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[dominiquegroves-blog]

10 weeks

         Most of you probably wont read this, and that’s okay because this is more so for me than anything else. This isn’t a pity party or a cry for attention. I figured if I took the time to really think about my feelings and put them down on paper that it would somehow help me heal, and maybe help someone else going through a similar situation. So here we go.

        For weeks now, I’ve had a thousand thoughts and emotions flowing through my body and have until this moment been able to put them into words. Dozens of people, including my husband, have asked me over and over again how I am doing and all I could think to say is that I was “fine” or “ok”, because I didn’t actually have an answer. I couldn’t process how I was feeling. I didn’t know how I was supposed to be feeling.  Part of me questioned whether or not I had the right to be depressed since I was only pregnant for such a short amount of time. Was I being dramatic? Did I have a right at all to be so heart broken since, after all, 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage? It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later as I was laying in bed, unable to sleep, that I finally forced myself to mentally relive the events that led me to this place; and I finally had my answer, I was sore.

            Usually “sore” isn’t a word you would use to describe your emotional state. That may be why it took me so long to be able to put my feelings into words. But in my case, it wasn’t any one thing I was healing from. Over the course of a week I was hit with one traumatizing event after another without any time in between to process the previous one. It’s kind of like when you over work a muscle, or work out the same body part multiple days in a row at the gym. A couple of hours, or a couple of days later you experience a nagging soreness that can make the slightest movement painful. That’s what I was experiencing, only emotionally. A nagging soreness that made everything unbearable.

            It started on Monday, September 24th. I had a normal prenatal check up. They took my vitals and blood samples and did a pelvic exam. By this point the baby was in it’s 9th week. We had already seen the flickering of it’s little heart beat during an ultrasound 3 weeks prior. Everything seemed perfectly fine, including my blood work, so we had no concerns. The medical assistant offered to use a doppler so that I could try to hear the heartbeat and started glopping gel on my stomach. After about a minute of hearing nothing but static and my own heart beat, I began getting anxious. She assured me that it was normal not to pick up a heartbeat yet on a doppler and said that it was probably just too early.  I hadn’t been having any worrisome symptoms so I relaxed, as much as someone with anxiety could, and put it in the back of my mind.

            Two days later we arrived at the hospital for our second ultrasound. I was working at the time as a nanny for two babies who were also with us. Cody and the kids were sitting in the waiting area watching “Trolls” on his phone while I went in for the scan. Before she began I prayed over and over to myself “please find a heart beat, please find a heart beat”. Maybe it was mother’s intuition that I knew something was wrong, or maybe every pregnant woman experiences the same few nerve-wracking seconds before their ultrasound.  Either way, after what seemed like years of moving the probe around, the technician asked me if I had had a previous ultrasound. Red flag. She then told me we were going to do a Transvaginal Ultrasound. I asked her if it was too early to see anything with the standard ultrasound. She said “no” and my heart sunk.

             A few minutes later she finally said to me “I, uh…well, there doesn’t seem to be a heart beat. It appears that the baby stopped growing a day or two ago”. She looked down. I stared. I don’t know what I was staring at because I didn’t see anything. I couldn’t tell you what was on that screen. I just stared at it, listening to what she was saying while trying to form a thought. She politely waited for me to respond but all I could say was “so is it…” I refused to say the word dead. I wouldn’t even allow myself to think it. She looked at me the way you would look at an injured puppy and said “I’m not really allowed to say, but the doctor wants you to come to her office straight from here anyway so”… pointing to the screen she explained “if there were a heart beat, we would see a flickering in this area, but um, there doesn’t seem to be anything going on”.  I continued to stare. Eventually I looked at her and said “okay”, got dressed, thanked her, which now seems like a funny thing to do, and walked out of the room. I don’t know if she had spoken to Cody before I got out or if it was the look on my face that clued him in but he knew. All I could do was look down and try to hold it together until we got to the car. As soon as we got the kids loaded in the car, we both broke down.

             It was a short drive to the doctor’s office but in those couple of minutes I tried to gather myself. Again, Cody had to wait with the kids so I asked him to wait in the car. They called me back immediately and started taking my vitals. Thirty or so seconds in I completely lost it. Unfortunately, I am the type of person who hyperventilates when they get upset so here I am, hysterical, alone in the middle of the doctors office. The nurse didn’t know what to say so she just got me a box of tissues, asked if I wanted her to get Cody and left the room. I was trying not to think and to focus on breathing so I could get myself together but there were posters of babies and the stages of fetal development on every wall. Helpful. Eventually the doctor came in and reiterated everything the technician had told me, only with less bedside manner. She then jumped in to explaining that I could wait for signs of a miscarriage to begin and to see if it occurs naturally but that I would most likely need a D&C and suggested I schedule it for Monday. I looked at her as if she were a Martian. Did she not realize how terrifying and devastating this all is? She prompted with “what would you like to do”? I was so aggravated that she could be so callous. I looked at her through tears and said, “I want to go home”.

