Starting Fresh and Staying Still

While these days I feel anything but "fresh," this is more like an attempt to breathe, process and stay still in the hopes that sooner or later, I can move forward.  And in the interest of moving forward, I'm not going to attempt to pick up where I left off.  Rather, I'm going to just be.  Just write.  Just express.  Because 4 years is too damn much ground to cover. And because it's been 2 weeks that I’ve been trying to process what I need to process and I feel like I've made so little progress.  Maybe this is the answer.  And maybe I'm not the only one going through this.  And maybe this can help someone else heal too.

2 weeks and 2 days ago, we found out that our one "normal" (chromosomally-verified with PGD testing) embryo from our two IVF egg retrievals done in 2018 and 2019 and a 6-year battle with infertility, didn't make it.  We transferred her into my plush and comfy 13-mm lining on March 29, 2021, after years of hope, months of monitoring and treatments, weeks of doing and eating all the right things and days of making sure all the meds were taken at the right times, and of so...much...hope and anticipation.  We had the HIGHEST of hopes for her, and literally, all our eggs were in this one basket.  Then came the "two-week" - or in my case, 9-day, wait.  The phone call we received at 3:40pm on April 7 confirmed the worst, though.  She never even settled in to that fluffy, inviting, supple lining.  Our one known chance at having our beautiful baby was gone.  And I've never felt more loss, guilt, or despair in my life.  Alex and I are both........ just completely devastated.  I feel like that phone call ended life as we knew it.

The last two weeks have been a blur of spontaneous outbursts of crying, hours of staying in bed, heading back to bed, going to bed early but unable to fall asleep...then more crying.......interspersed with moments of normalcy: sweet friends meeting for coffee and getting me out into the fresh air to walk and talk, focusing on organizing or cleaning around the house or spending time with the dogs or playing games in the evening with Alex - things that allow me to intermittently forget about how desperate and miserable and hopeless I feel inside.  Then there's the hyper-focus on what we do next: researching new clinics and options, recommendations from friends or my acupuncturist and holistic health practicitioner or my therapist.  The YouTube and Google searches for the best supplements to improve egg quality and odds of conception at the ripe old age of 39+, the re-reading of It Starts With the Egg by Rebecca Fett, among other sources both old and new, the scouring of the all-knowing internet for things I could have done or even still could do differently to achieve this dream of becoming a mom, the reading of testimonials about all the clinics and treatments we are now researching as potential next steps. 

The mornings are the absolute worst part.  My body doesn't let me sleep past 6:30am even though I'm off work from my Mother-Baby Nursing job (more on that, to come) - no matter how late I was up crying or googling or distracting myself the night before.  It's like it's the witching hour of pregnancy loss: It's time!  The momentary relief is over - wake up from your blissful forgetfulness that comes with being unconscious - it's time to remember that your life and dreams for the future are forever changed.  It's time to sink into that ever-widening chasm of despair all over again.

Despite still having these moments, I knew my leave of absence from work was coming to an end, and I thought, it should be.  It's been 2 whole weeks since I found out our baby had slipped away - surely I should be toughened up and cried out and ready to get back to it, right?

WRONG.

I had my BLS renewal skills class on Wednesday.  It went well, but when we did the infant portion of the class, I dutifully carried out the motions of CPR and dealing with a choking infant, but it almost felt like I shifted to autopilot.  It just felt off.  I wasn't in it - almost like an out of body experience...like I was doing these motions with my body and had the right answers in my brain but I was watching myself carry it out from a more distant position several feet away.  And it felt odd and awkward and cruel to be holding this plastic baby with a battery-powered diaper.

Thursday, I was due back on the floor at work.  Upon learning that our census was very low, I had requested the day before to be flexed off, still feeling the way I felt regarding our loss.  However, especially in my specialty, flexing is an ever-changing dynamic, and the odds were as good that I would still end up at work as they were that I would actually get my Excused Absence as requested. As the day went on after my BLS class, the feeling of dread was starting to mount.  How would I feel when I met my patients, these mamas, some of them pregnant for the first time or pregnant for the fifth, on purpose or many by accident, some of them with successful IVF cycles at my clinic or elsewhere?  None of that is relatable for me.  How would I handle watching them handle their precious little ones?  How would I cope with having to handle their little ones myself?  Would I be able to hold it together?  Would I start to cry?  Would I go catatonic?  Would I hold my tongue, or would it hold me? 

