It’s life Jim… but not as we want it…

Sometimes, stuff happens and I just think some other me from another dimension of space and time has somehow managed to swap our lives over and dump me in her crappy version. It’s like I’m a kind of Ace Rimmer, I have to have to slide in and sort out all the different me’s in different dimensions by being them when something goes wrong because they’re all to whimpy to take it. Twice in my life the most amazing fantastic gobsmackingly brilliant thing has been handed to me on a plate, just long enough for me to see how completely fucking fabulous it is before it’s taken away again. And from the word go you are aware it’s not going to happen you hope but you know……

Well… I have had the most bizarre and strange time since I started this blog… I mentioned I was pregnant right at the beginning although that’s not really why I called it Babychaos. Babychaos it has been though… here’s the whole story….

I’d been feeling like crap warmed up for some weeks and was having period pains – you know just light ones – every day, sore tits, pmt the whole shebang but no effing period. Quite frankly, since Mr Babychaos and I do “natural” contraception – well, it’s worked fine for 10 years – I was getting a tiny bit peed off because in my view, nice though the other stuff is, it was high time I had a full on shag! Also, I was a little worried something was wrong with my “Lady’s Things” (can’t write the Little Britain voice so you’ll have to imagine it in) so I thought I’d maybe better go to the doctor…. Mr B, meanwhile, discussed my predicament on a boys night out and was told he’d got me up the duff. Lots of taking the piss ensued, yeh right, immaculate conceptions r us, we’re going to have God’s baby we told them all… seed of doubt planted I consulted a doctor friend. “You sound very pregnant to me” She said. So Wednesday 3rd May I took myself off to the doctor and discovered – oh lordy me! – that I was, indeed, pregnant and not just a bit pregnant either, we’re talking 7 or 8 weeks (or at least, that was how long it had been since our last “safe” shag). As I didn’t know whether or not Mr B would want a termination, we agreed I’d go home and talk it over and I’d see her the following Tuesday when we’d start to get everything sorted and work out the er… logistics.

As you can imagine, this was a gopping great HUGE shock. We’d made a real life baby, spawn of us, our own 50:50 Mini Me, Junior Us. Even more huge was the fact that Mr B was quite clearly absolutely delighted and well aware how completely screwed up I’d be if I had to kill Junior. What’s done is done, he said. Wahoo! Three fucking blissful days followed, I found out that you can put a baby seat in a Lotus safely – I wanted to keep BOTH my babies Lotus and Junior – and which make and model it was while Mr B surfed the net looking for houses with more bedrooms…. I wandered round, deliriously happy and totally unable to get my head round the fact that I’ve always wanted children but I wanted Mr B’s and now totally by mistake I was going to have a family, the thing I thought I’d never be able to have and how I was a jammy lucky dodger and what a complete gift it was. We made lots of jokes about Spawn and Junior and how we’d accommodate its arrival in this particular house. Then on Saturday, I started to bleed. Not much, just a bit but I’m an old bag and I thought I should get it checked out.

Clearly there’s bugger all you can do at 6.00pm on a Saturday – I’ve never been one for getting taken ill at a convenient time – other than ring your nearest obs and gynie (not a blind clue how you spell that) ward. There are two hospitals within striking distance of us and since one had done an op on my knee and been fab and since you get a free superbug with every transaction from the other one I rang the one I’d been in before. No probs they said, come in for an emergency scan so off we went. They were great. Junior, it transpired, was very small, only about 6 weeks old. Not possible, we said. Cue jokes about affairs since the last time we’d done full-on babymaking sex it meant s/he had to be 7/8 weeks not 6/7 as they were saying… hmmm. Well, they said, the bleeding was nothing to worry about a natural thing that happens to 30% of women during early pregnancy called an eroded cervix. They booked me a scan for two weeks’ time as there’d be more to see then.

For only the second time in our marriage ever – doesn’t our timing suck – Mr B had to be away all the next week on business so on the Tuesday I went to the doctor on my own. She explained that basically, sometimes a bit of the code gets left off and the baby grows to a certain size at which point there are no plans so it doesn’t know how to grow any further and it just stops. She said that often your body will then hang onto it for a little while and this is called a missed miscarriage, although eventually it will die and in most cases you will usually miscarry… this is what causes 98% of miscarriages in the first stages of pregnancy. She also said that if you include weird big periods that people don’t realise are very early miscarriages only 50% of babies make it to week 12. On the up side, since I’d floated it into existence on a lake of red wine it might just be a bit stunted in which case it’d grow. Either way, only time would tell.

Oh dear. That “this can’t be my life it’s somebody else’s” feeling began to come on. When I told Mr B that night on the phone I suspect he cried (he admitted, later to “a little manly dampness”) and it was horrible because he was one end of the country and I was the other and I couldn’t hug him.

I was still bleeding and each day I bled a little bit more. I went to see my parents for a couple of days and just before lunch on the last day – Thursday – I started to bleed a lot. It’s not like a period at all, it’s very red blood and you do the whole day’s bleeding, soaking an industrial strength ST in about an hour after a similar length of time of grim period pains. I guess at this point I knew it was all over, Junior wasn’t sticking, and the best place to be when s/he fell out was at home or at least, in the hospital where I’d had my knee op. So decided I’d better get home as fast as I could. Wolfed lunch and set off back here.

