There’s a Bird on my Head and other Random News…

That’s our budgie, Fancy Pants, in the above picture. He’s grooming me because I’m growing my hair out and I’m starting to look a bit unkempt. I’m in that weird in-between place where it’s too long to stay out of my face, but too short to put up. I will persevere though… Isn’t Fancy Pants too cute? He’s such a friendly fellow. His new girlfriend Lucy is doing well, but we’ve had to keep them separated because she freaks Fancy Pants out. She’s a very bold gal and needs to stop nagging her man.

So… it’s been 16 days since the miscarriage fiasco where I ended up being transferred by land and sea to emergency for a d&c cause I was hemorrhaging… My blood work came back the next week showing low iron, but my thyroid is normal, thank God. I’ve been taking chlorella with floradix iron supplement together and eating lots of spinach, kale, and nettle to rebuild my blood and boost my iron levels.

After surgery my neck and shoulders were so knotted up and sore that I paid almost $80 for a *real* massage from a registered massage therapist, and when she was doing my neck and shoulders my lower back went out. A chiropractor told me last year that I have a degenerative spine which explains why this happens. Not fun. Lots of painful muscle spasms forcing me to rest, and I do stretches and spine rolls to get it back into alignment. The chiropractor won’t touch it.

The next day I was hired to start a new job working as night receptionist at a resort two nights a week, and they put me on 3 days a week to do my training. After my first 3 days of training (which largely entailed reading manuals) I was called in to do my first solo night shift because the regular gal was sick. I was a little nervous, but fortunately it was really dead that night, nothing happening, so other than being bored to tears I did just fine.

As you all know I had been on a 8 month healing cleanse before getting pregnant, which interrupted it about 2 months prematurely. I’m back on it now. The first 4 days of sugar and caffeine detox were a bit rough, big massive headaches and SOOOOOO tired, but I’m past the worst of it now. Didn’t help that I was working a new job while detoxing. One night I came home and told my family I was just going to lie down for a couple hours, and then didn’t wake up till 10:30 PM! I got up, ate dinner, watched TV till midnight and went back to sleep no problem. My body must have needed the rest.

Surgery and being hooked to an IV drip for 11 hours makes you really constipated apparently, and I’m proud to announce I’m finally having normal BMs again. I’m sure that’s partly from the colonix I’m doing, but whatever it is, I’ll take it. I’m generally a regular gal, and am not happy when things aren’t flowing normally.

Weight loss. This is my first week back on the healing cleanse, but I’ve been so busy with training at work that I haven’t had time to track my calories. I’ve eliminated all the foods I”m sensitive to: sugar, dairy, caffeine, wheat, soy, yeast, vinegar, citrus, hazelnuts, and carrots. I’m hoping for a good loss this week, but if not, at least maintaining my weight. Starting on Monday I’ll be tracking my cals again so there will be no excuse. The good news is that I’m just under the weight I was when I got pregnant, so other than the 3 months break from the cleanse and weight loss, I haven’t lost any footing here.

Last Tuesday night I started our 6 week foster parent training. This is step two in the process to becoming foster parents. I knew this was what I wanted to do, but the training is really solidifying that belief. I really love my assigned social worker too. She’s very down to earth and easy to talk to and I think we’re going to have a great long term working relationship. She’s one of the training facilitators as well, so it’s neat getting to know her in a more casual environment. Hopefully we’ll be able to start the home studies in April/May and have our first foster daughter with us before school starts in the fall.

Saying Goodbye to Eliza

I apologize if my blog is bringing up past hurts for anyone, and feel I should post a disclaimer warning the following post contains sensitive content regarding miscarriage. I process my emotions through writing, and I’m dealing with a lot of big feelings due to the recent miscarriage of our baby, so you can expect lots of writing on the topic for a little while…

The night I started miscarrying I kept calling my midwife over and over because I had never experienced anything like this before and was totally confused and overwhelmed. I needed someone to walk me through what was going on, and she was so calm and reassuring.

