Trigger warning: miscarriage, graphic descriptions. Please care for your own mental health and skip this post if you need to.
I haven’t been very active on my blog over the last few months and I honestly haven’t written anything (for myself) in even longer. This year, I decided to return to college to work on a degree in education. I have wanted to return to school for a long time to work on this and I decided enrolling would be my 30th birthday present to myself. I am still working as a copywriter for multiple businesses (writing their newsletters and social media posts) and of course, I have all of my regular responsibilities as well (being a mom). The experience going back to college has actually been really inspiring and a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I had to work through some imposter syndrome and I also felt really awkward returning to college at 30 when most of my peers are a decade (or more!) younger than me. But I’m glad that I am doing it. My life has been very busy but overall everything has been going well. Or at least, it was.
Then I found out that I was pregnant. It wasn’t a planned baby, but I was thrilled. We started making plans and I was coming to terms with not enrolling in the fall semester since the baby would be born during that semester. We made plans to upgrade our car to a minivan and I started going to doctor’s appointments. At this point, I was really focused on trying be as healthy as possible because my last pregnancy (over four years ago) was really challenging and I dealt with preeclampsia and a traumatic birth. It was because of that experience that we had decided not to have any more children, but I was determined to do what I could to avoid a bad outcome. On Easter, we announced the pregnancy to our friends and family during an Easter egg hunt by hiding clues in the eggs and the final egg revealed that we were expecting. We were so excited. Life had other plans.
I started hemorrhaging. Initially, the ultrasound showed that it was a subchorionic hemorrhage and they didn’t think it would harm the baby. I tried to stay hopeful. Then after three days, the bleeding increased so dramatically that I had to be rushed to the ER in the middle of the night. It was there that we discovered that our baby no longer had a heartbeat and it appeared smaller than it should have been. I was miscarrying.
Of course, we were shocked and so devastated. Our loss came so quickly after our announcement to our family and to my other children. It felt like whiplash. It still does. I don’t have a clear reason why the miscarriage happened. It doesn’t appear to be related to my previous traumatic birth experience.
It’s been hard to adjust to life “as it was” before the pregnancy. All the plans that we had made were slowly reversing. I decided I would stay in school and we don’t have any plans to try again for another baby. As it was, the pregnancy was likely going to be high risk. And while we were prepared to deal with it when we were put into that position, I wouldn’t willingly walk into that again.
As I’m writing this, I’m still on bed rest and trying to recover. Even though I have been going through this experience, the world around me still spins. I have work commitments that can’t be pushed off and assignments for school that are due tomorrow.
I opened my email this morning and found so many authors that have reached out to me for author interviews, as well as some authors that I interviewed months ago that I haven’t posted their interviews yet. During my bed rest, I’ve been reading a lot and I do plan to write book reviews for those books as well. But I’m taking it slow. I apologize to anyone that has been waiting on me to get back to them. I’m going to ease back into my normal schedule and during summer break, you can expect a lot more posts from me.
Pouring into work and school does provide some relief from the emotional stress, but I am trying to ease into things. I hope that you will be patient with me as I deal with my own grief and I apologize to any readers who have been waiting for the third book in my Paige Parker Mysteries series. Writing is usually a positive outlet for me, but the story that I have been writing is also emotionally charged, and I realized I had to step away from it while I deal with my own heartbreak. Thankfully, our friends and family have been extremely supportive and we’ve received flowers, meals, and we’ve even had volunteers to clean my house and mow my lawn. Things that I would normally be able to do but physically I’m restricted from doing right now. Even though my loss was early (about 8 weeks, although the baby measured smaller), the hemorrhage has taken a toll. I don’t regret announcing my pregnancy early, even though there was a loss, because I truly needed the support during this challenging time and I think suffering alone would have been much worse.
So, that is my life update. Originally, this post was going to be a happy one. I was excited to be able to start this new journey and expand our family. But life doesn’t always go how we expect. Please send positive thoughts or prayers my way as I begin to heal, physically and emotionally. And to all of you that have gone through a similar experience, my heart goes out to you and I hope that you find healing.
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