The first few weeks after Ava died were filled with some of the deepest grief I have ever experienced. When the surgeons reached inside of me and pulled her out it was as if they removed a piece of me as well. I felt like my guts had been ripped out (literally and figuratively). I cannot describe it any better than to say I just felt empty. My heart and my stomach were a bottomless pit of dark, black, nothingness….
When I checked in to the hospital I thought we would be stuck there for weeks, maybe months. The baby had been stable during my monitoring and I was feeling more movement everyday. I was looking forward to having another ultrasound because I was certain it would show marked improvement. I was caught completely off-guard when things deteriorated so quickly.
After finally getting a solid night of sleep I woke up on Sunday morning feeling refreshed and full of hope. We ordered breakfast and I got dressed before my nurse came in to start the day.We hadn’t met before but she was just the kind of nurse I needed. She was smart and experienced but she was also funny and laughed at our dark humor. She updated the whiteboard: 26+3.
I was completely exhausted after our NICU class and it was only noon. We ordered lunch and then waited anxiously for my parents to arrive with Logan. We had spent our first night apart and we missed our little guy. We wanted to see our happy, healthy, perfect son and squeeze him until he begged us to stop. My parents had been texting me updates throughout the morning and it sounded like Logan was having a wonderful time and a good…
I’ve started feeling a lot of anger lately. My therapist told me that anger is a secondary emotion, that it is our response to another underlying feeling, and she’s right. I am heartbroken and I’m tired of crying so instead I’ve started to get more and more angry. I’m angry at the world for making me sad. I’m angry at pregnant people and new mothers and babies that aren’t mine. I just want to scream at the universe for what…
When I woke up in the morning I felt ready to face another day. It was Saturday the 14th. We had made it past Friday the 13th so maybe our luck was changing. Today was the NICU class that was going to prepare us for the long road ahead. I was looking forward to it and feeling like I was actually doing something besides sitting around and worrying.
I want to preface the next posts from 26+2 until 26+4 by saying that they aren’t going to be pretty. Nothing about this blog is pretty but these are particularly difficult days for me to relive and to write about. These days were filled with a lot of emotional ups and downs, and lengthy discussions about our future that I don’t feel I can censor or edit into single posts. There are a lot of feelings I had and still…
It was the evening of 26+1. We had made it through our first full day and things were looking up. We had amazing staff and teams of specialists that had given us more hope and made us feel like we made the right decision coming to the hospital.
I didn’t cry yesterday. For the first time in two months I didn’t cry. I didn’t wake up with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach and I didn’t go to sleep feeling like I had a gaping hole in my heart. I didn’t choke back tears or even have to turn my face away from someone so they couldn’t see me trying to swallow my grief. Yesterday I got a real glimpse at the person I used…
I didn’t get much sleep the first night in the hospital. I stayed up writing e-mails and texting back and forth with my mom who was en-route to Denver. We called my parents as soon as we found out we were headed to Denver and they immediately jumped in the car and started driving from Minnesota. They left their house before we left ours and drove through the night. This is not unusual behavior for my parents, they are always there when…