Back in October, before I had any inkling that I'd be pregnant in under 8 weeks, my husband and I had a tear-filled discussion.
As is typical, I was the one doing all of the crying. Clomid-induced hormones combined with all the emotional turmoil that comes with infertility led to a particularly difficult night for me.
That night my sweet husband asked me what I thought would make me feel better.
"A viable pregnancy" was my only response.
In all honesty, I thought that being pregnant would heal all the wounds and make the pain go away. If pregnancy losses were the cause of my distress, then shouldn't a viable pregnancy also be the cure?
It turns out that for me the answer is No. Even 4 weeks after finding out I was pregnant I was still struggling with many of the silent panic attacks and the preference to shoot daggers with my eyes at any pregnant woman I saw who I knew had conceived easily, rather than be genuinely happy for them.
Since then, things have been a little bit better but I still find myself irked by women who announce their pregnancies with comments like, "28 more weeks until I can eat sushi!" Really? You care more about eating sushi than meeting your baby?
Come On, People! Don't you get how blessed you are?? And can't you please be aware of your audience when you make statements like that? Yeah, some people will think it's funny, but you must realize that any woman struggling with infertility isn't going to appreciate the joke.
That's not the only problem though--this lingering sensitivity to pregnancy announcements . . .
I've been to my OB's office 3 times since the day of my bfp. The first was after a panic attack where I was sure the baby had died in the 2 weeks since I'd seen the heartbeat at the REs office. A wonderful nurse practitioner who I'd never met before sat and talked with me then rolled in their old ultrasound machine and, warning me that it still might be too soon to view the heartbeat transabdominally, proceeded to try so that I didn't have to have a transvaginal u/s. And there it was, the little baby with a heartbeat. The picture wasn't clear because the machine is old, but it was definitely there.
When I started to cry and explain why I was crying, that lovely lady came over and gave me, a stranger, a hug and cried with me. I felt like my fears were validated because someone understood. She, too, had experience multiple losses during her childbearing years and seemed to really empathize with what I was going through.
The following week I met with one of the new OBs in the office, a recent medical school graduate with no children of her own and a very clinical approach to her questioning. It seemed a little cold, but not horrible.
My third visit was my 13 week visit last week and I finally met with the OB I had seen during my last pregnancy and that had done my d&c after the baby died. He's a very nice man, nearing retirement, whose only child died a couple days after birth. He was very caring and sensitive during my loss in 2012.
Unfortunately, being in his presence as he put the doppler on my stomach to listen for the heartbeat, like he had on September 28th, 2012, was just too much. Even as I could hear the whoosha-whoosha of this baby's heartbeat, my mind was replaying the silence of before and I had to do everything in my power not to jump up and run out of the office in tears.
The memories of that appointment with that doctor are too strong. So here I am, just a few hours away from being 14 weeks pregnant, and I have to find a new provider because I can't go through that again. As caring as he is, the memories and emotional trauma that followed are still too present and too real for me to continue in his care.
And so the hunt for a new provider begins. . .
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