The “Before” Pictures
CONTENT WARNING - FAMILY PLANNING AND LOSS
This new year I’ve been walking around the house, the property, just around in general, reflecting. In 2020 I set my focus on the future, hardly living in the present, and NEVER dwelling in the past if I could help it. Every messy area nagged me and drove me to work and fix and plan and dream and sometimes that was a great thing. Eventually though I realized all I saw around me was one giant “before” picture and the stress and pressure I put myself under to get to the “after” soured my day sometimes.
I also realized in 2020 that even one day when my expectations bullied me into anxiety and depression is very unnecessary.
2019 was not my year. In January I discovered retinal tears in my left eye and had them lasered, which fixed the steadily increasing blurriness in my vision thank goodness. In March my last remaining wisdom tooth became so sneakily infected that I thought I had antibiotic resistant bronchitis or pneumonia for months, until a routine dental checkup finally identified the problem in JULY. I had my tooth taken out two days later, and crashed for about a week while my body finally kicked the infection. The brain fog and wet smoker cough cleared up within a month and I felt renewed enough to take the next steps in mine and Jess’s family planning journey.
Since January of 2019 we had been trying to conceive, without success. As far as we knew age and health weren’t factors in this delay, but I thought maybe all the medical mishaps of the year may have contributed- I had experienced only about 3 cycles in the past 12 months by that point. Come October I began to worry, and consulted a fertility specialist around the middle of the month. I was prescribed a two week course of progestin, a synthetic form of progesterone, which would theoretically trigger my cycle after the course ended- but again, the progestin course ended with no sign of my cycle.
What was even more worrying was that I was beginning to feel pressure and pain around my ovaries, and constant dizziness, nausea and fatigue.
Can you guess where this is going?
A couple days before thanksgiving I took myself to the ER convinced that I had a malignancy around my ovaries or something else even more upsetting going on inside me, but never imagined that I would walk out with pictures from an ultrasound tech of what looked like an 8-12 week old baby INSIDE MY BODY. I watched the recording of it’s heartbeat a thousand times that week. After not having a cycle for six months, and taking progestin to trigger my cycle, I had NOT expected to already be pregnant. The blood test at the specialist’s office in mid October had even showed a negative result, they had made sure to check just in case, and Jess and I had been sure to “manage ourselves” in a very trackable way since the beginning of the year.
We celebrated the surprise with our families over thanksgiving and I found an OB/GYN in a nearby town that came highly recommended. There was no wait list, just a couple weeks delay until they could get in the lengthy first appointment. I took my mom with me so she could see the ultrasound monitor for the first time, we were both excited and a little nervous. The news that we got blindsided us in a way I can still barely wrap my mind around.
Not only was I no longer pregnant, what was growing inside me (and continuing to grow) had never really even been what I thought of as a “baby”. I had shown no signs of miscarriage at all, and had even begun to show. Everyone has different beliefs and conceptualizations of life, so I’ll give the scientific version so you can get a picture of the information we were given:
What had occurred was that two sperm had managed to fertilize one viable ova, or egg. This extra set of genetic blueprints from the spare sperm prompted out of control tissue growth, first in the actual fetal tissue, and then in the placenta. This rampant tissue growth, when unchecked, turns into a cancerous placenta that spreads to the lining of the uterus, then into your lungs, and soon thereafter your brain. The level of betrayal I felt at this potential experience was mind boggling, and just so incredibly painful.
The miracle was that this specific kind of tissue growth (known as a Partial Molar Pregnancy) is incredibly treatable- I’m talking success rates over 99%, and recovery times of just a few days. Over the next few weeks I underwent two minor surgeries, the initial D&C the week before christmas to remove the malignant tissue and verify that pregnancy was indeed molar, and then a second D&C soon after new years based on a gut feeling I had that something wasn’t right. After inconclusive scans following my first procedure, my incredible medical team had taken me at my word that I was beginning to “feel pregnant again”, and scheduled me for a second D&C just in case malignant placental tissue had begun to regrow and flood my body with pregnancy hormones again. It turns out that there was tissue regrowth, and it was successfully and completely removed by a veteran surgeon who had been performing the exact procedure I needed since the year of my birth. I was very, very lucky.
