Mind Games

(I saw two lines a few weeks ago...)

...

Those two lines have lost all the energetic, happy meaning they used to hold.  That they still hold for other people jubilation and relief and happy tears is something I am aware of, but it's a concept so foreign to me that I can't even really imagine it anymore.  It's an out of focus picture, a blurry image I can't make sharp in my mind.  I know that I was that girl once, who took pictures with the positive test, who told her husband excitedly when he came home from work, who skipped around the house because I was going to have a baby!  

But.

You all know that girl is long gone.  Oh well, I say.  I wouldn't want to be that girl again anyway (okay maybe just a little bit).  Since then, I have learned so much, grown as a person, met incredible people, done amazing things... I'm more me now.  Does that make sense?

(Gah, I'm very tangential right now. Sorry.)

It's an interesting mind game that is played when one who has a history of RPL and has also successfully carried a healthy baby to term learns she is pregnant again.  

Hmmm, she thinks.  I've done this once... this worked once before... why not now? Why not again?  Maybe this one could just slip in under the radar all sly-like, mmkay?  Pretty please?

Oh that Hope, it is a feisty, determined little devil.  It never gives up, even when the odds are not in its favor.  Even when - hello, Ella - this is your, what are we up to now?  FIFTH?  Pregnancy?  Yes, yes that's right.  Good luck with that one (ah, there's the other player in this mind game, loudly filling my thoughts with doubt, efficiently tainting any hope that was (is?) there).

Ah well.  Each player has their say, and yet all we can do is trudge on.  And so we do.  Appointments are made, prescriptions are filled, and once again, The Business of Pregnancy-After-Loss commences.  No one is particularly excited (why would they be?) - except your mother and very best friends who hold on to that hope for dear life when you simply cannot allow yourself to go there.  My husband and I don't talk about it, we avoid discussions about baby names, nursery decor, May 2013 in general.

The unspoken words between us become so loud they are deafening.  It builds and builds, that silence, those unspoken words, to the point that I must say something to someone.  It bubbles out - once in a while - some little whisper about May (what a lovely time it would be to have a baby... to feel the warmth of the sunshine as I walk to the park with a baby nursing in a sling, holding Eliza's hand...).  I do it just so I can remember that this is happening.  That this is real.  At least for now.  And then I bottle it back up, praying that I can just save it for later, when we know.  When we know we have a chance.  October 1st is that day.  The day when it will be or it will not be.

...

October 1st arrives and it is a stunningly beautiful and warm fall day - Minnesota at its finest, truly.  It is a day full of friends and family, of rest, of play and of course some work, and I am reminded how lucky I am.  How grateful I am for what I have.  I hold on to this.  I carry this in my mind as I drive, hands shaking and stomach in knots (is that nausea or nerves?), to the clinic to meet my husband.  I arrive, step into the cold ultrasound room and see the exam table, the stirrups, the ultrasound machine and immediately have a mental conniption. "Nope. Nononononononono I can't do this.  Why am I here?  They are going to see nothing, why am I even here? I'm gonna be that crazy lady with the psychotic pregnancy aren't I?  Yep that's me, folks, right here!".  Hope, once so cocky, runs screaming from my mind and that other player celebrates its win.  Right then and there I am convinced that I will leave crushed and broken and barren (I can be very dramatic sometimes, it's true).  My husband tries to calm me, but really, he's equally as unsure and scared.  We both just want to be anywhere else at that moment.  So we quietly hold hands and steel ourselves for the next 60 seconds.

And then, a dark round circle appears on the screen.  It's empty, Ella, it's empty, I think.  At first it is, and then a split second later it isn't.  It isn't.  Holy @*&! it isn't.

He points. "Perfect cardiac activity, right there."

...yolk sac... embryo... perfect... normal... 

My breath returns to normal and I am free.