Getting There

I'm getting there. My old self is starting to creep back from the depthes of the murkiness she was hiding in. I'm still angry. I still get sad. I have nightmares sometimes and I still don't think its fair but I realize that my baby didn't develop properly and that's why I lost it. I take solace in the fact that I found out when I did and hadn't finished out the first trimester without my body telling me. I still hate knowing that it was dead insid me for about two weeks before I knew... but I can't imagine finding out it had happenned weeks ago, ya know?

Sigh

Today I felt a little more like myself. I'm still struggling but staying busy today really helped. Yesterday I realized that being alone in the mornings before Husband comes home from lunch has been very lonely for me. So I asked my friend Sarah to come have coffee with me. I woke up early to shower and tidy the house and after awhile I realized I was smiling. Me Smiling!!! It was almost as if the muscles were sore from disuse but it felt good. I didn't give myself time to feel guilty about it either. Moving on has been hard. I still don't like to look at my stomach in the mirror. Seeing pregnant ladies and babies still hurts my heart. But instead of looking down or away I keep my chin up and focus on my faith and remembering that Husband loves me.

I go back to the doctor Oct. 1st for a recheck. Hopefully he'll clear me to go to the gym and resume normal activities- including sex! Its been quite awhile since I've been allowed to get any action and I can't wait to get that part of my life back again.

After I'm cleared for the babymakin' stuff Husband and I will also need to st down and discuss when we start trying again. There's not going to be another oppurtune time like the last one for quite awhile....like years...or who knows since life is so crazy sometimes! Anyway... Thankfully I think I've accepted that fact already. If we are able to conceive before Husband deploys next summer then I'll be preggers and deliver while he's gone. If we wait to try until after he's back then we are waiting eighteen months or so from now. That puts me at or toeing the 30 mark. And while 30 isn't old at all, there are so many more risks of conceiving after 30. Not to mention that we don't know if conception and/or (yes, I hate to say it but it is an "and/or") staying pregnant are hugely critical components to the issue and need to be considered. Can I get pregnant as easily as the last time? And moreover, can I stay pregnant or are more miscarriages in my future?

One of the worst parts...

Is that I still think I look pregnant. I hadn't put on a lot of weight but I still can't button my jeans. Some people probably think I look fat but I feel like I look pregnant since all the weight is below my bellybutton and that's not where I usually gain. I hate looking at myself in the mirror. Whenever I catch a glimpse of my stomach I remember how happy I was when it started sticking out the tiny little bit it does now...how I felt my stomach and was glad it felt hard and not hard from muscle anymore. I can't wait till I look back to normal. Maybe then I'll feel back to normal?

Right now I hate myself for acting the way that I am...but I'm not sure how else to act. I know I'm glum and moody and sad and uncaring. I know those aren't necessarily good things to be- especially not all at once! But I don't feel like I have much to smile for. I feel like being sad and moody is the only way I can be in this situation. Husband says I need to move on and when I start being myself I'll feel better. How can I be myself after something like this? Will I ever be "myself" again?

Its not fair

Its not fair that I lost my baby. I did absolutely everything the doctor told me. I was vigilant with bedrest. I laid down except to walk my dogs out and sit down with them outside. I didn't lift, strain, have sex, smoke, drink, stand for a long period of time, or change the cat litter. I didn't eat lunch meat, hot dogs, fish, raw steak, or under cooked eggs. I did everything the doctor said and I still lost my baby. One of Husband's buddies has a GF who is pregnant and she's still smoking at 9 weeks. How is this any kind of fair?

Being pregnant renewed my sense of faith. I prayed for my baby to be healthy and for Husband and I to be good, supportive parents. I prayed for my baby more then I've ever prayed in my life...and yet I still lost my baby. And mostly, I thanked God for the miracle of being pregnant. Now I'm struggling with my faith. How do I continue with my faith when I feel God was spiteful?

Everyone tells me that I'm young and to keep trying. But if we keep trying and this is an ongoing thing how will I stay strong enough? I'm not sure I'm strong enough to repeat this.

Too Good To Be True

The week after I found out I was pregnant I had a bleeding spell. I ended up in the ER and after an ultrasound and about a billion tests they determined it was "threatened miscarriage." Apparantly any type of bleeding during pregnancy is called a threatened miscarriage. I was told to get in bed and stay in bed. The beginning of bedrest...
The following week my doctor told me to keep on bedrest..
And the week after that, week 7 of pregnancy, I had another threatened miscarriage. The bleeding was much more heavy and red and I was sure then that I was loosing my baby. The ultrasound yielded positive results and I was put on more bedrest. That was my third week of bedrest and it was starting to wear on my last nerves. My house was a mess and I couldn't do anything about it. I was super bored and my only bridge to the outside world was my husband who was tired of not having help. He'd come home from work and have to fix dinner, walk the dogs, and do basic chores and I know he was exhausted.
We were so excited when I got put on a resting schedule soon after.

I went for my first scheduled sonogram as I entered my tenth week. I was so excited to leave with a picture of my baby. The doc put the cold goo on my tummy and started pressing but couldn't see anything. So she decided to use the "wand." The wand is nothing magical...its a long probe that goes inside your vagina to take pictures and is supposed to show images more clearly. The wand clearly showed that there was no baby in my uterus. There was no heartbeat and no beginning of little baby arms or legs. There was a black blob which she told me mean that I'd had a missed miscarriage. I'd miscarried my baby and my body didn't tell me. As soon as I saw the black blob I knew. Tears streamed down my face and I tried to focus on what the doctor was saying but after a few seconds I was crying uncontrollably. She handed me a box of tissues and hugged me as I struggled to regain my composure.

