When I Talk About My Miscarriage

A list of some things that happened when I've talked about my miscarriage:

A female relative sends a message to me about her miscarriage.

Another female relative sends a message about her miscarriage.

Another female relative sends me a message about her miscarriage.

A colleague tells me about her miscarriages.  

A colleague tells me about his friend's stillbirth.

An aunt tells me about her miscarriage.  

Another aunt tells me about her miscarriage, but also her stillbirth.

A colleague and his wife take me to lunch to share the story of their son's stillbirth.

A friend tells me about her relative who had a miscarriage.

My nurse at my kidney doctor's office cries with me while telling me about her miscarriage.

The same colleague and his wife share with me everything they went through following their son's death.  

My kidney doctor tells me about his and his wife's miscarriage. 

The neighbor with whom I started walking to the commuter train in the morning tells me that he and his wife suffered miscarriage.  

A colleague tells me about her miscarriage.

The security guard at my office tells me about her miscarriage.

It's Hard Out Here for a Mom

God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers. 

~Jewish Proverb

On Aug. 3, 2015, I woke up, in the hospital. The story of my life.  I'd spent most of the day before that vomiting up everything that I ate. Ben was my witness.  We both figured it was morning sickness, since I was 11 weeks pregnant at the time.  But when the vomiting turned to blood, I ended up going to the nearest Inova ER center.

Thoughts on That Time I Was Pregnant

I was pregnant once.  

That’s the thing about miscarriages and women who have them.  Unless you knew me personally, or asked if I was pregnant, or saw me in the final days of my pregnancy, with a belly about the size of a soccer ball, you wouldn’t know that I was in fact a pregnant lady for about four to five months of 2015.

On Hiatus

2015 was sh*t.  And that's not an understatement.  

And I don't want to leave you guys hanging, waiting for a new blog post, especially when I don't plan on publishing one anytime soon.  

I have loved writing about my health situation(s) and sharing my life with you.  Right now, I'm going to go out and, hopefully, find that elusive thing called healing.  

Healing is freedom from worry.

Healing is to live and not pretend to live.

Healing is gratitude.

Healing is balance.

Healing is letting go.

Healing is the energy of now.

~Terri Guillemets

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A Tale of Two Surgeries

"Do not pray for an easy life,

pray for the strength to endure a difficult one."

--Bruce Lee

Originally, this blog post was supposed to be about the time I had an emergency appendectomy while 11-weeks pregnant.  Before the surgery, I asked the surgeon if he'd ever performed an appendectomy on someone who was pregnant and had a kidney transplant.  He said no.  He said there was a 50/50 chance the growing baby would survive.  Then I squeezed my mom's hand and was taken to the operating room.  

They Don't Talk About the First Trimester-- Part Three

Welcome back everyone to the final installment of my first trimester diary.  Just to recap:

--Here you can read my reasons for keeping and posting my diary on the internet, along with the first installment;
--Here is the second installment.

And we've reached the end!  Let's catch up with me as I finished my eighth week of pregnancy:

They Don't Talk About the First Trimester--Part Two

Welcome back for the second installment of my first trimester diary.  If you missed this post about why I'm sharing it, you can go back and read it here.   

Without further ado, let's just right into "Jewel's Emotions at about Six-Seven Weeks Preggo."

They Don't Talk About the First Trimester-- Part One

Because I'm a writer, one of the first things I did after finding out I was pregnant was start a a little pregnancy diary.  Once a week or when the mood struck me I would write down what I was thinking and feeling about the pregnancy and the changes that were happening.  And, with all writing, even this blog, it's so fascinating to go back and read what you wrote a year ago, a week ago or even a month ago.  I've found in my own writing that it really is a testament to how quickly your circumstances can go from good to bad and then back to good again in just a day's time. 

If I could describe my first trimester diary in one work, it would probably be unbalanced. Either because of hormones or just the natural reaction to being pregnant, I was constantly oscillating between immense fear and happy excitement.  I think that what made matters worse was the fact that I felt like I couldn't talk to anybody about it.  Even most of the other bloggers who I read daily who've had children never talked about their first trimester.  The practice seems to be that you don't tell everyone about your pregnancy until you're more confident that the baby is going to survive. And that confidence, doesn't come for most medical professionals until the first trimester is over.  It's a sad, but true reality.  

I can't tell you how helpful and therapeutic it would have been to have some source of real-life, first-hand experience to go to when I wasn't glued to the online version of "What to Expect."  Because I want to fill what seems to be a void in that area, I'll be posting from my real and raw first trimester diary in one to three parts on this blog.  So if you're in your first weeks of pregnancy, tender boobs, excitement, peeing a lot, but also freaking out about everything...don't worry.   I was there too.  

Dad's Kidney Meets Growing Fetus

Finding out that I am pregnant was kind of an unexpected turn of events on what started out as an awesome day, but ended up kind of spiraling into a depressing one.

Two days before our two-year wedding anniversary, I took a pregnancy test.  This happened several hours after Ben and I had taken our first fly-fishing course and just a couple hours after we were rejected by yet another person selling a home we were hoping to buy.  This instance of rejection stung a bit more than the previous three rejections we'd already suffered.  Our realtor has this great talent of getting information out of other agents. So the seller's agent for the home we were looking to buy basically came right out and told us what numbers we would have had to offer to win the home from another prospective buyer.  With that information, we were armed and ready to submit the winning bid and be under contract that night.  We were counting down the minutes to the end of our housing search.