To refresh your memory: January, the first week of February, the second and third weeks of February, my first surgery, and my second surgery.
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I wake up sobbing. I'm not sad, and the pain is manageable, but I can't stop crying. I've come out of anesthesia vomiting uncontrollably before; crying uncontrollably is less of a pain. Until my recovery nurse mistakes the weird anesthesia tears for genuine sadness and tries to comfort me by telling me to think of my D&C as "tilling my lady garden" to get ready for the next pregnancy. I have encountered a lot of really excellent nurses in my time. She is not one of them. I don't even know what tilling is. I'm no farmer. I'm annoyed and then hours later, after I have time to Google, I am pissed right off.
I am not allowed to go home because first I can't pee and then when I finally do, my urine is brown. Not, like, dark yellowish brown. Cola brown. This earns me an overnight stay in the hospital. Unfortunately, there are no available beds so my gurney is parked in a hallway. I'm in a hallway on an actual ward, not in the emergency room, so it's not entirely chaotic but it's not restful. Especially as I'm parked across the hall from some dumbass who injured himself while committing a crime and has two police officers standing guard outside his (private) room. They have to stay awake through the night so they play games and watch videos on their phones and there is no sleep for anyone in my little corner of the hospital.
I see the on-call OB/GYN in the morning and she sounds like she isn't going to release me so I make eye contact and use my it's-taking-enormous-effort-to-keep-my-tone-steady voice and tell her that what I need is to rest and I cannot rest in the hospital hallway. She relents and I am released.
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I have follow up appointments with my GP and the OB/GYN who did my first D&C and my OB/GYN who is now back from maternity leave. I am told the first D&C revealed my pregnancy was a partial molar pregnancy. The mass that grew in my uterus, and continued to grow until the D&C, was incompatible with life. A genetic accident. Something that could not have been carried to term as cysts had already started to overtake it. Something that could not have been born alive due to catastrophic chromosomal abnormalities. Something that never had a heartbeat. Something that has to be thought of as "something" instead of "someone" or I will never get out of bed.
The second D&C was necessary due to my overachiever cervix that closed up too quickly and too tightly after the first D&C resulting in large blood clots that could not pass. The pain I felt following my first D&C was my uterus contracting trying to expel tissue and clots. The physical pain disappears after my second D&C.
My hCG level remains high. I have weekly blood tests to monitor my hCG and I am not deemed officially unpregnant until they drop below 5. It is a month after my surgeries before I am unpregnant. The end of March. I found out I was pregnant at the beginning of January. It is a long and difficult way to start 2015.
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Today is my due date. Spoiler alert: I am not cuddling a squishy newborn.
I am doing mostly okay. I ended up doing a lot of therapy in the months following my surgeries. I still have pockets of sadness but they are fleeting. I have wonderfully supportive family and friends who have carried me through the tough times and celebrated with me during the happy times. I have done some really awesome things in 2015 that I would not have had the chance to do if I'd been pregnant. It's taking a lot of effort to trust my body (seriously, body. You had one job.) but I'm working on it. I'm grateful that I get to be Grady's mama. I'm hopeful that one day we will add to our little family. And I'm happy to be where I am today.