If only...

I'm sad tonight. It's Friday. If this were a normal Friday maybe my husband and I would be out at the movies or out for dinner. Maybe we'd be hanging with friends having fun. Maybe if things were normal we'd be planning to do some 'advance' baby looking tomorrow. Not with the intent to buy anything of course, but just, you know, for fun.

But things aren't normal. Things are shit.

I've been trying to be good and remain laying down as much as possible, but I continue to leak fluid and mucous, so I'm definitely not counting on re-sealing anytime soon. We've listened on the doppler a few times, so we know the baby's heart beat is still it's normal 150-160s range. However, it makes me sick thinking about how just over a week ago, I was starting to feel some pretty obvious baby flutters pretty frequently...and now I feel a lot less. Just like with Aidan. Baby has no room, baby cannot move. I'm afraid all the time that I'm crushing him/her.

One thing that has made me really angry the last few days was that I do not know Acorn' sex. At our 'placenta' ultrasound at 16 weeks, we specifically asked the tech if she could tell us if it was a boy or a girl. She looked for about 5 seconds and then said "Um...might be too early to say, cord is kind of in the way...and I'm not really comfortable saying". AND NOW WE LIKELY WON'T KNOW UNTIL THE BABY IS BORN. If she had just taken a few more seconds, or if we had pushed a little harder, I might be able to better prepare for what might (will?) happen. I want to name the baby instead of just referring to him/her as Acorn. I want to be able to buy a gender specific blanket to wrap him or her in that belongs just to us. I want to have something ready with his or her name on it, but I can't. If I could go back and do one thing, it would be to continue taking my progesterone longer (not that it would have helped anything, but just in case), and I would have pushed to have them tell me the sex. When you might lose your baby, the sex is not just an 'insignificant detail'. It matters very much.

I'm just angry and sad and disappointed that we are here again. No one knows what to say, again. And I don't have any answers. I almost feel embarrassed that this has occurred again. Sort of like if you fail your drivers test. Once, everyone understands, but any more than that and people start looking at you funny. Like "gee, what the hell is wrong with you? How could you screw up this natural, normal thing, not only once, but TWICE?" My brother was funny when he joked that the only way things could have been worse at this point was if, when my membranes ruptured, I had been in Japan, when the earthquake hit, and I could have been on a tour of their Nuclear Power plants. Seriously.

I just wanted a normal, average pregnancy. I would take the morning sickness, the tiredness, the added pounds and back pain. I know I'm a heart patient and things might have got a little more dicey to towards the end, but in the couple weeks before I ruptured I was physically feeling pretty good. The doctors thought so too. I was up, I was active. I was feeling healthy and not so tired. Now I feel sore and achy from lying down, and I'm worried every day that I'll get an infection, or bleed, or that the baby's heart will stop. And those are just my short term worries. Long term ones are worse.

I wake up every morning wishing I was someone else, somewhere else. It takes all the strength I have just to open my eyes. I feel all alone and there is no one coming to the rescue.

I can no longer remember a time when I was not yearning for something I could not have.