The beginning - part one

I suck at blogging. I figured I'd get that out there right up front. If you are going to follow this blog, don't be afraid to let me know that I'm a slacker. I think that I'll have a lot to say for a while, though.

On February 25, 2009, I lost my baby. I haven't really written about how it happened, so I thought I'd start there. We were at a college basketball game about two hours away on Tuesday night (2/24). My mom had come up to stay with M so we didn't have to take him on the trip. We got home about 11:30 and I went right to bed. I was tired, but Rob wasn't. He stayed up for a bit. I don't remember him coming to bed, although he said he came up around 12:30am.

At around 1:30, I woke up. I wasn't in any pain but for some reason, I felt like I'd wet the bed. I thought it must be just a dream, since I hadn't wet the bed since I was probably 8. I got up to go to the bathroom nonetheless. For some reason, I knew something was wrong. I got to the toilet and all hell broke loose. I lost clots and clots and clots. My pajama bottoms were blood soaked. I called for Rob and warned him about what he was going to see when he came in. He was great. I was a mess. I kept saying "I lost our baby, I lost our baby."

It all happened very quickly. At some point, I tried to get up. I don't remember what happened after that. Rob says that I stood up, and fell into the wall in between the toilet and sink vanity. I tripped over the scale that was there and he caught me and put me on the floor. After passing out, I remember coming to lying on the cold floor saying I was going to throw up. Rob flushed the toilet and started to try to get me up. I remember very clearly the toilet flushing. That's the moment when I thought that my baby had been flushed. I was so heartbroken. After I sat up, Rob ran to our guest room to get my mom. I was now conscious. Rob picked me up and brought me back to the toilet.

I remember him getting a towel and cleaning the floor where I was lying. There was a small pool of blood. At this point, I went into supergirl mode. Somehow I started ordering mom and Rob around. I told Rob to get me some underwear. And, I told my mother to get a pad out from under the sink. As she did that, I rattled off the number to my doctor's to Rob. (How I remembered it at 1:45am, I'll never know.) I sent Rob into M's room to find one of the leftover newborn diapers. (When I hemorrhaged after having him, I wore one of his diapers to the hospital because no pad could contain what was coming out of me. I was afraid this was going to be it again.) I put the diaper on top of the pad. Rob got me some sweats and a bra. The doctor called back almost right away. He gave me the option of waiting it out at home or going to the hospital. I told him that we were going in. Rob and I had already talked about this. No way were we going to take our chances since I nearly had a hysterectomy the last time I'd bled like this. One of them put my shoes on for me and by the time we got on the road, I was fully awake and talking to Rob.

It took about 20 minutes to get to the hospital. We left the house at 2:12 and got there at 2:35am. I wasn't in any pain, which was welcome. I knew that my emotional pain was going to be far worse than any physical pain I could experience anyway. The hospital doesn't actually have an emergency room. It's a triage. I went in and Rob registered me while I went behind the desk and the nurse asked me all sorts of questions. Little did I know, I'd be answering the same questions over and over for the next few hours.

I'll have to finish the hospital stuff later. This is harder to write than I thought it would be.