Thursday, January 11, 2007

The report

I must be getting better. We made it through the doctor's visit with what I think was a decent amount of tears, and no complete meltdowns. Plus, when the nurse came to take us back, the way she treated me caused me to immediately think, "How will I ever get this accurately across in the blog?" That has to mean I'm getting better.

Guy and I show up exactly at 2:00, not a minute earlier, because I don't want to sit in the waiting room. Only one pregnant woman was waiting. I focused on the fake tree I was sitting next to and managed to forget about her and her belly. It was fine.

The nurse called us back with a chipper, "Mrs. Canape?" followed by a great big smile. Then she looked down at my chart. I am so not even kidding. Her face dropped, and as I walked through the door, the nurse who had just sounded like Snow White, began to whisper at me. Everything she said was a whisper from that point on. A whisper and a question. And she touched me a lot.

"We are going to go right around here and weigh you, okay?"
- hand on shoulder

"Can you get on the scale for me?"
-hand on elbow

"We are going to go right around this corner now and go into this room to wait, is that alright?" - hand on back

"I'm going to get your blood pressure, okay?"
-hand on knee

"Now I'm just going to check your pulse, can I do that?"
-hand appropriately on wrist

"We are going to just wait a minute for the ultrasound room to be ready, okay?"
-tiptoeing backwards out the door away from the apparently volatile, fragile, scary, non-pregnant-anymore-woman.

Whoa! Not okay. Not okay at all. Nobody said anything about an ultrasound. There was no way on God's green earth that I was going to be okay with them sticking Mr. Happy Wand back in my vajayjay to get a good view of my now vacant womb. No thank you.

Since the nurse seemed like she would not be able to handle one single tear from me, I waited until the door had completely shut to say to Guy, "I don't want an ultrasound." Tears. Calm on the outside, but tears. "I do not want an ultrasound. There is nothing there."

The doctor came in and thankfully, said that we weren't going to do an ultrasound (how is that for anticlimactic?), and that she was just going to examine me. Nurse Whisper got someone else to stand in for the exam. Thank you very much. I'm sure she was being careful with me out of sympathy, but please. I am a woman who had a miscarriage, not a five year old whose puppy you just ran over. Talk to me. Treat me with a little dignity.

The bottom line is that everything looks fine. I asked when Guy and I could be doing the Happy Dance again and she said as soon as I stopped bleeding. I guess that was all I needed to hear because I haven't bled a drop since. In my best baritone, Oh Yeah.

We are supposed to wait until after one cycle to try again. That is fine. I'm not ready yet anyway. Although I know that if we do get pregnant again right away, there is going to be overlap between grief and joy, I am okay with that. I think that maybe that will be how I learn to live and how I learn to heal.