It's been a while. By the end of this post you'll understand why.
My daily commute is 45 minutes each way. I hate it. It adds 1.5 hours on to the work day, it's long and boring and I'd rather just get home to my family. But for the last 6 weeks, that commute has been my saving grace. Because that's when I cry.
On the morning on Dec. 12 - not long after I announced here that I was pregnant - I woke up and knew something wasn't right. Without going into details, it wasn't long before there was a reason to call my obstetrician. That afternoon, I was in her office, having an internal ultrasound.
A minute or so in, I asked the question: "Do you see a heartbeat?" My doctor very kindly told me that I was jumping ahead of her.
I laid back and stared at the ceiling. My husband was there but we couldn't find a sitter on short notice and our daughter was not cooperating so I had asked him to take her out of the room.
There was a poster on the ceiling of a kitten in a field that said "Put it in God's hands." I stared just to the side of the poster, forcing myself not think about why an OB-GYN would hang it there. I kept quiet, mostly because I didn't trust my voice to come if I opened my mouth. I didn't know what I would say anyway. I had already asked what I needed to know and she couldn't answer.
After a few minutes, my doctor turned the screen to me and spoke. "Here's the baby," she said, pointing. I looked at the screen. It was so small. Almost the exact same size as the last time I was there two weeks earlier, I found out.
Finally I found my voice again. I said "Did you see a heartbeat?"
"No, I didn't."
"He's gone isn't he?"
I don't even know what she said next. It wasn't really important. Two weeks before, there was a heartbeat. If there wasn't now, I knew what it meant.
I started sobbing. I asked for my husband. I stopped sobbing because I wanted out of there as fast as I could get out, I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere where the news we had just gotten wasn't echoing around the room.
The baby had stopped growing at almost the same size as our last ultrasound, so sometime around then was when his heart stopped beating. When our child died. And then I carried him for two more weeks, blissfully ignorant of his passing, thrilled and finally relaxing in this pregnancy now that we knew we had seen a heartbeat.
I cried for four days and miscarried at home. Eventually life resumed. I got out of bed, went back to work. Somewhere along the way I stopped crying, pregnancy test stopped turning positive, and my doctor gave us the okay to try again in three months - if we wanted to.
We'll try again. That wasn't really a question. We want more kids, we want Lea to have siblings to grow up with. I'm terrified, and I'm sure he is too but the one thing I am sure of is that if we don't try, we will never have a healthy baby. Hopefully if we do, we'll add to our family soon.
On my way home today, I listened to the radio because my husband had the I-pod and forgot to gave it back to me. I heard a song by Gavin DeGraw (who apparently is still making music. Who knew? Good for you buddy!)
If you ask me how I'm doing I would say I'm doing just fine
I would lie and say that you're not on my mind But I go out, and I sit down at a table set for two And finally I'm forced to face the truth No matter what I say I'm.. Not over you, Not over you
