On your birthday...

Last year.
630 - 11pm June 20 -felt rhythmic cramping that we thought was the beginnings of labour. They started and stopped a few times so we just waited and went to bed.
330am felt a strong labour contraction and a strange "rushing" sensation but nothing else happened
530am my husband rolls over and looks at me and asks "any more contractions?" I answer "no"
I check for Baby Steve's heartbeat with the stethoscope
I cant find it
My husband says "lets go to the clinic and see if we can find it with the doppler"
I poke baby and have a drink of juice to wake him up.
no response
I get up to go pee and my water breaks.
the toilet is full of blood.
My husband yells at me to get in the car we have to go to the hospital now.
I grab a towel to protect the car as blood is gushing out of me.
We drive 160km to the hospital and all I can think of is I just left my 19 month old in her crib in our house by herself. Thank goodness she is asleep
We leave the car outside of the hospital entrance
We walk as quickly as possible to Unit 25. Blood is still gushing
The nurse puts me in the assessment room on a cot.
She puts the monitor on my belly.
There is no heartbeat. She looks in my face and says "let me try the Doppler"
No heartbeat
They stick an internal monitor inside and poke baby Steve in the head. They get my heart beat.
I ask my husband if my baby is dead. He says "don't say that"
The OB on call comes in with a bedside ultrasound.
She says "i am sorry your baby has passed away."
I can see on the ultrasound that his placenta has pulled away from the wall of my uterus
I hear my husband's grandfather come in and hear the OB. He put his hand on his face and started to cry.
I ask my husband if I am going to die too. He just looks at me.
The doctor and nurses prepare for a post-pardum hemorrhage.
My contractions that began after my water broke are getting stronger.
They wheel me to a labour room.
my baby is born at 837am
He is dead. He looks like me
He has dark hair and long skinny finger nails.
He is 7 pounds even.
I give him to his daddy and say "you name him, i can't."
The rest of the day passes in a blur for me.
The hospital volunteer took photos
Friends visited
His family came and held him.
His older sister gave him a kiss and said "brother."
I cried
a lot
I held him
we left him
at 9pm I went home without my baby.

Creating Meaning

So if you read my last post you'll know what I am talking about. I bought the sweater. It is so stinking cute and I figure if this babe does not make it, eventually I will give it to a living baby boy. Anyway I am on two count downs right now. One week until the year anniversary of my son's stillbirth and 12 weeks until i will be induced. Also going through my head is a count of the number of months (3) since my friend passed away in a tragic accident. A strange comparison of sorts creeps into my mind. I am thinking about where I was at on the 3 month anniversary of my son dying. I think I had just about hit the bottom of my grief. It would have been September 21, 2011. I cried everyday. I woke up every morning feeling like I had been hit by a emotional truck load of crap that I had to sort through before I could move on with the day. My husband and I had also began using Clomid again to try to conceive another baby. (It took 4 rounds to be successful). That had its own bundle of emotional junk. I have been trying to pin point the time in which I started to feel better. I guess between 6 and 8 month passed.


I think what helped me most was having things to look forward to again. Nothing made the loss go away but even small things that were interesting to me helped me continue to function. Anne and my husband and I went on a short trip to Tofino in Sept, we went to Cranbrook in December for a baptism and April for my niece and nephew's birthdays, we went to Victoria in May for mother's day. Making small daily plans with friends and family helped too. Anyway I guess I am saying all this because I remember at 3 months thinking I would never feel normal or better. Well, I do feel better but I have found a new normal. A normal that sometimes includes grief and sadness but not the crippling kind. I still think about my lost baby everyday. I wonder what he would be like now, how it would be to have two living children and expecting a third. Its a completely different path that is gone now.

So back to my initial purpose of this post. Creating meaning. My therapist and a few other people have asked what my plans for my son's anniversary are. I have been thinking really hard about it. I have had thoughts around releasing balloons and lighting candles but I want to create a legacy. I want to be able to give what I should have given to him to someone else. So I think I am going to "sponsor a child" in baby Steve's memory. I have some research to do on which agency to use but I would like it to be a boy. Age is not super important. Hopefully when Anne is old enough to understand she will capture the importance of giving instead of taking. I believe that when we* are ready, so much personal healing happens when we give to others and see them benefiting from our efforts. It moves us from a self-centered focus to a focus on others and helps us be grateful for what we do have and helps us acknowledge it really could "always be worse." So that is where I am at today.

*we being anyone bereaved or dealing with trials

moment by moment?

I heard a friend who lost her husband say shortly after that her life was "moment by moment." I think right now I feel like that a little but perhaps emotion by emotion or thought by thought? Let me explain...
On Friday I went to the farmers market and saw a little jacket for a baby boy. I wanted to buy it and had it been a year ago I would have. But now I don't want to buy anything before this baby is born because what am I going to do with it if he does not make it? I have a whole bunch of baby boy clothes in a dresser that were never put away. Those drawers stay closed. I am not sure how its going to feel to put them on this baby when they were bought for someone else... It is so weird. I know that baby Steve never wore them but they were bought or collected with him in mind.
I just spent the weekend getting IV fluid in the hospital maternity unit because I had a really bad flu and lost a lot of fluid. The doctors were concerned that I might go into preterm labour. My emotional energy has been so focused on this new baby for the past three days and the hope and promise of him - I had a bed side ultrasound, they checked his heart beat every shift change and I could hear people talking excitedly in the hallways on their way to see new babes. So much happiness and so hopeful. But then I got home and received a call that our baby's headstone came today. It is on the ground next to his grave. I am going to see it with his daddy after he gets home from work.
One moment up, one down. My emotional energy is split three ways. Anne, Baby Steve, new baby... a repeating mantra that goes around and around.
Baby Steve is so present in my thoughts right now also because his anniversary is coming closer and closer. It feels contradictory to be focused on a dead baby when I have a living one growing inside and a two year old charging around soaking up the world as fast as she can.
My therapist said that when we lose someone it is almost like they become frozen in time. And that time is gone. Life and time moves forward at a breathtaking rate and those grieving have to figure out a way to catch up and rebuild a new path to travel until life ends and we get to go home.