How would I deal with the questions and comments and unsolicited advice from them?  "Do you have kids?" *No...unfortunately I don't...?* Or *No, I can't?*  WHAT DO I SAY? 

"Oh, well when you DECIDE to, you'll be a wonderful mom." *Thanks, I had thought so too.*   (?)

"Have you tried just relaxing?  Just go somewhere with your husband.  That's what WE did, and now look!" *How nice for you.*

"I get how you feel, it took us more than 6 months to get this one.  But it will happen."  *A whole 6 months, huh.*

"Don't worry. It will happen when you least expect it."  *Well, I couldn't expect it less than I do now.*

"You just have to stop thinking about it." *OH!  DONE!  THANKS!*

"It will happen when it's right." *Thank you, unmarried recovering drug addict with multiple kids from various relationships, on welfare to pay for your iPhone.  So it's not right and hasn't been right in the last 6 years for us...even though my husband and I are in a loving, committed relationship, both stable, gainfully employed adults in professions that help people, with a faith in God, a home, health insurance, sweet dogs, and a - albeit now dwindling - savings account?  Tell me when the right time is, I'm curious.*

"It will happen when God wants it to." (That might be the cruelest, and honestly the most ignorant, one of all.  So you're saying God did this to me?  I refuse to buy into what this implies.)  

"You should try this, or my friend did this, or THIS clinic is supposed to be the best - go there!" (Nevermind that it's $50k per round of IVF at said clinic and we've already blown $40k with nothing to show for it.  I'm a nurse, not Oprah.  Do you think I have several thousand more sitting under a mattress somewhere to throw at this?)

“Have you thought about adopting?” *Honey, it’s been 6 years.  You really think that’s something that’s never come up?*

Or better yet, “You can always *just* adopt.” *Sweetheart, do you know how much money, time, effort and heartbreak go into adopting? Clearly you don’t because if you did, you wouldn’t have used the word “just” in your asinine comment - in fact you probably wouldn’t have said it at all.*

Mama’s getting sassy when the “honeys” and the “sweethearts” come out.

DREAD, I'm telling you.  

I was able to fall asleep that night (shockingly), but woke at 2:15am with a racing heart and dread-filled brain.  I debated calling in sick, but I again told myself - you can do this.  You have to do this.  You have to get over it, Cat.  Put on your big girl panties and DEAL.  I rolled around for the next 3 hours.

5:05am the text came in from the charge: "You will be on call for today."  Well, it's not getting called off, but at least I can try and snooze a little longer since I've been up for most of the night - but alas, the raindrops on the window told me more was to come.  Rain is never a good omen in baby-delivery land. And sure enough, at 8:01am I get another text, "We need you to come in. Sorry."

I hustle my butt in to work, fighting through the traffic and throngs of people dropping off their on-purpose and accidental children at the local elementary school, which I need to pass to leave my community, as well as the traffic due to intermittent rain on my way down to the hospital.  I arrive and am assigned a patient who ends up bleeding profusely and whose doctor isn't around to reach easily or intervene quickly.  Mid-my second round of orders/interventions obtained and awaiting an assessment from the OB hospitalist, I am in the med room trying to bust open a glass vial of medication to try and help my patient - but this vial decides it's a great day to fight me.  I have my gloves on and am gently but firmly pushing the top away from me while pulling on the base of the vial - the way we learn to do in our classes on med administration and that way I have done successfully and without injury dozens of time in my 7+-year career thus far.  I try every angle but it won't budge...until finally, the top completely shatters and my hand lurches forward and the jagged top slices right through my glove in two places.  

Of course...OF COURSE, this would happen today.

It stings, but it's manageable, and it doesn't appear to be extremely deep.  However, it's bleeding copiously.  I subdue it with some paper towels and have to run to a different room because the sink in the med room won't work.  

OF COURSE, it wouldn't work today.  

