Just general thoughts. I read the Guardian article on miscarriages (in part a response to the Zuckerberg announcement) and it made me think about the things we do during pregnancy to keep it “safe”.
I just got back from Japan, where I ate sushi, drank a bit of alcohol and generally enjoyed myself. I am pretty sure that there is not a positive test in my immediate future (not that we didn’t try, but my most fertile hours were spent in a flying tin can). But what would I have done if I thought I was? Not sure.
After my miscarriages, I come to recognise that a lot of the safeguard activities don’t really make a difference if there is something fundamentally wrong. All the bed rest in the world didn’t stop the miscarriages. The acupuncture, the staying calm, the vitamin taking- none of it helped. The constant refrain of “it’s not your fault” is what I remember. The pregnancy that lasted the longest featured me walking quite a bit, being at an onsen in the early stages (hot bath) and sashimi (also early).
Yes, there are things that can actively cause damage, but most of us don’t sniff pennyroyal even when not pregnant.
Those of us in the TTC circle of hell spend so much time being told what to do and what to avoid, to the extent that it shrivels up some of our life. But how much of that is needed and how much of it is a form of bargaining? “If I give up coffee and wine and do thirty minutes of head standing a day, will I be rewarded with a baby?”
I have lost track of how many people I know who, based on their test results, should not have gotten pregnant, or struggled, but now have at least one child. And there is nothing in my test results to say I will have issues. But I do.
So maybe what I am saying here is that there is no magic factor- either for getting there or staying there. It is all a fluke. Appreciate the magic you received, but stop telling me that there is a ritual I must follow- I have been there and done that and it does not work.
Sadie says:
3 August, 2015 at 10:17 pm
Yes to all of this. It really is fluke, pure dumb luck. But I have always thought that the people who tell themselves there are rules you can follow to make everything work out just right are the ones who look at us in the ALI community with something akin to horror; they want to be able to tell themselves that ‘this would never happen to me’ because they did things ‘right’.
Chickadee says:
10 August, 2015 at 8:16 pm
True!
Mel says:
4 August, 2015 at 4:49 am
You’re totally right. I think a lot of it is control. We control the things we can control because so much of the process is out of our hands.
Chickadee says:
10 August, 2015 at 8:17 pm
Yes, so much of it is about control, or trying to feel in control.
Valery Valentina says:
4 August, 2015 at 6:25 am
Didn’t read the article yet. But from my personal experience, being pregnant with two embryos, only to have one stop growing at 8 weeks while the other turned into a baby, I say it all has very little to do with the rituals, the do’s and don’t’s. A fluke, and depending on your point of view the fluke was losing one, or keeping one.
Like blips in the universe, hiccup in the statistics, hoping the odds are in your favour soon.
Chickadee says:
10 August, 2015 at 8:18 pm
Thanks, it is all such a fluke.
Jess says:
4 August, 2015 at 11:56 pm
Love this. I would (and still do) get so irritated at people making it seem like there is a magic formula to having a healthy pregnancy. So much of it is luck, is all those tiny little stars aligning in just the right way, pretty much all of it beyond our control. Having a pregnancy end in an inexplicable bleed that showed a sac on ultrasound but then resulted in me on bedrest for 3 days, my pelvis lifted, worried that my lift wasn’t enough, that crying would disrupt whatever disruption had already taken place… I tried so hard to make that embryo stay. And it just wasn’t going to because it was unhealthy, and not due to any actions or inactions of my own. I thank you for this post, because it says what I have felt.
Chickadee says:
10 August, 2015 at 8:19 pm
Yes, and sometimes I wish someone would have said that early in the process- but I don’t know I would have believed it.
deathstar44 says:
7 August, 2015 at 2:59 am
Years ago, I remember I read a newspaper article that recounted a woman’s skydiving accident. It might even have been on Oprah. She hit the ground. She was pregnant. (I’m going to assume she didn’t know she was pregnant.) She still went on to have a baby. WTF? She jumped out of a plane, got twisted in her chute, hit the ground and still managed to have a baby. And I couldn’t. That burned my ass for days.
Chickadee says:
10 August, 2015 at 8:19 pm
Oh wow! Yes, that would be frustrating.
Jen says:
9 August, 2015 at 7:30 am
It would drive me crazy to try and understand why the babies I have stayed, and the two I lost didn’t. It’s hard to accept that this is just the way it is.