Healing

I've been in pain. An intense emotional pain. But also a physical very tangible sort of pain. 

Never before have I experienced a sadness that lives in the body, but grieving the loss of our acrobat has effected me in unexpected ways. I wasn't expecting to feel betrayed by my own body. I couldn't anticipate having these strong conflicting emotions of pregnancy and loss. How could I explain to D that a compliment regarding my new "voluptuous" figure felt like a kick in the stomach this week when just last week it had made me smile. How was it possible to feel devastated and relieved at the same time?

When we first got the news I experienced a tight squeeze around my heart and a firm pressure over my chest. The only thing that would temporarily relieve that feeling was to sob. Loudly. Over the next few days my entire body started to tense up and I felt like every muscle was an achy knot. Taking hot showers worked at first but soon that just wasn't enough. D volunteered to give me a full body massage and that made me cry uncontrollably but left me feeling better for hours. But the pain kept creeping back. A few days ago when my bleeding had finally tapered off to minor spotting D suggested making love to relieve the pain. At first it didn't sound very tempting. All I wanted to do was hibernate until everything was back to normal. So what we hadn't been intimate since the egg retrieval over five weeks ago? Had it really been five weeks? I let him talk me in to it. Reluctantly. 

Making love was like therapy and when I finally had an orgasm it felt like my body and mind exploded. Sorry about the bad romantic novel line here but seriously, although sex with D is always good, this was different. It felt as if all the pain and hurt left my body and I started shaking, crying and laughing all at once seconds after climaxing. Scared the heck out of D, he probably thought I had completely lost it. The day after I stopped bleeding completely and for the first time in a very long time I started feeling almost back to normal.

Today I went to have my hcg levels checked. I'm hoping that my body has taken care of this miscarriage on its own and that I won't need a d&c. I talked to Dr. Boss Lady at the fertility clinic in Sweden last week and told her what had happened. She was sad to hear about our loss but made sure to tell me that medically they consider this good news. She said it's nice to know you can get pregnant with yours and Ds embryo, and that what happened is most likely just bad luck and that out of our four nice blasts they happened to pick the one (statistically) with a chromosomal defect. She was very confident next time our chances of success would be even better. We talked about doing an unmedicated FET in February if my cycle is back to normal by then. I feel pretty good about that. It will give me time to heal. It will give me and D time to find each other again. We'll have a Christmas free from worry and we'll be able to toast in champagne for New Years and Ds birthday. And we'll have time to make a whole lot of love.

Friday the 13th

This should be a long post but I don't know if I have the strength to write. I'll try to stick to the bare minimum so I can at least keep you all updated. I can't thank you enough for all your support through this nightmare.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the ER at the Military Hospital and got hooked up to an IV as soon as they noticed my heart rate was over a hundred. Got examined inside and out and they ran more tests than I could keep track of. Apparently my blood pressure was also very high (I'm normally on the low end of normal BP). They saw lots of blood, it was actually gushing out at them as they were examining me... scary. They couldn't find the acrobat anywhere. Not in uterus, cervix, tubes or ovaries. My HCG came back at 1000. They also called the NHS clinic I'd been to on Monday to get the result from that bloodtest... and suddenly the results had magically appeared (it wasn't there a few hours earlier when I called!! OK, I won't get in to that whole mess today). Monday's HCG was 415!? The ER doctor scratched his head and didn't know what to make of it so he paged the OBGYN on call. She came down. Repeated all the probing and poking. Looked over all the test results and told me that I had probably just had a miscarriage when I arrived at the clinic and that she was going to give me some meds to stop the bleeding and make my uterus contract. I said "No Thank You" and asked to come back in the morning to recheck the HCG levels and get that miscarriage confirmed before I took any meds. She said alright and told me the bleeding should be slowing down and my HCG levels should stop or drop.

This morning I went back to the Military Hospital. Waited for an hour and a half to get the result (needless to say I'm never going back to the NHS clinic I went Monday even if the drive down to base is 45 min). Went up to the OBGYN and met Dr. Swedish (crazy, an american who spoke swedish fluently after living a couple of miles from the swedish town I grew up for 2 years). He went over the notes from yesterdays visit to the ER with me, looked at todays HCG result and scratched his head. Todays HCG was 1300. He got me up on the table, brought out the wand and gave me another good scan. He was greeted by a blood bath. He saw nothing. Except... maybe... a tiny speck on the uterine wall. He then gave me the verdict. "It's a mystery. It's possibly an ectopic pregnancy, but we just can't be sure until your HCG levels are at 1500." I guess that's the magic number when they're able to see the embryo on an ultrasound. He said "we can either do a D&C and see if the tissue we remove contain an embryo and/or we can give you methotrexate to help your body terminate the pregnancy no matter where in your body it is". I was confused. So if they'd do a D&C to remove tissue from my uterus and they found the embryo there... wouldn't that in fact mean they would kill the embryo to rule out an ectopic? So again I said "No Thank You, what other options do I have?". He told me that if another blood test showed my kidneys functioning ok and that I'm not too anemic he'd consider waiting until Sunday when my HCG levels would surely be over 1500 if the pregnancy continued to develop, he could then make sure the acrobat wasn't hiding somewhere in my uterus and comfortably give me methotrexate to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. And if my levels would still be under 1500 that would mean it's not a normal pregnancy and a D&C would just help nature along. I went and had the blood work done and was cleared to wait until Sunday. Before we left I asked if there was any chance of bringing home a healthy baby from a pregnancy that starts out like this. He said: "probably less than a 1% chance". 

So that's where we stand. In a great vast landscape of gray.