The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
A week ago we went in for our 8 week ultrasound. I watched the screen as the resident OBGYN, a baby doctor baby doctor, manipulated various gels and tools to summon on a screen some queer portal into the feminine realm of creation. My wife is a third year psychiatry resident that had strongly considered going into the specialty of baby doctoring when she was in med school. The two women were more able than myself to divine meaning from the various blobs and sacs that came in and out of view. Maybe they saw a cyst? the big black blob at the top was the bladder. I paid close attention but learned little as the good doctor tapped away measurements. And then after what must have been a few minutes of building suspense the star of the show made its appearance. Among the grayish blobs came a white circle containing what most resembled a sea horse.
It came in and out of focus and several minutes were spent doing some kind of action where a vertical line was drawn on the screen aiming for the center of mass and then a kind of sine graph would appear. The chest of the sea horse noticeably bulged with regularity and it seemed to be this bulge they were targeting. My wife had not so subtly signaled that she knew what was going on and the woman doing the measurements did not explain their purpose. I didn't profane the ritual with a question. From context clues I deduced that they were taking snap shots of the heart rate.
From the question of whether she was sure that she had measured her last period correctly and a somber tone in the room where I had expected excitement I knew something hadn't gone to plan. The resident left and my wife told me that the size was much smaller than was expected and the heart rate was quite low. She had come off an IUD just before this so it was floated that perhaps the gap in period had delayed things and we were simply early, maybe this was a 6 week visit instead of an 8 week visit. I could tell she was not convinced of this.
The superior doctor came in and told us that we hadn't done anything wrong, never a good sign. They said much of what my wife had just said, that the size was off for how far along she should have been and the heart rate is concerning. We were scheduled for a follow up the next week, last Thursday. I called an Uber home and canceled the plans to call the inner circle to first announce the pregnancy. Resisting the urge to announce early showed its prudence. She seemed to have no real hope that it was viable but I resisted. It didn't seem right to give up on them before their hearts stopped beating. If this all worked out how was I going to look at a son or daughter and explain that I'd given up on them when they were fighting for their life? I didn't quite say this, she was protecting herself and I wasn't going to make her feel bad for it.
As the second session started I had come to terms that the odds were dire. The ritual started with only slight variation from the previous. The preamble of measurements seemed like a burying of the lede. Her bladder was more full this time, I confided in her later that it looked like the eyes of a yoshi of ninja turtle with her womb forming the snout. As the star came into view it was the same size as before and the regular pulse had gone. No one said it directly, it was just measurements but I could tell.
After the procedure the doctor laid out our options. We could wait it out or induce it earlier, we were early enough to use chemicals to induce the miscarriage or surgery if we preferred. It seemed like we had skipped a step. No one made an announcement, no one said that my kid was dead. We had all seen it and that was quite enough. We're flying out to China to see her extended family in a couple weeks, no longer bearing the good news we had hoped to share, and couldn't reasonably just wait it out. Not that there was seemingly any upside in doing that. We opted for the chemicals, it was pragmatic, the right option.
After another Uber home I mixed her up an old fashioned, her favorite that she'd been denied for months. The chemicals, which aren't to be taken with alcohol, wouldn't arrive until the next day and I'd grown up with the catholic habit of celebrating both good and bad news with a drink.
Life continued, we both worked yesterday and she took the first of the two types last evening, a few hours ago she had to keep several pills in her cheeks, which I referred to as chipmunk medicine, a phrase she liked. The medicine she liked less, it was reportedly chalky and unpleasant. She's in the other room now, experiencing painful cramping. I do what I can to help, she has a little stuffed bear that you can microwave to warm which helps a bit and I can bring her tea and Tylenol but beyond that there isn't much to do besides write a rambling post on themotte.org.
Spirits are high, we're both of the opinion that this sucks but we'll get 'em next time. In fact unless I try, unless I torture myself with imagining kids that could have been I don't really feel anything at all about this. I think we're both kind of watching out to help the other through what we expect to be a hard thing emotionally but it's just not really happened. Neither of us have really broken up about it.
I don't know if this post has a purpose. I've not told anyone else about this and just wanted to put it down.
My mother grew up on a farm and as a result always took the pragmatic position regarding these matters that nature knows what it's doing, and it knows what it's not doing too. One seed grows, another seed doesn't, they both had the same care and conditions. All you can do is keep sowing and keep caring. Sounds like you and your wife share a similar level-headed and caring attitude to each other.
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