G1P0

prologue:

a young supplicant approached the oracle at delphi, bare feet padding softly on the sun-warmed stone path that wound from the valley floor up the southern slope of the muses’ mountain to the temple of apollo.  two lines snaking up and down the mountain.  one a stream of arriving querents bearing gifts and seeking guidance, and the other an exodus of satisfied, thoughtful, angry, or heartbroken folk set to return whence they had come.

our supplicant ascended the stone stairs, sprig of laurel in hand, and in turn she entered the soft lamplight of the temple, approaching the priestess from whom she sought her answer and holding her laurel offering aloft.  the oracle sat, head-down and draped in robes of red.  though from the height of her dias she sat high above the supplicant, her draped face was shielded from view.

question.

silence.

no answer.

waiting.

the oracle sat unmoved, and so the supplicant departed.

the next year, the supplicant made the same journey to the oracle with her question.  the climb felt a little longer, less spring in the step, but still hopeful.  she brought a larger bouquet of laurel to make a more fitting offering to the oracle this time.  up the winding path, bare feet softly padding on the sun-warmed stone.  approaching the enrobed oracle, she once again voiced her question.

once again, she was met with silence.

the oracle sat unmoved, and so the supplicant departed.

for the next four years, the supplicant returned to the mountain.  joining the hopeful throngs who sought divine guidance from the pythian priestesses.   up, up the mountain, each time feeling a little longer, a little heavier, a little less hopeful.  sun-warmed stone path becoming hot, burning rock on tired feet.  each time with larger and larger offerings of laurel, until at last she drug boughs behind her up the steep mountain sides.

each time, she was met with silence.

each time, the oracle sat unmoved, and so the supplicant departed.

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a wild summer this year marked the beginning of a new kind of life for me.  one where i get crucial hormones from a little purple pill, and one where the inability of a measured daily amount of hormone to meet the fluctuant needs of an organic body have left me feeling great, feeling tired, hair falling out in handfuls, anomia-soaked memory fog thick as peanut butter, and everything in between.  most days i feel good.  some times are hard.  just a new normal.

because i didn’t wind up needing a sternotomy (thank effing christ), i wound up being able to go to sean and emma’s wedding in england, which was a lovely break after my re-entry into work-life post surgery.  i came home feeling rested and refreshed (into a massively expanded position at work, which a pal swears i manifested at stonehenge….mwahaha).  besides time off for recovery, it had been the first vacation i’d had since i don’t know when.  good heart medicine, laughing with old friends and new, drinking pimm’s and dancing to james taylor on a manor house lawn. plus, who doesn’t love looking out their over-pub inn bedroom window, across the plains of avalon to glastonbury tor?  magic.

i dove back into work in a new role in august upon my return, wrangling the jobs of two former employees somehow into one 32-hour week, and in general, i felt great.  productive.

and speaking of …productive… about 3 weeks after i got home, i had what we ladies like to refer to as monster period–one of those where you wonder–hey, ummm… is there such a thing as too much bleeding?  if you are a non-menstruating type person, i suppose there’s nothing for comparison, but ladies will know that i mean the kind of period where a sneeze can be certain doom and no mattress makes it out alive.

i wasn’t too worried about it, because thyroid changes are a tug on the web that connects all of the signals in your entire body.  i knew it was perfectly reasonable for this to be another new normal.  though i hoped it would even out on its own over time.  so after about 6 days of deluge, i was feeling more human and looking forward to not doing that for another month.

fast forward to a week later.  i’m feeling generally quite crappy and not at all like myself.  my boobs are killing me like wacky bad, i’m laid up on the sofa convalescing, and all of the sudden, i become really acutely aware of my uterus. not pain–just in the way that you maybe aren’t normally aware you have, say, tonsils, or a duodenum, or a second-to-last toe, because in general, they just feel like nondescript parts of your body.  suddenly i realized that i did indeed have a discretely separate pelvic organ. and then came cramps.

sore boobs, weird uterus, tired.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.  wait?  nah.  but wait!

