It was mid September now. My wife is about 8 weeks along and life is carrying on in a normal way so far. She’s still working her normal schedule and our pregnancy is still a secret to most people.
I was working my normal 9 to 5 shift and she usually got done with work around 6 pm. That means I’m home ahead of her on most days and would get something out for dinner and try to start cooking so it would be ready about the time she got home. I have no memory of what I made for dinner that night. She got home that evening and rushed straight to the bathroom. I saw the look of urgency mixed with panic in her face as she came through the door. My first thought was “SHIT SHIT SHIT, please don’t let that face be what I think it is”. I sat quietly cursing my brain for thinking that way. Let me get up and go keep working on dinner.
She came out of the bathroom and went back to the car with towels. She came back and said she started bleeding heavily on her way home from work and had passed what she thought was a large mass of tissue(probably the fetus). I saw her face and wanted to bawl. I still get a tear just writing and thinking about this. I took a breath and hugged her close. I felt distraught for myself, for her for the unrealized potential we had lost.
We sat in silence with bursts of small talk that I’m guessing all couples say to one another in this situation. We can try again. It happened once, it will happen again. We both knew this is always a possibility. My heart was aching in a way I never knew and I fought hard to keep it together because I could not imagine what she was feeling in this moment. We thought, “this is it, lets just sit down and figure out a way to be normal again”. We seriously didn’t even want to bother going to the hospital thinking it would be a hamster wheel exercise, getting us nowhere and then telling us something we already knew. I also think neither of us wanted to hear it from someone else at that moment. It would become way too real.
We did get ourselves up and make our way to the hospital. We needed to make sure that she was ok and get past this feeling. We trudged into the ER that night with our heads down. After a few hours of waiting a doctor finally came to check on my wife. He performed his exam and said very few words. There seemed to be no expression on his face as he said he wanted to send her down to radiology for a sonogram. He left the room and my wife finally lost it. She sobbed into my shoulder and I hugged her as close as I could. This happens all the time and no one talks about it. How are you supposed to react?
It was another eternity in that room waiting for a sonogram tech to be called into the hospital as it was the middle of the night at that point. The hospital worker wheeled my wife down to radiology in a wheelchair with my limp soul plodding alongside. The sonogram tech was a lovely woman who showed no irritability for being called in for this in the middle of the night. My wife got up on the table and took my seat beside her. The tech turned on her machines and got ready to scan my wife’s belly for any lingering problems from the trauma. I grabbed my wife’s hand and gave it a little squeeze.
Whish, whoosh the wand traveled around her belly. We both look on not knowing what we are looking at but just hoping that she was ok. The tech moved the wand while keeping her eyes fixed on the screen. She makes a couple thinking sounds. The wand stops for a moment and the tech says, “this is a very early pregnancy, maybe 9 weeks”. My wife and I shared a moment of utter disbelief and then both burst into tears of joy, of relief, of unbridled happy surprise. “Everything looks good”, the tech says. Are you kidding me? We still have that potential?!?! We had gotten back something we had lost only hours ago. Our hearts were all over the place.
There are no words to describe the feelings when you think all is lost, when something you have wanted for so long is coming into reach and then is snatched away for no reason. Then to have that gift come back to you, gives your emotions a whiplash they are not built to withstand in such a short time. We were terrified, in despair, grief stricken, relieved, joyous and happy in the span of hours. I would never want to go through it again but found myself more appreciative and ready to take on the role of DAD.
P.S. This is the night we decided on a name if it was a boy. Still had not much of anything in the way of girls’ names.
Maybe next blog will be dad’s turn for some physical pain. 🙂