            Terrible things happen in threes, right? Well, as it would happen, the battery on my boss’s nanny car decided to die. So, after unsuccessfully asking around for jumper cables, Cody and myself, along with two crying children who were long overdue for a nap, sat in the car until my boss arrived to give us a jump. He kept apologizing that we had to deal with this, referring to the car, not yet knowing that the car was only the cherry on top of the world’s shittiest day for us.

            Fast forward to my surgery. Cody called on Friday to schedule it for me. I didn’t have it in me to do it myself. The day of the procedure, Cody and I were sitting in the hospital room waiting for them to roll me to the operating room. My hair was braided down my back and I had a mint green hospital gown on. In any other situation I would have loved the color.  They told me I could leave my socks on. I laughed to myself. I was about to be the most exposed I would probably ever be in my entire life and they think I’m worried about my feet. A nurse administered a type of sedative through an IV and warned me that it is very strong and that I probably wouldn’t remember leaving the room. I made it to the hallway before I blacked out. Apparently I was still conscious though. I wasn’t put under anesthesia until after I was in the operating room. The nurse told Cody I “became very emotional” before they put me under. Wouldn’t you? When the surgery was over I remember the nurse waking me up, asking me if I was ready to go home. I told her “no, not yet”. That was the first time I had actually gotten sleep in days. Eventually the anesthesia wore off and I was forced to face reality, and my sore abdomen, and go home. Before we left the hospital they told me that I had lost a lot of blood during surgery and to take iron pills twice a day but they seemed unconcerned and we thought nothing of it.

            For the next few hours I tried to sleep but I had a headache. At some point I began to feel a weird, tingling sensation in my tongue that began to spread to my lips, then my cheek, then eventually the entire left side of my face. I texted Cody who was downstairs to tell him my face was numb. A second later he came flying up the stairs like a bat out of Hell. He asked what was going on but by that time my face had gone back to normal. While I was explaining to him what had happened, it started again, only this time it spread to my left hand as well. I was trying to explain to him what I was feeling but I couldn’t form a sentence. I couldn’t walk and I was stuttering and stumbling over words. By this point, Cody thought I was having a stroke. He called the hospital to fill them in on what was going on. I must have done something really freaky while he was on the phone because he suddenly said “ um, yeah, I’m bringing her in” hung up and loaded me in the car.

            The hospital on post was the closest so we went straight there rather than to the one where I had my surgery. I sat in the waiting room, in a wheel chair, doubled over with a horrible migraine. I had my eyes closed the entire time I was there because it was too painful to open them. I could hear little kids running back and forth yelling and I seriously considered screaming at them to shut up. Finally the triage nurse called us back. Long story short, with my eyes still closed, I threw up all over his fancy office trashcan. That was enough to convince him and he escorted us to a bed. The next hours consisted of blood work, IVs, CT scans, and ultrasounds. Finally, after obtaining my medical records from the other hospital they realized that my hemoglobin count was so low from the blood loss during surgery that I developed anemia. My baseline before surgery was at 12 grams per deciliter, now it was at 9 and dropping. They did 3 blood tests in the matter of 3 hours and the last one read around an 8. They told us that if it dropped any lower I would need a blood transfusion. They also said that they needed to transfer me back to the original hospital incase God forbid anything goes wrong they do not have surgery here. So, Domi took her first ride in an ambulance.

           When we got to the hospital the paramedics rolled me up to my room, which was, get this, a labor and delivery suite. If you cant appreciate the irony in that, good, because nether did I. It felt like a cruel joke. Later on I found out that Cody had asked a nurse which room I was in to which she replied with the number and said “labor and delivery, congratulations”! He then had to explain that there was nothing to celebrate. He went upstairs to find me and she probably went to find the nearest hole to burry herself in. We spent the night in that room listening to the annoying beeping of the machines while I routinely got poked and prodded to check my hemoglobin levels. Eventually they decided to give me an intravenous iron supplement. Only then did I actually start to feel better. My numbers began to improve, not by much, but enough to discharge me. We left around 3’oclock in the afternoon. We went home and I immediately started packing. We already had a trip planned for New Jersey for the following day. It was supposed to be the weekend of our gender reveal (he was a boy, by the way). As depressing as that was and as shitty as I felt, all I wanted to do was go home and see my family. So we packed our suitcases, brought the dogs to the boarder and left for the airport around 3 am.

            It’s two weeks later now. I’m still not 100% better. I ended up quitting my job because both physically and emotionally it was too straining for me. There are still days that I wake up with a splitting headache that I can’t shake. I still cry at the drop of a hat. My energy level is at an all time low. I have no desire to eat, or do much of anything for that matter. Needless to say I still have a lot of healing to do and Cody and I decided that I would do that best while taking it easy at home. If you actually read this far, I’m impressed and also thankful that you took the time to try to understand what both Cody and I have been dealing with. I didn’t write this to throw myself a pity party, but instead to help myself heal and find closure. All of the horrible, little things added up were traumatizing, especially being Cody and I are so far away from family, so it was a lot for us to process. But every day we are making progress and continue to grow stronger.