Ouch

Losing a baby leaves a sharp edge that I'll nudge up against unexpectedly and suddenly find pain. I've lost two. The first was 5 years ago, and the second was almost exactly a year ago. The upcoming anniversary has me feeling a little raw.

I had to write a letter today to our insurance company explaining why an ambulance was called a year ago. That was sort of upsetting also.

But the sharp edge that snuck up on me was an innocuous blog my dad made fun of while he was writing about silly blogs. It was the picture of her ovulation chart that struck me. The little form she uses to write week by week about new symptoms.

In February 2001, I downloaded freeware for charting ovulation. I took my temperature every day and entered it into the software...it even had a little smiley icon to indicate the days you have sex and what the chance of conceiving for that particular event based on where it predicted you were in your cycle. On April 28th, the software remarked that my basal temperature had been elevated 18 days and that it predicted I was pregnant, which a EPT confirmed with the faintest pink line. Two days later, I started bleeding and called my gynecologist in a panic. It took nearly a month for a diagnosis. Tests of increasing amounts of pain. Finally, 5 weeks later...that is 5 weeks of pregnancy symptoms knowing that this wasn't going to result in the child we'd hoped for...she diagnosed the ectopic pregnancy. I was given a shot of methotrexate. At my followup appointment, she prescribed another painful test that I had to wait 3 months to take. The result of the hysterosalpingogram (HSG) was that there was no blockage found in my tube.

But as we tried again, all of that excitement that Angela writes about in her blog had been wrung out of me. The beginning of the 3 pregnancies after that first one were a call to the doctor and then bloodtests every 48 hours where we watched, wondered, and waited with our breath held.
It was a nerve-wrecking process.

A year ago, I had just gone off the Pill, and called my obgyn to ask her if I should be alarmed that I had been spotting for 4 weeks. "Well, are you pregnant?" Huh. Well, that thought hadn't occurred to me. She took my stunned silence as an emphatic maybe. "Because, with your history, I would be alarmed if you told me you were pregnant and spotting since that was your symptom last time." I saw her the next day, and she said the same thing my gynecologist had said 4 years earlier, that all we could do was wait 48 hours and do another test. It wasn't to be. Forty hours later, I was in the emergency room trying to listen to a doctor telling me what I already knew. That worse-case scenerio. It had happened again. But this time, I needed surgery.

The path that has brought me here has been full of potholes and dark alleys. Some days I feel really blessed. Days like today I wonder if God, like us mortal parents, sometimes gets distracted. If so, I'd really appreciate whatever the karmic equivalent is of getting to eat ice cream for dinner and staying up way past my bedtime...