Transition!

I have been hot and cold with this blog for a while. The pressure of having to post daily or even just a few times a week got to me. I dropped it all instead of just posting when I wanted to.

I started the blog as a way to decompress from my wedding planning (I planned it all myself in like 4 months). It definitely helped. Then life got busy and I had nothing to say.

But now, as you can tell by the blog design I have plenty to say and talk about. I am going to try to post often, but it will be much more about posting when I want to share or document something. I am keeping a journal for my pregnancy, but I wanted to post here as well. I am going to use this almost as a diary to my baby as we progress through this pregnancy and beyond.

I already have some posts that I pre-wrote, but before I post those I wanted to do a little bit of a transition post. The last time I posted here it was a lot of venting about my miscarriage so I didn’t want it to be so cut and move on as it otherwise would have seemed.

So… this post might be a little long.

I found out about my miscarriage on March 15 th , 2016. I was 10w5d pregnant
and I was going in for a regularly scheduled midwife ultrasound. It was obvious pretty quickly that something wasn’t right, but I tried to keep my hopes up initially. My husband couldn’t make it that day so my mom came with me instead. My midwife was training another one so they were both in the room. At first they had tried to do an abdominal ultrasound, when that wasn’t showing anything they gave me a vaginal ultrasound. It was obvious that the midwives were getting nervous at this point and didn’t know what to say or do. They went ahead and called the OB on call.

He took quite a while to show up. He did and wasn’t able to find the baby, or if he did, he did not point it out to me. He gave me time to get dressed and went out. In the time it took for him to get back I called Thomas and he was able to make it to the hospital.

The doctor explained that it was most likely a chromosomal defect that caused the miscarriage. He said that the baby was destined to not survive since conception. He also said that “at least you know you can get pregnant”. As you can imagine this was not helpful at all (I have learned since that this particular doctor has been a pretty bad doctor to two of my friends).

I requested to have a more thorough ultrasound done by radiology just to ensure that the baby was indeed gone. A stage of grief I suppose. My sister had told me that they had told her something similar when she was pregnant with my youngest niece and so she insisted on a more detailed ultrasound in which they were able to find the baby hidden. That was not the case for me, but I couldn’t just let it go without making absolutely sure. At this ultrasound we were able to see the baby, who had stopped growing at 7w2d (per measurements).

I passed the baby just before midnight on 3/16/16, at home, in my bathroom. Thomas was sleeping. He got up, but he had to go to work the next day. I think it was his way of coping. I stayed at home for the rest of the week. My family visited me and I tried to take it easy. I definitely was going through some denial. I didn’t cry too much at first.

It was something that happened over time.

I don’t think I will ever be done grieving. I was recently speaking with someone who had a couple of miscarriages over 45 years ago and she still thinks about the baby’s that she never held.

I knew that I wanted to try and conceive right away. Partly it was the need to fill the void (although one baby does not replace the other in no way whatsoever) and partly for the same reason I was in a hurry to conceive to begin with – I’m not in my 20’s anymore.

I tracked my cycles using Ovulation Prediction Kits (like a pregnancy test, but it tracks when you ovulate) and in my 3 rd cycle after my miscarriage I conceived again – on July 1 st , 2016.

I was happy, but I was also super-duper nervous. I had a panic attack at my first ultrasound and I just couldn’t look at the screen. Thomas did well and I glanced over. The doctor understood my anxiety and asked if I would like to come in again two weeks later to help me keep calm. Normally the next appointment wouldn’t have been for a month. From that point (I was 6 weeks at the time) I had an ultrasound done every 2 weeks until I was 15 weeks.

The posts that I will be putting up in the coming days were written in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I am now almost 18 weeks along with an estimated due date of March 24, 2017.