I think I felt my dead baby say to me in a moment of extreme grief, "Time will pass, your mission will end and when you come home we will all be there to greet you."

numb

Today is 23 weeks and 2 days.
I spoke with the monument place today and they said that my son's headstone would be ready for installation on May 29. I saw my therapist yesterday. She encouraged me to have a plan for the year anniversary of baby Steve (June 21). Is it bad that I don't want to think about that? I don't want to plan for it? It feels almost like if I think too much about my dead baby that my growing unborn baby will share the same fate. Death is so hard to think about when it is not staring you in the face all the time. Is it bad that I am trying to avoid it? I am putting all my hopes and positive energy into trying to get this new baby here - alive. But at the same time I don't allow myself to think beyond Sept 5 - his induction date. Because if he does not make it and I have not allowed my hopes to get too high maybe the grief wont be so hard this time around?
I wish that I could go back to being ignorant and blissfully happily pregnant where my biggest worry was if our house was going to sell before the baby came.

I suppose I will share on my own terms as a few people have figured out my baby's gender. It is a boy.
So as you may or may not be able to imagine that hurts a little. I am happy for another opportunity to raise a boy but I am nervous because I do not want myself or others to think that he will be a replacement or that everything has "worked out."
One child can NEVER replace another.
That is all I have to say on this subject. I don't really want people to try and discuss this any further with me right now. Please don't come up to me and say "i heard blah blah and how are you feeling about that."
Thanks for respecting my pain.

Wait I am not ready yet!

I have come to the understanding that it is the people who are the closest to us that have the most power to emotionally destroy us. To illustrate my point I will give an example of something horrible that happened to me that I am now completely over and then I will give an example of something I will never get over.
This is a letter that I wrote to the paper last week:

"On April 18, 2012 I was driving on Hwy 11 at 9:45pm in my husband's new car (a
manual). I was in the left lane stopped at the lights at Hwy 20. I was the
first car in the left lane. After the light changed I sped up to the posted
speed limit (80km/hr) and waited to merge. Two cars in the right lane sped up
to block me and a third was coming. I put my signal light on and was ready to
merge. The third car, a van also squeezed me out. I honked my horn to let him
know I was there and flashed my lights out of frustration. I continued on to
the 60th street entrance into Sylvan Lake. As I signaled my high beams
flashed again - this time accidentally as I was still shaken from feeling as
though I was going to be run off the road and still not used to driving that
car. The driver of the van stopped in the entrance to 60th street and stopped
his car. He proceeded to get out of his car and storm towards me. I am visibly
pregnant and obviously a woman. He yelled and swore at me that he had the
"right of way" and that if I were a man he would have pulled me out of the car
and beat me up. He said that he was "so sick of this." I am not sure what he
was referring to exactly. Perhaps that others are racing to get in front of
him a the merge? Anyway I was not very happy with the way he treated me and
that he was not interested in listening to my side of the story. I hope he
reads this and will have a little more patience and compassion for other
drivers who might make mistakes and probably are not trying to be vindictive.
If I had managed to collect my self to memorize his plate I would have
reported him to the police for harassment."

I watched for this van on the highway the day after but now I find myself not caring about this encounter. It taught me a lesson about what I will do if I ever find myself in a similar situation but it no longer drains my emotional energy.

On the opposite end of the extreme is my current pregnancy and my loss of my last baby. As stated in my last post I have some baggage around gender of my children. There are many reasons for this that I am not going to explain because others may consider them to be petty or unimportant. I will say that the reasons for my baggage are my own and they do exist for me. I cannot simply dismiss them even if they really are not that important. The point is that I have significant pain that I am dealing with right now and I have a number of individuals whom I am especially close to that seem to think that it is their right to know if my baby is a boy or girl just because I let everyone know the last two times.
What they fail to grasp is this time is different. I am not good at dealing with pain. I need time to process and be okay with this before I can celebrate it with others. I feel guilty because all I want is to be celebrating this pregnancy like I did with my other two. SO when I am ready to share my good news I will. Until then I ask for some patience and compassion from those who are curious. You will know probably before I am ready to tell anyway.

19weeks

19 week ultrasound today. It went okay but I cried. I can't remember feeling as vulnerable since baby Steve died. I was watching the tech's face waiting for some grimace or scowl to show something was amiss. At the end of the test I said to him "my last baby died can you tell me the gender before my husband comes in so I can deal with it." he told me and I cried. I am not really ready to tell others yet because I am still not certian how I feel about it. I have to get to "okay" before I share the gender because if I don't and somebody says the wrong thing or hits a nerve inadvertently I am not sure what my response will be. So please don't ask. Both genders would have different baggage for me but one is significantly painful. Otherwise things seem to be okay but I await the official report from my doctor.