TWSTBE – Founder’s Husband - Part 1

Happy Father's Day to all the Fathers out there, whether its grown up kids, little kids, babies, babies-in-womb, angel babies and ever furry babies.  

Here is Part 1 of my husband's story of our journey.   I love you, sweetie.  Your strength has kept me strong as well. 

TWSTBE – Founder’s Husband

Part 1

My wife mentioned to me that she wanted to start a blog. We had tossed around the idea of one a few times before, but when she said she wanted to be about our miscarriages, I was relieved.

It had been a year since our first miscarriage and quite honestly, I didn’t feel we were healing from our losses. We had been visiting a family counselor/therapist and she was helping us achieve our goal, but we still needed something to tie it altogether. We wanted something that would not only help us, but help others who went through similar incidents.

 So, this is a blog for women (and men) who have been through miscarriages and/or infertility. She asked me to write our story from my point of view so that men could also find comfort in knowing they aren’t alone in what they have experienced.

On May 6^th, 2013 I was extremely anxious. It was the day of our first sonogram and I was so pumped to see our baby. We had only tried for a few months, maybe three and we were pregnant. At this time, my mind was racing with what color to paint the nursery, what car seat is the safest, where could my child go to college. These thoughts were normal for first time parents; we were ready to start a new chapter in our lives.

Once we arrived, they make the wife/girlfriend/fiance’/baby holder take one more pregnancy test and the doctor said it showed pregnant. At this time, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief thinking that health wise, everything was ok. However, once the sonogram began, we received a quick and sudden dose of reality. There was a sac present but it looked like a dark hole. In my mind, questions began to arise. Was the machine broken? Where’s the baby, don’t we normally see something? Are we not that far along? In our relationship, I’m the optimistic one. I thought the doctor will tell us it’s all good or that we needed to show patience, etc. Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The doctor stated that we had a blight ovum which is when egg and sperm conceive together but a child never develops. It’s more or less the equivalent of a false positive pregnancy where the body has all the symptoms of pregnancy but no child present. Our doctor is a straight forward and honest person which we appreciate, but I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that I wasn’t a father yet.

The doctor and I had this back and forth conversation: Her hormone level is too low. It can bounce back. No, it can’t. We could have the baby start to develop next time we’re here. No, it can’t. Isn’t there hormone shots, pills, anything that could help kick start development? No, there isn’t.

When I came to realize that this wasn’t our time, I went through the whole range of emotions. My first reaction to our news was getting my wife back to health. She still hadn’t physically miscarried and getting her back to health was priority one. Subconsciously, I had gone into father mode. Father mode is when you protect your family with all your might and will keep everything or everyone away. It was a two person wolfpack and I needed to nurse my wife back to health. Once she was back to normal, which took a few months, we took a break from trying for a family.

 
I asked myself typical questions: What did we do wrong? What did we do to deserve this agony? Why can’t we have a baby, aren’t we good people? I had come to realize that our next child is a blessing and I will cherish it that much more once it arrives.

TWSTBE Founder Story 2:

A few months after our first miscarriage, my husband and I started to try again.  My periods were all out of whack and it was hard to nail down the right timing.  But soon, on Sunday, November 17^th, we saw the 2 pink lines again.  

I imagine that everyone who has gone through what we had gone through earlier in the year would feel the same way we did.  Super excited and super scared at the same time.  I would say we spoke less and made fewer plans for that time.  Until December 10^th.  I had taken the whole day off work for the first sonogram and appointment.  The doctor had brought me in earlier than last time by a few weeks, just so that we could see early on what was going on.  Husband snuck out of work too and that morning we were in the same room that had devastated us 6 months earlier.  It was surprisingly hard to be in that room, even though we were confident that we were going to be getting good news this time.  And we did.  Right there on the monitor was a tiny little image with that had a little pumping part in the middle.  Our baby!  Her heart!  It was all there!  I couldn’t hold my tears back.  We were over the moon!

Plans intensified immediately, looking at the calendar to decide when to tell everyone.  We narrowed the names down to Boy and Girl names and purchased tiny little Dallas Cowboys onesies (gender neutral).  We told our family and closest friends in what we felt was an adorably creative way on Christmas and New Years.   Everyone was ecstatic for us! 

January 4^th, in the early afternoon, I started to bleed.  Not much, but it was enough to concern me.  I tried to call my doctor and got through to Doc on staff who said if it got worse I could go to a hospital.  We were not taking chances.  We went to an emergency care clinic near our house.  It was a Saturday, so they had to call the sonographer in special.  She did the sonogram, measured the baby at 8.5 weeks in size (we were almost at 12), and said she couldn’t find the heartbeat.  I didn’t even look at the screen the whole time.  I couldn’t.  Husband did and he stayed very strong even though he knew what he was seeing.  The doc told me I was miscarrying and to make an appointment with my gyno first thing on Monday to decide how she would want to proceed.  I left her a message and assumed I would see her on Monday morning.  

**GRAPHIC CONTENT TO FOLLOW**

Sunday late evening, I started to cramp.  Bad.  Worse than anything I have ever felt.  Some things would help a little; meds, heat, laying down in certain positions.  But the pains would come back just as strong after some time.  About that time the bleeding (which had been like a light period to this point) got significantly worse.  By bed time, I was soaking through a full pad in under 2 hours.  My cramps kept coming.  Without my knowing it, Husband had been monitoring time between when the waves of pain would hit.  8 minutes, each time, dead on it.  More or less, I was in a form of labor.  The doc on duty at my regular gynos office told us that if I started bleeding more than 1 full pad an hour that I might look at going to the hospital.  By the end of the next hour, I had used 4 pads.  I went to the bathroom and as I pulled my pants down…I really can’t even put it into words, but it was like my insides all fell out of my vagina.  I was standing in a puddle of tissue and clots and blood was everywhere.  Husband came in right then and saw everything.  I think this was probably the most traumatizing moment in each of our lives.  We knew what we were looking at.  We cleaned up as best we could and went to the hospital.  There, after vaginal exams and sonograms, they confirmed that there was no longer a baby in my uterus.  

