I got pretty behind on posting so playing some major catch up on the blog as the story has continued and I’ve still got a lot to say….

Right after Ava died the doctors at the hospital offered me anti-depressants. I immediately refused. There is no doubt I was absolutely and crushingly depressed, but I didn’t think medication was going to be the answer. I didn’t have a chemical imbalance in my brain, and I didn’t have an illness that needed to be fixed, my daughter was dead and I was grieving. I knew things wouldn’t get better if I didn’t do something about it, so I started going to counseling. I wanted to find a way to feel better and I figured professional help was the first thing I needed. It went well for a few weeks but then I reached a point that it didn’t, in fact, it started to make me feel worse. I started to feel like I wasn’t making “progress,” and started to feel shamed by my grief. I felt like counseling was forcing me to just get over it, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t want to move on and feel better. I was holding on to my grief because it was all I had left of my daughter and I didn’t want to let her go, so after my session on Ava’s due date, I quit going. I decided I would heal and rebuild myself through exercise and self-care instead, and it worked for a while. A long while. I dropped the baby weight and I gained physical strength and a confidence I had never had before. One day I started singing along to the radio again, and my smiles came more easily. I started sleeping again at night, and I rarely cried. I felt like I was on top of the world, until one day I wasn’t.

One day I just started feeling sad again. I started picking fights with my husband, and I stopped sleeping. One random morning, without warning, on the way to work, I hit my bottom and had a panic attack.

It started first thing in the morning when I felt like I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. As I rode the bus to work the tears silently poured out of my eyes, and by the time I reached my stop I could barely breathe. I started walking across the pedestrian bridge towards my next bus and my thoughts turned darker and darker. The thought of taking a running leap over the edge crossed my mind and that’s when I got really scared. I immediately ran off the bridge and in to an alley where I paced around regaining my composure until I was ready to face the day and go to work. I alluded to what happened in a blog post and I got a pretty concerned response from a lot of people which was so appreciated but also made me feel bad. I didn’t want to burden others with worry, so I stopped talking about it. I didn’t have any intentions of actually hurting myself, but I started getting pretty worried about how frequently I was having thoughts of self-harm. I was ashamed and embarrassed but when I finally decided to talk to Travis about it, it felt good to admit that I wasn’t doing as well as I was letting people believe. We agreed I needed to go back to some kind of therapy, but I didn’t want to go back to what I was doing before. I needed to do something different. I remembered hearing about EMDR and decided it was worth giving it a try. I found a provider and made an appointment.

My first appointment was spent giving my therapist a brief history of what brought me to her and then she explained EMDR in more detail and helped me understand what to expect. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) was designed as a psychotherapy to help alleviate distress caused by memories of traumatic events. The way she explained it was that when we make memories our brains process, organize, and store memories into different files that we can access at will, but when trauma occurs sometimes our brains never really process these memories. Without being processed the traumatic memory sort of lingers in the forefront of our minds and continues to fester and cause distress repeatedly. EMDR is a way to process these memories and file them away, not to be forgotten but to be placed in the mental file cabinet where they belong so that the brain can heal. I was skeptical. This sounded hokey and even felt a little silly but I was desperate so I scheduled my next appointment to actually begin my treatment.

The first session I sat in a wooden chair less than 10 feet from my therapist, still unsure of how this could possibly help, but ready to try. She handed me two little plastic ovals, one to hold loosely in each hand, and she let me feel them alternate vibrating between each hand. We did a couple of warm-up exercises and then she had me close my eyes and simply said, “tell me about your daughter,” while the little ovals vibrated back and forth in each hand. It felt weird and almost forced at first but I went with it. I started at the beginning and told her everything about my pregnancy, about her birth, about her death, about the funeral, everything. Every time I started to cry she asked me to stay in that place and elaborate on what was going on. It was an emotional roller coaster. I could feel myself experiencing everything all over again. One minute I would be calm and the next I was sobbing so hard my tears had soaked through my shirt and into my bra. We would stay in those moments letting words I never had the courage to utter about some of the darkest moments came spilling out of me. I could feel my body purging the shameful thoughts I had never known I needed to release, and I started feeling lighter. I left my first session feeling emotionally exhausted, almost drunk, but strangely light and euphoric. Something was happening and I could feel it working.

The next session was similar but strangely, when I got to the parts of the story that had caused me so much distress the first time, I felt less uncomfortable. I still felt sad but I didn’t feel the need to cry. I felt comfortable talking about Ava without overwhelming and debilitating emotion. It was incredible. The real test came a few weeks later at work when I held a baby for the first time in two years.

For two years I managed to avoid every baby that came in to my office, and working for an OB/GYN made that pretty challenging some days. I had a couple patients hand me their babies as they stepped on the scale to weigh themselves and I would just stand there frozen, keeping my arms outstretched and holding the baby away from me like a rotten fish until their moms would take them back, usually while giving me a look of “what the hell?” A few weeks after completing EMDR a patient needed to use the bathroom and asked if one of us would hold her baby. Not only did I hold her baby, I volunteered to hold her baby. There were a lot of shocked faces when my co-workers realized what was happening. I was a little nervous but something inside me just said it was time. I took a deep breath and braced myself for the worst, but the sadness never came. I had imagined that holding the first baby since Ava would trigger all sorts of memories and emotions but instead it simply felt nice. I actually enjoyed the feeling of that squishy little newborn snuggling into my chest. I felt like a completely new person. Over the next few months I noticed more changes. I wasn’t triggered by other people anymore. I was suddenly able to separate my experiences from what was happening to other people and I wasn’t randomly hit with overwhelming sadness. I finally felt at peace with my grief and that peace has continued to stay with me.

I’ve come to learn that grief and peace can co-exist. My grief is not “cured,” because that’s just not how it works. I will likely need some more “touch-up” sessions of EMDR in the future, but now I feel like I am truly living instead of coping and surviving. I will always carry my grief with me. I will always feel an absence in my life as I continue to live without my daughter, but that grief no longer consumes me.  Sometimes I still cry, and sometimes I get lost daydreaming about how different life would be with her here. I still get pissed about the unfairness of it all and I make dark jokes to cope with my sadness, but its not the same as it was before. I am able to picture a future full of hope, and light, and happiness that can coexist with my grief. For the first time since Ava died my grief is no longer my identity but a part of the sum of all that I am and I am ready to see what else I can become. I’m ready to carry my grief with me and start looking towards the future.