Recovery

On Valentine's day we found out our first baby girl, Sable, may have gone home a little early. I went in for my first prenatal appointment and they couldn't find her heartbeat and she was too small, only six weeks big and I was supposed to be at ten weeks. We spent the next week not knowing for sure what had happened, hoping, praying but also realizing that she was gone and trying to come to grips and cope with it. It was confirmed with another ultrasound a week later. That Wednesday I went in to talk to a doctor about my options, I had essentially three. There was just waiting, which seemed frightening since she had already been gone 5 or 6 weeks and my body hadn't caught on yet at all and after 4 weeks the risks of infection [that could have left me sterilized] increase. Another option was to schedule a surgery called a D&C to "scrape" everything out. This is a perfectly safe procedure that has completely positive outcomes almost every time [there have been horror cases that lead to serious health issues that I of course had to read all about because I'm ridiculous] but I just felt it wasn't for me. I opted for the medication route, as you may have read from the last few days, it's been a very long and uncomfortable week. I've never taken so many meds in all my life.

The drug they gave me is misoprostal, the same thing they use to induce labor when it's time for babies to come out. It sounded mostly pretty safe and I tried to be brave but my body didn't respond correctly, it didn't work, none my of tissue came out. Sorry for the TMI, I've had to look at my body from a COMPLETELY medical perspective the last couples weeks to keep myself from going crazy, and aside from the spiritual and emotional healing we've had to do I've been looking at recovering as from a medical point of view too. The misoprostal did make me bleed for the first time and, ten days later day, I was still bleeding. A phone conversation with my doctor on Thursday revealed that I had to come in for blood work once a week every week to see if my HGC [the pregnant hormone] were dropping like they should. If all the tissue was gone they would go to zero. If it wasn't, they would plateau somewhere and stop dropping and then I would need the D&C anyway. If I got and infection they would have to do an emergency D&C. I didn't think the misoprostal had worked but they couldn't confirm it until a few more weeks of HGC levels to compare to each other and if it did work it could take 6 to 8 weeks to now for sure. And I learned that I could bleed for four weeks. Four weeks. Everything seemed to be taking so long and it was wearing on me. I understand funerals now, I understand the need to have the time set aside when you lose a loved one to grieve and have closure and move on. These weeks just kept dragging on, not knowing if things were alright or what was going to happen or when was keeping me from healing all the way, emotionally too in ways I didn't expect and that I can't quite explain now. I just couldn't imagine her in heaven very clearly when a part of her was still with me, not living.

I've been blessed with so much inspiration during this time. I have received so many promptings on what to do and when to make my body more comfortable and progress on it's way to healing. More than anything on days when I was worried about D&C, infection, and crazy scary things like emergency hysterectomies knew that anything could happen but no matter what did happen it would be okay. I've never felt like that before, I always thought "okay" meant nothing bad would happen. I think I'm learning.

In the end I think my body finally figured it out and knew what to do. On Friday night on our drive I started having cramps worse than I had when I took the misoprostal. Saturday night I kept both Craig and I up all night by waking up every few minutes yelling from pain. i was having contraction-like pains, with lulls in between when I could rest and then huge, growing pains that came to an unbearable climax that would last a while before receding again. That was after two vicodin. I was able to make it through church today but by the evening I was hurting more than I ever have in my life. After yelling, pacing, crying, and all sorts of craziness Craig was holding me and all the sudden it was over. I expected it to be a shocking, devastating, and scarring experience once my body let go, but all the pain instantly disappeared and all we felt was joy and relief. We were so grateful, so ready to let go, so ready to heal. I feel like my body is finally mending now. I don't feel any pain at all. There isn't any more vague timing, wondering when it was finally going to be over. It's over. Just a little longer and we can have our second baby on the way. And all of our children who come to stay will know they have a big sister helping them stay safe.

This is my attempt to try and bring everything to a conclusion finally. I've been so terrible at talking about any of it that I've kept those close to us a lot let updated than I should have but I feel comfortable writing about it now that it's passed. There's so much loving family and close friends that care about what's been happening but I've been really bad at making sure everyone was caught up. I hope this helps wrap everything up and let's everyone know we're finally safe and mending. No more worries, all we have now are high hopes for the future. Thank you for all the support out there that we've received, I really found levels of comfort from the eyes of others that helped me greatly.

Craig drew a picture of Sable for me. Our little one flying home. They're both the most precious to me.