by Band Back Together | Sep 11, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Help A Friend With Infertility, Infertility, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Miscarriage |
The first miscarriage was the one that destroyed me.
I lost four more babies; suffered a failed adoption; and barely saw my first born before she was yanked from between my legs – limp and drenched in a dark, life-sucking coat of meconium – then rushed to specialists trained to cheat death.
But that first loss, when my body cramped and convulsed and spit out a baby we so desperately wanted, is what shattered my heart. It robbed me of hope and started a years-long spiral into grief, despair and, ultimately, nothingness.
Exhausted by the anguish and terrified of feeling it again, I turned off as one loss became two. I numbed myself as two bled into three, and the doctors called me infertile. I became a shell and didn’t feel the fourth miscarriage or remember the fifth. I disassociated from my body when the doctors told me they intubated our first born and knocked her out after she had an eight-minute seizure. That person, sitting speechless and alone in the hospital room after they rushed our baby to a first-rate NICU at a different hospital in another city? That wasn’t me.
But it was.
I was 30 and married just a few months when I first got pregnant. I didn’t know much about babies, didn’t have friends who had them – or lost them. And I certainly never heard the statistic that as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.
We pored over baby name books at the bookstore and delighted my parents with the news. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and marked the due date on the calendar.
Then we saw blood. Just a spot. “It’s common in early pregnancy,” the nurse told us over the phone. “Try not to worry.” So, we didn’t. We believed her. We didn’t know enough not to. Idiots.
Then I bled more and they asked us, ever so calmly, to come in to the office. “Let’s just take a look.”
I sat in the passenger’s seat while Kent drove down the interstate and I tried not to think this was anything more than typical bleeding. Truthfully, though, I feared otherwise. Kent excitedly pulled an ultrasound photo from his suit pocket as we readied for the doctor; he couldn’t wait to compare the growth from the last appointment to now.
Ten years later, I can still see the inside of the car and the exit from the highway as it was that day that changed everything. I see the inside of the doctor’s office and Kent fiddling with the black and white photo.
“Put it away,” I snapped nervously. Sure he was jinxing the luck we needed.
And then, quick and impersonal as a business transaction at the bank, the doctor inserted the ultrasound wand, marked the top and bottom of the little bean with an X and explained that he didn’t see a heartbeat.
“Put your clothes back on and when I come back in we’ll talk,” he said.
We left the office in silence, a short, poorly-written book about miscarriage in our hands and an appointment for a D&C on the books. The tears started in the car and rushed with scary abandon once I crumbled on to the couch at home. I hid my face and howled into a pillow. Angry, terrified, lost.
Kent made phone calls to my family, talked to my boss. He tried to explain what we didn’t understand. How it happened. Why? When.
I agonized over the “when,” made myself sick flipping through the calendar as I tried to imagine what I did the day our baby died. Because, of course, I killed the baby. We went camping a few weekends before: did scrambling over rocks and hiking to exhaustion kill the baby? I spent too many hours at the newsroom: did I drown the baby with the stress of deadlines, interviews, and vapid politicians?
The baby fell out of me in horrifying pools of blood and fluid and mangled clots the night before the doctors planned a sterile procedure on a cold operating table. I was alone in the house, doubled over with cramps when the first gush sent me running to the toilet. Over the course of the night, Kent phoned the doctor several times to ask about the shocking volume of blood spilled in the tub, the toilet, the bed, on the floor.
We left the doctor’s office the next morning in silence. We stopped for bagels – because I was famished after losing so much blood – and ate without a word: chewed food, swallowed milk, stared past each other. Like robots, if robots could eat.
Kent went to work while I called in sick the next few days, stayed home and wept with little reprieve. I listened to angry, pulsing music at deafening volume to drown the mournful wails of my heart. And I wrote a letter to the baby I held in my belly but never felt in my arms.
“Today we were supposed to see you once again, all flickers and squirms and holy, miraculous life,” I wrote. “Instead, we shall say goodbye. We came to church to do it. We had hoped the baptismal waters would rush one Sunday morning in June as the priest held you aloft and the congregation craned to see your pink body and dark hair. God would welcome you then, we thought. We didn’t know He’d want to take you now…
“Now, we entrust you to Him. Though we wanted so desperately to hold you and touch you. Love you. Watch you. Clothe and bathe and feed you. Nibble your feet and tickle your ears. We couldn’t. But we did love you. And we will miss you. You can be sure.”
