Realities of Pregnancy: After Loss

I said I would come back to the NPR article about Pregnancy Loss. One of the reasons that people often don't reveal pregnancies until about the end of the first trimester, is because they don't want to have to "untell" people if things go badly.

Natural miscarriages are *extremely* common. My mother lost two pregnancies, and my grandmother lost several. Common enough that my high school science teacher expressed the opinion that human bodies prefer to have a "trial pregnancy" before completing the real deal.

When my mother suffered her first miscarriage, she was further traumatized to learn that the medical term for a natural miscarriage was "spontaneous abortion." She was morally opposed to abortion, and there it was in her medical records.

In the aftermath of my salpingectomy, and the removal of my ectopic pregnancy, I had a follow-up visit with the OB/GYN surgeon. I had to have additional blood tests, to ensure that the pregnancy hormone returned to normal levels, indicating that any remaining tissue was absorbed into my body or expelled from it.

It turns out that, if that did not happen properly, a Molar Pregancy could result - which could further progress into cancer.

So I had follow-up visits until my hormones returned to not-pregnant levels.

Music Monday: Wake Me Up when it's over

As often happens, this video takes a bit of discussion.

I ended on more of a dark note last week, but it's important to keep in mind that that story, that happened a decade ago. Much of the drama of it has faded, has passed... although there is still more to unpack.

That was the opening salvo of what I call "Hell, part 2," but my Global Leadership instructor would call another "Crucible." And so, to be leaders, we are called to identify the lessons we learned in those crucibles, and begin the process of articulating them, telling those stories, in ways that can help to teach others going through the process.

I don't know that I'm to that point yet, on this story. I don't know that I have it in a coherent, lessons-learned format.

 I do want to add a caution, from a post a year ago, about Inspiration Porn, because those "inspiring stories of coming through the crucible" can readily be just that.

So, building on that event ten years ago, my theme song for that November was "Wake me up when November ends." Wake me up when 2005 ends.

Because what do you do, after a grief like that?