best.

Luminous beings are we.

As if I wasn't fragile enough right now, I've just had the wonderful experience of being turned down for the one decent flat I've found so far simply because I'm childless.

Yes, that's right. I'm being penalised because my babies keep dying.

Fuckin' A, man.


On the plus side, at least I'm not this guy:

I have just been informed that [name removed] who came into the Department to discuss climate change about two weeks ago, and has been causing a nuisance on campus, was arrested and sectioned yesterday.  [Name removed] has since escaped from a secure mental unit and may return to the Hicks Building posing as his twin brother.

There's always someone worse off.  Plenty of someones, really. 

My foot hurts. I was resting it on the heater at the side of the bus on the way in this morning, and slowly cooked the underside of my foot without properly noticing.  I also have a whopping big lump and painful bruise growing on the inside of my elbow joint, thanks to the phlebotomist in the gynae ward at the Jessop. She did a good job with my elusive veins though... she needed to get eight vials of blood out of it, so I guess she had to! 
 

...it'd be someone that none of you know, someone that I've never even met.  This woman lost a child a couple of weeks before I lost Roo, and was so kind to me when I began to go through the same thing.  Seriously, she was amazing.  As it turns out, that was the second of five losses she's had to go through within a twelve month period, with two others (one at 25w) before that.  The last one just turned out to be an ectopic, and she's lost the tube as well.

Shit, but life's not fair.

Back in April... well, I know what I'd have given up for her, and I gave it anyway.  Now I have nothing except tears and prayers, and a strong wish for a god both all-powerful and easily coerced.  Enough is enough, dammit.

Well, my friend Jo (who I shared the same due date with) had her baby girl this afternoon. 

I now have a stinking virus on top of the second miscarriage.  Woop-de-bloody-do!

It's official.

We're miscarrying baby #2.


Baby Hope wasn't with us for as long as the last one, and things looked precarious right from the start. I don't know that expecting these things makes them any easier to deal with though. Knowing what it's like, going through it at an earlier gestational age... these don't make things easier either, just different.

This is a time of year when thoughts naturally turn towards families, and giving thanks. Although we'll never meet our first two babies, they'll always be with us, and they've taught us so much.  I'm going to nick a quote from Bujold's Barrayar here: "Our children change us... whether they live or not."

This has been a year of change, grief, joy and growth.  I'm so much stronger than I used to be, and so is Jez. We're closer than ever, as well as being older and wiser.  And despite the pain, I feel incredibly blessed.

For the first time since April, I can truly hope again.

Well, the interview yesterday went okay.  Could've gone better, could've gone a lot worse.  I think I was very convincing with some aspects, but less so with others.  I won't be surprised if they turn around and say 'thanks, but no thanks', in other words - besides, the fact that I'm not an x-ray astronomer automatically makes me a bit of a wildcard.  If I don't get the job, that'll be the main reason.

Staying with Jo and Ben on Wednesday night was interesting, to say the least.  Seeing her, I didn't react as badly as I'd expected I might, though there were of course tears in a few places during the evening.  She's looking wonderful, and at 31 and a bit weeks, pretty enormous.  We talked a lot, and I felt her daughter's back through Jo's tum, but not any kicking/movement.  And all the while, wonderful, wonderful mental disconnections were being made.  We may have shared the same EDD, but I'm not pregnant, not in a position to be getting excited about a new arrival, none of that - and there's nothing like the evidence of your own eyes to kill off all those should'ves.  It'll get easier again once she's born, which almost certainly won't happen on the exact Day of Doom.  More disconnections in the future, anyway.

