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The looooong road to baby story - Part I

We’ll begin in true Stephanie style smack dab in the middle of my list from my first post.  I’ve never been known to be orderly. 

I’ve been pretty open with my story of infertility with anyone who asks, but I want to go ahead and get the whole thing down while the details are fresh(ish), so my story has the opportunity to help anyone it can.  This is going to be very thoroughly detailed, and thus very long. THE BEGINNING

Less than 3 months after Brannon and I got married, we found out we were (SURPRISE!) pregnant.  I’ve never been on birth control in my life, so I knew this was a possibility, but it was still unexpected.  We were kind of using the natural family planning form of birth control at this point (i.e. not having sex during the time of the month I’d be fertile.)  However, we weren’t 100% at that....so things happened rather quickly.  At the time we had just bought a house, Hazel was a tiny psycho puppy, I was working full time with Brannon at CCC and had just started Interior Design school full time on top of work.  Not to mention we had joined a kickball team (relevant b/c every ounce of energy I had was being super extra sucked up). I knew I was pregnant before I tested, the same way I’ve known every time since - by the fact that I had become possessed with a demonic rage against Brannon.  I had never felt anything like this kind of irritation before in my life, but I have felt it since - every time I’m in the window of 3-4.5 weeks pregnant.  There’s another symptom I actually get even sooner which is my physical stamina immediately plummets to nonexistant during any form of working out, but this symptom isn’t normally enough to tip me off.  I did however know Khloe K was pregnant before she did in the episode where she’s having a rough go at her regular workout, because the way she describes feeling is how I have felt every single early pregnancy workout.  ANYWAY, back on track.  So here I was a pregnant newlywed and I was super excited but also scared at the same time, and I decided not to tell hardly anyone about this pregnancy.  So it was up to my friend Google to learn all the stuff about finding a doctor and when to go and what to expect and yadda yadda yadda.  Let me tell you, Google is not very good at this sort of advice.  I was told to wait until 8 or 9 weeks, and I was told that all the ladies of Knoxville love a doctor named Brabson and his team of midwives.  So I scheduled my appointment for 9 weeks on the dot, not wanting to appear too eager.  How silly this was in retrospect! The day of the appointment we show up to this wildly outdated office and are called back to a room to receive my first ultrasound.  I was on pins and needles excited to get a look at my little nuggets for the first time (I was convinced they were twins).  The ultrasound tech starts looking around in there and we’re seeing some stuff on the screen, but I don’t have a clue what I’m looking at, and the ultrasound tech is DEAD SILENT.  She then says she’s going to go get a midwife.  Midwife comes in and they start probing around again and the ultrasound tech mentions something about a yolk sac and a fetal pole or something, but this is all gibberish to me because I’d not previously schooled myself in anything to do with whats happening in my body, and nothing was stated in plain English until the midwife starts to tear up and stroke my arm and literally just says, “If it were me I’d wait a week and check again to be sure.”  And I’m still sitting there like wait a week for what?! What on earth is going on?! No one had mentioned anything about what they were not seeing that they were supposed to be seeing.  I had no idea at this point that we should be able to see a heartbeat and we weren’t seeing it, because like I said I’d done zero research into this type of thing.  So all I knew was something was wrong, but I was too shocked to want to ask anymore questions I guess, and I was wondering if the infamous Dr. B was anywhere around because maybe I could see him next and he’d actually tell me what was happening? But that was not to be, after way more arm petting than I was comfortable with they sent us on our way.  So we went home and of course that was when I decided I had questions.  I called the office back in hysterics asking if the midwife could explain to me what was seen on the ultrasound but the midwife I had seen was gone, and the girl who had taken over said she couldn’t tell me anything over the phone and that I needed to come back in a week, but I had absolutely zero desire to step foot in that office ever again. We were going to Birmingham that weekend where we had planned on sharing the good news with Brannon’s parents, but instead I was stifling the emotions of potential miscarriage the whole weekend. With my lack of information from the midwife or ultrasound tech, I promptly googled the few words I could remember from the experience (namely “fetal pole” and “yolk sac”) and began looking at other images of 9 week ultrasounds to see what I was supposed to be seeing.  What I could recognize was that what I had seen on the screen was not as developed as what I was finding in the image search.  My thing hadn’t looked anything like this clear shot of a little tadpole like embryo with a defined head and body.  I had seen a picture perfect circle, maybe 2 circles?, but nothing remotely human like.  I deduced that maybe this meant there was no baby developing at all, and I told brannon thinking of it this way made me less sad because all along I had felt like I was pregnant with twins, so this made me feel more like I was just making the whole connection up if really nothing was happening.  

