The Aftermath - part three

For part one of Starbaby's lifestory click here

This has taken awhile to publish, and there is so much I have left out. I often wish I could go back to those first few weeks. I was allowed to be a complete mess and think of nothing outside of myself and my grief. It was horrific and glorious at the same time, and I felt the closest to him that I ever have.

The week after leaving the hospital was a blur. We slept and lived curled up together on a single mattress on our living room floor. Aside from going to the funeral home to make arrangements, we didn’t leave the house. We watched a lot of trashy tv. If something was funny, I laughed. When I was sad, I cried. The nights were the worst. I would howl and cry for hours until I passed out. I started blogging again the day I got home from the hospital and I spent many, many hours devouring other DBM stories and blogs.

He was buried on a very hot day. The night before we went and had Laurie do matching tattoos of his name on our feet. I was excited to see him again the day of the burial. I couldn’t wait to hold him again. But when I saw him, I knew I couldn’t. He had been gone too long and he was too fragile. He was smaller than I remembered. We buried him silently with his music playing. I thought I would say something, but I couldn’t find the words. We only had our immediate family there. Once again, I found myself oddly calm and in control of myself. I barely cried.

We held his memorial a few weeks later. I didn’t think many people would come. But it was standing room only. We had a little party for him, and handed out his birth announcements. I made a speech. I can barely read it even now. There were many tears shed that day.

We “celebrated” every month for nearly a year. My blog and my friends on forums kept me going. I had no idea that stillbirth were so common.

We received the autopsy reports six weeks later. All my fears, all my late night terrors were laid to rest that day. I was overwhelmed by the thought that there may have been something we could do to save him. But the results were what I had always expected, and what I had found myself hoping for. Our baby boy had full trisomy 18 with a double aneuploidy. He never would have survived. I felt immense relief knowing that his fate was decided at his very conception. There was never anything we could do to change the outcome. The only thing I wish I could change is that I wish I had known some things that I know now. I wish I had known I could call a photographer in to get lovely photos of him. We have so few, and they are not great. I wish I had thought to bring in his blanket, his things into the hospital.

My greatest regret is not something that I ever could have changed though. I wish that we had known. At the time, we were so relieved that we didn’t know that there was something wrong. But now I wish we had known. I wish we could have induced while he was alive. I wish I could have seen his little eyes open. I wish my family and friends could have met him, even once. That’s the only thing I really wish I could change.

Losing my boy is quite obviously the most traumatic thing that I have endured. But it is not a horrible thing to me. Do not feel sorry for me that it happened. He is still my child and this is his story. It is who he is and I wouldn’t change it.

Little one, little one
Where have you gone?
Your going has darkened
The brightest dawn
Why did you leave us
So soon, so soon?
Where can we look for you?
Over the moon?
On butterflies' wings
In the heart of a rose?
Who knows,
who knows
Where a little one goes?
Where I have gone,
I am not so small
My soul is as wide
As the world is tall.
Wherever you look,
You will find me there~
In the heart of a rose,
In the heart of a prayer.
On butterflies' wings,
On wings of my own,
To you, I'm gone,
But I'm never alone~
I'm over the moon.
I am home.

How do they do it?

Today my eldest has a pupil free day.
I should be taking this opportunity to get a LOT done, as he keeps the little tacker completely occupied. Instead I have spent the entire morning in bed, reading blogs and being generally lazy.

I have in my reader some amazing blogs of amazing mothers who seem to get everything achieved every day. They write about the 10 loads of laundry they did, the four course meal they whipped up with organic produce and truffle oil, their amazing outings with their kids, and the 400 craft projects they did while their perfect children coloured next to them.

They simultaneously inspire me to be better, make me jealous as all get out, and cause me to throw my hands in the air and exclaim "who does that?"

