(Picture from when I was pregnant with Raven)
I feel like I need to start off this post with a whole bunch of disclaimers:
I’m not sure I’ll even publish this.
I know I have nothing to complain about compared to many women who so desperately want a child and don’t even have one.
For all I know, I might be pregnant again in a month (hey, I can dream!), so this might seem silly.
But disclaimers aside, this is a blog of my life. My story.
And my story involves this right now.
Back in March, we suffered a miscarriage. This you know (at least you do if you’ve been a reader for awhile). You also might know that for that particular pregnancy, we’d had to wait longer than we’d planned, due to some medications I had to be on for my autoimmune disease.
When we finally had the go-ahead from my doctor that my disease was fully in remission, I thought we’d be good to go right away. But then we had to wait awhile for the medication to be fully out of my system. And then we had to wait for my body to get back to normal after having had an IUD in since Raven was born.
But still, we counted ourselves as marvelously fortunate that we were able to get pregnant rather quickly, once all those obstacles were out of the way.
I relished the thought of having a baby in October (my due date). Matt and I were both born in September, and I always LOVED being one of the oldest students in the grade, and having a birthday in the fall. I was riding the motivation train pretty high too, since I just KNEW that I wanted pregnancy #2 to be different—I wanted to take way more pictures, I wanted to watch my weight a lot more carefully, I wanted to keep exercising as long as I could (all things I regret from my first pregnancy). I even wanted to announce it earlier because I was just so excited and didn’t want to have to wait until the end of that loooong first trimester to be able to share our news with the world.
When I found out about the miscarriage, I was pretty surprised, truth be told. I actually hadn’t been bleeding or anything, and my cramping hadn’t been *that* severe. I just had the feeling that something was a little “off” in the pregnancy—I felt too good, I had too much energy. Even the nurse didn’t hide the fact that she thought that me taking the blood test was a waste of time, but since we’d planned to announce the news to our families that weekend, I wanted to be sure.
And when I got the call from the doctor’s office, I actually knew the results about three seconds before the nurse confirmed it, as I’d forgotten until she’d reminded me that I could look up my results myself online and didn’t need to wait for the doctor to phone me.
So when I saw that the numbers were dropping instead of doubling, I didn’t need her telling me, in her matter-of-fact voice, in her I-give-this-news-every-day-to-someone voice, that I’d miscarried.
I knew.
And I cried. I mourned. I didn’t feel at all guilty or strange for it because all the other women who’d been through it before (and there were soooo many who came out of the woodwork, whose words were like life preservers thrown out my way) told me to let myself grieve for this lost baby.
So I did. I let myself grieve.
And then my doctor told me to expect my levels to get back down to normal in 4-6 weeks or so, and so that became The New Plan. To wait. Again.
I went back two weeks later to get tested, to get another ultrasound. Things were moving right along, I was told. My body was doing exactly what it should be. There was no need to do anything but wait.
So we waited.
And I went in again, for more blood work. And at 4 weeks past the initial miscarriage diagnosis, while they hadn’t yet dropped back to normal, I still knew that there was that end deadline of six weeks that we needed to hold out for, so I didn’t let myself get too upset over it, and I waited another two weeks.
And tested again.
And my body still registered as pregnant, but with dropping levels.
And then I tested again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
The doctor started spacing out the tests to be every 4 weeks instead of every 2.
And we tested again.
And again.
Yesterday I had another test.
Yesterday, I thought that the test *might* actually show me I was pregnant again. After all, I’ve been feeling sick to my stomach for days and been feeling beyond exhausted. (I tried to remind myself, again, that it might be nothing, since I’d also thought that the last test a month ago might show me that I was pregnant again because of where the levels were, and how they lined up with my cycle and blah blah blah, but I hadn’t been).
And so I brought up my online file over lunch today, heart skipping out of my chest, sure that it was going to tell me the reason I’ve been feeling this way…
And it only confirmed that my levels are still not quite at zero (like they should be), nor are they in the range they would be if I were pregnant again.
They only confirmed more waiting.
And I just felt so very, very tired.
But there’s nothing I can do but wait.
And wait some more.
I’d like to say I’m getting better at waiting, and I guess in some ways I am—I’m no longer making plans around a pending pregnancy, or around when a new baby might arrive. I’m still keeping up my high level of intensity in my exercise classes rather than letting myself succumb to the feeling that I need to take it a little bit easy, just in case I’m pregnant again.
So I guess you could say I’ve accepted the waiting.
But I still don’t like it.
And that’s just the truth, plain and simple.
