Lifeslurper’s Tipping Point

‘Hold on to me!’ He said with some urgency.

So I did. More tightly than I could remember doing in any of the previous five years. Then I wept some more, thus continuing the pattern of virtually every day for the last four weeks.

I am at a loss to really explain to Wobbles what is going on. I feel fearful. I find it hard to imagine better times. I cannot seem to control my emotions. I am more anxious than I can ever recall.

There is worse still. I think I have reached that place I never thought I would. What does a breakdown look like, I wonder. Why can’t I just keep it together?

After all these years – and I include those ones long before ART entered the fray – the ones that can only be remembered, and so are best forgotten, for the severe depression that became my closest associate.

Wobbles reassures me constantly. Telling me not to worry about anything else than just finding a way through each day. It feels like an unfair burden on him. Like usual, he is not complaining.

Would it be too much if I said nothing is going well at the moment?

Is it unexpected that I find myself looking into territories of despair previously unchartered?

Can there really be any point to anything anymore if nothing makes sense?

What if there is worse to come? Worse than those years of major depression already past?

Why does the thing that upsets and hurts me the most have little to do with lost babies or a future without children?

These weeks since Black Friday have been long. Longer than any of the longest days in the years of ART before this event.

Sometime since, I managed to stop feeling complete shock over our news. I was distracted by physical pain and uncertainty. Eventually I let go of my feelings of abandonment and frustration over the clinic. Two weeks after Black Friday, I was sent for another ultrasound. The clinic making a late decision that perhaps some things needed checking on. Their complete lack of guidelines in what to expect was annoying. The weekly ‘We’ll just have to wait and see’ conversation became maddening.

Despite that fleeting moment as ‘dildo’ cam made entry of thinking ‘maybe it has all been one horrible mistake’ I was shown to have a clear uterus. I was not retaining any of the ‘products’ of pregnancy. I began to wonder if Baby Wobbles had ever existed at all. For if he ever was, he had not left any evidence behind.

After my umpteenth blood test, I stopped making those regular pilgrimages to the clinic’s pathology outpost. I despised having to hand in slips with the tell-tale “falling HCG level” diagnosis. While I did not chose to stop going, after my last result of a HCG reading of 11, I found it hard to leave the house. Each day I planned to leave early in the morning for that last test, but somehow never made it. After a while, it just seemed pointless. Perhaps I was avoiding final confirmation of could no longer be denied?

There were practical considerations pressing on me. The essay I was racing to finish on Black Friday became a stark reminder of the ‘before’ and ‘after.’ I was a few hundred words from having a completed essay that day. Once the news came, I downed tools and it has been very hard to pick them back up again. Then I felt I was working for our future. Now I feel, once again, completely adrift and overwhelmed.

For more than a year our usual lives, including our IVF efforts, have been dominated by the increasingly malevolent external forces of Other Stuff. I will go back and continue write those password protected blog posts, if only for my own sanity. For now events are still very raw.

I had foolishly consoled myself that our second pregnancy would be our reward for enduring this. That it would keep me sane during the worst that could happen. For a while, there had been a belief that these things would end soon. I realise now I had clung onto that suggestion for dear life. It was not to be. We were barely a week post-loss when it all kicked off again, and took a turn down some even nastier hate-filled streets. None of it makes sense, as the psychologist I began seeing soon after this all began reminds me often. I should avoid trying to apply my own concepts of decency and fairness to a situation that involves none of those elements. He decided early that these events had caused a traumatic stress disorder in me, probably as it echoed dramatic events from my early life. I tend to agree with him. Why else would I wait until now to fall apart and lose the ability to cope with the things over which I have no control?

As Other Stuff shifted course in ways never predicted, I feel despair knowing that these things could go on for much much longer. Over twelve months worth has almost been my undoing. I do not see myself surviving another extended period of the same. Worse is the thought it will get nastier. It is like some vile self-fulfilling prophecy. Every time I have uttered the words: ‘Well, at least it cannot get any worse than this!’ it does. One year was my imaginary cut-off point, and as it turned out, we were denied the right to exit the situation. Really damned if you do. Still damned even if you don’t.

Wobbles as usual is rock-solid. I’ve been unable to make new appointments with my semi-retired psychologist, who can be difficult to track down. I see it as his job to pick up a bit of the slack, so Wobbles does not need to be constantly on the receiving end of my despair. My history of physical medical conditions that relate to my emotional state have reappeared just to ensure the misery is complete. The main issue now is my great areas of weeping, odorous, itchy and bleeding areas of eczema and psoriasis. On its own, it can be enough to drive me to distraction. Heaped on top of what has now become standard daily life, it is just one more aggravation.

Somewhere in these weeks I again sensed myself having that same horrible thought I had about the same time last year; maybe it is best our baby did not survive….what would he have been born into? The rest of the time, I wonder if indeed we are being punished for being the ‘bad’ people events are suggesting we are? Why we even had to officially document our loss as part of this mess. This fact feels like the ultimate indignity. Other Stuff has previously humiliated us over our quest to have a family of our own. It is not a nice feeling at all.

I vaguely wonder about IVF sometimes. My usual conclusion being that even if there was the money and personal strength required to undertake an 11^th cycle, conditions would be far from ideal to conceive. Sure, people like to say even third world women living in famine can conceive. I just do not imagine surviving the guilt I would feel about a third loss. I have seen enough to know I would always blame my own stress over Other Stuff for things not continuing. I have enough issues over Other Stuff to not want to completely link our own world of IVF and trying to conceive with this ugliness.

If we were to enter into a deliberate (as opposed to all those accidental ones) ART hiatus of twelve or so months, what would be the consequences? We would be even more older than we were before. Our hopes will be that little bit more faded. I will be even more tired than I am now. Will Other Stuff be over and if so, would I have recovered sufficiently?

Why are answers becoming so hard to find?

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