But there's more.  She's a good friend, and was very sympathetic to how I was feeling... but.  But.  Her empathy could only take her so far, and there was a real, tangible gulf in our mutual understanding of each other.  I'll get to her position one day, I've no doubt of that and I'm in no hurry to gain that understanding - I want to get to step three before I start worrying about steps nine, ten and eleven.  But miscarriage is one of those things that... yes, you can imagine it, sympathise with it, but the reality goes (or can go) so much deeper.  Infertility, too... I think she sensed she'd almost crossed the line when she (almost) implied that I should 'relax and it'll happen'.  I am relaxed, and that won't make it happen, because I do happen to be one of those people who is biologically Fucked Up.  But that's not the point.  The point is, this experience has changed me.  It's brought Jez and I closer together as a couple, and it's made us different people.  I hesitate to say 'better people' - that's a rather subjective thing, really - but I'm leaning in that direction.  Everything has deepened.  I'm still getting used to my new skin, and I find it hard not to react to everything I feel.  How can I describe this?

Hands up if you've read Bujold's Curse of Chalion and/or Paladin of Souls. (If you haven't, they're worth reading. If you have, you'll know what I'm about to say, I expect.)   There's a concept in those stories which goes roughly like this.  The human soul isn't big enough for miracles, unless it goes through a heck of a lot of stretching first.

That's where I am.  I've been stretched.  Unlike the fictional protagonists, I don't necessarily have a miracle waiting in the wings, but I've changed and grown, and I'm quite capable of finding/making my own.  So, when I was hugging Jo goodbye yesterday morning, a little voice in my head asked whether I'd swap places with her, if I was given the chance.  As I drove away, it suddenly sunk in that I was mentally recoiling in horror at the very thought.  Give up all of what I've learned, all those changes, all that growth? I couldn't possibly squash myself small enough, or cut away enough of myself to fit in to the mould of someone who hasn't walked this particular path.   Back in April, before anything happened, I accepted the possibility that it could, and arrogantly asserted my willingness to shoulder it - better me than someone who's been through enough already, or couldn't cope.  Well, that kind of innocence was never going to last very long.  Now, though...

Now, I genuinely wouldn't change a thing.
 

As seen on another forum:

"I guess it's just really lonely to realize that pregnancy is such an open, public display and celebration, while the whole topic of m/c is such a closed, private pain. No one else walking down the street knows about my m/c. No one can tell by looking at me that some very important hopes and dreams died and slipped away at the first of the month."

I still can't face ringing up a university friend of mine, El.  I think her baby will have been born by now, or sometime in the next few weeks.  I don't just want to congratulate her, I want to get back to being a proper friend.  The last time we spoke was after christmas, when I rang to congratulate her on being pregnant, and inevitably I ended up having to explain to her WHY I was breaking down on the phone.  I'm not sure I can face that again, or at least, not right now.

These aren't memories I want to rule my life, or to be the focus of everything I do.

But sometimes I feel as if society wants me to conceal them completely, to lock them away and perpetuate the taboo.

Neither choice works for me.  I can't just abandon the meaning of what I've gone through. And I can't blithely throw my grief in everyone else's faces.  I feel so guilty for not keeping in touch with these friends because of this, but isn't friendship a two-way street? Why should I be the one to make the first move, even knowing what it'll cost me in those first minutes of explanation.

Yeah, I know.  If everyone only went half-way, no-one would ever meet in the middle.  I have to do this.  Just... not yet?

On the plus side, the bleeding stopped this week, and everything seems to be in working order.  Hooray for small blessings.

Last night, we threw a bit of a half-term party.  It was meant to be a BBQ, but the weather was pretty cold and cloudy, so it became an indoors pizza-party instead.  Nice seeing a lot of the teachers and a few of my work friends together.  Everyone was impressed with the size of the garden, as most of the people there haven't actually seen our house in daylight before. Chesney was also a hit, as despite the loud music/voices and a few shouts of "NO!" whenever he got too close to the strawberries and cream, he spent the entire evening moving from lap to lap.  I'm going to spend the next week getting hairs out of my trousers though, and I'm sure everyone else is going to be doing the same.

