My intention is not for this blog to always be about heavy, sad things. Who would ever want to read such a thing? Right now, a huge part of my journey happens to be in dealing with grief. It weighs on me, and there are so many things I want to say.
I had put off beginning my Stillbirthday training for 4 months. I just couldn't bring myself to start it, knowing it would be intense, knowing I would be required to face my own demons, and to re-enounter those I have faced with others, taking a fresh look, learning what lessons I failed to internalize when grief and heartache were fresh and too overwhelming. But I have finally begun, only just. I know it's going to be hard.
As I read my assignment yesterday, I was consistently sidetracked by thoughts of those I know and love who are gone, those I never got to meet but who were mine...and always, always my own sweet son has been at the very front of the line. You see, he was "supposed" to be my sixth miscarriage...and that situation unfolded before my very eyes during an ultrasound. My husband and our 2 very little girls were there with me. During my first visit I'd seen my little bean, seen his heart beating. But here, on this day, there was nothing there...and I started to bleed that very moment. It was crushing in a way that I had not previously experienced...because I had always been alone when the news came before. But here we all were, and here I had to face other people's grief too, had to explain to my 5 and 3-year-old daughters that this baby we were all so excited about wasn't coming afterall.
When all of this took place, nearly 8 years ago now, we were in the middle of a cross-country move. We were leaving my beloved San Francisco Bay for Memphis. There wasn't a lot of time for grief, and there was no time for a D&C and recovery. Then, the very next day, the day after learning my baby was gone, I got a call from my mother-in-law. My husband was at work, and she had news that she wanted me to decide how to share, for his beloved grandmother had died. We'd have to attend a funeral, in Michigan, during a miscarriage, and 5 days before the movers were scheduled to come, just one week before our move to Memphis. And we hadn't told anyone yet, either about the pregnancy or the loss. My grief, and the overwhelming exhaustion that befalls a person in such circumstances, was...formidable. I couldn't see how I was going to find my way clear of it. So I operated on auto-pilot for a few weeks.
The day we took possession of our home in Memphis and were waiting for the movers to arrive with furniture was the day everything changed. I was feeling really badly. I was nauseated, still experiencing heavy blood loss after 4 weeks, pale, weak, and really not at all right. Around noon I decided it was time to go to the emergency room. I called my husband to meet me there and called the only person I'd met from church to see if her daughter could babysit my little girls. I was in the emergency room for seven hours. I'd had blood taken enough to transfuse someone, and I'd had 3 ultrasounds through which technicians went to grab other medical personnel and whispered to one another. I'd been lying alone in a bed for 3 hours when a doctor came in, shook my hand, and said, "I have no idea what's happened here, but congratulations! You have a live, healthy fetus in there!" He went on to explain a low-lying placenta and a significant subchorionic hemorrhage, which would likely seal up with some modified bedrest. I was stunned and full of questions. The best guess was that there'd been a twin in a separate egg sac, which hadn't been viable, and for whatever reason, our son wasn't seen that day when everything had come apart. And the hemorrhage hadn't been identified, or even looked for, because seeing the empty sac was a reasonable enough explanation for the bleeding at the time.
Seven months later, my perfect son was born at home. Four weeks after that, my brother-in-law, who had been battling leukemia for 2 years, contracted an infection in his heart and died within 3 days. I was close to him, and the loss, and the guilt, and the empathy for my widowed younger sister washed over me in monstrous, heaving, relentless waves. That grief affected me to the point of decimating my breastmilk supply and put my son in danger once again. He lost too much weight, and we were hospitalized. While in the hospital, my son was exposed to RSV and our total stay in the hospital ended up being 16 days.
Four of those days were days of not knowing if he would pull through. The unraveled, grief-stricken, angry, and mentally broken part of me created this fierce warrior inside, a wild mother bear who understood every single moment might be the last one. While I understood the doctors, nurses, students, billing department, etc. were all doing their jobs, they were forgetting that my son was a baby, and one of his most critical needs was to BE WITH ME, and they were forgetting that I was a human being, a new mother again, that this might be all the time I would get with my baby. They didn't know very much else about the kind of year I'd had, but what they knew should have been enough to create some compassion, some humanity. And so I fought. I fought passively, and sometimes I fought with words fashioned to put them in their place and make them either feel ashamed, afraid, or simply just to make them reconsider their approach. I was barely holding it together, or maybe I wasn't at all...but I was going to be damned if I let their stupid, sterile, inhumane policies and personalities rob me of the precious moments I would have with my son.
As I have been writing all of this, wondering what the actual point was, an idea for my required community project (for my Stillbirthday certification) has hatched. Perhaps it's time to go back to LeBonheur Children's Hospital.....
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