Every day is a gift

Lame cliche, right?

You know, I really do forget almost all the time that I almost died.  It doesn’t occur to me because it is so overshadowed by the heartbreak I feel about the loss of my baby.  I feel like I need to start reminding myself each morning:   I almost died.  Had I not had a doctor’s appointment scheduled that day, I could have had a stroke at any point while driving home from work.  I had no warning symptoms of my preeclampsia and I could have developed eclampsia and died.

I need a giant reminder:

” Good morning, idiot.  You lost your baby but you could have lost your life.  But you didn’t.  They caught it in time.  You had to give up your baby but for that you got to live.  Hopefully a long life where you will potentially adopt one, two, three, however many kids you want.  You will be a mom because you want to be one.  So get up off your ass and make it happen.  Fill out an application, make an appointment.  Get off the internet.  Stop bookmarking all the clothes you want to buy when you get skinny and get on the treadmill and GET SKINNY.  Stop watching tv.  Stop thinking oh I love taking the dog for a walk because it makes him so happy. I will take him on a long one this weekend and take him on a quick one now.  He’ll appreciate walks every day more than the walk that you probably won’t even take him on this weekend.  Stop crying every night because life is hard.  It is hard but it’s life.  It’s the only one you have and you ALMOST LOST IT.  Both you and your baby could be dead right now.  Yes, it’s hard that your baby is dead but you are still alive.  Walk outside. Do something.  Make your life a life that your baby would be proud to see you living.  LIVE.”

Even typing it now, I don’t realize the magnitude of it because I’m still so overcome with grief.  I really do need to start appreciating every day I have more.  I almost had no more days.

Tags: loss

How to break my heart

If you want your heart to break, look through the things that people search for to find your blog.  I don’t have the funny ones. (Maybe a few – someone keep searching for spoiled rotten Anna .  Is that a hint?)  Instead I get ones that break my heart in two:

• got hgc levels taken yesterday and dr told me to go in today to talk about results wil they be good or bad
• how to shake the impending feeling of doom
• no one told me this would be so hard
• ttc betas going down then up
• will the first response test be accrate even 8 days before miss period
• and every day i fail
• i feel like if i disappeared today no one would notice
• life feels pointless why bother?
• no one will notice if i’m gone
• today was supposed to be my anniversary but we broke up before it happened
• i feel like my body is failing

Infertility is a cruel, heartless bitch.  It takes and it takes.  And even the success stories are scarred by their time in the trenches.  I’m sorry to those of you looking for TTC answers here.  I don’t have any.  All I have are my own experiences.  I so remember the days of typing these questions into Google, praying that someone will have had the exact same experience as me and will have posted my future on their blog.  I can’t promise that but I can promise I can tell you what I’ve been through.

And whoever you are searching for this: someone will notice if you’re gone.  Don’t disappear.

Google Searches

I love when people do Google Search posts.  Here are the crazy search terms that led people to my blog and the like.  I never get those. There are obviously people who use the same search term to find my blog every day because the same terms keep coming up every day over and over again.  But no one ever stumbles upon my blog with anything crazy.  Maybe once or twice – but that’s about it.  So I rarely check.

Today, I checked.  Someone found me by searching “I had to have a D&E to save my life” and my heart broke in two for that person.  I just wanted to cry for them, with them.  I hope that something they found here brought them some level of comfort.  I don’t know where they are in their grief but if you’re still reading, it gets easier.  I promise it does.

I don’t know if it ever gets easy.  I’m not there yet.  I still struggle with guilt and sadness about the loss and anger about the unfairness of the world.  But it gets easier.

 

Tags: loss

My automatic response

Lately, many people have made comments to me.  They tell me how lucky I am that I don’t have children.   Children are expensive, they suck up all your time and you’re better off not having them.  Obviously, these people have no idea what I’ve been through.  They are making a joke.  I laugh with them.  Hahaha, who could want children?  I want a life with more money and time instead. You’re right.

Then there is always a pause, and I tell them we are adopting.  I automatically laugh at first.  I don’t know why.  I guess I don’t want them to feel awkward.  Then I remember that if I don’t say something, they will make those little jokes to others and those others might be infertile as well.  So I tell them we are adopting.  Usually people are very excited and realize that if we are adopting, there was an issue.  Sometimes someone doesn’t get it and they say oh yes, I would avoid the trauma on my body too.  Then I have to explain that I’m not adopting because I don’t want stretch marks, I already had stretch marks from my pregnancy from my baby that never made it home.