Let me give you a little insight into how my day generally goes:
6am - Rocket and Lou get up, have breakfast.
7am - Lou goes to work
7:30am - My alarm goes off. I snooze it.
7:45am - My alarm goes off. I snooze it.
8am - I start thinking "dammit I should really get up now". My alarm goes off. I snooze it.
8:15am - I roll out of bed and get dressed.
8:20am - I wake Manny up (he is so not a morning person...takes after me!) and get him dressed. Ok so in honesty sometimes on work days he goes to daycare in his jammies.
8:30am - I am yelling at Rocket that it's time to go get in the car we have to leave NOW!
8:45am - drop the big kid at school.

This is where it varies:

Work days - drive the 45 minutes to work, drop off Manny and proceed to be bored to tears for roughly 8 hours. Then pick up the Manny, drive home, collapse on the couch under a blanket and observe while Manny runs around shrieking and Rocket rolls around on the floor or wrestles the baby.

Home days - after dropping Rocket at school there is generally a mess of doctors appointments, dentist appointments, meetings with tradesmen and errands to be run. Little man is dragged from one point to another. When we get home he is exhausted and has a good long nap. I take this opportunity to try and get the house into some semblance of order - a task I never seem to complete.
Before I know it it's 2:30pm and I have to go and get Rocket from school. His best friend tends to come over a lot, and when he is here I get nothing done. My time is occupied by trying to keep Manny away from the big kids who, while they think he is cute, do not appreciate the way he manages to simultaneously get in their way and destroy whatever it is they are doing.
BFF goes home at about 5:30, (or on the days where Rocket is at his house, I go pick him up about 5:30, get caught up in conversation and don't leave till after 6)
Lou gets home at about 5:30ish and we have about 3 minutes to chat before it is time for dinner/baths/showers/bedtime routine/the adults collapsing in front of the heater watching tv/bed.

I just can't see at what point I could ever get anything else done? Perhaps I just need to try harder.

And perhaps on these days off I should be prepared with fun things to do and oh, yes, not lie in bed until 10:30! Ok time to get up now...

His little face - part two

Meet my tiny baby boy, destined to be a Star xxx


click here for part one of his lifestory
click here for part three of his lifestory

His Story - part one

On the evening of the 25^th February 2008 I was almost 37 weeks pregnant. I was desperate for my baby to be born as I was feeling huge, it was the middle of summer and I just wanted him out. My first was born at 37 weeks and was a big baby (8lb 9oz). I just knew this one wasn’t as big, but I had hoped that I could somehow be induced early, the way I was with Rocket. I tried to convince the Dr at my last visit to at least re-scan me to see if he was big, like his brother, but in the back of my mind I kept flashing to the 18 and 20 wk ultrasounds where he measured small, really small. At the time I was desperately worried but all the doctors kept telling me it was nothing. I panicked over the fact that he had a choroid plexus cyst (CPC) a marker for Trisomy 18, but all the doctors reassured me, “your baby is fine!”

That day at the appointment, the doctor listened to his heartbeat and said “your baby is PERFECTLY healthy, and HAPPY in there” and told me no induction, no ultrasound. Basically told me that I was an idiot. I was still worried. I had hoped using the reason of “I was induced with a big baby before” would prompt at least an ultrasound to reassure me that the baby was ok. I had a bad feeling. It was only a few days until my fears were confirmed in the most horrific way.

But back to the evening of 25^th February.

I went to bed late (not unusual for me, especially when pregnant). I suddenly realised I hadn’t felt him move that day. I tried to think of when the last time I felt him move was. I couldn’t for the life of me remember him moving in days. This wasn’t that unusual, as I had an anterior placenta and was told that I wouldn’t feel his movements the way I did with my first baby. Now I know the real reason.

I lay in bed for an hour poking, prodding, begging him to move. I could push him from one side of my belly to the other. I could feel his weight shift easily without a single movement. I felt sick. But I decided not to go into the hospital again, as I would have to take the whole family in there in the middle of the night, and I had already done that once this pregnancy, and spent the whole night in there for no reason. As soon as they put the trace on there he bounced around madly. So I stayed in bed, convinced myself he was ok, even though I really knew he wasn’t.

