Heartache in the Midst of a Pandemic
Thursday night felt heavy.
Everything felt too much.
I was vacuuming the downstairs and steam mopping the floors. When I am mad or anxious I clean. Ask my husband, he will testify. I am pretty sure it was a mixture of both emotions.
What I couldn’t pinpoint was if the anger was because we lost our sweet September baby, or was it because of COVID-19? That in and of itself makes me angry.
Some days I feel good, some days I feel lost. Most days I am so consumed with this pandemic I don’t have time to really think about the horrible things we went through the night before my D and C.
When I wake up in the morning I feel like I am waking up from one nightmare right into another.
I keep going back to this picture I took a few weeks ago when my parents came to visit us. We spent a day up in Santa Cruz. We went into the forest and showed me parents the wonder of the redwood trees and then we hit the Santa Cruz boardwalk/amusement park. Ellie had a blast riding the rides.
Since I was a kid palm trees have always made me heart happy and made me feel at home. Growing up in Hawaii and San Diego will do that to you.
This day may heart felt happy.
Five days later my heart would shatter into a million pieces.
Seven days later I would experience the most intense heart wrenching night of my life. {One day I will tell this story, because it needs to be told, but right now it is too raw.}
Friday, March 13th through Monday, March 16th feels like a bad dream.
I kept hoping I would wake up and things would be normal. Instead I woke up every day with a more upside down world.
I’ve clearly moved on to the mad stage of grief. But what I still can’t pinpoint is what I’m mad about.
I spent almost the entire month of February horribly sick. Taking medication, barely able to function, and throwing up kind of sick. My body was clearly pregnant. I began to show around week 7, my body knew what it was doing.
My body was pregnant.
And then one day it wasn’t.
My body still looked about 11 weeks pregnant with baby number 2, but I wasn’t.
I packed back up all my pregnancy clothes and unpacked all my jeans that still wouldn’t fit.
Five days after my D and C I had a post-op appointment where we made the hard decision for me to go alone because our state was officially sheltering in place and it felt unwise to ask someone to watch Ellie.
This was my third time at this doctor’s office.
The first time was at just under 8 weeks, when we heard our sweet September baby’s heartbeat.
The second time was just under 12 weeks, when we sat in the same room and saw our sweet babe’s tiny little body, but heard nothing.
When the nurse lead me to a different room I was relieved. As I sat in the waiting room I was afraid I would have to sit in the same room where our life was changed, and this time be alone.
As I sat in this “new” room I was still flooded with emotions. Half naked, a paper sheet on my lap, and the sound of faint laughter and joy coming from the room next to me was all too much. The tears fell. I felt so incredibly alone. The baby was gone, and because of a pandemic my husband wasn’t with me.
That is how a miscarriage feels, like you are all alone. The world keeps on going, and you try to too. Most days you do move forward but sometimes in the quiet moments you remember the pain and the loss, and you feel alone, because everyone else has moved on.