I signed the letter, then Kent did too and we traveled to church to leave a pink tulip at the base of the baptismal font, a symbolic gesture to signal the start of our healing.
Ten years later, I pulled the letter from the envelope and found a leaf from a Japanese maple and a helicopter seed tucked in with it. Signs of life lost, just like our baby.
I changed, but I am not healed.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Poverty, Economic Struggles and Hardship |
I’ll start this off with the fact that I hate money.
I know. Everyone says that. Everyone, especially now, is having a fuck of a time. Bills have to be paid. Kids need diapers and food. Cars don’t run without gas. My problems, in no way, take more precedence than any other family trying to keep everything together. We’re all trying not to sink under this never-ending weight of feeling like you’re working your ass off, day after day, never seeing the people you’re doing it for, and for what?
The red envelopes still show up in the mail.
The phone still rings for an answer and your routing number.
The library remains the last outing that’s affordable. Though at this point, it resembles more closely a broken down sales-outlet that barely captures the images of the place I felt was a second home.
I’m not writing this for sympathy or as a plea for help. I’m writing this because more than once, shit, more than i can count, I have felt utterly alone in this flailing to keep everything okay. Keep everything normal. And I know there have to be others out there that feel the same way. Regardless of whether they talk about it or not.
So, I’m throwing this out there. Feel free to comment and commiserate and bitch. Or, just read this and know that you’re not alone. There are others trying, pushing, shoving. And we’re all going to get out of this at some point. There may be some scars, but seriously, wear those motherfuckers with pride. This is warfare and you got out alive.
Besides, everyone knows war wounds are way cooler than tribal tattoos. *They can also get you free beer.
*Free beer not guaranteed.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Baby Loss, Child Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Coping With Losing A Child, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss |
A little while after Charlie died, a girl I volunteered with at the Ronald McDonald House shared her idea with me about the grieving process. She had lost her 5 year old to Cancer a few years earlier so she had experience and was already a member of the “Moms of Angels” club.
She said grieving was much like a rock in your shoe.
And you can’t get it out. Can’t take the shoe off and shake it out. It is there and always will be.
At first it cuts into your heel and ball of your foot causing you to bleed and be in pain. Then after a little while, you can wiggle it around and get it into a spot where you can’t feel it too much.
But every now and then something will happen and make that rock get under the heel of your foot – causing you to bleed and be in pain. So you go through life with this rock in your shoe that sometimes causes you a lot of pain and sometimes is just “there”.
I thought that was very interesting at the time. And now I know that it is very true.
I attended a visitation for a friend’s stepdad about 5 years later at the funeral home where Charlie was. I remember our visitation almost too vividly. I remember greeting hundreds of people (seriously, like 500) – local friends and friends who had driven several hours or had flown in for our 24-day old baby’s funeral. It was very humbling. I had been in that room for various visitations over the last 5 years with very little pain. But tonight for some reason when I walked in the room, I felt physically ill. Like I might throw up. I remember feeling that way the first time I went in the church where we had his service (my home church) and that morning they just happened to have a baptism and sang “Jesus Loves Me”. Again, I felt physically ill.
You never know what is going to trigger one of those “Moments” and the moment might not make you cry and get all emotional or anything, but it puts a knot in your stomach and makes your hands shake and just makes you feel that rock in your shoe.
But I’ll be able to wiggle it back out of the way and go for a little while until it decides to get under my heel again. This is how we are able to go on.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Coping With Losing A Partner, Grief, Help For Grief And Grieving, Loss, Partner/Spouse Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
i’m thinking i should tell my story.
or attempt to.
i am being nudged because there is a new site coming up and it’s about..READY FOR THIS…grief.
all kinds of grief, the grief spectrum. whatever.
anyway, i know about it. way too much. and i also realize this is an attempt, because it won’t be right.
not that it’ll ever be right, but i figure i’ll have to hone this to make it really readable, or good enough, or…
wtf? good enough? for who?
jesus, it is what it is. i write like i write. i feel what i feel. (sense the anger? i seethe a lot, sometimes it is a murderous rage, often directed at my dead husband. it’s a nice side effect of ptsd. as is depression and drinking and eating too much or too little – done all)
so.
january 21 2006.
i feel my husband get out of bed, roll over. “morning”
..i go back to sleep.