Weirdly, we found out that two of our friends have just been through the same thing we have pretty much (i.e. post-heartbeat disaster), but about a week earlier, so I probably wasn't the best hostess to everyone else there.  These things happen so often, but it's kept so hidden, except when it's not.  I think they, too, have grown from the experience, and that's what it is.  Just life, and experience.  Nothing to be afraid of.  Anyway, some interesting discussions were had - we agree that a science background can make basic acceptance easier, not that it helps at all with the rest of the mountain.  But the main question was about life, consciousness, souls and all that.  An eight or nine week embryo really doesn't have much scope for consciousness, but the spark of life's there already, and they're amazingly tenacious.  As far as souls go, my totally non-scientific opinion is that they grow out of love.  These were lives worth grieving for, if only because we loved them.

Anyway... the party wound down at about 1am, which was about right seeing as a lot of us are working today, and the teachers are still zonked out from teaching.  I got Jez to drive me in - he didn't drink an entire bottle of wine, unlike myself, and I'd prefer to give myself a couple more hours before getting behind the wheel again.  No obvious hangover yet (aside from a touch of dehydration - why did I forget my pre-bed pint of water? Why?), which surprises me, but I guess I took things fairly slowly over the evening.

Must do it again some time.  Preferably when it's sunnier.

Ah... and the whole fandom debacle.  Well.  I've been following it for a few days on fanficrants and also over at fandom_wank, and my reactions have been a mixture of laughs and raised eyebrows (both of which were heavily tinged with a large dose of WTF? at Six Apart's complete lack of clue), and annoyance on behalf of the groups who really shouldn't have been caught up in the Great Strikethrough.  I mean, they even bahleted serious literature communities, which is getting pretty close to the level of book-burning.  But even so, some of the stuff that's gone and reappeared does make me a little uncomfortable (and by some, I mean a very tiny minority).  Yes, it's fictional, and yes, it's not actively promoting any nastiness, and yes, the disclaimers are all in place.  But I think I see some of it in the same category as foxhunting... the enjoyment that the participants get out of some of the... edgier? journals/communities seems a little too much, and a little misplaced.  To be blunt, some of it is just too... squick, and I'm uncomfortable just knowing it's out there.  But who am I to judge?  There's fanfic porn, and then there's fanfic porn.  Mileage will vary, as they say.   But honestly, wielding the big delete purely on the basis of listed interests?  The sheer stupid of it all beggars belief.

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This is pretty much where I am right now, in one minute's worth of words.  Progress is being made.

Well, the worst is over.

Everything went as well as it could have done today, the pregnancy came away cleanly, and I've been given the all-clear and discharged from the Hallamshire. Not a pleasant experience, but we've got some sense of closure from it.


Goodbye, little Roo.

It's been barely more than 24 hours.

It feels a lot longer, of course, not helped by those hours awake from three in the morning 'til dawn.

The grieving goes on, and will do for some time. What helps, is the staggering knowledge that a scattered group of people across the globe seem to care about me, and understand. I know this has brought back bad memories for a lot of people, for my mother-in-law Chris, and for my godmother Lynne, and for all the others who've been through similar experiences. Debbie... any advice you'd be willing to share would be gladly accepted at this end.

Over here, well, we're beginning to get used to things. Acceptance has been relatively easy for me; I seem to be the only one who had an inkling that this was on the cards already. Not that that really helps, with my body still burning up with the conviction that I'm still pregnant. I'm opting for medical management - a course of anti-progesterone drugs, to get my body to gently shrug off the pregnancy. It seems a bit more respectful than the D&C option, but physically, it'll be harder on me. But I think the physical catharsis will help me and Jez grieve more easily, make it seem real... which it doesn't really, not yet.

That'll change, on tuesday.

...And because I'm a masochist.

I've got a number of posts tagged "pregnancy" that I wasn't planning on unlocking just yet, but they may as well be now. Hopes, fears, dreams... if you're feeling curious or ghoulish, or compassionate and with words of advice, or just want to see what I've been thinking/feeling over the last two months, then feel free to read them, and comment or not.


I think I'll go and open a bottle of wine now.

In the next few days, I'll be having a miscarriage.