At one point I remember us talking about me feeling weird about flushing my baby down the toilet, yet not being able to fish it out. She told me to try to save some of the baby’s tissue and find a way to memorialize the baby – bury it, put it in the ocean, just do something so there’s a place and time to mark the existence of this baby… I liked that idea…

Suddenly I was gushing tissue and blood again, so I found a little container in my cupboard and caught some of it, put the container in a baggie, wrapped it in paper towel and put it in the back of the bottom of my fridge until we could deal with it together as a family. That was in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

Today was the day we planned to take the baby to the ocean and say goodbye… My boys were going to town to pick up a few things from the health food store for me and run a few other errands, so I suggested we go down to the ocean first and then I would take them to the ferry. We picked a spot on Berry Point Road because that is where Brent proposed to me, and also where we got married. It’s a particularly special spot for our family.

When we got in the car, I told my son what we were going to do, and he started crying and saying over and over how sad he was. I felt myself tearing up. Then Brent, who was driving, suddenly burst out laughing and when I looked at him like he was an insensitive buffoon, he grinned sheepishly and said, “I saw some guy holding his hand to ear like he was talking on the phone. It was funny. Sorry.”

The waves are not usually very big here because our little island is sheltered by Vancouver Island, but today the wind was gusting and the waves were crashing unusually large and wild. There were two cars parked at “our spot” when we arrived so I suggested we walk down the rocks a bit for some privacy. Brent had our camera and I warned him not to get it wet.

I found a small inlet that looked like a good place, and just before I unwrapped my little package to release the baby, a huge wave came crashing in, soaked my feet and legs, I slipped on the slippery seaweed covered rock, and Plop! I landed on my butt in the ocean. We all burst into laughter. WOW, it was cold!

I scrambled to my feet and moved out of the wave’s way, found a different spot nearby, and released the baby.

The waves moved the tissue and blood in and out, in and out… and it slowly unfolded like a crimson flower. It was strangely beautiful – the most vivid red imaginable.

On the way back to the car my son and I held hands and giggled about me falling in the ocean.

“Mom, we didn’t even get to find out if it’s a boy or a girl,” my son started sobbing in the backseat as we pulled on to the road.

“Which do you think it was?”

Without hesitation, “A girl.”

“Then a girl it is. Should we call her Ellie?” (the nickname we had picked out if our baby had been a girl)

“No, lets call her Eliza. Mom, I’m so sad right now.”

Brent was silent and didn’t want to talk, lost in his own private thoughts.

We went back to the house so I could change into dry clothes, and when I got back in the car M said, “Mom, I figured it out. Sometimes there’s life, and sometimes there’s death.”

“Yes, and you are life, and we will always hold Eliza close in our heart and will never forget her.”

Life often strangely twists the tragic and hilarious together in a way that brings hope and joy back to our hearts.

Finding my Groove again…

My life was starting to centre around a new baby arriving in approximately 6 months and I’ve had to really adjust my focus the last couple of weeks. I opened a drawer yesterday to get my scissors and immediately noticed a couple little flannel newborn nighties I picked up at the thrift store and a little pair of tiny gap shoes my friend found for the new baby. I took them upstairs and put them away in a bin in storage, along with the three ring slings I scored at the local recycling depot. Closure.

Yesterday I got a letter from the BC Foster Care agency listing the upcoming dates for the foster care orientation classes we enrolled in last month. It’s part of the grueling long process to become approved foster parents. When I woke up this morning I felt a sense of excitement that I couldn’t place, and then I remembered we are going to have a new child in our home in about 6 months. It won’t be a newborn baby like we had hoped. It will be a hurting child who has experienced too much heart ache. It will be a girl. She’ll be around 5 or 6 years old. She’ll be a child to love and welcome into our home. It’s meant to be and our hearts are aching to meet our borrowed child.

