Can we talk about post-partum after you lose a baby in pregnancy? I mean, how do you live after the loss of a baby?
When I was home after my losses, I found NOTHING on the internet that was remotely helpful when going through the post-partum grief. NOTHING. Friends or family didn’t know what to tell me. Or what they said wasn’t what I needed.
It was extremely frustrating. I knew that millions upon millions of other women have gone through similar experience, yet no one wants to talk about it. Well, I’m going to talk about it.
Let’s talk about the hormones
Let’s talk about the pregnancy hormones for a second…despite losing one of my two babies; I was still pregnant with my second baby. Pregnancy hormones + grief. Let’s try an organize that first. But wait, I was told and I knew that this second baby wasn’t going to survive, so let’s throw on a dash of hopelessness and a sprinkle of hope that the doctors are wrong! Let’s see what happens. Then, I was encouraged to stay calm, stay positive, stay healthy for baby number two…which they had already told me wasn’t going to survive. Talk about being absolutely confused in a place of already immense confusion.
Then my second baby died.
Here come the post-partum pregnancy hormones crashing down on an already overwhelmingly, oversaturated, immense feeling of guilt, grief, and shame.
It is so messed up. There I was, bleeding, crying, cramping, doing all the things that a woman who has just delivered a baby does. Then comes the leaking of the breasts. The hair loss (yep, that still happens). Then those post-partum hormones do a nose-dive. It was exactly like I had delivered baby, but without the babies.
Here’s what happens next…
Then about 4 weeks after that, Flo shows up. Yep, she’s a bitch! So just before that I was PMS’ing hard! You know, trying really hard to see how good things are, when really it’s complete shit!
By this point, my body doesn’t know up from down. I went from pregnancy highs and hormone lows, to grieving a baby and hanging on to hope for the survival of #2, to then post-partum hormones with the loss of two babies, to getting my period about a month that the ordeal began.
Riding the wave of emotion
To this day, I’m not sure how I walked out of it. What I want from writing about this is for anyone who has had to go through or is going through this to know… it sucks. This whole up and down wave riding sucks! Let it suck. Don’t let anyone tell you “it’s for the best”, or “you’ll get over it”, or whatever other “reasoning” someone wants to say to make themselves feel better… the roller coaster of emotions is real and it sucks!
Feel it.
Live it.
Survive it.
Once you come out of it, you will be a new person. What that looks like, I’m not sure. I just need you to read and know that it’s real. But mostly, you aren’t alone….YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE! I am proof that you can live after the loss of your baby. It may not feel like you can, but yes you can and you will!
This is my story within the space of my children…This is the story behind Within This Space.
I am a mom to two amazing boys that are six and a half years apart. “Wow what a big age gap…”, is something I often hear, or “did you want such a big space?”… There was always going to be a gap. Now, there will always be a gap.
Here I go…
I didn’t want such a big gap. I always envisioned my first child going to school and then we would welcome baby #2. It didn’t go quite to plan. There is a big age gap between my two boys, because we have two other others. But they died.
When my second son was born, I should have been preparing for my twins’ first birthday party. But it never happened because they never came. They were never born.
Writing about them is therapeutic but it also makes me relive the trauma that I went through. That time was a very dark in my life; I honestly didn’t think that I was going to come out of it. I sound so dramatic, but the loss of a child (or in my case, two) it does something to you as a parent. It cuts you deep. It creates a wound so large that you know that the scar will be there forever. But there is something else there is a sense of self-betrayal. Your body betrayed you and those babies; it really messes with your head. The space between my children was large to begin with and with the loss, the gaping hole refused to close.
Of course, I know that I am not the first person to have a loss or even a multiple loss. Sadly, that offered me some comfort but also made me so incredibly sad.
This is my story…
I’ll take you back to August 2017, I took a pregnancy test and it was a big, fat, and FAST positive! Shaking and in complete shock, I couldn’t believe this was real. With my first son, I had several negative tests and only got a conclusive positive result after a blood test at 8 weeks pregnant.