so i blast out of my couch cocoon, look at the clock, and realize i have 15 minutes to get to walmart (which is 10 minutes away and the only thing even thinking about being open at this time of the evening in nowheresville maine).  the bra-less, crazy-hair drive to north conway is an adrenaline-drenched, number-crunch-fest.  period last week… couldn’t have ovulated yet, right?  what on earth is going on? am i nuts?  i can’t be pregnant, so can’t this wait until tomorrow?  (it must have been a manic nightmare to behold)

i get my test and book it home, resisting the urge to take it in the soon-to-be-closing walmart bathroom (because what a fecking despicable way to make an acquaintance, eh?)  couldn’t do that to a kid.  i zoom home, run to the bathroom, get almost-maybe-not-quite-enough pee into a cup and take the test.

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stephen and i have been some form of trying-to-get-pregnant ever since the wedding in 2009.  sometimes that looked like TRYINGtrying, and sometimes it just looked like not NOT trying.  i’ve written before about that experience, so i won’t belabor it here, but it was a roller coaster of

try

pregnant?

nope. period.

try

pregnant?

nope. period.

try

pregnant?

nope.  period.

month after month.  year after year.  it wears on you in an amazingly painful way.  in midwifery school, it wasn’t so bad, because i can’t possibly imagine having made it through with a baby, but that old sting started to come back as i was finished with school and moving on with things.  especially since we’d found our house.  the first time i brought a friend to this house before we moved in, i’d had a vision of fat babies rolling around in the tall grass of the yard.  perfect place for a family.

i’d gotten a whole lotta nil in terms of answers in our situation up to that point.  ultrasounds in india had suggested i had polycystic ovaries, but i have no other symptoms of PCOS and the treatment for it associated with fertility (taking glucophage) wouldn’t have been helpful and might actually have been hurtful because i’ve always had spot-on blood sugar.

i started to wonder if i’d been getting pregnant over and over and then just miscarrying early.  had i ever been pregnant?  was it even possible for us to get pregnant?  with very limited access to healthcare, especially “non-essential” services like fertility care, we’d really never know.

one of the scary pieces of post-thyroidectomy life for me was not knowing what effect, if any, it would have on my reproductive health.  would it make it worse?  better?

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i can’t tell you how many pregnancy tests i’ve taken.  how much money i’ve wasted on answers that would have come for free with a little more patience.  BOXES and BOXES of them.  pee on stick.  wait.  is that a line?  no?  how about now?  no.

so i peed on the stick.

and holy hells.

 

i yelled.  i stood in my kitchen and yelled with a smile on my face and tears in my eyes.  doing the math backwards, i figured that my last period (you know, the mondo bad one) had actually been a miscarriage at 5 weeks gestation.  i never thought i would be thrilled about a miscarriage, but if that’s what had happened, it meant finally and officially that we COULD get pregnant.

i went in to work the next day to have serum hcg testing for more info–a perk of working at a midwifery school.  (long story short, a pee test can only tell you whether or not your levels of a particular pregnancy hormone are up–it can’t tell you if your pregnancy is viable, if you’re about to miscarry, etc.  you need a series of blood tests to see that whole picture.  for more on that–take my lab class at birthwise!)  i also took a higher-tech pee test that estimates weeks gestation (which is dubious at best, but hey?)  my high tech test put me at “1-2 weeks” at a time when i should, if still pregnant, have been at least 3 (which we would actually call 5 because, oddly enough, we measure the 40 weeks of pregnancy from the first day of your last menstrual period and not from ovulation).

looking like a miscarriage.  the hormones of pregnancy will take around 2-3 weeks to clear from your system after a miscarriage, so that would explain the boobsplosion and pelvic heaviness after the fact.

my first blood test came back at 50–way too low–and my second, two days later, which should have been at least double the first, came back at 35.

i bled again a week later, and then all of my symptoms subsided.  i’m not sure if one was a period and one was a miscarriage–if they were both parts of a miscarriage that took a while to complete–who knows?

but i had confirmation at last, of ability at least.  and i had confirmation that i hadn’t indeed been getting pregnant over and over again and miscarrying early.  the somatic symptoms were new and very distinct.

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after a boost like that comes lots of planning.

