Becoming Human

Sitting in the waiting room with a dead baby inside of me, completely numb. Holding my husband's hand and waiting. One hour before "I just want to let you know that I do not see a heartbeat...let me go talk with the doctor and have her take a look." That moment began the slow decline away from my humanity and reality. My mind silencing my thoughts of the reality, my physical heart pumping, but my theoretical heart still. Months later as grief set in, the fog over powered me and my inability to focus became paralyzing, I began to question why pregnancy loss is so damn lonely, even when I thought I was doing it all right. Talking about my loss, starting a group in our daughter's memory, participating in weekly therapy and being supported by an amazing partner. How did I get to the point where the silence around pregnancy loss was affecting me so deeply? So I started talking about my memories of our experience outloud, sometimes repeating certain parts over and over. The sweet nurse coaching us through decisions. Her 10 fingers and 10 toes. My sigh of relief when we delivered her, and our tears when holding her. Those memories live in my mind and I think of them often, but they live closely to the memories I hate... the ones of sitting in a crowded waiting room of pregnant women waiting to determine me and my dead baby's fate at my doctors office. The comments when leaving MFM minutes after learning our baby had died, "oh at least you have an empty waiting room to walk through". The quick US that gave us the most devastating news a person can hear, with little explanation.  Awkward silences. No follow-up card from my doctor, who saw my dead baby too. A 5 minute post partum follow-up call to tell me 2 things, when I can try and have a baby again and when to see him next for my annual visit and to make sure my bleeding was doing ok. Ignoring my symptoms when we came in to discuss genetic testing results. Not completing heart rate monitoring at a visit a week before we lost her. Why when I frantically tried to get evaluated for PPD, I couldn't and got an email response "you aren't thinking about hurting yourself are you ?" from the nurse. Those memories are what took away the humanity of my experience. They were taken by other humans either untrained or unwilling to allow their humanity to aknowledge mine. When I began having emotions surrounding our loss, I couldn't understand them... are these feelings real? No one else seemed to think it was a big deal. Why is there silence around pregnancy loss? Because the first people we see and hear the news from don't validate our experience. They don't know what to say and we REALLY need them to know what to say. Because when we don't know what is actually happening, those first few people we see with credentials are the ones that imprint on grief journey. The tone is set by the medical world when they don't wrap us up in their knowledge and treat us like the sad, confused and scared humans we are. Silent messages are the cracked bricks which guide our feet unwillingly on our grief journey, physically broken, emotionally cracking and desperately searching for our humanity to ground us. 

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