The following week I had my ultrasound with the new doctor (not just a tech...thank goodness!) and was shown my twins whose hearts had stopped beating probably around 8 weeks.  I was heartbroken knowing I’d been right about the twin feeling, but glad to know what was going on.  We discussed options and I opted to have a d&c the following Sunday so I would get it over with and not miss any work or school.  The on call doctor for Sunday approved my surgery and she ended up being my favorite obgyn I’ve had in Knoxville so I was happy to be in her care for the surgery and aftermath.  I ended up hemorrhaging in surgery so it was a little scarier than expected, and I did end up missing a day of work and school, but everything turned out ok in the end. 

Following this situation I knew I wasn’t ready to be pregnant again for awhile, both because of the emotional recovery and the fact that I now understood so much better the intense physical toll pregnancy takes on your body (i.e. 24/7 worst hangover of your life) so we made greater efforts to avoid this happening again for the next year or so while I got deeper into design school and we enjoyed our first year of marriage.  I guess I shouldn’t end this part of the story without explaining the way this first miscarriage left me feeling, as each one has been unique.  This time I was left feeling pretty alone.  I didn’t feel like Brannon really felt the same depths of emotions pertaining to the loss, and none of my friends had gone through this.  One friend with a child said some pretty insensitive stuff when I was trying to talk to her about it one day so that left me feeling more closed off and alone. Another friend without a child always knew the most perfect thing to say to make me feel better. My brother and sister-in-law had just gone through a miscarriage of their own weeks before, so I did have them, but our situations were different in that they’d been trying for that baby for awhile, so I didn’t feel like my pain was really worthy of being related to the greater depth of their pain. But I guess back to trying to explain some of the miscarriage emotions, I’ve learned that for me the massive flux in hormones leaves me feeling the same way each time for at least 2-3 weeks.  It has always mostly resolved by the start of my next cycle.  It’s easy to see the difference between the depression like feelings brought on by the hormone flux and the more deeply rooted feelings of hopelessness that lingered past the first cycle of subsequent miscarriages when I was so desparately wanting a baby and not knowing if it would ever be in the cards for me. The last factor brought on by this miscarriage is something that will probably never leave me, and thats the little hint of worry brought on by reading stories of misdiagnosed miscarriages in the time since, and wondering if maybe it was too soon to have detected the heartbeats or if the timing was incorrect.  I can mostly logic these worries away (with really good reason), but theres a tiny shred of me that will always have that fear, I think just because I was so much less informed about everything that was happening with this miscarriage than I was with the next ones. 

One final note on this first miscarriage is an interesting fact I picked up on much later when reviewing my medical records from the pregnancy.  On that second ultrasound done at the good doctor, my twins’ measurements showed an estimated due date of 6/16/14.  This sent chills up my spine, because my dad and his twin sister were born 6/16/61. :) Of course this wouldn’t have been their actual EDD because they’d spent the last week not living, but it was still pretty crazy to see on paper!  Ok I thiiiiiiiink that about covers it for babies 1 &2.  We’ll pick up in fall of 2014 for part 2 of this probably 3-4 part story. 

[esskadi-blog]

A place for my thoughts.

I’ve been meaning to make a new blog for quite some time, but I’ve been in a fight with tumblr about them terminating my old blog due to lack of use, which was due to my password expiring and no longer having access to my account email to fix the situation.  Never make accounts with college emails, people!  So at last, I’ve given in and created a new url.  I’m a bit upset about the mess of stuff I have going on with my online presence. I’ve got some amateur portfolios here and here and another old tumblr where I used to put stuff I made here. It’s a big ol mess and I’d like to get it streamlined down to one nice clean website and delete all this old stuff, but I’m scared of committing to annual payments for something I’m not sure I’ll have the gumption to keep up, and I like to be able to go back and read old stuff and see how much I’ve grown and changed over the years.  I think it can be good for the soul to realize how much you’re growing, as in practice things can really feel stagnant if you forgo taking some time to reflect.  So for now, this post will remind me where I left all my marbles in the event my brain gives out.  While I’m here I’d like to outline some goals for this blog and possibly life:

1. Have a place to put my regular thoughts and ramblings that come up.  I’m sick of social media and no longer comfortable with sharing everything on such an active public forum, but I still need a place to get stuff down.  My thoughts will likely mostly relate to life with this baby I’m currently growing, cooking, hopefully some creative happenings, discussion on sermons or stuff I’m reading, links to things I’m loving.

2. Post all my baby photo/video spam where most people won’t be seeing it but I’ll always have it.

3. Share my infertility/miscarriage journey with the world before I forget it all. This is a big one because for awhile this was all consuming and it’s crazy how at 23 weeks pregnant I’m already feeling so detached from that period as I look ahead to the next phase of life.  I learned so much going through what I went through and I want to share it with anyone who might need it before it all gets gone.

4. I’d like to build a valuable resource for nutrition & recipe info because I’m really passionately into how great I felt on the diet my doctor put me on the try to resolve miscarriage issues, and I’d like to get back into that asap once I’ve delivered this little nugget. 

This is getting long so I’m going to save the life goals for another day. I’m so happy to be back to organizing my thoughts to myself! :)