Random Thoughts

Because it is such a struggle to be coherent, I think I'm going with lists for a while to attempt some level of thought organization. So many random but not necessarily connected thoughts and worries and fears are playing pinball in my head, and maybe putting them somewhere outside of my subconscious will help make sense of them. Because really, nothing at all makes sense to me right now.

• I am terrified to go back to school. Not just because my first major outings leaving the house occurred today and I am exhausted, but because I have been so doped up and so focused on the physical pain that I haven't really dealt fully with the emotional pain of everything. It is starting to seep out and I fear that it will seep and seep until it ruptures and then I will be consumed by the emotional heaviness of everything that has happened. Or maybe it will just seep a slow steady bleed and I will slowly acclimate to the realization that we lost our pregnancy in a violent and scary way. Nobody wants a special education teacher in the middle of her own mental breakdown. It is awfully hard to support others with their needs when your own needs are monumental and overflowing like a cresting river over the sandbags of your coping mechanisms.

• I am afraid that people won't understand that I need to say "I lost my baby." I realize that it was between a lentil and a blueberry, and technically still an embryo, not even a fetus. I realize that I was only six and a half weeks when my pregnancy was surgically removed, like a tumor. It really looked like a tumor in the pictures we have of the laparoscopy, too. I didn't look pregnant. I certainly felt pregnant, and as I've said before I really enjoyed each day of the pregnancy as much as I could. But to someone who didn't know what was happening, I was "barely pregnant." Not that I really and truly care what people who aren't in the know think, but my mind is working in mysterious ways. I feel like saying "I lost my baby" is somehow unfair to people who have lost further along in a pregnancy that actually yielded a sac, or a heartbeat, or a recognizable fetus. Like somehow even though I have gone through hell over and over and over again to get to this point, this squished tumor pregnancy, I don't deserve to say I lost my baby. But I did. I lost my baby and it hurts more than I thought I could. Not that I can really feel all that much thanks to the painkillers and the physical pain I am going through. 
• I am realizing that I am vain. I hate that I am bloated and that I look fat. That somehow, I have to start school and look presentable and I fear that I have no pants that will fit me. I have skirts, and thankfully am not involved in vocational training in a commercial kitchen this year and so can actually have bare legs and open toed shoes. But I feel like to wear any of my pants I will have to use my belly band. And that makes me horribly sad, because if you wear a belly band and it is visible (as it inevitably becomes in the course of sitting down and standing up), people will assume you are pregnant. And I am wearing it because I'm not anymore but I don't fit in my pants yet because of the bloat from the IVF cycle, the pregnancy, and its subsequent surgical removal. But I will be wearing the band because I refuse to go up a size again. I need to get back to a size ago where my BMI was within a somewhat normal range (not that I believe in the BMI, because in order to truly fit into the middle of my "normal" range I need to be a size 6, and me at a size 6 is actually comical what with my giant ta-tas). And the reason for wanting to get back to a healthier size is totally vain as well. I want to be a cute pregnant lady. And I fear if I keep all of this infertility weight on me I will not be as cute as I could be. I could just be lumpy for a long time until I truly pop. And I am hoping, because I am short-waisted, that I will pop early and look super pregnant super early. I want people to say, "Wow, you are really big!" because I EARNED that big beautiful baby belly. I want to look as pregnant as possible for as long as possible. And I want to wear maternity clothes that accentuate my belly, not clothes that hide it. I am not behind the "baby on board" crap with arrows pointing at your tummy, but you'd better believe I will be enhancing my bump to no end. Assuming I'm not too fat to have a cute bump thanks to all this infertility crap.
• I feel like this whole experience has taken from me (albeit temporarily) everything that makes me who I am. We went to a gardening center today (one of my first forays into the outside world since my world collapsed on itself), and I was walking, zombie-like, through the plants. I've been wanting to get some sedum that has dark foliage and isn't quite as broccoli-like as regular sedum, and then I found another beautiful blue plant that the bumblebees were in love with. I need to fill our side yard with perennials at some point. But that point is not now, because I can't handle the physical act of planting. So I looked at the plants and imagined where they would go in my beds, and then started to cry because I can't do any of it. I'm sure that by the time it is pumpkin-and-mums-time I will be able to set out the fall display without pain, but it depressed me that I couldn't plant cheap off-season perennials in the ground now and enjoy them for September and then all next year. Cooking is another thing that makes me me, and last night I was finally able to get in the kitchen and make something fun--goat cheese polenta stuffed poblanos with a cinnamon tomato sauce. Yummy, and it took me an hour, and we ate at 10:00, but finally a small sliver of my pre-tragedy self was restored. It's not that Bryce is not a good cook, it just is not his thing and he doesn't enjoy it the way I do. I think food tastes different when the person making it actually loves the act of preparing it. And Bryce was happy to be returned to doing something else during dinner preparation, and being left with nothing but dishes. It was definitely a small return to normalcy. Reading is another thing-- I am still struggling with reading while on the pain meds. I am slowly taking myself off them, because I need to drive and I need to be able to work (things you simply cannot do on Percoset as a responsible person), but until that happens I am not able to read the way I love to. Immersed completely in a story and devouring it like fine chocolate--slow and melty in my brain. I miss that part of me. Compulsively preparing for work is another thing that makes me me. It is killing me that I have been completely unable to focus on work prep while coping with my physical pain and eventually coming to grips with the emotional reality of everything that's happened in the past two horrible weeks. Stacks of work sit untouched next to my bed. It has to be a priority for the next three days straight. Because I do not "wing it." I exhaustively research and organize and want to feel like an expert on day one. And that is just not going to happen. And I have to somehow be ok with it. Maybe part of my inability to get deep into my work prep is because if I go back to work, I have to pretend everything is fine and I am a fully functional human, not a shell going through the motions because of a personal devastation. But maybe if I pretend enough I will actually become a functional person faster. 
• I need to start looking forward to our next try, but I don't know how to handle it. We have two beautiful frozen embryos waiting for us to be physically and emotionally ready to transfer them into my apparently very healthy uterus. Thankfully the financial aspect is tremendously less daunting with a frozen cycle--it's at least 1/5 the cost of a fresh. We have been told over and over that our frozens are exceptional, very good quality, excellently expanded blasts. We have a good chance with them. But I am terrified to have hope that this is our time, this time. I can't help feeling like we just keep getting the shit end of the stick. Yes, yes, I know, I should be positive. Really, how positive would YOU be if you failed IVFs twice in a row, then finally got pregnant but with a low HCG so you had to relive your test day every two or three days, only to discover that your precious pregnancy was literally lost, stuck in the wrong place, causing you pain and endangering your life if not addressed immediately, and you had to have emergent surgery to remove both your pregnancy and the offending tube, then suffer complications due to an asthma attack and coughing directly after coming out of anesthesia? How positive would you be, REALLY? If you can still be chipper and full of hope and not feel like you seriously built your house on an old cemetery after all that, then kudos to you. You are a far better person than I am. Because I am scared to even find out what else can go wrong. Once it's uttered, it feels like an almost certainty that it will happen to us. And I just don't understand it. I need my doctor to write a paper on how rare a twin pregnancy is with a two-blast transfer, just so that it can be a possibility for us. I realize this is crazypants logic, but I think you can see how I got there. 

So that's it for now, all the junk in my head that I can release for the time being. I thank everyone who reads this for bearing with my pain and incoherent ramblings while I sort out how to at least categorize all this, if not make sense of it.