Wibbly Wobbly

The Doctor:  People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.

[spoiler] If you are sensitive to the subject of miscarriage, for your own sake, read no further.

Gotta dash. Things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard.

Time, for us, certainly feels all wibbly wobbly.  And, at the moment, it also feels particularly non-linear.  The month of August has really thrown us for a loop.  We got the happy news that we were expecting our first child!  We were quietly telling those closest to us, and then the news made it to Facebook via my mother in law.  Since the cat was out of the bag, we made the announcement ourselves, too:

And then, it was out in the universe.  I enrolled in school, taking the last three courses to finish up my Associate’s Degree.  It’s pretty exciting, I get to take Sociology – family dynamics in modern society, a History course – through the eyes of women, and a Business course – team building.  They’re all online, and just started on Monday.

We went house hunting.  The apartment is too small to raise a child in without drastically changing out lifestyle.  We would, we totally would, except if we didn’t have to, then why should we?

We found a beautiful home:

 

Our car even looks good parked in front of it 😉  It’s 3BR, 1BA, on half an acre with a 3-car garage–it’s 30’x30′ so it’s deep enough to actually fit 5 cars and 1 car-sized area of lofted storage.  The lot is wooded in the back, fenced in for a dog, and had 1/2 of it either decked or filled with wood chips so that the maintenance wouldn’t be outlandish either.

So everything was looking up, but then suddenly, they weren’t.

Fascinating race, the Weeping Angels. The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death. The rest of your life used up and blown away in the blink of an eye. You die in the past, and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had, all your stolen moments. They’re creatures of the abstract. They live off potential energy.

They live off of potential energy.

Potential.

We are grieving our lost potential at the moment.  On Tuesday, we had an ultrasound where we anticipated hearing the heartbeat of our little adipose.  We had been calling it an adipose, jokingly, because of the stage of development that we were at, the 9 week mark.  Her eyes are fully formed, but her eyelids are fused shut and won’t open until 27 weeks. She has tiny earlobes, and her mouth, nose, and nostrils are more distinct. …Like adipose.

Ahem.. Did I mention we’re fans of Dr. Who?

We went to the ultrasound, and the technician took all sorts of measurements.  The room was dimly lit so that we could see everything on the monitor.  But then the technician didn’t say congratulations or print out any pictures.  She looked a little concerned, and said that she had to go talk to the doctor, and said that she couldn’t find the heartbeat.  It turns out, that I was only measuring at 6 weeks, 5 days, instead of the 9 weeks that I was supposed to be at.  She excused herself, and I stood there, trying not to fall apart, and just looked at Jeff — “She’s going to talk to the doctor, so that means we shouldn’t panic yet, right?”

They moved us from that room, to another room.  Then they changed their minds and took me to another room to get my blood pressure checked.  Then they moved us to a third room.  Here, we waited and agonized, and tried to reason that maybe we were just wrong about how far along we were.  When the doctor came in, I could tell in his body language that he was not there with good news.

Me: “You’re going to use your happy voice, are you?”
Doc: “No.  No I’m not.  Let’s sit down and talk.”

So we sat down, and we talked.  The doctor touched my shoulder, patted my knee, and told me that these things happen.  I clutched Jeff’s hand as he explained to us about statistics, and chromosomes, and how the body has an innate ability to tell that something just isn’t right, and that there’s nothing that we could’ve done differently.  I let the sound of his calm, reasonable voice wash over me as he told us that we should allow ourselves time to heal–emotionally and physically–and then if we wanted to, we could try again.  Jeff is a facts kind of person, so I want to say that it was him that asked what actually happened.  The doc explained that there was no embryonic sac (yolk), and the amniotic sac was showing signs of collapse.  By their estimation, we lost this pregnancy about 3 weeks ago, and my body just doesn’t realize it yet.  Physically, hormonally, I’m still pregnant.  But the fetus isn’t developing, and things are breaking down.  According to The Mayo Clinic’s Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, this is what’s called intrauterine fetal demise and the type of miscarriage is called a missed miscarriage because we wouldn’t have known had we not visited the doctor.  Given the circumstances, I’ll be going in for surgery on Friday to have it medically extracted so that we can begin the healing process.

Tuesday was horrible for us, and we spent the rest of the day at home, alternating between crying and trying to find the silver linings.

Wednesday, it was back to business because there was work to do.  We had put in an offer on a house for out future child and so we were obligated to review the results of the inspection.  The Weeping Angels, I have determined, stole this opportunity from us as well.  Because the beautiful, charming house, in the quiet neighborhood on a private lot with a park around the corner… was miserable.  Here, just to summarize, I will paste the decision e-mail that I sent to our Realtor and our lender:

“…Upon reviewing the inspection report, it is our decision to NOT proceed with the purchase of the property located at [snip]

Our areas of concern include but are not limited to:
– structural supports missing or insufficient
– plumbing missing or inefficient
– electrical missing or inefficient
– exposed vermiculite asbestos
– gas leak from the stove
– water infiltration from the foundation due to poor grading and lack of gutters.

At this point in time, we do not have the liquid assets necessary to address such a myriad of critical issues. For this reason, we are also electing to suspend our house hunt for the foreseeable future…”

So now, we return to the Dr. Who theme… in that time is more of a non-linear progression, it’s all wibbly wobbly.  We had turned our lives upside down in preparation of starting our family.. and over the course of the last two days, all of it was taken away from us.  All of the potential that we were starting to count on was ripped away and we’re left in our same little apartment with our same nuclear family of two humans and two fur-butts, and it feels like Time is saying that it just wasn’t meant to be.  Like someone hit the reset button and decided that we’re not actually going down that road, but that we’re going to stay on this one.

I keep going back and forth about whether or not I’m alright.  Tuesday I was a mess. Wednesday I was all business.  Today, I’m feeling so very depressed, but I can still laugh.  I have no idea what tomorrow will bring, but I know that I have a loving husband, snuggly fur-butts, and a family that will support me through thick and thin.  We’ll get through it, and the waves of time wash us all clean.