After I was finally able to get dressed she led me out of the sonogram room to her office to discuss options. I'm not sure she even noticed that she sat me next to a bulletin board of smiling babies that she'd delivered. I felt like they were laughing at me. She told me I could take medicine to induce a mscarriage, wait for it to happen naturally, or have a D&C- a surgical procedure to remove it. I opted for a D&C the next day. Dealing with it on my own with medicine didn't seem like a good option and I certainly wasn't going to wait for it to happen naturally.

Husband was with his unit at the range and didn't get back for three hours. By the time he got home I'd cried myself to sleep. I'd realized that it was dead inside me for at least two weeks without me knowing. That morbid thought was the cruelest possible end to the situation. How could my body not have alerted me? How could my body not have known?

I loved my baby. I prayed for my baby. I said good morning and good night to my baby each and every day. It hurts that I lost it. I don't think I've ever been so heartbroken.

So back to the story.. As I was saying, its a kind of a miracle that I'm pregnant. See, for almost five years doctors have been telling me that I'll have trouble conceiving. About five years ago I started having some issues with my baby makin' parts. I had a LEEP, which is where they scrape precancerous or cancerous tissue out of your cervix. A year later I had a HUGE, ie two centimeter cyst removed from my right ovary along with endometriosis. A year later I had more endometriosis removed. My OBGYNs- all seven that I was seeing, yes SEVEN, recommended birth control pills to control my ovarian cysts and endometriosis. They said if my stubborn ovaries would just go dormant for awhile via The Pill all the ickiness should clear up. But it didn't and none of them could figure out why.
Anyway!!
I wasn't married until recently and I didn't want to start trying for a baby with just anybody. My almost certain infertility weighed heavily on my mind but I felt trapped. What could I do without a husband? When I met my now husband we had several conversations about my malfunctioning ovaries and we decided that we'd try until Husband's Army contract was up and then seek infertility treatments since TriCare (military health insurance) doesn't cover much at all. The plan was that if we didn't get pregnant soon after that we'd seek a child for adoption.
So in early May I stopped my birth control pills. I expected to be plagued with more ovarian cysts almost immediately but I really didn't have much of an issue. And guess what! Ten weeks later I was pregnant! We really didn't expect it to happen so quickly! And its still pretty scarey and nerwracking because we thought we'd have a little more time to save money and get prepared...but honestly we are thrilled. We couldn't be happier.
And now I'm incubating our little Miracle.

How We Met <3 <3 <3

I knew my husband's older brother for months, maybe even a year before I met Husband. We all met at an, ahem, bar that I worked at. Actually I worked at a couple bars his brother frequented. He and I would shoot the shit and talk shit about the other people there. It was all in good fun and funny that he never mentioned having a brother until lo and behold one day there's a cute, slightly younger guy at the bar with him. "Hey this is my little brother, he's in the Army and he's home from Iraq," Husband's Brother says. "CUTE," I think. Husband was interested and gave me his number written on a bar napkin before he left that afternoon... I saw him a couple more times before his leave was up and he had to go back to Iraq but we never got to go on an actual date. He was busy visiting friends and family and I was working 60+ hours a week.

His smile was ingrained in my head and even now I often still think about the way he smiled over the bar at me and my knees went weak and I melted into a mush puddle in the middle of a bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

He made it a point to keep in touch with me. He Instant Messaged me and texted me. He called me a couple times and I fell in love with his voice. His voice is thick and velvet-y and I couldn't even tell you what we talked about because all I was paying attention to was his voice.

We met in late August or early September. By mid November he was asking me what I wanted for my birthday, which sometimes falls on Thanksgiving. I told him I wanted a day off work or a new paid or boots. He couldn't get me a day off work from my many jobs and he was relentless about getting me the boots I wanted. I didn't actually think I'd get them but there they were a week or two later!! His wanting to do something for my birthday even though he was so far away really cemented our bond. It wasn't that he bought me something..its that he wanted to do it.

From then on we were inseparable as long as his Internet in Iraq held out. We'd Instant Message and text through my phone for hours at a time. I'd feel butterflies everytime my phone would chime with a message. I'd hide in the bar bathroom just to talk to him. Eventually we became a couple and just before Christmas he started asking me to marry him. I thought he was looney bin crazy at first. He kept trying though and by Christmas we were "engaged." We knew we'd be together and even though there was no ring yet I didn't care. I just knew.

He got back from Iraq in March and I met him in Virginia. We shared our first kiss in a room filled with people but I don't remember hearing anything but our breathing. It really was like the cheesey cliche' that time stopped. It felt right and even though I just said it, I'll say it again: I just knew. We were married two weeks later.

Almost five months later I found out I was pregnant. My being pregnant really is a miracle. I'll tell you why later.

Introduction

So a friend of mine suggested I start this blog to help me deal with the constant boredom I've been dealing with the past 3 weeks (Thanks, Bella!). So why I am so bored? Why do I have so much time on my hands? I'm 8 weeks pregnant and on bedrest!!! And in case you don't know what it is, bedrest is pretty much what it sounds like...staying in bed all day and only getting up to do essential tasks like bathrooming, showering, and eating. Women get sentenced, ahem, prescribed bedrest for a variety of reasons. In my case I've had two threatened miscarriages so I need to stay off my feet to give my body a chance to do its thing and incubate the bun in the oven.
Soo... that's my story. That's why I'm here... Next the back story.