Post-miscarriage rock bottom

I starting writing these posts as a way of trying to process my thoughts and get through the worst of times with minimum damage. As I sit here now, three years after we started trying to get pregnant a second time, I wonder if it’s working or not. You see, this week I hit rock bottom (again).

It’s a familiar place for me, having terminated a pregnancy at 16 weeks for medical reasons, having lost five other babies including failed IVF (most recently and inexplicably to a virus), and having multiple surgeries including for Asherman’s Syndrome. All this has been in the last three years.

Rock bottom happened to me four nights ago. I was feeling better. The cloud of bewilderment and sadness from losing our little guy to a virus was starting to lift. I was at the movies and when the lights came up I saw a text. My heart sunk as I read beyond the first line. My sister-in-law had some news and she had trouble deciding when to tell us. I knew even before I read on. She was pregnant. I didn’t really read the rest of the message. My heart instantly clenched, as did my whole body and the tears flowed. I couldn’t breathe. I started to shake and tried to tell my friends what was wrong. But I was having an out of body experience. I couldn’t talk.

My friends held my arm and walked me to my car. I would never have found my way back to the car park without them. I realised at the car they were probably concerned I would crash the car and we’d end up in a fiery ball of flames and front page news, so I forced myself to calm down. I asked my friend to talk about herself. It helped.

How did this news cause such a reaction from me? I was well used to hearing of pregnancies, and within the family. I think there were two things. The first is obvious, I had miscarried 10 days earlier. The grief was so raw and I hadn’t dealt with it properly (nor had time to do so) beyond tears, reflection and a building sense of anger.

The second is that I always believed we would get pregnant well before my sister-in-law. She hadn’t known her partner for long, about a year and a half, and I had expected that we would first at least get the warning shot of an engagement before a pregnancy announcement.

The shock was immense and it destroyed in seconds whatever tenuous structure I had built for myself to lean upon and get through this. It has forced open a wound that I am not sure how to sew back together. I feel a permanent pain in my chest, a squeezed heart. My head is fuzzy.

In hindsight though, I knew that children were a priority for her. I love my sister-in-law heaps and she deserves every happiness, but I will find it hard seeing her pregnant. It’s shit that these things just impose themselves on you and make you a person you don’t really want to be. The positive about feeling like you’re at a real low point is that surely the the only way is up!