(it’s a saturday morning, it’s 7:30 am..yeah, i go back to sleep! don’t judge)
maybe, MAYBE 5 minutes later i hear my son running down the hall, screaming “daddy fell and there’s blood”.
up like a shot, into the bathroom, where he was feeding the dog. water everywhere. did he slip in the water? “No. i passed out”….
calm me to crazed son ”call 911 and then get me some pants.” (i thought enough to ask for pants. i’m great in a crisis.)
husband not in pain, but says he’s having a hard time breathing. so we sit him up (BTW… we is me and a 13 year old scared shitless piece of love). we wait for the ambulance. it seems like hours..under 5 minutes.
i am CALM. SO CALM. i put on pants, i hold husbands head. i speak soothingly to both my guys. i call neighbor to come over to stay with son while i go to hospital. ambulance comes, and as they get him loaded and i see i can’t go in the ambulance, i grab water and my knitting…and then i BRUSH MY GODDAMED TEETH (WTF? what was i thinking?), because i figure i’ll be at the hospital for a while, and. and. and…i can’t remember if i told him i loved him. (drives me insane to this day)
i called my friend to meet me at hospital and took off. got a call en-route that ambulance was changing hospitals…what? why?….so i pull a u-turn in the middle of the street and head to the 2nd hospital. still..calm enough to call friend and tell her. weird.
(Later i find out that the 2nd hospital was trauma center. great)
when i arrive she is there, we go in. i speak to a nurse who IMMEDIATELY brings us into the ER. at this point….well, the dread is setting in. i breathe, say to susan “this can’t be good”.
AND NOW I NEED A BREAK…saving as draft.
(BTW..it’s been almost 5 years. i still can’t breathe, often, when i tell my story. and now i’m back, 6 days later to, hopefully, finish).
and i walk into the ER room that has doctors hustling and bustling (that sounds like a song from Oklahoma) and all i can see/feel/hear/ KNOW is that there is no life in that room. because, the only life i cared about is not there. the doctors kept working on tom as i held his hand and cried and asked for “a xanax, PLEASE”…, but he was gone, we all knew it. and there was a point when i just asked them when were they going to stop, so i could leave and get my son (my son, our son…how was i going to tell him?) and then they stopped. and called the time. and it was truly over.
(crying again. i wonder when i ever will not cry telling this?)
my husband and i met in 1985, married in 1989 and he died in 2006. our son was 13. my son will be 18 on september 21st, and the pain is still acute for him. but we’re going to get tattoos, SO FUCKING THERE! (tom HATED tattoos…we like them)
i’m older than most of you who will read this. i didn’t know about blogging when tom died, i wish i had. it would have helped.
the only thing i regret about that day, in terms of my choices, was the choice to leave my son at home. it seemed right at the time. i believe it was a mistake; we were without each others most important OTHER person at the worst moment of our lives.
i have never written all of this before, and it is filtered through several years. but, it is exactly how it was, because i will never forget it. and there is more to say about that day, and friends and how to deal with grief, for yourself and others, and i will.
i know i will because now i NEED to.
and i trust that this new site will be a safe place for us all.
by Band Back Together | Sep 10, 2010 | Cancer and Neoplasia, Cancer Survivor, Coping With Cancer, Testicular Cancer |
I’m on an airplane, heading home from my recent vacation with my wife and most of her side of the family and writing this entry on the notepad on my iPhone. That is the dedication I have for BAND BACK TOGETHER!
How did this entry come to happen? Well, I blame Aunt Becky. Why didn’t I have a link for Aunt Becky?! Umm, if you are reading this chances are that you know her. If not, well…I got nothing. I follow that crazy (crazy AWESOME) lady on Twitter and love reading her blogs. Mostly cause she says fuck a lot and you don’t hear women talk that way. Come to think of it, she might be a dude. Eh, I would still follow her…or him.
She tweeted how she wanted to make a shirt that said “CANCER IS BULLSHIT” and I told her I would help with the design. This led to a stream of DM’s of why I wanted to help and what it meant to me. So I thought, what else is there to do on an airplane ride? Well, besides watching “Breaking Bad” that is. Here it goes. This entry is going to be a bit different from how I normally write so please don’t judge! This is serious, we’re talking about my nuts here!
