Sorry, not a winner: Confessions of a (primary school) drop out

I guess you can tell I am not on my prac. I pulled out during the school holidays. I’m glad I completed my two-week unit. Maybe I’ll go back and do the final 6 weeks and maybe I won’t. Right now, nothing is certain except my belief in my resilience, and thank god I have that because otherwise I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t go and pop myself off.

The day is promising sunshine and blue sky, I have a friend coming over at 1 pm to help me in the garden. Birds are tweeting and I went outside earlier and was struck by the beauty of my surroundings and the deep solace I get from living on this piece of land. This is what keeps me grounded, connected to life, constantly reminding me of the here and now, the present moment, breathing this clean fresh air and feeling such peace.

And as I sit here and contemplate such things, my seventh baby is struggling to survive inside me. I am at a loss to describe how I feel. Terribly sad. The kind of sorrow that goes right to the bone, to the core of my being. I feel angry, in the sense of “this is not fair”. I feel tired and worn out from hoping and praying and doing the right things and being positive and giving it a chance and all of that endless cycle of hope that has yet to end in anything else but despair. I think I feel a bit dissociated. Part of my mind is producing images of myself careering back and forth from side to side across a small room, or something similar, flailing about at each end, flopping to the left, and flopping back again on the right. Something soothing about the repetition, perhaps it is a bit like an autistic behaviour, or cutting. The constant moving and banging of myself in my head keeps away thoughts and feelings that would perhaps undo me if I looked at them right now. But also it is probably quite reflective of how I feel about my situation. Back and forth back and forth, hoping in the middle and crashing at either end, over and over and over again. But still I go on. Without my resilience, in whatever form it takes, (and, perhaps, gravity, if you want to be pedantic about it) I should have flung myself off the earth years ago.

So here I sit. And wait. Wait for my baby to die. Wait to cry some more. To feel like eating. To feel like talking to someone, or reading a book, or painting. At the moment I need to be writing. It is cathartic.

It wasn’t my intention to get pregnant in the middle of my 2 week prac, but it happened. By 11dpo I had a faint pos on a pee stick and began progesterone pessaries for good luck, and clexane for the clotting disorder. This was day one of the school holidays. I agonised about whether to go back, whether to keep programming in case I did go back, whether to pull out now or wait and see. Given my history I didn’t want to be at school for a week or two and then discover I was miscarrying or worse, had another ectopic. I might need the kind of monitoring I’d have to be a t home to get. Did I want to be standing up all day trying to herd year ones around and be exposed to high risk of swine flu?

Sometime later that week I began spotting and cramping and lost my nerve. I quit my prac (everyone understood, but it is disappointing not to be finishing this year, nonetheless) and began beta monitoring for ectopic. By the middle of the following week, we could see that the beta levels were normal (for the first time ever) and doubling roughly as they should. We booked an ultrasound for 7w4d, continued the drugs plus almost daily acupuncture and a lot of nasty herbs, and hoped for the best.

Yesterday was that ultrasound. The sac measured 7w, the foetus measured 6w1d, the heart rate was 90. I’ve read enough scientific journal research articles to know that the prognosis is very very poor. I do not have the heart nor energy to entertain the wild one in a million chance that this will be ok, and I don’t wish to be judged negatively for that decision. Right now, evidence suggests that I am at a very high risk of impending miscarriage and my past experience suggests that evidence is generally right. So I am beginning my grieving process now, for what is to come, and for what will never be. On the other hand, I am also continuing with my progesterone and my clexane, because I do not wish future me to start up with all the ‘what if you did blah blah blah, things might have been different’ head fuck games it likes to play. So meanwhile, I stay with the meds, wait for the next ultrasound which is scheduled for next Thursday the 13th, think about booking the d&c for the following week, and we sob our bloody hearts out.

DH went back to work for the afternoon session following the scan. When he came home neither of us wanted much dinner. He had two gins, neat. I had some chocolate. We got out the cheese and crackers and sat around moping a bit and he said “this is like the wake”. I said yes, but the difference is this is not a socially recognised death. There will be no sympathy cards or flowers, like other people get when their loved ones die. This is my seventh loss and I have had one card and one bunch of flowers out of the whole previous six losses. It’s the silent death that nobody sees, nobody wants to talk about. People (in general) just simply can’t understand that this is a real to me as it would be to them if one of their living children suddenly lost their life. Anyway, poor me. Whatever.

And that’s the update. I don’t feel so much like a winner now. I had hoped to swan in here with good news and hope that come March 2010 I would have a baby in my arms, but no, just another due date to remember what might have been. And I won’t be 27 weeks pregnant when we go to South Africa in December for a friend’s wedding. And I won’t have a baby bump starting to show under my bikini when I go to Bali in September. And my SIL who is currently trying for #2 will probably get pregnant shortly, and have another baby close to my due date to remind me of what I’m missing, just like the first one.

Yep. Poor me. This sucks.