Anxiety

Busted has a post up about anxiety. We talk a lot about the pain of grief, about the cost, the emotion, and the sensation of loss. Those aspects of it are all easy to understand. They have a clear source. Just about everyone can comprehend those emotions (even if some people have a hard time realizing how long we continue to feel them). But I think the anxiety surprises everyone. I know it caught me unprepared and when I try to explain it to people outside of a select few, they get this look on their face like they think maybe I’ve slipped a gear or two.

I didn’t notice it until we went back to work outside of the house. From the day I went into the hospital until seven days after Zoë died, I hadn’t been alone for more than an hour or two. Shannon worked from home, I couldn’t drive. But then, Shannon went back to work in the office and I stayed home for one more week. He walked out the door that first morning to start his 35 mile drive to work and I felt my heart leap up into my throat. It seemed like someone was squeezing my chest so I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly I could imagine a hundred different scenarios that could happen and, as you can probably guess, none of them included his stopping at the coffee place, driving uneventfully to work while listening to NPR, and arriving safe and sound, which is how his drive usually goes.

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Allison is the contributing editor for Neonatal Death. She writes daily at Our Own Creation where she chronicles not only the life and death of her twins, Lennox and Zoe, but her world beyond.

April 23, 2008

Dear Sweet Zoë and Lennox,

Today is your official due date. It’s the date your daddy and I circled on all of our calendars even though we knew the likelihood of your putting in an appearance well in advance of today. It still gave us a concrete goal to look forward to. I liked the idea that you might have your birthday in the same week as your grandma and your aunt. That it would be spring.

Then, when you arrived so much earlier, that date circled on the calendar took on a whole new meaning. It became the date when you would most likely be able to finally come home. It would be the time we’d say goodbye to the nurses and the doctors of the NICU and leave all those bright lights and loud noises behind to come home and be all together. April 23 seemed so far away in January. I drew a bigger, brighter circle around the day, I erased the countdown of weeks left in my pregnancy and added in a countdown of weeks until Lennox and Zoë came home. Those calendars are packed away now, in a box full of other memories and reminders of hopes and dreams.

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Allison is the contributing editor for Neonatal Death. She writes daily at Our Own Creation where she chronicles not only the life and death of her twins, Lennox and Zoe, but her world beyond.

Facing Fear

I had to go back to the hospital today. I had my appointment for my post partum check up, which we scheduled the day I was discharged. We had the option between making it with the doctor who’d treated me at the hospital or my regular ob/gyn. At the time, we assumed we’d be at the hospital twice a day to visit the NICU, so I might as well have my check-up there as well.

Notice how life never works out that smoothly.

This wasn’t my first return visit after Zoë’s death, but it was my first by myself.

I started feeling queasy on the highway as the exit got closer. I felt my pulse start to race as I turned into the parking deck. The tears started to well up in the elevator and I kept my eyes glued to the floor while I sat in the waiting room.

I managed to get through the questions the nurse asked, including the “and the baby?” But the nurse practitioner, who took care of my problems with my incision broke me. She hadn’t heard the news and I had seen her just the day before Zoë died and told her how wonderfully she was doing.

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Allison is the contributing editor for Neonatal Death. She writes daily at Our Own Creation where she chronicles not only the life and death of her twins, Lennox and Zoe, but her world beyond.

Cheated

This post probably isn’t fit for anyone to read. It’s something I’m trying to work through, emotionally and intellectually. It feels ugly to me and I’m more than a little ashamed of it. If I don’t get it written down, though, I’ll just keep dwelling on it. Sure, I don’t have to publish it, but my goal here has always been blatant ugly honesty. Just don’t read it, ok?

I feel cheated out of too many things. I was cheated by infertility, denied the ability to conceive a child without major medical intervention. I’ve written about this before and I’d more or less managed to come to terms with my feelings about it. Until now. Now, it’s one more tic mark in the column of things I feel cheated out of.

I was cheated out of the pregnancy experience. Yes, there were a few incredible moments that I’ll never forget, but they’ll always be shadowed by the vomiting and the illness. The second trimester, when things were supposed to improve will forever be lost in the fear of the gallbladder surgery and then the membrane rupture. I had one good week in all of that…one week of feeling good. One week of no vomiting, of a healthy, pregnant appetite. One week.

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Allison is the contributing editor for Neonatal Death. She writes daily at Our Own Creation where she chronicles not only the life and death of her twins, Lennox and Zoe, but her world beyond.

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Allison's Story

Allison is the contributing editor for Neonatal Death. She writes daily at Our Own Creation where she chronicles not only the life and death of her twins, Lennox and Zoe, but her world beyond.

I'm supposed to be telling you who I am and that's not an easy question. I suppose I'll start with the basic labels. I was born in 1971. I grew up in Raleigh,NC, went to college in Asheville, moved to Fort Worth, TX in 1998 and have been here since (with the exception of a 12-month detour to Boston). I've been married to Shannon for just shy of nine years.

I'm a voracious reader. I love to cook and garden. I'm kinda granola-hippy-crunchy. I like to play video games. I've been a nanny, a landscaper, a waitress, the customer service manager for an internet dating site, and a researcher. I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy. And my newest label? I'm a mother. I just don't have my children anymore.

We decided to try to start our family in 2005. We knew it wouldn't be easy. I was diagnosed with PCOS and we moved through the stages of infertility treatment; clomid, IUI, IVF. On August 16, 2007, I learned that our frozen embryo transfer had worked and I was pregnant. Shortly after that, we found out it was twins. At 17 weeks, I had surgery to remove my gall bladder. At 22 weeks, I was admitted to the hospital with a premature preterm ruptured membrane and put on bed rest. At 24 weeks, at 2:35am January 3, 2008, I delivered Lennox and Zoe.

Lennox's membrane was the one that had ruptured and every moment of the almost three days he lived was a struggle for him. He died in my arms on January 5, 2008 from a collapsed lung. Zoe was a fighter. The night of January 23, they moved her from the most critical care room in the NICU to the long term room. On January 24th, her heart stopped beating. We don't know the cause. The autopsy showed no reason for it. Her official cause of death is extreme prematurity.

Since then, I have struggled with being a mother with no children, and with trying to figure out where we go from here. Grief has become a constant in my life now. Normal has a new definition for us. We are just taking our first scary, tentative steps towards trying to get pregnant again.

I started blogging when we started going to the fertility clinic. Originally, the blog was to keep my family in the loop since we live so far apart and they wanted to know what was going on. As we got further into it, I started writing to share what we experienced and learned. I may be shy, but I'm not easily embarrassed and I figured if I was busy googling to try to learn more about the process, so were others. I hoped my willingness to write about all that we were going through might help someone else. It also meant that I got to hear, "I know what you mean! The same thing happened to me." and I realized how much comfort there was in knowing that someone out there was going through the same thing. Blogging has been a way for me to connect, to vent, to remain sane in the face of overwhelming emotions.