It’s very weird how different I am since losing Jonah. It flipped a switch in my brain and, honestly, I hope it stays flipped. I just wish I could have had the switched flipped by other means – you know…like being fed up with myself or something. I hope this stays, I really do.
I just know I can’t go back to the girl I was before. I had a hard time getting up and doing anything. Yes it’s part of depression…at the time I felt like I really had no choice. You feel very locked in a cage when you’re like that. Granted – I was sick from being pregnant and exhausted at the same time. It was a lot of television time. A lot of secluding myself in my house (which happens often for me in the winter anyway). I’m sooooooo scared of going back to that.
What’s so scary is that I know with the recent circumstances – that lifestyle will ruin me completely. Completely. It’s too depressing. Having a messy house swallows me up and makes me feel like I can’t move, it fuels complacency. I have three gorgeous men in my life that I need to stay strong for.
Wow I sound like a really lame person now. I’m not.
Since I was able to get back up on my feet after losing Jonah I haven’t wanted to stop moving too much. Especially now with my mom gone. So I’m staying busy, learning who this new Leah is and welcoming even parts of the old Leah – the one who couldn’t sit still for long. I’m getting up a bit early and eating breakfast before I drop off the boys at school and getting into my gym clothes. That gets me to the gym every day. I’m starting off slow but it feels good to go. I hope this is a healthy way of dealing. I hope I’m not avoiding. I just hope I’m allowing the pain to fuel me to be a better person.
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We have another scary hurdle to get over still. Once we handed Jonah to the nurse, he spent over a week in pathology. The funeral home was able to tell me that he was even sent to Children’s Hospital to their pathology lab. I don’t know if that’s a normal thing or not. It kind of made me mad that I had no idea what they were doing with him. But they would have done tests on him to see why he died. We should get the results any day now. I’m a bit scared of them.
To me it would feel better if he just had some freak heart condition and wouldn’t have survived anyway. It’s scarier to think he was perfectly healthy and it was a cord accident. But there’s some possibilities already.
No one told me this at the time but Jonah came out with a very tight cord around his neck which means that may have been the cause of death. Ugh. There’s also something else really weird that that we could see. Once I delivered the placenta I had the nurse bring it to me so we could look over it together. Everything looked normal. I was actually in awe of it as I’ve never looked at mine up close before (or anyone else’s for that matter). As the nurse checked the cord, she ran her hand along the underside and we saw the weirdest thing – the cord branched off into another cord.
I spent hours, sometimes till 2am researching late miscarriages and cord abnormalities and I finally found that it’s called a bifurcated cord and it’s very very very very very very very abnormal. There really isn’t anything about it online. Just a few things and they don’t even describe it as the same thing I saw with Jonah. It’s just like his cord decided to grow another cord about 4 inches away from the placenta. So who knows if that had anything to do with it. I would think if he wasn’t getting enough nutrients then he wouldn’t have measured as big as he did. He was a little small for 19 weeks, the US tech was saying he was measuring more like 17 + 5 but he midwife said he looked right. Gah.
I’m dreading the call even though I know I will also be relieved. I just want to know that there’s nothing wrong with me. That I can go on and have a healthy baby if we feel like doing so. Of course at this point I feel like my body is broken. I’ve had five pregnancies and two children. Man I’m so thankful for those two children. Ok my insecurities about not being able to keep a pregnancy anymore is another blog for another day.
These two gorgeous boys. I can’t even stand it. That was a few weeks ago, I was cleaning off my welcome mat outside and then it turned into a game of Simon Says. If they got it wrong I would spray them with the hose. Yes it was that warm out then. My boys, they’re so healing.