Taking a deep breath, I walked down the stairs and my husband was sitting at the table with our almost 5 year old son, and shoved the test in his face. He looked at it, and then looked at me. He asked, “what’s this?”. I rolled my eyes and said “really?”. I sat on the couch, shaking, laughing, and crying. Looking at my clueless singleton son would not be a singleton any more. My husband and I sat on the couch hugging and crying, so happy in that exact moment. I had never seen my husband so excited.
Here we go, we thought!
That day and the weeks after, I went to work as usual with our little-big secret held tight between the two of us!
A month later…
I remember patting my belly saying “stay with me, I need you, I love you…stay with me”.
On September 18, 2017 almost a month after I took the positive test, it was an unusually warm day (also my nephew’s first birthday). My pants became so tight, I was limited in what I could wear to work.
That day, despite how warm it was I wore the only pair of pants that fit (thank you stretchy jeans). I was super hot and sweaty all day, super uncomfy. Remember, I was pregnant, so I peed…a lot. While in the washroom at work, I noticed blood. More than just spotting, there was blood. “What’s going on? No…no…”. I panicked…I paced and walked in circles in front of the toilet of my two-stall communal staff washroom,unable to breathe; unsure of what the hell to do.
Literally, running down the hall to my office, hoping no one would see me, a friend who I spilled the exciting news to saw me, following me into my office. She begged me to tell her what was wrong. I couldn’t speak. I just said “I’m bleeding”. She held me. She said “what can I do?” I told her to tell my boss I was leaving. Running to my car, unsure how my feet were moving, I left…
I was shaking. Somehow I managed to call my husband at work. He didn’t answer his cell, I started to panic. I called his office, again, not sure how I managed to spit out a sentence, I was short and told them to page my husband and find him right now, it was an emergency. He answered the page, I somehow managed to say “Get to the hospital”. I raced as fast as I could to my local hospital ( I worked in the city almost 40 minutes away). As I was driving, I remember patting my belly saying “stay with me, I need you, I love you…stay with me”.
We waited…
Waiting in line at Triage at the hospital…barely breathing and having people with their own emergencies looking at me and maybe wondering why I was there and what was wrong with me….my husband came. Finally. He held me. I cried, I lost it all. He was strong and I was not. My husband left me briefly at the hospital, picked up my son from school, and take him to our closest friends home where he could play and be loved (I will be ever grateful for them that day).
He returned and I was (finally) seen by a doctor and waited for what seemed to be forever before I had an ultrasound. My husband wasn’t allowed to come in; I had to do this alone. I was absolutely terrified.
Laying on the bed, I continued to cry as the ultrasound tech did her job. She was kind; I knew she was not allowed to tell me anything. I cried more as I laid there with the wand gliding across my stomach. That was it, feeling like brief moments but also feeling like it lasted forever, and it was over.
The nurses were so amazing and gentle with us. They took us to a private room and told us that there are some more tests and the doctor would see us soon. They took blood from me, offered me snacks, water, juice… I didn’t want anything.
I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be in that moment, I didn’t want this to be real. This wasn’t supposed to be my story.
The moment where my reality became my hell
The Doctor came in. I could see it in his eyes and in his stance that he hates this part of his job. Sitting down, he let out a big sigh. He took a deep breath right along my husband and I, telling us the ultrasound showed that we had twins. “HAD”… that was it, the key word.
Sadly, Twin A did not have a heart beat and Twin B was alive, but the heartbeat seemed quite slow. He told us that we could be hopeful but also prepare to lose Twin B. At that moment, the room started to spin and I sobbed. Unable to comprehend what he was telling me. “Devastated” is the only word that I can describe that moment. He put his hand on my shoulder offering his condolences, he ordered me off work and put me on bedrest. He asked me if I needed anything, between breaths, I asked for my ultrasound picture.
Thank god they gave me my ultrasound picture because it’s all that I have of being a mom of twins. I stared at the picture in disbelief. I shook my head, almost to wake me up from this dream and told my husband that we had to leave. But first, I had to walk out of that Emergency Room with all the peering eyes watching me stumble into my new world, and prepare for what was next…
Continued on Part 2 of Within The Space of my Children..