“so hey, i guess now i can get pregnant since i had thyzilla removed—woohoo!!  which month should i shoot for?”

i didn’t announce what had happened because i knew it would be easier to dive back into renewed trying for a baby without a cacophony of well-meaning “are you pregnant yet?”s and “how about now?”s.  the experience was mine, and keeping it close felt right.  (it still does, so i challenge you to do some self-reflection if your reaction was “ugh, why didn’t she tell MEeeeee?”)  i hadn’t lost a known pregnancy–i’d realized after the fact that i had been pregnant.  my story, my choice ❤

but back to it.

over the next couple of months, we tried again to get pregnant.  i counted the experience of miscarriage processed and put away, and in general, i felt positively about everything.

for some reason, toward the end of december, the experience started to change quality in my heart and mind, but in a way that i really couldn’t put my finger on or verbalize.  i started dreaming repeatedly about a daughter with curly black hair, i started imagining the possibility that had chosen august to pass us by, and what was at first a happy occasion started to become very, deeply sad.

i hit a crisis point on new years eve.  i’d spent an amazing evening with people who i love very much.  we’d had good food, waaaaaay too much red wine, and the bonfire to end all bonfires.  stephen, shane, and i were the lone souls left up by the fire in the wee hours of the morning.  we were toasting by the massive heap of embers the fire had left, leaned back in our chairs, and staring at the stars.

shane asked me what i wanted for myself in the new year.

and all of the sudden, what felt like out of nowhere, all i could do was sob.

“two weeks was not enough time with her”  was all i could manage to say, though i don’t know if i said it loud enough to be heard.  stephen took my hand on the left and shane on the right and i cried and cried.

(my heart hurt the next day that i hadn’t been able to ask the question back)

after shane went to bed, stephen midwifed me through a whole-body-shaking, yelling, keening, cry on the ground out there in the woods unlike anything i’d ever experienced.  grief is often surprising, and i was truly surprised that i’d had all of that in me for a pregnancy i didn’t even know i’d had until it was gone.  in a way it was all about so much more than august–it was about the whole process over all those years.  so much grief.

and the other surprising thing about grief is that it isn’t, no matter how badly we want it to be, ever exorcised completely.  it isn’t purged–it just changes.  i didn’t get rid of it out there by the fire with my hands in the dirt and snow, body wracked with sobs, but i did change it.  i marked and honored an experience, and i had to dredge it up and look it in the face.

i faced some important truths, and i got rid of some old untruths.  and i’m not finished working it out.  my husband, ever my perfect caregiver, reminded me the other day when i was weepy, that i needed to write.  this is my therapy, so that’s what i’ve done.

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moving into my 35th year, i’m thankful for my experience in august, i’m thrilled to know i CAN get pregnant, and i’m hopeful for what the future holds.  i know when i catch my baby in the water here at the lee of the stone, when i see that face, i’ll say, “of course–you were the one i was waiting for.”  and until then, i wish patience and grace upon myself.

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epilogue:

in the seventh year, the supplicant returned one final time to the mountain.  her heart and body were tired.  the hot stone burned her slow feet as the younger and more nimble pilgrims passed her by on her way up the mountain.  she had no laurel–her own tree had died from too many offerings cut of its branches.  she stooped to pick white oleander from the side of the path–she had nothing else to offer.

the supplicant approached the oracle, laid the oleander on the red-robed lap, and laid her own body prostrate on the ground before the priestess.  she asked no question.  she only cried.

as her tears hit the floor, a great rumbling arose as in an earthquake.  the other supplicants and temple attendants fled in fear through the rising dust and chaotic light cast by lamps swinging wildly on their chains, but the heartbroken woman lay at the sybil’s feet unmoved.

at the end of the quake, the stone of the floor split with a CRACK, and a rift opened up.  the oracle’s throne sat astride the jagged crack, and the oleander tumbled down the softness of the red robe and into the black abyss beneath the stone.  a slow-swiring vapor began to rise from the rent temple floor and engulfed the sybil like slow white flame.  a GASP inward from under the red hood of the robe, and the sybil awoke and began to speak…