Getting there

First and foremeost, heartfelt thanks to everyone who has passed on their kind thoughts following news of the miscarriage. I really do appreciate it.

And thank you to Zinnia for pointing me in the direction of Boob Pencil. So much of Clare's experince mirrors mine, and there's a comfort in reading about someone else going through, and ultimately coming out of the other side of, the same load of shit. "21 Reasons Why a Miscarriage is A Bit Rubbish" made me laugh, a lot, at a time when I didn't think I could manange to twitch the corners of my mouth into any semblance of jollity. The following excerpts were especially welcome [& I hope it's ok to reproduce this here?]:

(11) It goes on forever. I think most people assume (I certainly did) that you collapse in a big pile of blood for a few hours, and then it's all over. But no. It takes days, sometimes weeks, for it all to come out. And modern scanning techniques mean you often know (as we did) it's going to happen before it actually happens. So first you get the waiting. Then the bleeding. Then more waiting. More scans. More bleeding. And so on. It's rather tiresome.
(12) You don't get anything proper to grieve over, so you feel you have to gloss over it all the time. Unfortunately, your hormones don't agree.
(14) Babies and pregnancies and all related matters are fucking everywhere. You will not escape.
(15) It's a very common complaint. It doesn't even make you special. At least if I'd given birth to a half-horse-half-hippopotamous it would have given us something to talk about.
(19) People's faces. Ally said last week he didn't want to go into work cos he couldn't be arsed arranging his face. People are either too sympathetic or not sympathetic enough. I don't want people to act like nothing's happened, but I don't want them fawning all over me either. Sorry folks, you're best avoiding me for a bit. I don't have an Etiquette Guide for this one, and I'll change my mind from one moment to the next.
(20) Sick leave. The pain and the bleeding come and go. The tears come and go. Sometimes I'm fine. I feel crap for taking all this time off work. But I really don't want to go to work. But I still feel guilty.

Number 20 is especially pertinent to me. I took all of last week off work. Coming back on Monday was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not because I dreaded the sympathetic head tilt and wan smile that I’ve seen a thousand a day since it happened (see number 19 above), but because it marked the end of it all. Back to normality.
When I was pregnant I loved having this tiny little secret that I carried wth me everywhere. And even following the miscarriage everything in my life was still all about the baby and the pregnancy, albeit the loss thereof. I enjoyed (as far as possible, given the circumstances) my week of coccooned protection from reality. Things were still going on outside my four walls, but they didn’t touch me. I was safe, removed from it all. It was all still "special”, somehow. But starting the week on Monday was like someone had hit rewind, and I’d gone back in time two months, to the days before the wee one existed at all. And I hated that part of it, the sense of erasure. Things aren’t special anymore. My breasts don’t hurt, I don’t feel sick, I’m not exhausted. And I can’t talk to him in my head anymore, which I miss, because I used to do that all of the time.


But on the plus side I have thrown myself into reading (such an escapist pursuit) and writing (ditto), and I’ve been running again. In fact, on saturday I went running in my gorgeous local park. I was really enjoying the catharsis, until I bumped (not quite literally, but almost) into the lady from the hospital who peerformed my scans and had the unenviable job of telling me that there was no heartbeat. I ran away pretty fast, not least in case she told me off for runing 8 days aftr a miscarriage, but it shook me up quite considerably.

But I'm much much better now. I'll never be totally over it, but I'm getting as close to "over it" as I can.