Somehow I slept.

In the morning I headed into the hospital. I didn’t tell Lou any of my concerns as she was up at 5am for work and I was still asleep. I dropped Rocket at school and drove into the hospital for what I thought would be a quick check.

They took me back straight away.

What happened next was the stuff of nightmares. The midwife tried and tried to find a heartbeat with the Doppler. She got a senior midwife to try. I watched the clock on the wall as minutes passed without them finding a heartbeat. I tried to be calm but I started to panic.

2 minutes in and I was scared. 5 minutes in and I know my own heart rate went up. 10 minutes passed and I knew something was drastically wrong. They called a doctor down to perform an ultrasound.

He started scanning and was talking as he did it. “There is your baby’s head. There is a lot of amniotic fluid here” I was thinking “Oh thank goodness he must be ok. Why else would he be talking about these other things?”

Then the words that will always haunt me. He looked me in the eyes and said “I’m sorry, it does appear your baby’s heart has stopped”.

I panic just writing out those words. At the time, I think my heart stopped too. I screamed, I hyperventilated, I lost complete focus on reality. The nurses were telling me to listen to the doctor…LISTEN TO THE DOCTOR. I could see no point in listening to the doctor, my baby was dead. My baby was DEAD.

I jumped out of the bed and screamed “I have to call my partner, I have to call my LOU”. Of course my phone had no reception. They led me out to a phone in the reception area and I called her sobbing. All I could say was “they can’t find a heartbeat”. She could barely understand me. I now know she ran out to her boss in a panic and he drove her to the hospital himself, the only sounds in the car both of them swearing every time they hit a red light or a car in front went too slow. When she went back to work, every time the phone rang in the factory for months she would almost hyperventilate with fear of another terrible call from me.

By the time she got there I had already been upstairs for a full ultrasound, which I kept my arm over my face for. I did not want to see him there on the screen, lying still, not moving. It was all too much for me to bear.

I don’t remember getting back to the assessment rooms but somehow we did. We sat there in shock. I started apologising over and over and saying “how does this happen? How does this happen? I don’t understand…How does a heart just stop?”

I started crying for the first time. I wailed and sobbed while she held me and cried her quiet tears.

The doctor came back in and told us that he was very small. He guessed about 4.5lb but he was far smaller at only 3lb 7oz. There were a full range of problems showing including pleural effusions, malformed kidneys etc. There was a whole discussion on “why didn’t we see this coming”. We agreed to an autopsy. I wanted a c-section. No way did I want to go through labour and birth for a baby who was already gone. The doctor firmly told me no, that would just make things harder. I thought he was mental but I agreed to the induction. We had to choose whether to be admitted right away, or come back later to be induced. I chose to go home and have a few hours, then come back that night.

We walked out in shock. It was my mother’s birthday. I was supposed to meet her in an hour for lunch. Making that call was hard, but I steeled my emotions and called to say the baby had died and I wouldn’t make it to her lunch. We had a very strained relationship at that point because she reacted very badly to news of the pregnancy and had shown no interest in him. I think this still haunts her.

We lay around for a while in shock. Crying, asking why. We decided it was for the best that we didn’t know about all his problems sooner. We never had to make any tough decisions and he passed away (we hope) peacefully, in the warmest, safest place possible. He was never alone for a second. We were strangely calm and rational in between the fits of sobbing.

THE HOSPITAL

Arriving at the hospital was surreal. Everyone else there was getting ready to meet their baby and start their lives together. We wanted to scream at every person that passed us “Our baby died! Our baby DIED” but we sat there quietly and waited to be called up. They put us in a special room at the end of the labour ward, as far as possible from the happy families. Our lovely midwife came in and apologised in advance if we had to hear any new babies cry.

