Sunday, April 6, 2008

Feeling the Void

(I hope this is okay, because my response would have taken up too much room on your blog...)

Dear Antigone,

First, I'm glad to see you seeing a new doctor. If I can put my two cents in, any decent doctor would want you to come back in (maybe after a month) to discuss how you're feeling on them, adjust the dose and/or change 'script. And ask and answer questions about how you're feeling on them. Maybe your GP? Maybe a shrink? To answer your question, my gp changed my script to Le.xap.ro because in the time I had been taking the Z (a couple years) I had problems with increased dosage, and I've been experiencing increased anxiety & trouble sleeping.

I hope that you come to find some peace with the sequence of events. I echo everyone else, in saying any loving dog owner would have done the same thing. And what Tash said, too.

In my case, for the first month or so after i lost the boys, I was *sure* that I had been leaking, and either ignored it, or didn't know it. I've come to something resembling peace with the idea that if I was I didn't know it and I did the best that I could. (The peri said there was no evidence of long-term leaking, too.) But this idea caused me -- and I can feel my face flush as I type this -- no end of misery and pain. Panic and uncontrollable sobbing. Pain worse than anything I experienced at the hospital. And there's no morphine for this kind of pain. Maybe your lack of affect is your mind's way of protecting you right now? Just like we both have spotty or little memory of the night we lost our boys. Some things are just too horrible to feel, to remember.

I don't know what's changed in how I deal with this feeling of responsibility, maybe time, maybe some denial. Maybe it was just too much to face, especially without direct confirmation. I think what Tash said was probably true, that this was likely to have happened anyway. As horrible as it is to think.

I wonder the same things. I have a hypercoagulation disorder, as well as the protein S deficiency. I missed doses here and there, I couldn't take the baby aspirin because it made me throw up. Was that spotting at 18 weeks that came back around 19 weeks just spotting, or was there fluid it? Was Joshua already gone by then? Was the second heartbeat just the echo of Jacob's?

I still have guilt and questions. It kills me not to know. It hurts even more to know it might have been something I did or didn't do. As I commented, as so many have tried to tell me, I still try to remind myself that *I did the best I could at the time.*

And so did you.

Sincerely,
S

3 comments:

Amy said...

STE,
Wonderful post to Antigone! You all (CDE, you, Antigone, hell all of us) did the best we could at the time. Now we have to do the best we can at this time.

Thinking of you always!

Tash said...

I think this guilt just follows us, no matter the result. In my case, I know I would've wound up with a dead child, no matter what, no matter if they had found something -- but my guilt likes in making her be here and suffer for six days, when perhaps we missed something that would've lessened her pain much earlier. We'll never know, so it's on to acceptance.

Antigone said...

Thank you.

The numbness has got to be selfprotection. As it starts to peel away I get unbearably sharp pangs of grief.