I was a month away from turning 31 and 2 weeks away from my first anniversary with my wife. It was Halloween and we were at a party at our friend Nick and Lauren’s house. I had probably 4 beers and we were home in bed by midnight. Everything was fine. That was Halloween.
November 1st was a different story.
I woke feeling like crap. Well, I actually felt like I had to take a big crap. Gross, but that’s the closest thing I can equate it too. As the day went on, I started to feel worse. I decided to take a shower because for some reason that always helps me feel better. I like to sit down in the shower, that’s just how I roll. Well, when I did that I felt a sharp pain…in my nuts. Actually it was just my left nut if we want to get technical about this. I decided to give myself a self-examination. Right nut, smooth and pliable just the way it should be. It seemed to be normal size, from what I remembered. Okay, left nut…fuck. The thing was 4 times the size of the other and hurt like hell to even squeeze ever so slightly. I called my wife to look at them. She saw them and how there was a noticeable size difference and we were off to the hospital.
After waiting for 2 hours in terrible pain due to all the assholes that ran to the ER, convinced they had H1N1, I finally got see the doctor. He poked, prodded and jostled my testes. Then, he ordered an ultrasound.
You know what’s awkward? Having your nuts scanned by a female nurse while your wife is in the room. Yup, not cool. When I returned to my room in the ER, I was met by my doctor who had already scheduled me an 8 AM appointment with another doctor who would be talking about the surgery and my cancer.
Wait…WHAT THE FUCK!?
Yeah, it was laid that smoothly on me. My wife and I walked to the car (it was 10 o’clock by now) and I made a phone call to my mom. I told her I was okay, but that I there was something that I needed to talk to her about but I needed to go home and sleep and that I would talk to her when I knew more. She cried a bit, but respected my space.
Next day, we met with my Urologist. He had red hair and was kinda weird. That’s all that I can tell you about him. He is just kinda weird. Whatever, he showed me my scans and told me my options. I knew surgery was necessary so we were all for that.
They would be removing my left nut the next morning at 8AM. My tumor was directly in the middle which was good because the doctor feels like that stopped any spreading of any kind. He was very sure of this.
However, I was still going to go through Chemo or Radiation therapy.
I had my nut removed and then had two weeks off. It was nice to have the time off but at the recovery sucked. They had to give me a hernia, take the nut out and then seal me back up. I couldn’t lift, sit up or get out of bed for about two weeks without being in pain or uncomfortable.
I was lucky that I didn’t have to go through massive sessions of chemotherapy. I chose chemo because one doctor said for the type of cancer I had and where it was that it was the best treatment and he stood by that. Also, I chose it because I thought the radiation oncologist was kind of a douche.
Chemo wasn’t so bad. Yeah, I did have to sit in a chair and people gave me the look of death when I walked in for treatment. Old people seem to think that no one young should have cancer and when they saw me they thought the worst, so they would give me this look. I hated that part of being in the clinic.
I finished my treatments and now I do blood tests every three months and scans and blood every 6 months for 3 years.
What I hate most about the scans is that every time I have one done, for about a week I am on pins and needles waiting to hear the news. That time is the worst.
It happened during this economic struggle that everyone is going through. We were hit hard and our savings was completely destroyed. We are a young couple that is trying to save for a house and get started, but life decided that we would have to grow up really quickly. You can always earn more money, right?
We want to have kids and now it seems my number of fellas down there has been cut in half. We were taken from being this happy couple that is young and didn’t have a care in the world, to a couple that is now having to think about freezing sperm just in case! My wife was my rock during this whole thing. She was there by my side and never left it. I even had a medal made for her that says “Best Wife Ever” so that title is now officially taken and no one else can have it. My wife has that shit LOCKED DOWN!
Cancer is BULLSHIT! I definitely agree with that.
However, I have learned a few things since it happened. I now know that I am not invincible and that things can happen. I knew that when I broke an arm or something but that’s different. When you are told you have something life-threatening, it really makes you stop and look at life. I may be a “single jingle” (I want a shirt that says that) down there now but I am still alive and that’s what matters.
There are times that I lose it and cry. Shit, it happens to us all. I could be fine one day and think about it and how if I hadn’t caught it I could have died and how I would leave my wife all alone and it makes me sad. But, I am still here. I am alive and kicking and not going to let my cancer run my life.
Cancer IS BULLSHIT!