We have done well over the past 6 months; healing at our pace, through our own methods.  I will add more posts on our processes and other things that I want to share soon.  I just wanted to get this part down, to give a frame of reference of what we went through.  And to get it out.  It took me two weeks to write this, but I feel better telling my story.  I feel better knowing someone might read this and not feel alone.    The better posts from me will come.  The ones that talk about how we made it through and how we are, but the posts like this are important.  For all of us.  We have to start here.  

I still want to share all of your stories!  Please send them to me at thiswassupposedtobeeasy@gmail.com.  I may not post them immediately, but they will get posted.  And share this blog with your friends and family who you know might want to share or just feel less alone.

TWSTBE Founder - Story 1

TWSTBE Founder - Story 1




April 2013 - We were so happy!  I came home one Friday and took a pregnancy test while Husband was taking an after work nap.  2 pink lines.  Wow.  We were going to parents!  We had not been trying very long, 3 months maybe.  But this is just what we wanted!  I did what any rational girl would do over the next few days...take about 6 more tests, just to make sure.  All positive.  First thing on Monday, I called to schedule an appointment with my gynecologist.  I was so upset that I had to wait another 4 weeks to come see her!  But, it is what it is.

The next 4 weeks were amazing!  Sure, I felt like someone was constantly beating my boobs with a plank of wood, and I peed what felt like every 15 minutes, but the joy we felt was immeasurable.  We made plans.  BIG plans.  And small plans.  Everything from how we would tell everyone to disciplinary practices for their first bad grade, to what colleges would be viable options for our star student athlete/scholar/musically gifted child.  We had a nickname.  We would have conversations towards my belly.  We took all the necessary steps toward a healthy pregnancy.  We were so ready to be able to share our secret with the world, but we knew that it always best to wait until after that important first appointment.

And so the day came.  It was May 6th.  We were beyond excited!!  I lay on the table as the sonographer inserted the probe and went to work finding our baby.  It took a minute to figure out what we were looking at.  What was that dark area?  It looked just like a dark hole.  Where was our baby?  I think it dawned on me before Husband…there was nothing there.  That dark hole was where the baby was supposed to be, and it was empty.  The sonographer said some non-committal things like “You may not be as far along as we thought.”  It’s her job.  She can’t say anything.  We waited for the doctor in the exam room after that.  When she came in, she confirmed.  I had what is known as a blighted ovum.  To cut through all the medical stuff, my body had terminated the pregnancy before it got far enough along to develop anything.  But your body still acts mostly pregnant until the ovum is expelled from the body.  I don’t think I ever knew true devastation before that moment. I went home, instead of back to work as originally planned.  Husband came home shortly after that too.  We spent the day on the couch, in a daze.  

So much went through my mind.  What had I done to cause this?  Was the shopping cart I pushed too heavy?  I was pretty tipsy around the conception date; did that kill the baby? Was it because I was over-weight? Oh and did I get mad! I was mad at everyone for a long while.  I was mad at God and the doctor and the person crossing the street too slow.  It’s not fair!  I was still having pregnancy symptoms, but wasn’t going to have a baby!  There is nothing right about that situation.  Then I felt like a fool.  There I was having conversations with something that wasn’t there and may never had been.  Making plans for something that wasn’t real.  Mourning and crying about someone I never met.  Someone whose heart may never have even beat once.  I felt stupid and foolish; like I had been fooled by my own body, even betrayed.  How could I explain this to anyone?  I felt no one would understand.  Everyone would think I was crazy for being so sad and mad about this mistake my body had made.  

Eventually, people started to know and find out.  And that is when I realized that I wasn’t as alone as I felt.  Other couples had felt these things and gone through this or other experiences.  I felt so much less crazy after finding out that others had these feelings too.  I am not saying that it ever gave me answers to the questions that my brain was throwing out in my head, but at least I knew that I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t alone. And that helped.  It didn’t make it all better.  Nothing ever will.  But I realized with the help of friends that sometimes a life starts when plans are made for that life. Life doesn’t start with birth, or at 20 weeks pregnant, or at the first heartbeat.  Even though there may have been no physical presence of “life,” Husband and I had created a life for this little person from Day 1.  And we deserved time to mourn that and time to cope and deal with that happened to us.  And we took that time.  We love our baby and we wish we could have seen the person he would have become, and that was OK.  We were not alone in those feelings.  It’s still not easy always and I still don’t know why this happened.  But feeling less along, less isolated, less crazy, helped so much.

On May 17^th, I physically miscarried.  We were at a wedding out of state.  I had been bleeding for a few days.  I began cramping very badly and bled like I had never bled before for about 3-5 hours, and just like that it was over.  It was sad; very sad.  But I knew that I would make it because I now knew the stories of others who had made it. 

Part 2 of my story to come…


I chose today (Sunday, May 11^th, 2014) to launch this blog and submit my first entry/story because it is Mother’s Day.  I may not have a stroller to push or little diapers to change or a little mouth to give a bottle too, so it may not seem like I am a Mother, but I am.  I am the Mother of Angel Babies.  No, they can’t make me breakfast in bed today and they can’t sign a little card for me, but they are with me today.  Happy Mother’s Day to the Mothers of Earth and Angel Babies alike.