Therapy

This week is a therapy week.

To be honest I'm a little apprehensive about going this week. I've been thinking a lot over these last two weeks. I've been trying to face a lot.

I've decided to never go back to the Midwifery practice that put me in this position.
I've also decided to call and lodge a complaint with the hospital.
I've started this blog and I've faced some scary shit.

What I need to do:
Forgive myself.

That's going to be hard to do. I know people that think that hospital births aren't safe, that women going there put themselves at risk and while I'm sure those women feel nothing but regret for me, some tiny part of me worries that I put myself in this position.

I knew right away I didn't want OB's to handle my birth. The main reason being I am not comfortable with men touching my vagina. I spent countless hours calling midwives and hospitals trying to find a hospital near me that had midwives. I was being proactive. I never KNEW we could birth at home. So when I found a midwife that my insurance would cover, I felt proud. I was armed with my Ina Mae books and I was ready to go!

Then the miscarriages started. First one, I lied about. I never told anyone. I just said we were having trouble conceiving. I was told things like:
"Relax! It'll happen when it's meant to!"
"You're young! Don't worry!"
"Drink a shot of cold medicine before bed, it'll make ya sticky!"
"If you're meant to have a child, you will!"

They all meant well, but it just focused on my failure. Was it their fault? No, not really. I lied. I hid valuable information. But did they really want to know? Who the hell wants to talk about miscarriage?

The second one, I told my mother. The third, I told friends.

The third is coming up on two years.

I'll never forget it. October 17th. I was going to a funeral for my Aunt Edie. That morning I started spotting and my heart dropped. I had just been to the Midwife that Wednesday and I was terrified that I was going to loose this pregnancy as well. She scheduled an ultrasound for that Monday to put my mind at ease, see that I had a heart beat, that everything was fine. I called her and asked if I could be seen right away after the Funeral and they drew blood and checked my cervix. It was closed and not dilated. She told me to go to my ultrasound on Monday and take it easy.

When we got home, there was a message on my husbands phone. He had been laid off. That night the flood gates opened and I miscarried. I was supposed to go to a Halloween party that Saturday, but my hemorrhaging was so much that Hubs was considering taking me to the hospital. We called and canceled. I lost her as a friend that Monday.

It was then I hit, what I thought was, rock bottom. A week later I tried to kill myself. Hubs found me with a handful of sleeping pills and flushed them down the toilet. He asked me if I needed to be hospitalized, I said 'I don't know.' I was numb.

We went back to be checked out and my Midwife, the one who would preside over my sons birth,  suggested to stop the miscarriages I should have gastric bypass. I left feeling like I was kicked while I was down. She also wrote us a script to begin infertility work up.

I did blood testing and then I started the 'internal' testing. I told them that I needed a female doctor, that I had issues with a male doctor touching my private parts. They didn't listen and a male doctor did my hydrosonogram. The whole time he kept telling me to 'calm down' and that 'it didn't hurt' when I was suffering from terror, not pain.

The next test was done by a woman and it hurt horribly. They put some . . thing threw my cervix and scraped my uterine lining. I almost passed out from the pain. The physician who preformed it apologized and said 'she was sorry, she couldn't get threw my cervix.'

Then Christmas came. The stress of waiting for my fertility results made me more on edge. No one, out side of my immediate family and very close friends, knew I had lost three babies. That I was going nuts about loosing them. So when my Aunt announced to me at Christmas dinner, against the advise of my family, that she was going to be a Grandmother again, I lost it.

I'm not proud of that. But I own it.

I was put on clomid in January of 09, by late February, I was pregnant with twins. I lost one twin at about five weeks. The other I got a heartbeat and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then it slowed. I was having ultrasounds every week and those weeks were agonizing.

The heart-rate slowed so much one week, that they couldn't find it on the normal ultrasound machine. One doctor called in another, then another, then another. I was told they couldn't find the heartbeat, then they found it. I had to dress and go to another machine.

The doctor didn't know how to use this new machine and the Tech wasn't in yet. So we tried and tried. People walked in and out as I laid on the table crying and worrying about my baby. Then finally it worked.

And I saw him. He was moving, so slowly.His heart-rate was 50 beats per minute and he was 8 weeks old. The OB removed the probe and asked about scheduling a D&C. She was saying he would probably die. I remember Hubs saying "We still have a heartbeat, the baby is still alive."

We came back the following week only to see that we lost it. Even on Clomid I couldn't stay pregnant. I asked for a second opinion, and three days later I got to see him again, the orders on the work up 'confirm fetal demise.'

I was given a script for cytotec because I didn't want to have a D&C. I specifically asked about sideeffects. I was told 'none.'

We filled the script and looked at the bottle.

There it sat for days. I finally googled it and found some scary sideeffects. Hubs flushed it down the toilet. A few days later I miscarried two placentas and one very small baby. My water broke at four am and by nine I had passed all of it. I held my son in my hand on the floor of the bathroom and wept. He had large eyes and little hands. I just sat there and held and talked to him.

I was told I didn't fail him. That sometimes these things happen. That sometimes the chromosomes don't line up correctly.  But I worried that I did fail him. I failed his little body. I couldn't keep him safe.I told him how sorry I was I didn't get to meet him. That I failed him. That I loved him. That I will always love him.

We called him Aiden.

I never told anyone that I named him.

I put his body in saline. I wanted to keep him. bury him here. But they wanted to run tests on him. I asked if I could have his body back or that it'd be cremated. . . .They told me he would be thrown out with medical waste.

Isn't that fucking lovely?! They threw my child out, like unwanted medical waste.

Three weeks later we, Hubs and I, decided to adopt a cat. We drove up to Upstate New Jersey and brought home a very underweight Maine Coon that we named Zoe.

That night we conceived Little Man. We had weekly ultrasounds from three weeks in. There were two gestational sacs. At five weeks we had a heartbeat with Little Man, twin B didn't. By six weeks they called it a miscarry for twin B. By nine, twin B was reabsorbed.

The doctor said to me, 'well, aren't you glad there were two??'

She always called me her 'nervous nelly' and her 'fertile myrtle.'

I hated her. I really hated her.