March has come in like a lamb and my hands are itching to get into the garden dirt. Herbs and veggies, mulch and compost. Organic fresh produce. Oh joy! My pasty white winter skin is longing for the sun and fresh air. I have a long checklist of things to do… find some old wood to re-use in building garden beds… get a pile of dirt to plant seeds on top of my lasagna garden beds… source some mint shoots from friends and family… get some decent tomato cages… buy more seeds… find some wood chips to use as garden paths… dig up the miles of parsley taking over the herb bed… check my garlic shoots… transplant bulbs into the flower garden… figure out how to refill the whipper snipper thread and trim the grass in the garden area…

I called my grandma Jean today. She’s going to be 87 years old in July, and is still as spunky and spry as I remember her when I was a kid. I keep her updated on the news in our family out West, and she keeps me updated on the news on our family out East. Her and Grandpa have been married for 67 years. My grandpa will be turning 89 years old in two weeks, but suffered a severe stroke last year that has affected his speech and sight, and he was already mostly deaf, so she has become his full time round-the-clock caregiver. He used to love working in his wood shop, was a voracious reader, but now he’s no longer able to communicate, hates TV, and is unable to read due to his loss of sight. Grandma says they bought a treadmill and he walks numerous times throughout the day, winding down his final years, like a hamster on a wheel. All of their friends died many years ago now, and they are now living in a grandparent suite at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. Grandma wants to come visit me and experience our little island here, but can’t leave Grandpa. I pray that his – and her – suffering will end soon.

Jobs. I have had three different job opportunities present themselves to me over the past week. I didn’t actively seek any of them out, but all three came about through friends and family recommending me for the job! I’m a blessed girl. Praying that the one I really want works out. I’ll post more when I know more…

So… my life turned upside down on Wednesday and Thursday. Today it’s righting itself. Life is a funny, strange, hurtful, joyful, wonderful thing. One of my oldest (she’s not old, we’ve just known each other a long time) and dearest friends wrote me after I told her about the miscarriage and she said some very wise words, “one of the wonders of being older is you know that life is in cycles and when you have to experience the sad ones yourself it hurts, but with that knowledge you are able to carry on…” It certainly does…

The Storm… (sensitive content regarding miscarrying)

Last night after I posted about miscarrying, things went from bad to much worse. I started hemorraghing around midnight and ended up needed emergency transfer to Nanaimo. No small feat when you live on a small gulf island where the ferries don’t run through the night. An ambulance came and hooked me up to an IV and started monitoring me while we waited for my parents to come and sleep at the house with our son so my husband could come with me.

I wasn’t dizzy or anything, but my legs were really unstable and I left a murderous looking trail of blood behind me as I was moved from the ambulance to the emergency medical boat to another ambulance and then into the hospital emergency room around 3 AM. They monitored me closely, subjecting me to all manner of unmentionable horrific torture-style procedures until the on-call gynecologist finally arrived at 9:30 AM. Within moments they had me in O/R and I was under anesthetic to have an emergency d&c done to stop the hemorrhaging.

B had gone home a couple hours earlier cause my parents had an appointment in Vancouver they couldn’t miss, and he had just gotten our son off to school and was crawling into bed for the first time that night when I called to let him that the hospital wouldn’t release me unless I had someone to pick me up after surgery. My incredible super-husband who hadn’t slept in well over 30 hours picked our son up from school and was there to meet me when I was released from recovery. He truly is my safe place in this storm.

We had to break the final news to our son, and I did a sloppy inadequate job of comforting him, but we just tried our best to validate the pain we are all feeling as a family. B & I went to bed when we got home around 1:30 PM, while our ds watched movies and kept quiet until B got up a couple hours later. I slept straight through for about 6 hours, just in time to wake up and tuck my son into bed, with deep gratitude for the gift God gave us in him.

There will always be a hole in our heart for “nemo”, and we are planning a little memorial for our family of three to honor and remember “nemo”. We thought it would be fitting to send some of nemo’s tissue back into the ocean, in the same place where our family started, where B proposed to me, and where we had our wedding. Life is a full circle of laughter, joy, death and pain.

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