When I needed to travel overseas for my brother's wedding, I had wished that I would get pregnant before that. Now I wished I had not been pregnant at the time. The doctor I saw after the subchorionic hematoma was first detected on my ultrasound seemed to be very sure that I had brought on the hematoma by taking on the stress of travel and that of attending a wedding. I had asked almost every doctor I had seen in the States about her theory, and none of them thought there was any credibility in what she had said. I believed them and trusted them more than that particular doctor, but during some low moments, I could not help wondering whether there was any truth to what she had said. It goes without saying that the few days after the first low amniotic fluid diagnosis were the very lowest point, not just in my entire pregnancy, but the lowest point I had ever hit in my entire life.
I prayed that our little baby girl would forgive us for making this decision. I prayed that she would understand that we made the decision only because we loved her and did not want her to live a life of pain and suffering.
I am normally not very religious and do not see a lot of value in prayer, but this was an event of life changing proportions. It made me value life in a new way and to appreciate the fact that we are alive. It also made me see that, all too often, we humans fret over things that are too little to think about at all. This kind of event puts a lot of things into perspective and makes you realize what is important and what is not.
I prayed to God and told Him that I knew that He would take better care of my little girl than I ever could, but the next time around, I just wanted one chance to try to prove myself.
After my visit to the hospital that Friday, I went home to wait for a phone call to find out when I would have the procedure, and where. I received a call from one of the nurses at the hospital where I would have my surgery, asking me a few medical history related questions. She also asked about any medications that I was taking. I told her I was just taking my prenatal multivitamins but was going to stop taking them, because I saw no point in continuing to take them. She said that was the right thing to do, because they did not want me to be taking any supplements containing Vitamin E for forty eight hours before the surgery. She said that they were still looking at operating room availability and I should expect a call later that afternoon about specific dates and times.
A short while later, I got a call from the doctor who was going to be performing the D&E. He introduced himself and then said how sorry he was that he had to meet me for something like this. I did not expect to hear that kind of genuinely sympathetic statement from someone who performed these procedures all the time. It made me wonder why the perinatologists I had been seeing until that point had not been more sympathetic, more human, even though I had thought earlier that I understood why they needed to be detached.
The doctor briefly explained to me how things would happen. Because I was at a late stage in my pregnancy, he wanted to see me not once, but twice before the actual surgery. He wanted to dilate my cervix on the day before the procedure and on the day before that. The entire process would not involve any cutting up. There would be no scalpels and no sutures. Everything would be done through the cervix. The disadvantage of that would be that the fetus would not come out in one piece and that I would need anesthesia. I asked if he would use local or general anesthesia. He said general. I was glad about that, because I did not want to see or experience any part of the surgery. He said that I was scheduled for surgery on Thursday and his office would call me shortly afterwards with exact times. Thursday was a little later than what I had been hoping for, but I understood that if he wanted to see me twice beforehand, the earliest it could possibly happen would be Wednesday. I just wanted it done that very minute. The waiting, knowing that the baby was still moving inside me when we had decided to terminate, wearing maternity clothes, all of that was very hard for me during that time.
His office called me later and gave me appointment times for Tuesday and Wednesday and the time for the surgery on Thursday. They told me to arrive an hour and a half before the scheduled surgery time and to stop eating and drinking after midnight before the surgery. Those were probably the standard instructions for all their surgical patients. The nurse told me that I would probably be with them for about five hours on the day of surgery, including the preparation before the surgery and the recovery afterwards. I would need to have someone who could drive me home that evening. That person would not necessarily need to be at the hospital the whole time, they would just need a phone number to call once they thought I was ready to go home.
I had never before had any form of surgery or any form of anesthesia. The doctor had described the dilation that he would do beforehand, and even that involved anesthesia. That would be local anesthesia injected in my cervix. It was a strange thought for me to imagine something being injected into my cervix. I had never before even heard of something like that. But now, after all the phone calls from the hospital, the actual fact of the matter began to set it. I began to think about the actual procedure, and it scared me. Of course I knew that lots of people have surgery every day and almost all of them come out of it just fine, feeling better than they felt going in. But I could not help being a little nervous.