Everything that night sort of blurs together now. There are a lot of random details I remember that aren’t that pertinent now. I remember one of the doctors coming in to talk about doing an amnio (they decided not to, to wait for the autopsy). I remember he was so emotional, his voice broke and he had tears in his eyes. We were stoic and unemotional whenever someone was in the room, sobbing hysterically when we were alone.

The IV saga started (as it always does) with two nurses, an anaesthetist and then the head of anaesthetics “having a go” at it.

Our midwife brought us some literature about stillbirth. I tried to read some but quickly became hysterical. I put them aside. I never really cried when our midwife was in the room, she kept saying we were so brave. I didn’t see it as brave, we knew we had to get through it, and becoming a mess wouldn’t help anything. I became a master at controlling my emotions (ha! As if)

I barely slept. Lou never has any trouble sleeping. In the morning we stared out the window. What else was there to do? We saw two friends running in the park across the road. Lou commented that our friends are always close by, even when they don’t realise it.

I had a patient controlled anaesthesia where I could self administer painkillers every few minutes. I had contractions every three minutes but they were easily bearable. At around 2pm they started increasing in intensity. I asked for more painkillers, then changed my mind and asked for an epidural.

From there it all went like lightning. I was in so much pain that I was begging for relief, but there was no time for anything. They were yelling for an anaesthetist to at least give me a shot of something. Finally he did, and less than a minute later my tiny boy was born. My established labour was a grand total of eleven minutes. And yes I am proud that this is recorded in my patient notes.

I was so afraid after he was born, of what he would look like. They had prepared us for the worst, and I asked anxiously “Does he look okay?” Our dear midwife Olivia said happily “oh he’s perfect”. And he was.

I got to see him and hold him straight away and he took my breath away. I couldn’t understand how he could be dead, as he just looked so…alive. He just looked like he was sleeping. He didn't have a single mark on him, they think he must have only just passed away when I came in. I believe it was around 2am the night before, when I first was struck with the though "what if he has died?" Olivia wrapped him up and took him to bathe him and weigh him while Lou watched. He was a grand 3lb 7 oz at 37 weeks.

We loved holding him. Olivia commented “You two are like different people when this little boy is in the room” and it was true. He lit up our lives that day. We had him the whole day, I don’t really remember what we did, or what we said. We just WERE. We talked and laughed and everything was ok right in that moment because he was there with us. Olivia took him overnight. In the morning I asked for him back. She had washed his blanket and his gown overnight and he smelled lovely.

We had him baptised and blessed by the Catholic Father in the hospital. He asked all the angels to watch over him and his mothers. We left late that day, going home to our empty house alone, and empty handed.

For Part Two click here.
For Part Three click here.

money money money, must be funny, in a rich man's world

I think I am getting better.
I'm Tonka Tuff.
When I put Manny down for a nap just now, instead of crawling into bed, I am sitting upstairs. This is progress, I've been lazy for months now feeling sorry for myself.


I had a big freak out the other day about money (seems to happen after every failure, where I look at the tens of thousands of dollars we have poured into this process). It's amazing, ALL out friends earn SO much more than us. I didn't realise until we had a conversation about it with some of them a few months ago. How did that happen? I thought we were pretty average, but then all our friends (who all have different jobs) all seem to be earning DOUBLE what we are. Huh?

This makes me do two things:
1) think "what the freaking heck are they wasting all their money on?" I think we live really nicely, but I guess we are very frugal.
2) start thinking "damn it we need new jobs! I need to work full time!"

Of course after my freak out and jealousy fit, I settled down and remembered that I chose to not have the lucrative career, I chose not to work full time in order to run my home. Do I wish Lou earnt more? Of course I do. Mostly because she should be earning more, her work is underpaying her. But she loves her job, and the industry is suffering a bit at the moment so she doesn't want to rock the boat by saying "Oi! Gimme money" ;)

We don't need much. I enjoy thrift shopping and saving money. I don't believe my children need new toys every month. We have everything we need and then some. Well, we are also in a lot of debt right now but once the house sells we will be debt free (aside from our current mortgage)

Its a lot like fertility. I am okay with waiting. I am okay that I am not pregnant right now (no, actually I am. I believe in a higher power having a plan for me and if this is the plan, then I accept it). But if I look at other people who are pregnant, other people who don't have trouble conceiving and never miscarry or lose babies, then I become deadly jealous and want it NOW.