Needless to say, because clearly I wasn’t having a shit enough time already, somebody ran into me in the queue for the Dartford Tunnel. Great! Lots of phaffy insurance crap to sort out while I was losing my baby. Oh joy. The doctor I saw that evening was a little more optimistic, I explained what I’d been told and what was happening and he said he’d speak to the hospital and see if he should book me an emergency scan or whether I should wait the extra week for the one I’d originally been booked in for anyway. They told him yes a scan was a good idea and that I should come in the next day, Friday, at 2.00. I’d told a few people – unfortunately one of them was my Mum and she’d told the entire Western Hemisphere – but round here only a couple of mates knew one of whom was a cousin on my Dad’s side who lives near me. She’d said she’d come along to any scans I had to have if Mr B couldn’t so I rang her and arranged to go with her. That night I had something very like labour pains, bad period pains but in kind of whoops with no pain in between, however by the morning they’d gone off. I was still bleeding and still pretty sure that Junior had gone.

Mr B tried to get the day off to come with me but his complete tosser of a boss, despite the fact Mr B is really reserved and despite the fact that he’s only going to actually ask something like that if it’s incredibly important said that no, the 10 minutes of the presentation they were doing for a potential new client which he was to scheduled to make in Aylesbury was far more important than going to be with his wife who’d been taken ill – he hadn’t mentioned scans, I told you he was very reserved – and was in hospital. This man’s wife has breast cancer, somehow, I suspect he went with her to the appointment when they were going to confirm to her what she had got and what they could do…. Doubtless he allowed himself that luxury but not me and Mr B because he believes you shouldn’t “bring your home life to work”… not that I’m bitter or anything…! Mwa ha ha haaaargh! Cluddy Bunt!

….. So the prognosis was that Junior hadn’t grown, s/he’d shrunk so they gave me the options. The bleeding was an approaching miscarriage, I could have it at home, take a pill and then come into hospital and have it in a “controlled” environment there or have a d&c the following morning. I didn’t really know what to do and Mr B was still in his presentation so I couldn’t call him and discuss it. I was afraid though, several of my cousins had haemorrhaged and so had my Mum so I was scared I might, too, so in the end after discussing it with my cousin – who’d had a similar experience, two weeks in her case from finding out she was pregnant to finding out it was dead – I decided a d&c was probably the best option and they booked me in for one the following morning.

Mr B got home about the same time as me, I told him what had happened and cried and cried – blummin’ hell it was shit! Then we drank a bottle of red wine and went to bed. I didn’t sleep, the period pains or labour pains or whatever they were, kept coming all night. Jeez it smarted. In the morning the er… chopped liver… started and we went hot foot to hospital. They said there was no point in having a d&c if it was going to happen naturally so I had the miscarriage in hospital. I was glad I was there because I was still scared of haemorrhaging but I had to collect the “products of pregnancy” basically, our baby, in cardboard bedpans as it fell out in bits every quarter of an hour or so. I then had to ensure I told somebody it was there so they could collect it from the loo before any of the other patients saw it because there were people there having hysterectomies or d&c’s like I had been going to have and they’d be very upset.

I lay there bleeding like a stuck pig and just in case I hadn’t cried enough – human beings may be 80% water but I reckon I was about 50% water by this time and so was Mr B’s shirt. I cried some more. Mr B held my hand and every 15 minutes or so, I’d go to the bog and more chicken giblets would fall out of me – not sure I’ll be able to make chicken stock for a while! Eventually after about 2 hours something fell out which looked a bit like the neck you get in a bag of chicken giblets and was also, alarmingly, about the same size. After that things began to slow up and they gave me another scan, I think that was the worst bit, seeing my empty womb on the screen and just knowing that all hope had gone…

So that’s it. After that I carried on having contractions and bleeding but the contractions gradually got further and further apart and the bleeding got less and less until about 2 days ago, it stopped. They said 7 – 10 days but they also said I might stop a bit quicker than that, in the end it was 10 days.

They were absolutely sweet at the hospital, gave me loads of numbers to call and the number of the ward, too and said that if there was anything worrying me not to hesitate to phone them. It was so, so horrible but it could have been very much worse had the people on the ward not been as compassionate and sensitive with me as they were. One of the worst things was that I just have had no idea what to expect and without being very graphic they can’t tell you…. And anyway, each woman is different.

I guess the worst thing is how totally empty and bereft I feel, it’s like being the last remaining human alive on earth, dying horribly of radiation sickness, alone, with no one to look after you. Most of the time I’m fine but every now and again I just bust into tears and I can’t stop. I have just never known such utter, utter desolation. Mr B’s very sad, too but I don’t know if he’ll want to try again. For my part I could handle not having kids before but now something’s opened up in me that I just can’t close and it’s not the same any more… The hormones are gradually settling down but I’m sill a bit la la and all over the place. I know I’ll be ok, I grew up in the country for heaven’s sake, I know it’s nature and sometimes things just die. I know stuff happens. I learned from being made redundant that sometimes you just aren’t in control, however well you think you’ve covered the bases, however unlikely it is that things will go wrong and that sometimes you just have to be a passenger in life and roll with the knocks but… well it’s a bit crap and it’s not over yet. After they’d told me Junior was dead, when I finally managed to stop blubbing, the first thing I said was “Oh bollocks!” In an oblique way, I’m proud of this…

So what with the 3 months on crutches beforehand, I’d say that all in all, 2006 has been a pretty crap year so far… I wish I could just fast forward to the end of the ruddy thing! Ah well… there you go. That’s life.

Scant compensation…. it was too small to have a heartbeat, that makes it a little easier and the people providing my courtesy replacement car on behalf of my insurance company have somehow convinced themselves that “like for like” with a £20k Lotus Elise is about £35 grand’s worth of brand new Porsche Boxter… It’s not the kind of car I’d ever think of owning but it’s quite fun to try it out….