Halfway

Another week has passed. Thursday would have marked 20 weeks of pregnancy. When I first found out I was pregnant I counted through all the weeks and thought it was really neat that St. Patty's day was the halfway point. I find myself thinking a lot that "I should be pregnant right now," "I should be this many weeks," or "I should be feeling him kick right now." Instead of feeling those kicks, whenever I bend over and my back muscles stretch, I feel the spot where they inserted the epidural. It hurts, physically and emotionally. A constant reminder.

On Thursday I went back to the hospital to get a checkup. I was fine that day (well.. I didn't break down yet) until I got to the waiting room. Oh. My. God. I walked in and saw baby pictures plastered over every wall and pregnant women in every seat. I sat as far away from them as possible, then a girl and her parents came in and sat across from me. They kept commenting about the pictures and then they were talking about her (she's having twins) and her friends who are all pregnant. I had to move away from them because I couldn't stop myself from crying. So now I'm sitting in the corner playing sudoku on my phone, hiding behind my hair, sniffling like crazy (still not over my cold) and crying. They honestly need to make a separate waiting room for women who have miscarried.

Finally a nurse calls my name and I go in to one of the exam rooms. She asks me how I am. Seriously? Apparently I look more put together than I feel. I told her I could be better and eventually she realized what was going on (or she looked at my chart). She gave me some kleenex since I was still crying and I calmed down enough for her to take my blood pressure. She talked to me a little about things and then left so I could get undressed, and shortly later Dr. Moses came in. Fantastic.

In case you didn't read 72 Hours, Dr. Moses is very straightforward and very blunt. The nurse mentioned that I might see a different doctor that day, someone more motherly. I definitely needed someone motherly, but no luck. Dr. Moses said they got the pathology report back for the testing they did on my placenta. An infection is what caused my water to break and my son to eventually die. I had a really bad infection. "Severe acute chorioamnionitis" is what was written on the report. You can google that if you want, but it's basically an infection of the fetal membranes and amniotic fluid.  The fact that the infection was so bad means that I had it for a while. Weeks..months.. who knows. The chorioamnionitis was caused by the bacterial vaginosis that Dr. Mullins discovered my first night at the ER.  According to Dr. Moses (and some websites I've googled), even if we had found the infection earlier and even if we test and find I have the infection again, the best (or only?) thing to do is induce labor, then give me some antibiotics. So there's nothing we could have done to save Aidan. Having Dr. Moses tell me all of this was like getting punched repeatedly in the stomach. It actually feels worse now as I write it all down.

There are more details I could give, as Dr. Moses talked a lot about antibiotics and how bacteria become resistant, thus leading to his "there's nothing we could do" approach, but I'll leave it at that. I do wonder about other options, though. We had no way of catching this with Aidan, but we can at least test for this in the future. I don't have to go back to Dr. Moses - he's through the hospital and not my OBGYN - so perhaps the OBGYN will give me antibiotics during my pregnancy, just to prevent this from happening again. I've only read a little about this option so far, but other women have done it and they have healthy children. I guess we'll see what happens next time.