The Drought

4.25.17

“At this point, my hope is more so that this won’t be what my entire pregnancy is about.”

At 6 days of no significant blood loss, this drought had already become the largest since the chaos began, but again, I couldn’t allow myself to believe it was over. By this time, the mental battle had become real. I needed to believe something good.

I needed to believe our pregnancy wasn’t going to be defined by blood loss, by previa, by abruption, by chaos.

In my heart, I fully believed we were starting our family with this pregnancy, so that’s how we planned and projected. But in my mind, what toyed with me, slaloming in and out of my thoughts, was that we might not even have a baby at the end of this. To go through so much and end up with nothing seemed too unfair to be possible, yet I know it happens, and I knew I couldn’t write off that possibility just yet either.

But the baby was fine. The baby had been fine at each step so far. It was me who wasn’t – my body that had been fighting the pregnancy, refusing to be beautiful and glowing and all the nice words people use to describe a pregnant woman, and instead gushing blood, misplacing organs and growing cysts in the space meant for our baby.

I was pregnant with a trouper who was putting up with the overly unideal circumstances my far-from-trouper body was giving it. I was mentally and emotionally asking a baby to flourish in the slums that were my reproductive system.

I was losing my mind.

In the stats: 
Gestational Age: 18 weeks, 3 days
Days of blood: 13
Days of bedrest: 20
Doctor’s Appointments: 5
Ultrasounds: 2

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P.S. I selected the picture above mostly to show that I sat on towels everywhere, just in case. If that’s not humiliation, I don’t know what is.