I am fine with us not having much money. We get by and have a lovely life. But when I look at people I know who have so much more money coming in, I get jealous and think of everything I could do and achieve if I had that kind of money! And then I want MORE!

So my lesson learnt today is: be happy with what you have. And for heaven's sake...stop comparing your life to others! Because really, my life is pretty amazing. My partner is everything I ever asked for and then some, and my kids are priceless. We have a lovely (unrenovated, but still) house full of lovely things. I have so much to be thankful for.

This is what gets me through grief, and envy, and all those nasty emotions that come with it.

Break In

Whyyy?
Once again I had a lovely entry planned all about our new investment property and how excited I am that we are discovering things like beautiful timber floors under the disgusting carpet...how I think it'll come up so nicely and be a great investment.....

then on my way into work this morning I get a phone call "Hi it's Constable *** from the **** police station is this Suzy ***?"
Me (frantically thinking what I did to break the law recently) "Uh yes?"
Him "Are you the current owner of ** *** Rd, ***?"
Me (sinking feeling) "Yes"
Him "There's been a break-in overnight".

Oh FFS. Apparently some asshole broke in (or tried to break in, we aren't certain yet) through a front window. Apparently there is also a "significant amount of blood" all over the front porch.

EW.

So some little fucker clearly saw us working there all day yesterday and thought there might be something of value there (powertools maybe??). They can't tell if anything was taken from inside because apparently all the doors are still locked.

Well sucks to be you, little would-be-thief. My wife is paranoid and left nothing there except some cheap painting equipment. I hope you feel really stupid right now.

(I also really hope you are not currently bleeding to death all over my nice timber floors).

What do I hope for?

So I was goin to come on and post about the GOOD things in my life right now (for there are many, not the least of which is we sold our second renovation property in just THREE DAYS!!!! Yay!!!) But my life being the rollercoaster it is, will not allow me to come on and have a happy post.

There is something seriously hinky going on with my vision.

I am severely myopic and progressive myopic. My current prescription is around -9.5 with astigmatism in both eyes. So my sight is pretty damn bad. I've been wearing contact lenses for about 13 years.

Just a few weeks ago, my left eye started going blurry every now and then. I thought my lens was moving around, but it just kept happening, which was unusual. One night when it went blurry again, I took out my lenses and put my glasses on. The left eye was still blurry. Perplexed, I took my glasses off. And got the shock of my life when I could SEE THE TV with my left eye, with no glasses. (For those of you lucky people with 20/20 vision, a person with -9.5 is almost blind, I cannot see my own hand in front of me with no glasses.)

Needless to say, I was shocked. I went into my optometrist, but of course my vision was back to normal when he saw me. He'd never heard of anything like it happening before, so he sent me to an eye surgeon/physician. The eye surgeon also said he'd never heard of it happening, but perhaps it was diabetes. He wants me to have blood tests.

I went back to my optician today. My left eye is almost permanently "off". His only other theory is brain tumor pressing on the optic nerve. He did the field vision tests, they were all clear and normal (90% of the time, this will show if there is a brain tumour.)

Now he wants me to go to a neuro-opthamologist, and I assume I will need another CT scan.

This clearly is problematic as if this pregnancy is by some miracle actually viable, I will have to put it at risk by having CT scans. On that note, I had another blood test this morning, and will soon know whether I need to even worry about the effects of CT scans.

I don't know what to hope for - a good result (yay! pregnant) will mean serious concern and putting it at risk by having scans. A bad result (boo, another miscarriage) means I can have as many scans, tests, treatment that I need.

What do I hope for?