This morning I had to make sure I was awake by 10am. This is the first time I've had to be awake for anything in a long time. The reason was because my cardiologist was going to call me to go over my last ECHO results. I haven't gotten to it yet in my pregnancy story, but I had an ECHO done on my own heart when I was 19 weeks pregnant. I had a cardiology appointment booked for the week after Aidan died which I never attended where I would have got the results, so my cardiologist very nicely agreed to call me at home today in order to go over them.
In short, my heart is its usual totally abnormal, but totally normal for me, self. What does that mean? Basically at 19 weeks pregnant my heart was actually coping with the extra load of pregnancy pretty well. It didn't show signs of starting to fail. Yeah! So the years and months prior to becoming pregnant that I worried about my heart causing my baby harm were all for naught. My baby likely died because my uterus, placenta and amniotic fluid gave out and not my heart! Super.
All sarcasm aside, this is good news and I was happy to get it. It's really the first good news regarding my pregnancy I've heard in a long time. What it means is that some day, hopefully, with any luck, I'll be able to get pregnant again (please please please), and my heart will be able to get me and my baby to the end of a healthy pregnancy. Now all we have to do is get the rest of my body on board...yes I'm talking to you uterus.
After this happy news, I moped around for awhile...then started cleaning my bathroom, which progressed to me sweeping our upstairs hallway ceilings for dust bunnies. (I'm not sure I've ever actually done this...so it was quite productive). This progressed to sweeping away the cobwebs in Aidan's room...or what would have been Aidan's room. This led me to look around at this almost empty room and wonder "what the heck are we going to do with it?"
This is one of the practical considerations when you lose a family member...what do you do with their room? Since 'the bad news' at 17 weeks, we haven't really even gone in what would have been "the baby's room". Brian had almost completely emptied it out in the weeks prior to that and we had hoped to start buying baby stuff when I got to 'viability' at 24 weeks. Since that never happened, we are now at a loss of what to do with this empty room. Do we paint it and put a chair and bookcases in it and call it 'the library' or 'the reading room'? Do I give in to Brian's desire for a treadmill and make it a workout room? Do we just put back the junk that was in there in the first place? Do we leave it empty and hope that in another few months we'll be pregnant again and begin to fill it with another baby's stuff? It's just another heartache to decide. Right now I keep thinking of it as Aidan's room. Perhaps when I stop thinking about it that way, I'll be able to see it as something else.
It makes me really glad we didn't buy any baby stuff yet. What would we have done with it? Would I have been able to use "Aidan's things" for another baby? Would we have had to return things to the store...that would have been awkward and depressing. I'm glad we have a few things...but I'm glad that the things we had he actually USED...a blanket and the small clothes I got from an online preemie store. If we'd had a stroller or a crib just waiting to be used at home, I'm not sure I could stand looking at those representations of the hope we'd had and lost.
this is so hard. we started collecting baby hand-me-downs of every kind from friends before we ever succeeded in getting pregnant. nursery furniture, car seats, bath tubs, clothing, toys, etc. they were all shoved into our guest room. one evening my husband and i moved everything from in there to our office b/c his parents were coming to visit in a few weeks. the plan was that after their visit we were getting rid of the guest room furniture to start putting together a nursery.
ReplyDeletebut the very next day my water broke and my son died. after the in-laws' visit we went into the office, which we couldn't leave the way it was - we use this room all the time. so we re-packed a ton of the baby stuff. some went to the shed, some to the attic. the rest went back in to the guest room. the guest room is still a guest room. i hate having this stuff here. we intend to use it for a future child but until we actually have that living, breathing child in our home i will be anxious every time i see all this stuff.