I began to notice a decrease in the amount of fetal movement I was feeling each day. That made me feel like the pregnancy was just not meant to be, and it was going to end tragically sooner or later. I had feared the worst but hoped for the best all through it. I had been terrified with every bleeding episode and relieved with every ultrasound that I had had, until the two most recent ones. I had always wondered, always been uncertain, nervous and worried about what the outcome was going to be. As heart wrenching as this whole process was, it put an end to all the uncertainty and stress, both physical and mental, that I had been dealing with all this time. I am not trying to minimize the value of my little girl's life, but with all the unbearable pain of losing her, there was a strange sense of relief that I felt from time to time.
Through the weekend, I could not do much other than cry. My husband cooked some food for both of us, and I was mostly taking it easy. I could not decide whether it was easier to deal with the pain when we were together or when he was at work or out somewhere else and I was at home. When we were together, we were there to hold each other and wipe each other's tears. But when one of us teared up, there was nothing that the other could say to make the first person feel better. We just ended up holding each other and crying with each other. Neither of us had experienced this kind of grief before. It was so overpowering and so mind numbing that we did not know what to do or say in those initial few days. My husband had lost his father fairly recently, and his father had been quite young at the time of his passing. Even so, his passing did not disrupt the natural order of things. He passed away after his parents did, and before his children. Our daughter was going to die before us, and that goes against the natural cycle of things. My father in law had lived a full life and had made both his sons into mature, grown up people who could take care of themselves. Our daughter was going to leave us, and take with her all the dreams we had for her, a whole lifetime full of potential, years and years of what could have been. Maybe she could have been an artist, a writer, a doctor. Maybe she could have been the doctor who gave the world a better understanding of subchorionic hematomas and found a way to actually treat them. We would never know what potential her life would have held.
In the movies, often, when a person is crying on the inside, it happens to be raining outside their window, or they happen to be caught outdoors in the rain. It happened to be raining outside my window a lot during those few days too.
I prayed to God to forgive me for whatever it was that I had done to deserve something like this. I prayed that I would get a chance in the future to hold a child of my own while I was still on this Earth.
I prayed that our little baby girl would forgive us for making this decision. I prayed that she would understand that we made the decision only because we loved her and did not want her to live a life of pain and suffering.
I am normally not very religious and do not see a lot of value in prayer, but this was an event of life changing proportions. It made me value life in a new way and to appreciate the fact that we are alive. It also made me see that, all too often, we humans fret over things that are too little to think about at all. This kind of event puts a lot of things into perspective and makes you realize what is important and what is not.
I prayed to God and told Him that I knew that He would take better care of my little girl than I ever could, but the next time around, I just wanted one chance to try to prove myself.
After my visit to the hospital that Friday, I went home to wait for a phone call to find out when I would have the procedure, and where. I received a call from one of the nurses at the hospital where I would have my surgery, asking me a few medical history related questions. She also asked about any medications that I was taking. I told her I was just taking my prenatal multivitamins but was going to stop taking them, because I saw no point in continuing to take them. She said that was the right thing to do, because they did not want me to be taking any supplements containing Vitamin E for forty eight hours before the surgery. She said that they were still looking at operating room availability and I should expect a call later that afternoon about specific dates and times.
A short while later, I got a call from the doctor who was going to be performing the D&E. He introduced himself and then said how sorry he was that he had to meet me for something like this. I did not expect to hear that kind of genuinely sympathetic statement from someone who performed these procedures all the time. It made me wonder why the perinatologists I had been seeing until that point had not been more sympathetic, more human, even though I had thought earlier that I understood why they needed to be detached.
