The One That Got Away

For the last year and a bit I’ve had a trusty IUD hanging out in my uteris, stopping any “invaders” from getting at my eggs.  It worked beautifully, as beautifully as I could have hoped.  Birth control, the oral kind, turns me in to a crazy person and all the other options sounded not so much fun.

I believe IUD’s have a 99.9% success rate…

Now don’t get excited.  I’m not having a baby.  There was a baby but it got away.

I looked on my iphone to see when my period was due.  Tomorrow.  Fantastic.  I’m never impressed when it’s about to arrive but arrive it does, always there on the dot to the day, almost to the minute.

Tomorrow arrived but trusty period did not.  I was concerned all day but told myself, IUD IUD IUD IUD…I have the IUD and no babies can be made in this uterus of mine.

Unfortunately when I have a nagging feeling that I’m pregnant, I usually am.  And I was.  That night I peed on a stick and VERY faintly it showed me that little plus sign.  For the first time ever, I saw that plus sign and fell completely in love within seconds.  It was to be born in October, it was going to be scary but beautiful.

You see, me having another baby isn’t responsible.  We can’t afford a bigger car, we have no extra time to spare, what if it has autism too?  Why bring another child in to the world that my eldest son could torment.  Responsible? no.  Desirable? yes.  My mommy heart had not been finished loving people.  As much as it is full of love, it has room to grow, it had a desire to grow.

I took that stick to many people and had them observe it.  Everyone saw that faint faint line.

The next morning I woke up and began to spot.  The tinnnnnieeessst amount of blood but it was there.  I thought it had to be normal seeing there’s a foreign object in a body that’s trying to grow a baby now.  I went to a walk in, waited hours, talked to a very mean doctor.  He told me to go home and wait for a miscarriage and move on with my life.

I cried all the way home.  I knew he could be wrong.  I wanted him to be wrong.

I called a few trusted people and told them to pray.  Pray pray pray hard hard hard hard.  Make this baby stay.  Make it grow.  Make it live so I could love it.

The next day the blood continued, got worse, got harder, but just a little bit.  I was at work and one of the girls asked me if I was ok, I told her the news.  Luckily, she works for my doctor.  He’d been away on vacation for a few weeks but she STILL got me in to see him the next morning.  Bless her bless her bless her.

So off to the doctor’s I went.  I told him the news and that I wanted the baby to stay.  He called the on-call gyno and we made an appointment to meet at the ER that evening.

He was so late.  By that time I was bleeding very hard.  He came in the room and my stomach turned.  Aren’t male gyno’s supposed to be old?  It should be against the law for them to be THAT attractive.  Ugh.  So as I was exposing myself to him and hearing the dreaded “please bring your bum to the very edge of the bed” line, I was mortified.  He took out the IUD and told me I’ve most likely lost the baby.

After numerous blood tests, an incredibly pleasant internal ultrasound and a lot of waiting…I learned the baby was gone.  It was gone, really, before it was even here.  A .1% chance pregnancy was gone.

By that time I really had detached myself from the person who could be in there.  I set myself up for coping with the loss and I feel I coped rather well.  The first week was absolute hell.  I hated waiting.  But as I waited more, it got easier to accept that this baby was probably already in Heaven and I’d never hold it in my arms.

There’s always the relief aspect, let’s be honest.  I was relieved that I wasn’t going to be gigantic at my sister’s wedding in August and that I didn’t have to be pregnant through the summer.  But I wasn’t relieved for the loss, not at all.  The value of whoever was inside of me isn’t greater than the people who are outside of me.  That was a person, just a very very very tiny person.  I mourned who they were and who they may have become.  I absolved myself of any guilt for even having that tiny piece of copper inside of me because I did what I thought was best and…there’s no sense feeling guilty about it.

Now, I’m just kind of numb.  I have a jaded view of having another child.  I don’t know why but now I’m not sure if I want to make any more of them.  Perhaps I feel as though I am broken.  I’m not sure.

Again, it’s not “responsible” for me to get pregnant.  So I won’t.