Another thing.

[rivka]

I was already feeling fragile this evening before I discovered that someone had hacked Respectful of Otters.

Michael and I took the hospital L&D tour this evening. We were just there on Saturday afternoon for Alex's tour, but I guess that I was focused singlemindedly enough on her experience, or the surrounding details were different enough, that it didn't hit me the wrong way.

Tonight it did.

We were in a group of six or so glowing beaming hopeful expectant couples. A childbirth educator led us onto the L&D floor. Just across the hall from the nurses' station was the little registration room. I glanced in as we walked by, just for a second, and there was a woman sitting in the patient's chair, crying. Hand up to her face. Nonswollen belly.

This time last year I thought I was eleven weeks pregnant. I had just had my first midwife visit, at which everything looked great. I had told Alex that I was pregnant, and the two of us were looking at pictures in pregnancy magazines together. Two weeks afterward I was sitting hunched over my nonswollen belly in that same registration room, crying, having discovered that what I thought was a baby was just a bloody mess of misdirected cells. Getting ready for emergency surgery.

Everything brought it back. The brief glimpse of the crying woman. Standing at the window of an L&D room looking out at the gorgeous 16th-story view of the city by night. The childbirth educator mentioning the two operating rooms on the floor and the 24-hour anesthesiologist. Asking her about triage, did we have to go through triage, realizing only in retrospect that the reason the idea filled me with such dread was that I'd spent a good long time in triage before my D&C. Remembering how I had felt hearing the heartbeat of a laboring woman's live baby on the monitor, on the other side of the curtain, before I got my headphones on.

My due date is a week to ten days after the anniversary date of my D&C. I don't know if I will be thinking these thoughts, having these memories, when I go to the hospital for the birth. Maybe I'll be too focused on labor, too focused on my imminent baby. Maybe it will help that I've already freaked myself out now with the vivid memories that are apparently still locked on to that place. Maybe it will help to be prepared next time, because I swear that for some reason it never occurred to me that it would be hard to go back to L&D, because apparently it's not like I'm a psychologist or a reasonably insightful person or anything.

Maybe I should discuss this with my midwife and doula, but it's hard to think of what to ask for that would be helpful.

Comments

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I think this is a good idea.