Mother’s Day sucks this year. Again.  I’m praying this will be last without a baby in my home.

Tags: adoption, loss

Number 29

Last year, I gave up soda for Lent and it felt near impossible, but I did it. I rewarded myself with a giant 44 oz. Coke Zero on Easter morning.  And I promptly went back to drinking just as much soda as I did before Lent.  This year, I did something that hurt just as much but I did it and was able to cross an item off my 101in1001 list because of it.

Number 29. Go one month without fast food.

I put pretty strict guidelines on what constituted fast food too.  Fast food was any food that was not served to me by a waiter after taking my order.  So no drive-thrus, no Panera, no buying lunch in the cafeteria at work, no pizza delivery, no Chinese take-out, no Chipotle.  I did break one time and that was when I had to do an emergency baby-sitting when my sister-in-law had to rush to the ER. We ordered pizza because I was starving and we didn’t know when they would return.  But when I told anyone this, they said pizza didn’t constitute fast food in the traditional sense.

I brought lunch every day.  I would either make dinner or my husband would make dinner.  One time my husband brought home donuts and a debate ensued as to whether donuts were fast food. (We decided that they were a pastry item so they were ok.  Once they were in my house, I couldn’t say no.)

I was impressed by how long I held out.  Especially since I am a big lunch buyer.  I hate packing my lunch. I never remember to do it, I feel like it takes too long and it’s so convenient to buy a sandwich at the cafeteria.  Sometimes, I just want to escape too. Sometimes I just want to run out and buy lunch and not be at work for a little while.

I find that I’m resorting to fast food less now that Lent is over.  When I can, I bring a lunch.  We’ve both been cooking more – especially my husband. It helps that he is an amazing cook!  I find myself slipping into bad habits lately, but I think now that I recognize that I am, I can quickly remind myself that it was doable and it was easy to not resort to fast food constantly.  I guess sometimes it is good to test your willpower and see where your limits are.

Tags: 101in1001

Number 11

I was able to cross another item off my 101 in1001 list.

Number 11: Go to the dentist.

Most of you are probably reading this wondering why this is even on my list.  I mean, it’s not a stretch, right?  Wrong.  I haven’t been in probably 10 ten years.  The last time I went, I got my wisdom teeth out.  I haven’t had any desire to go back since.  So I skipped my first cleaning after my wisdom teeth surgery.  Somehow that turned into skipping ten years of them.

While at lunch, my coworker mentioned she hadn’t been in a really long time.  I assured her that it couldn’t be longer than me.  During this conversation, we were both lectured about going to the dentist and my one coworker would continuously remind me that I needed to make an appointment.  So one day, I finally sat down to make one.  It took a while – some back and forth message leaving between me and the office and then a three-month wait to get a weekend appointment, but both my husband and I went.

About a month ago, I went for a cleaning and exam.  I left there puzzled.  Why had I waited so long to go? That was so painless.  This past weekend, I went to go get a filling and get fitted for a mouth guard. (I grind my teeth constantly – during the day and while I sleep.  It’s stress and that certainly hasn’t been lacking in my life lately.) My cavity was so bad that it was almost a root canal so it’s a really good thing I went when I did, the dentist said.

I have an appointment set up for November for my next cleaning and in a month I go back to make sure my mouth guard fits.  All that stress for something that was so easy to take care of.  I feel like this is a constant theme in my life. I dread and put things off over and over again.  Once I have to face the things I’m dreading, they are never as bad as I thought it would be.  I just have to get off my butt and do the things I’m dreading.

Tags: 101in1001

NIAW

In honor of National Infertility Awareness Week, I posted the following status on Facebook last night: April 22-28 is National Infertility Awareness Week. Infertility is a heart-wrenching, faith-questioning, relationship-testing, life-altering, finance-draining experience that affects 1 in 8 couples. Please consider supporting the Family Act and the Adoption Tax Credit. (Most of the wording stolen from here.) And I added a link to Resolve’s website where they posted how to get in touch with your Congressman.

This is pretty much about as out as I’ve come about our infertility problems.  I alluded to it in our pregnancy announcement but my husband didn’t want me to straight up say it because he didn’t want me to dwell on the bad while announcing the good.  I’ve only gotten good responses: positive comments and likes.  I don’t know quite what I thought would happen.  I imagined my mother getting angry because certain things should be private.  I imagined people saying that infertility isn’t really a disease.  As usual, my imagination is so much worse than reality.

Tags: ALI community