I woke up groggy and hazy to her right at my bedside, and heard her say “You made the right choice. We found it and got it, it was about the size of a quarter.” My mom got me home- she’d been my wingman through both surgeries- and from that day on I finally, finally began the long road of grieving and recovery. From... pretty much the entire year.
My follow up appointments after that were weekly. Every seven days or so I would go back to my awesome team and have blood drawn to verify that my hCG levels- a pregnancy hormone produced by living placental tissue- were decreasing as they should, indicating that no new malignant placental tissue was growing. In extremely rare cases malignant cells that had managed to cross into the main body cavity would begin growing in a difficult to remove area, at which point localized chemo injections would almost invariably kill them off. Still- that was not an experience I was hoping to have. We kept our eyes on the declining numbers and crossed our fingers.
Simultaneously, the accepted literature surrounding molar pregnancies had been redacted (the timing, I tell you) and was being revised. Very little information turned into absolutely no information. Originally, I had been told that though this phenomenon was extremely treatable, the monitoring time to ensure complete recovery was at least one full year. Meaning, one full year of weekly blood tests and abstinence, then a couple monthly blood tests to seal the deal and get my stamp of approval to try again for another pregnancy at no increased risk. The consequences of an unexpected pregnancy during the year-long monitoring period would be a theoretical masking of potential malignant tissue regrowth, which would not only threaten the life of the new baby but also my own as it wouldn’t be detectable during another pregnancy.
While I was mourning the confusion of my miscarriage, the idea that I would have no choice but to relive the experience for a full year before moving on was devastating. My chemical depression due to the sudden hCG drop (I was coming down from about three times the “normal” levels due to the rampant tissue growth) was compounded by the thought of never-ending follow up appointments, and I spent the next three months re-learning to maintain a train of thought, hold a conversation, retain basic information.
By spring my body finally felt the way I remembered it should, and my slowly returning energy felt like lightning running through my numbed veins. Just as I came back into my own Covid hit and changed the entire outlook of the world outside our doors, but inside them I was experiencing a renaissance. In the forced calm and isolation of quarantine I processed the fear and trauma of the past year. Jess and I were left alone to re-connect and celebrate our home with renewed opportunity to tackle projects we didn’t anticipate having the time for with a new baby. My appointments were moved to an every two week schedule due to Covid precautions and I cried from even that small reprieve. Soon the updated medical advisement for treating partial molar pregnancies was released, and my year-long monitoring was reduced to six months, plus three weeks. It seemed too good to be true. Right before my birthday (late May) I received the official “all clear” from my medical team. We celebrated in June with champagne, and, well, other stuff, if you know what I mean.
And then, to my great surprise, I found out in July that we had conceived.
To make an absurdly long story short, I felt like I had BEEN one giant walking “before” picture during my recovery and renaissance of 2020. I was always holding out for the next blood test, the next project to distract myself, the next culmination of years of work and struggle- inside my body and mind, and out of it. January 2021 gently slapped me upside the head and reminded me that the choices I had made in 2019- to transition my career to work from home, to completely alter my lifestyle and daily routine, even my recreation and fitness- all of those changes saved me in 2020. I could work from home the entire year despite my medical needs. I could rest when I needed to during both pregnancies, and take time to process pain in ways I hadn’t made time for before. I set new kinds of goals and reached them consistently. I started dreaming again.
I can feel the pressure of the “before” state of mind lifting, and today when I walked around my property I didn’t care what the “after” will look like.
I just felt joy that my carefully cultivated “now” is not only here, it never actually goes away. It’s my new ever-present, my constant amidst the chaos of everything in the world that no one can control. I partook all day in the series of small celebrations that link together to form the chain of my ever-present “now”, and will go to bed tonight (probably at an unreasonable hour) falling asleep to surprisingly uncomfortable baby kicks.
And I feel extraordinarily lucky.
