the dunwall home for wayward whalers

Shit, friend, I am so sorry I freaked you out like that. God’s honest truth, I haven’t checked tumblr in ages, because I kinda noped out of most social media after we lost our first baby and then never really found my footing again after because a bunch more Life Stuff happened (more on that below). I don’t know that I’ll resume any sort of presence here, but for those who do want to stay in touch I have a twitter account (@patho_patho) I use occasionally. It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would worry. Again, I’m super sorry about that. I never intended to scare anyone.

Anyway, life update! The tl;dr version is that I found out I was pregnant in November of last year, freaked out SUPER HARD about it because of how things went the last time, freaked out SUPER HARD some more when covid-19 started showing up in the states, left the emergency department for a care management position right before the hospital implemented a hiring freeze, basically didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant until I was like almost 26 weeks along and it was incredibly obvious anyway, and — several months later — ended up having an unplanned (but non-emergent) cesarean delivery when my water broke three weeks early and the baby was breech.

The little dude is now 8 weeks old, growing like gangbusters and marvelously healthy. Unfortunately, our entire state caught on fire recently, so I’ve just spent the last week with him up at my parents’ house because the air is poison and their ventilation situation is way better than ours. Fun stuff.

I can’t explain how good it was for my mental health to get out of the emergency department. I was struggling even before everything happened with my first pregnancy, so when I got off my “postpartum depression is even more awesome when your baby is dead” medical leave, I was in a REAL bad way. We were thrilled when I got pregnant again, but it was also much earlier than we’d intended (apparently I’m super fertile, hooray?) and I spent the first trimester pretending like it wasn’t happening because I wasn’t sure I could survive the loss of another child. Covid started being a thing riiiight as I was heading into the second trimester, and...let me tell you, being pregnant during a pandemic is absolutely terrifying, and it was even more terrifying when I was still working in the ED. Those early days, when we really didn’t know much except that it was really, really bad? God, that was brutal. I was having panic attacks on my way to work, because I was scared shitless that I was going to get it and either I would die (thus killing my baby), or there would be complications of some sort (which would kill my baby), or me and the baby would be fine, but I would give it to the Dude or my parents and then one of THEM would die and...

Anyway. Bad times. It was bad times.

I was interviewing for a number of positions when things started amping up, and accepted the care management job literally days before the shelter-in-place orders went into effect, which led to a hospital-wise hiring/transfer freeze. The transfer still went through, thank god, and my new job has been amazing. They were super cool when I finally told them I was pregnant, especially when I explained why it took me so long to disclose it in the first place (basically, I wanted to wait until the final diagnostic tests were done and I knew 100% that this kiddo wasn’t sick the way our first was). I’m currently on maternity leave, and every once in a while my supervisor will text with a demand for more baby pictures. It’s really nice, actually. Care management is challenging as fuck, but it’s also really rewarding and interesting, and I’m glad I was able to make the switch before the whole world imploded.

(Also, it’s super nice to be in a position where the stakes are not literally life and death, and I’m also not putting my own life on the line every time I go into a patient room? I might’ve been okay with that once upon a time, but, uh, a lot of shit changed for me last year)

That’s pretty much it, unless y’all want to hear the whole pregnancy saga (which probably isn’t all that interesting, to be honest, except for the last bit with the c-section and all). Parenthood is deeply scary and deeply amazing. Everyone talks to you about postpartum depression, which makes it super easy to be blindsided by postpartum anxiety, which is like regular anxiety except your hormones are completely out of whack and you cry a lot and also refuse to sleep because you’re convinced your baby will die the moment you stop looking at them. Being a new parent during a pandemic is even scarier than being pregnant during a pandemic, and I honestly have no idea how I’m going to explain all of this EVERYTHING to the kiddo once he’s old enough to ask what the fuck was up with 2020, anyway.

Again, I’m really sorry I scared you by going radio silent. I’ve got all my notifications turned back on in case you or anyone else has any follow-up questions, and people are always welcome to check in over on the twitters (which is a garbage site, I freely admit, so I totally understand if folks would rather not). I definitely aten’t dead, and right now I’m doing better than I have in a long while.

Hey there, friend. It’s really sweet of you to check in. I know I’m not active here, like, at all these days, and that’s largely because I haven’t felt particularly fannish about anything in a long, long time. That part of my brain is slowly coming back online — I started up a Flight Rising account because...I dunno, yay for pretty dragons? I also enjoyed the new Netflix Witcher TV show a hell of a lot more than I expected I would, so now I’m downloading the Witcher 3 and checking out the first of the short story collections. It’s the first time I’ve even vaguely felt ‘Oooh Hey Neat A Thing For Me To Gleefully Obsess About!!!’ in forever, so we’ll see if that goes anywhere.

Other than that, though, I’m...maintaining, I guess. Work has been nightmarish and triggering and I’m actively looking for a new job, because I’m so beyond burned-out that it’s completely ridiculous and every once in a while I just completely lose my shit because someone brings in their two-week-old baby or whatever, and...honestly, neither I nor my patients nor the hospital deserve that. And although I understand the impulse to want to say or do something helpful, there...isn’t really anything anyone can do? Grief is weird and messy and complicated, and often quite ugly. I know full well that I’ve become The Bummer Friend. It’s kinda lonely and kinda sucks, and I also know there’s no real point in trying to force myself to be anything other than what I am right now, which is a person grieving both the loss of a child and also the loss of the future that child represented. That shit takes time, so. I’m trying to be kind to myself.

But I do appreciate you checking in to see how I’m doing, I really do. And while there’s nothing specific anyone can do for me personally, I hope folks will consider donating to places like Planned Parenthood or NARAL or other organizations working to protect people’s reproductive rights. I’m extremely fortunate to have been living in Oregon when this all went down, and that my insurance both covered my hospital bills and allowed me to chose a hospital without any religious affiliations. A lot of people aren’t so fortunate. They need all the help and compassion they can get, so for those who want to do something concrete, that’s my suggestion.

Specifically, it’s melanoma, because of fucking course the universe can’t be cool for once and maybe go with the less severe version of skin cancer, jesus christ.

Her doctor is pretty confident they excised all of it, but they still want to take a larger chunk out of her leg just to be sure. And, y’know, more blood tests and shit. Just to be sure. And I know it’s probably going to be fine and I know she’s probably going to be okay, but it’s, like. For fuck’s sake. It’s my mom. After everything we’ve already dealt with this year, I really, really, really need my mom to be okay.

I’ve been trying to write this post for the past day and a half, and I’ve finally come to accept that I have no idea what to say. It’s like someone hit the mute button: everything is muffled; I feel like I’m floating through a world made entirely of fog. Our son was tiny and silent and beautiful, and looking at him I knew—I knew—that we had done the right thing in ending the pregnancy. I held him for hours. I could‘ve held him for the rest of my life, and it still wouldn’t be enough. I have no maps for how to navigate the transition from “expectant mother” to “woman whose baby died”. There are no maps for this. The transition is unthinkable, and I don’t know that I’ll ever truly figure it out.