Mental Musings

  A little background...
   A year and a half ago, I had a miscarriage. I was 12 weeks along by dates, but the baby only measured 7 1/2 weeks. It ended up being a grueling experience that involved life-threatening hemorrhaging, an emergency D&C, a transfusion, a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in my lung), a 5-day hospital stay, and 4 months of blood thinners. It was not pleasant, to say the least. At first, I think I had too much other medical "excitement" going on to fully process the miscarriage--I didn't cry about it until well after I was back home. In the hospital, I had the need to keep it together, so I could emotionally survive being stuck there and feeling so alone and vulnerable. Once I was home in a safe place, though, I was able to fall apart a little. Well, more than a little. 

    I thought I had processed my grief. I got pregnant again 6 months later, and now I have a beautiful baby boy, who is 2 months old. I thought I was done feeling sad about my loss. But grief has a way of cycling back into the forefront when you least expect it. I realize now that I still have a lot of work to do on it. So, I intend to have a journal of sorts about what I'm thinking and feeling about this. Some of it might seem irrelevant, silly, or strange. But it's how I feel...and it feels good to get it out.


   I feel guilty that I took antidepressants early in the pregnancy. I even had the thought, what if I get pregnant? But I dismissed it and figured it was OK because I had taken that same antidepressant while pregnant with Ethan. I tried to put it out of my head the fact that I hadn't taken any antidepressants during the first trimester with Ethan---I felt that my mood was poor enough that I needed to take them. But had I known that it could cause me to lose the baby---in essence, that it was possible it would kill the baby---I would never have taken them.
   I felt ambivalent about the pregnancy at first. I feel guilty about that too, that maybe she wasn't loved as much as my other two children. I did get more involved in the pregnancy as time went on, but for awhile, I wasn't sure I wanted to be pregnant. We had just moved cross-country and I was stressed out, and needed time to settle in, but I ended up getting pregnant probably somewhere along the way on the long drive. It's possible I conceived while we stayed a few days at my husband's aunt's house prior to arriving here.
   I feel sad that I never bought a single baby item for that baby. Everything I have to commemorate her life, I bought after the fact.
   I feel angry that it's possible the chlorine in the tap water caused me to miscarry. I read that chlorine raises the risk of miscarriage by 50%. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, the fact that we didn't have a water filter for the first year of living here put me at risk. And possibly killed my baby. Partly my fault, and partly the fault of the city water system...and our fault for moving away from Alaska in the first place. I wonder if that's why I didn't conceive the whole time we were in Pennsylvania? Perhaps the chemicals in the water kept me from conceiving?

   I feel sad to think that my body betrayed me. Instead of sheltering the little life growing inside me, it helped to kill it. My body decided that the life wasn't good enough anymore and decided to just get rid of it. Why couldn't I keep it?