Thankfully, my manager happened to be in the med room and saw the whole thing happen and she was able to take over care for my bleeding patient, and in the 4 minutes or so of this saga, the hospitalist has arrived and is with the patient as well. 

I go and tell the post partum charge nurse what happened while I start to wash up my hands, and she starts the process of reporting a "stick" to our Employee Care Center.  Of COURSE, of COURSE this would happen today.  Of course.  When it rains it pours.  I briefly wonder to myself if it's still ACTUALLY raining outside, because at least that's one thing that would make sense in life right now. 

The rain starts inside as well. After I get myself cleaned up, I head back to the charge office and the waterworks just flow.  I realize: I'm really not ok, thoroughly...not...ok.  

There are reminders everywhere of the life I'll never see and the life I'll never live.  I am shaking and puffy and wailing in grief while my very understanding and supportive charge nurse comforts me.  I realize and verbalize: I should never have come back when I did.  

I have heard over and over that the process of grief is not linear, but I don't think I fully grasped that before this moment, because I have had the moments of wailing and sinking to the floor and crying myself to sleep and crying on my husband and reliving the awful phone call and the shock that came after the nurse instructed me to stop taking the medications meant to keep me pregnant.  I've had so many of them over the last couple of weeks, interspersed with sporadic and few moments of relief, light, and distraction.  I thought I had had the recovery time I needed, or at least, that I was allotted.  You grieve and you move on.  That's what you do, right?  I had mistaken my ability to carry on semi-normal conversation, get a cup of coffee, walk a few blocks, fake a smile, and get some groceries as "getting back to normal." And I thought that being an adult means you make it ok and you make it normal, even if it doesn't quite feel that way.  But in this moment, I realized.  I am still anything but normal, and I can't do anything to make myself get back there faster.

I also wonder to myself if it's even SAFE...for any of us... for me to be here in my current state.

Coworkers start sharing their stories of pregnancy loss with me, as well as loss of other family members and the time they needed to recover from shock and loss and grief of it all.  I realize finally that I pushed myself way too hard, way too fast.  I discern that was driven out of a fear of loss of my livelihood as well as a fear of judgment by those same people who were now showing me so much grace and understanding.  Why did I put this on myself?  No one else had that expectation, it was just an expectation I anticipated and an expectation I had for myself.  Grace has never been my strong suit.  I've gotten much better at giving it to others...but apparently I still suck at giving it to myself.

I went home yesterday after having the cut assessed at employee health.  I'm extending my leave out a month to give myself more time to recover from the FET and pregnancy loss and grieve and figure out what's next.  What I really don't know at the moment, though, is what that will look like for me.  What is the right way for me to grieve and heal?  Will I ever be over this?  I just want this feeling of loss, sadness, and despair to go AWAY.  Part of me wishes I could just erase it so I don't have to feel this way anymore.  I don't want to miss our little girl anymore because the pain is all-consuming and wholly unbearable.

But to do that, I realize, I would have to forget her altogether.  I would have to forget the journey, the path Alex and I have forged together through something so awful and difficult that somehow seems to have strengthened our marriage through moments of fighting each other as well as others of holding fast together and learning to communicate better about our frustrations and our hopes and our desires for our future together.  I don't want to forget all that.  This journey has been awful...it's still awful in so many ways...but it's also been good.  It's contained moments of joy.  It’s contained moments of hope.  And it's grown me as a person and grown us as a couple.  I never want to forget our journey.

And I never want to forget her.  Our little girl.  Our one little embryo.  You were a baby to me.  I pictured our lives together a year from now and five years from now and ten years from now and twenty.  I pictured your first ultrasound and your joyous birth and your play with our pups and your extra-curricular games or plays and tutoring you through elementary...your first dance and getting your license and graduation day and meeting your "one."  Your wedding day, dancing with Alex as he gives you to your spouse.  The day you bear children of your own. I'll miss this life we would have had together.  I love you baby girl, and I will miss you,  forever, but I know you're dancing with our Lord.  And for that, I am thankful.  I don't know why things turned out the way they did.  I mourn that now and I'm sure I'll mourn it in various ways at various, gut wrenching times for the rest of my life.

But...I carry on.  We'll see what that entails.  Two steps forward, one step back...that's still forward, right?  

Right.