The doctor briefly explained to me how things would happen. Because I was at a late stage in my pregnancy, he wanted to see me not once, but twice before the actual surgery. He wanted to dilate my cervix on the day before the procedure and on the day before that. The entire process would not involve any cutting up. There would be no scalpels and no sutures. Everything would be done through the cervix. The disadvantage of that would be that the fetus would not come out in one piece and that I would need anesthesia. I asked if he would use local or general anesthesia. He said general. I was glad about that, because I did not want to see or experience any part of the surgery. He said that I was scheduled for surgery on Thursday and his office would call me shortly afterwards with exact times. Thursday was a little later than what I had been hoping for, but I understood that if he wanted to see me twice beforehand, the earliest it could possibly happen would be Wednesday. I just wanted it done that very minute. The waiting, knowing that the baby was still moving inside me when we had decided to terminate, wearing maternity clothes, all of that was very hard for me during that time.
His office called me later and gave me appointment times for Tuesday and Wednesday and the time for the surgery on Thursday. They told me to arrive an hour and a half before the scheduled surgery time and to stop eating and drinking after midnight before the surgery. Those were probably the standard instructions for all their surgical patients. The nurse told me that I would probably be with them for about five hours on the day of surgery, including the preparation before the surgery and the recovery afterwards. I would need to have someone who could drive me home that evening. That person would not necessarily need to be at the hospital the whole time, they would just need a phone number to call once they thought I was ready to go home.
I had never before had any form of surgery or any form of anesthesia. The doctor had described the dilation that he would do beforehand, and even that involved anesthesia. That would be local anesthesia injected in my cervix. It was a strange thought for me to imagine something being injected into my cervix. I had never before even heard of something like that. But now, after all the phone calls from the hospital, the actual fact of the matter began to set it. I began to think about the actual procedure, and it scared me. Of course I knew that lots of people have surgery every day and almost all of them come out of it just fine, feeling better than they felt going in. But I could not help being a little nervous.
I began to notice a decrease in the amount of fetal movement I was feeling each day. That made me feel like the pregnancy was just not meant to be, and it was going to end tragically sooner or later. I had feared the worst but hoped for the best all through it. I had been terrified with every bleeding episode and relieved with every ultrasound that I had had, until the two most recent ones. I had always wondered, always been uncertain, nervous and worried about what the outcome was going to be. As heart wrenching as this whole process was, it put an end to all the uncertainty and stress, both physical and mental, that I had been dealing with all this time. I am not trying to minimize the value of my little girl's life, but with all the unbearable pain of losing her, there was a strange sense of relief that I felt from time to time.
Through the weekend, I could not do much other than cry. My husband cooked some food for both of us, and I was mostly taking it easy. I could not decide whether it was easier to deal with the pain when we were together or when he was at work or out somewhere else and I was at home. When we were together, we were there to hold each other and wipe each other's tears. But when one of us teared up, there was nothing that the other could say to make the first person feel better. We just ended up holding each other and crying with each other. Neither of us had experienced this kind of grief before. It was so overpowering and so mind numbing that we did not know what to do or say in those initial few days. My husband had lost his father fairly recently, and his father had been quite young at the time of his passing. Even so, his passing did not disrupt the natural order of things. He passed away after his parents did, and before his children. Our daughter was going to die before us, and that goes against the natural cycle of things. My father in law had lived a full life and had made both his sons into mature, grown up people who could take care of themselves. Our daughter was going to leave us, and take with her all the dreams we had for her, a whole lifetime full of potential, years and years of what could have been. Maybe she could have been an artist, a writer, a doctor. Maybe she could have been the doctor who gave the world a better understanding of subchorionic hematomas and found a way to actually treat them. We would never know what potential her life would have held.
In the movies, often, when a person is crying on the inside, it happens to be raining outside their window, or they happen to be caught outdoors in the rain. It happened to be raining outside my window a lot during those few days too.
I prayed to God to forgive me for whatever it was that I had done to deserve something like this. I prayed that I would get a chance in the future to hold a child of my own while I was still on this Earth.
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